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An essential guide to Australian rhyming slang drawn from oral sources in and around Sydney. Three of the author's best informants were mates who'd spent some time as guests of Her Majesty in Sydney's Long Bay Jail. Two other prolific sources were a couple of retired shearers. Great as a social document or just for fun - or even as a gift to a 'New Australian' so they know the meaning of such phrases as He did a Harold Holt (bolted, vanished); Here comes the John Hops/Johns (cops, the police); I'm on me Pat Malone; I'm alone; The saucepan lids are home on holidays - The kids are home on holidays plus many more. -
Born Juliana Horatia Gatty in Yorkshire, 1841, Mrs Ewing's first successful story was The Brownies. Fifty years later, Sir Robert Baden-Powell adopted the name for the junior branch of the Girl Guide Movement. Even though these stories were written in the Victorian age, when life was very different, they address child behaviour issues that still exist: laziness, self-entitlement and taking things for granted. In this volume: The Brownies; The Land Of Lost Toys; Three Christmas Trees; An Idyll Of The Wood; Christmas Crackers; Amelia And The Dwarfs. With four colour plate illustrations by E.H. Shephard. -
I lost my own father at 12 yr of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false....The legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semi-literate yet magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer. To his own people, the ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to her lover, a famous horse thief, Ned saw his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he was finally captured and hanged. There is almost a sensation of Ned speaking from beyond the grave.
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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. -
Or Why I Don't Steal Towels from Great Hotels Anymore. This is not a travel book, exactly, and it's not a book about hotels. It's a book about obsessions and the need to let our obsessions guide us to discoveries...Travel can be the supreme pleasure in life but only if we undertake an interior journey along with our exterior voyage.Among other topics, Dale covers: Why men want to read maps and women want to ask the way; how to stop a taxi driver from talking to you; where to find the guidebook that suits your personality; the how, what and why of souveniring from Great Hotels; whether you should be in love with your travelling companion; where to go star-spotting for dead celebrities; how to enjoy fake travel and pseudo nostalgia; the best and worst waiters, streets, train dining cars, restaurants and small museums in the world; and why shopping is a waste of good siesta time. With amusing sketches by Matthew Martin.
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Barbed Wire: Hall Caine
$12.00Set on the Isle of Man during the First World War, the novel relates the life of Mona Craine, a young woman who lives with her brother and their aging father. Mona's life is disrupted first by her brother being called up to fight in France, and then by the authorities agreeing to set up an internment camp for enemy aliens there at Knockaloe. Mona consents to live there still and supply food for them odious Germans against her wish and only for the sake of her ill father. However, her hard and unforgiving attitude towards the Germans begins to lessen when she meets the polite and well-spoken Oskar Heine. As they begin to fall in love, they also need to deal with the fierce hostility of the local community.Originally published as The Woman of Knockaloe. -
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... -
The bizarre and hauntingly beautiful sketchbook diary of Charles Altamont Doyle, father of Arthur Conan Doyle, who in 1889 was confined to the dreary Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum in Scotland. He would spend the rest of his life in asylums but the question remains: was he actually mad? Readers may judge for themselves: the diary, long forgotten by the family and auctioned off in a job lot of books in 1955, then stored for another twenty years - is a wondrous blend of words and watercolour, facts and fancies and exquisitely detailed depictions of fairies and birds. At the core of the quips and Punch-like cartoons is a desperately lonely man, struggling to hold onto reality by facing his fears and fantasies through the medium of his art. Arthur's biographers have had very little to say about Charles or the circumstances that led the family to institutionalise him; what clues might the diary hold? Beautiful colour illustrations. Cover art by Colin Lewis.
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From the author of The Once and Future King. This volume contains: The Maharajah; A Sharp Attack of Something or Other; The Spaniel Earl; Success or Failure; Nostradamus; No Gratuities; The Troll; The Man; The Black Rabbit; Kin to Love; Soft Voices at Passenham; The Point of Thirty Miles; A Rosy Future, Anonymous; Not Until Tomorrow; The Philistine Cursed David by His Gods; A Link with Petulengro.
