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Kundu: Morris L. West
$30.00Set in the Highland valleys of New Guinea, a white man meddles with the age-old mysteries of the native tribes. There is Kumo, the sorcerer, jealous of the white man's power; Kurt Sonderfield, owner of a coffee plantation; Gerda, his wife - and the men who love her - and N'Daria, the sensual native girl who shares the worlds of Kumo and Sonderfield. -
Things To Come: H.G. Wells
$20.00Wells' own novelisation of the 1935 film inspired by The Shape of Things To Come. When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy - an unpublished 'dream book'. Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape Of Things To Come provides this history of the future, an account that was in some ways remarkably prescient - predicting climatic disaster and sweeping cultural changes, the Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare and political instabilities in the Middle East. -
The team behind the The Book of General Ignorance turns conventional biography on its head. Following their Herculean - or is it Sisyphean?- efforts to save the living from ignorance, the two wittiest Johns in the English language turn their attention to the dead. As the authors themselves say, “The first thing that strikes you about the Dead is just how many of them there are.” Helpfully, Lloyd and Mitchinson have employed a simple but ruthless criterion for inclusion: the dead person has to be interesting. Here, then, is a dictionary of the dead, an encyclopedia of the embalmed. Ludicrous in scope, whimsical in its arrangement, this wildly entertaining tome presents pithy and provocative biographies of the no-longer-living from the famous to the undeservedly and - until now - permanently obscure. Spades in hand, Lloyd and Mitchinson have dug up everything embarrassing, fascinating and downright weird about their subjects’ lives and added their own uniquely irreverent observations. Organized by capricious categories such as dead people who died virgins, who kept pet monkeys, who lost limbs, those whose corpses refused to stay put - the dearly departed, from the inventor of the stove to a cross-dressing, bear-baiting female gangster finally receive the epitaphs they truly deserve. Discover: Why Freud had a lifelong fear of trains; the one thing that really made Isaac Newton laugh; how Catherine the Great really died (no horse was involved) and much more. -
Reveals the secrets of the magicians, those techniques that are simple yet seem so complex. Here are the basic principles of magic using ordinary household items: a deck of cards, rubber bands and even a potato. You can learn to: control the order of cards through any number of shuffles; move a straw through a potato; make coins pass through a handkerchief; make knots evaporate; predicting the sum of a five-digit number and much, much more. -
From the Author's Note: The stories in this volume record happenings in men's lives which interested me during years of wandering among the bushmen and natives of Cape York Pensinsula; the pearlers, trochus and beche-de-mer getters of the Coral Sea; the native islanders of Torres Strait; the beach-combers of the Great Barrier Reef...with two exceptions all are transcripts of fact or are largely based on fact...I hope Colonel Woodman, Bert Vigden of Thursday Island, Bert Jardine of Somerset and others will not mind their names being mentioned. My old mate Dick Welch, I know, will not; neither will "Scandalous" Graham. "Scandalous" may swear a lot and say harsh things about me, then quietly show the book in almost every shearing shed in New South Wales and Queensland, That is, if he's "out of trouble." It doesn't get any better than that!
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Puckoon: Spike Milligan
$12.00Spike Milligan's classic slapstick noel. n 1924 the Boundary Commission is tasked with creating the new official division between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Through incompetence, dereliction of duty and sheer perversity, the border ends up running through the middle of the small town of Puckoon. Houses are divided from outhouses, husbands separated from wives, bars are cut off from their patrons, churches sundered from graveyards. And in the middle of it all is poor Dan Milligan, our feckless protagonist, who is taunted and manipulated by everyone (including the sadistic author) to try and make some sense of this mess... -
A light-hearted, adventure story, set on the Great Barrier Reef around Lizard Island and Cooktown, of two young boys who join a trochus shell fishing boat and cruise to Lizard Island. A story for young adults, and it is NOT about opium or any other drug. -
Dickens wrote five Christmas Books in all, the first and best known being A Christmas Carol. The Cricket On The Hearth is third in the series but probably the second favourite in line. The Cricket of the title is a barometer of life at the home of John Peerybingle and his much younger wife, Dot. When things go well, the cricket on the hearth chirps; it is silent when there is sorrow. Tackleton, a jealous old man, poisons John's mind about Dot. The cricket, a creature long credited in many cultures with supernatural abilities, has his work cut out for him to detoxify good John's mind of the horrible suspicions the repulsive old Tackleton has sown. Illustrated by Gordon Robinson. -
Nearing the planet Eminiar VII, the crew of the Enterprise picks up a message coded 710, clearly warning them that under no circumstances should they continue their approach. But an overzealous Federation ambassador orders Kirk to disregard the message and beam down to the planet surface - where Kirk and his landing party are taken captive, unwilling participants in an intergalactic war that the Eminiarians have been fighting for almost 500 years. A war unlike any other..A war with battles, but no blood; A war with death, but no killings...Where not a single shot is fired, yet casualties number in the millions...A war without destruction, yet thousands are destroyed. It all seems to be an incredible game until the Starship itself becomes a target, caught between two belligerent enbemies - and Kirk's only chance to save his crew gives him much more than A Taste of Armageddon...With 300 full colour action scenes. -
A literary Christmas Stocking of how Christmas is spent in the Land Down Under. The collection covers our early days: An entry from Banks' journal, 1769; an 1836 Christmas Day service conducted in a rush hut; Christmas letters and poems, sent to England with more than a touch of homesickness about them; Christmas Day in the Victorian goldfields of 1857; the Holy Day with the Rudds, on their selection; Melbourne's Father Christmas of 1890; an all-Australian Christmas Dinner, from cocktails to crackers in 1925...there's even a recipe for Kosciusko Christmas Cake. Contributors include luminaries such as Henry Lawson, Dymphna Cusack, Elizabeth George, Marcus Clarke, Mary Grant Bruce, Xavier Herbert, Tasma and more. Illustrated. -
Imagine - you have just finished building your dream home, it has two bedrooms and has been designed just for you. You've endured the traumas of tradesmen who you've had to cajole, bribe and beg in order to get your home finished. The next thing that happens is that you are suddenly married, and five of your husband's children, two grandchildren, a step-son-in-law and an assortment of animals are living with you. At the end of the year, your cosy two-bedroom dream home has become a six-room mansion. This is Patsy's entertaining story - all the comical incidents, tradesmen trials, nosy neighbours and extended-family dilemmas from her first year of marriage to Bill, a psychiatrist. Patsy Rowe combined being a best-selling author with coaching in business etiquette, conducting fun nationwide seminars. She passed away in 2016. -
TV Script writer Larry Baker is hired to pen a new horror series. On location at an old castle he crashes through walls with the ease of Superman - and somehow usually lands plunk in the middle of a lovely lady's bed. But Larry isn;t really a sex maniac. Not quite. Even though the black-haired babe calls him seducer and the gamin-type blonde screams bloody murder... When you're up against real live vampires, disappearing corpses, things that go bump in the night... plus a couple of gorgeously undressed gals guaranteed to drive you up the wall - something's got to give - and it does - with plenty of happy horrible hilarity... -
Quite a rollicking tale of corrupt soldiers and starving convicts, set in a South Pacific penal colony in 1790. Into this alien world comes Corporal Phelim Halloran: Innocent and lover, poet and scholar and soldier-by-accident who attempts to make a world for himself in this non-conducive setting. First published in 1967. -
Written in 1913, this hefty novel commences: "I was an unwanted child - unwanted as a girl at all events. Father Dan Donovan, our parish priest, has told me all about it. I was born in October. It had been raining heavily all day long. The rain was beating hard against the front of our house and running in rivers down the window panes. Towards four in the afternoon the wind rose and then the yellow leaves of the chestnuts in the long drive rustled noisily, and the sea, which is a mile away, moaned like a dog in pain." Mary O'Neill, unwanted by her wealthy father for not being a boy, is married off to an impoverished - yet titled - man. Mary is determined to try and love her husband - she may yet please her father - but then she meets a real gentleman, in every sense of the word, and is torn between her true feelings, duty and her marriage vows. -
The hysterically funny inside story of the fictional Butterfield Administration of 30 days duration in 1909 as told by the 'First Lady', hostess of the Executive Mansion for that one month. Among other things, she details her rise from genteel poverty in the Deep South to sudden wealth, her romances, glamour and travels; and then to love, marriage and the ultimate address - the White House! Now a spry 94 years and a permanent 'guest' at the Boskey Dell Home for the Senile and Disturbed, Mrs Butterfield gives American political history a real shock treatment in this mock-memoir complete with photos. -
A thrilling story of a strange caravan - a group of British colonists in the Raj travel in a wheeled house pulled by a steam-powered mechanical elephant in 1867 - that penetrates the Terai, the immense forest that stretches across India at the foot of the mighty Himalayas. In this forest wild men, wilder beasts and even more adventures are encountered in the aftermath of the Sepoy rebellion. -
From the Carpenter's World Travels series. A fascinating look at life as it was here - in 1926! With 126 photographs and enticing chapter headings, such as: Life on the Sheep Station; The Three R's in Australia; Gold Diggings in Creek and Desert; Social Pests; Kangaroos and Danc9ng Birds and Mutton and Butter for London Tables. Illustrated with fabulous black and white photographs. -
Philip Kimberley, top ranking British intelligence officer rocks the international spy community by defecting to Russia. However, not trusting his new colleagues, Kimberly leaves behind a hidden dossier exposing the KGB's spy network as insurance. Years later, drunk and broken, Kimberly is given one last assignment by his KGB superiors - to undergo extensive surgical alteration and re-enter the UK to retrieve the dossier. With news of Kimberley's death leaked to the media the defector slips back into the U.K. unrecognisable as his former self. With documents in hand Kimberley begins a dangerous game of intrigue that plays MI6 against the KGB with deadly results. But then Kimberley's nemesis Admiral Scaith brings the former spy's daughter into the game, the rules suddenly change as the final pieces fall into place.
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