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It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of four girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared. Later, an elderly teacher was seen walking in the same direction. One girl came running back - screaming hysterically. A few days later, another girl was found, seemingly asleep and without her boots, stockings or corsets and with no memory of what had happened after she and her friends had begun to climb the rock. And two girls and a teacher were still missing...what was the truth behind this Gothic mystery? This edition illustrated with photographs and artwork of the period. -
Three men on the run take Petra Gwinson and her sick mother as hostages. A nightmare journey ends in a tiny outback settlement in Australia's northern Queensland. The robbers are plagued by setbacks as everyone plots against them. The stranded men become more desperate and finally, the old blind Aboriginal Narli wreaks revenge as the men, in a frightening chase on a stormy night, fight for survival. -
Stephen Rudge, one of a rowdy gang of boys in a colliery village, is literally knocked head over heels into the Scouts by the Scoutmaster's car. He had been getting into mischief out of boredom and selfishness; as a Scout he finds life much more interesting and purposeful, with plenty of adventures and one or two steps backwards as he battles to get on the 'right path'. -
A compendium of comic pieces that take a light-hearted look at life, from cross the globe and across the decades. In this volume: Special Delivery, Richard Gordon; The O'Conors Of Castle O'Conor, Anthony Trollope; When In Rome, Peter Ustinov; Butch Minds The Baby, Damon Runyan; A Linguistic Experiment, Jerome K. Jerome; The Whore Of Mensa, Woody Allen; Introduction To Cold Comfort, Stella Gibbons; How I Killed A Bear, Charles Dudley Warner; A Day In The Life Of A Milligan, Spike Milligan; Adventures Of A Y.M.C.A. Lad, H.L. Mencken; The House Of Fahy, E.Œ Somerville and Martin Ross; 'Not A Porthouse Man', Tom Sharpe; Getting A Glass Of Water, Frederick W. Cozzens; The Wrong Boot, Evelyn Waugh; The Adventures Of A Christmas Turkey, Mark Lemon; The Stalled Ox, Saki; Darrowby Show, James Herriot; The Phantom Elopement, Charles Dickens; The Waltz, Dorothy Parker; A Visit To Grandpa's, Dylan Thomas; The Hand That Riles The World, O. Henry; Without The Option, P.G. Wodehouse; Top Of The League, A.G. Macdonell; The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society Of Mrs Rasselyerbrown, Stephen Leacock; Body And Soul, Alan Coren; The Brief Engagement Of Lupin Pooter, George and Weedon Grossmith; 'Absolutely Ghastly!' H.E. Bates; Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog; Kurt Vonnegut Jr; The Idol's Eye, S.J. Perelman; The Morning After, Kingsley Amis; A Visit To Niagra, Mark Twain; The Fiancé, Nancy Mitford; The Night The Bed Fell, James Thurber; An Italian's View Of A New England Winter, James M. Bailey. Cover art by Alistair Graham. -
Sub-title: How To Live in Australia - And Like It. This is actually one of those books that tells you what's right about Australia. Kit Denton, author of The Breaker and father of television's Andrew Denton, came to Australia in the late 1940s and worked as a gold miner, an itinerant worker, a radio and television interviewer. he covers his mining days, the old ABC television studios in Perth, landladies, characters such as Captain Sundial and Uncle Charlie, his search for the Big Bronzed Anzac Hero and so many other wonderful memories. His last book. -
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. -
Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer who lives in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory - he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries. And so Yambo relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and the life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image: that of his first love. Illustrated. -
A story of Viking days. In the middle of the banqueting hall, where Jarl Halfdene stood watching the crowd on the beach, and looking at him in the old man's arms eyes. "In your trust, Jarl Halfdene!" he said at last in solemn tones." "As the death of the band!" As solemnly he replied, "Halfdene!" and looking as earnestly into Birkabegn's face, as he pressed the little child to his breast. The crown of the gilt raven, which was held in readiness, grasped the hilt of his long sword, and hurried out into the gathering darkness. A little while after King Birkabegn was gone Hablok was crying piteously, and all Jarl Halfdene's coaxing and endeavors to console him were useless, but he was wearied out, and before the last ship had pushed off from the beach, he lay sound asleep in Halfdene's arms. The old man still stood watching the dark line on the sea, and the old men were left behind, and two or three nobles and councillors in the care of the kingdom. These nobles were called jarls, and the most trusted and beloved among them at King Birkabegn's court was Jarl Halfdene. Right well he deserved to be so; For King Birkabegn's father, then to Birkabegn himself, he had a trusty right hand, and he was shown as wise as he was honorable and loyal; and the king knew that no harm could ever be his little son while he was in Jarl Halfdene's care.
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At twenty-nine, Bettger was a failed insurance salesman. By the time he was forty he owned a country estate and could have retired. What are the selling secrets that turned Bettger’s life around from defeat to unparalleled success and fame as one of the highest paid salesmen in America? Here he reveals his personal experiences and explains the foolproof principles that he developed and perfected. He shares instructive anecdotes and step-by-step guidelines on how to develop the style, spirit, and presence of a winning salesperson. He covers: the power of enthusiasm; how to conquer fear; the key word for turning a skeptical client into an enthusiastic buyer; the quickest way to win confidence; the seven golden rules for closing a sale. This was first published in 1951 and the times have changed - but people don't. There is plenty that is still applicable today. -
Hilarious. Incredible. Bizarre. Witty. Deliciously malicious! Where There's a Will is an absorbing collection of odd and curious wills from many countries and many times. Vindictive wills, revealing wills, wills written on nurses' petticoats, eggshells, tractor fenders and wills found in a bottle at sea included in the book reflect the full range of man's virtues and vices. The colorful individuals whose Last Will and Testament grace the pages of this book give more than their money away - they give themselves away. They use their wills to get back at obnoxious relatives, to maintain control beyond the grave, to reward, to punish, to defy those who say you can't take it with you. And to have the last word. Among the famous and the infamous whose wills are featured are: George Bernard Shaw, W.C. Fields, Patrick Henry, Janis Joplin, Napoleon, Jack Kelly, Howard Hughes, William Shakespeare, Ian Fleming, Billy Rose, Picasso, Marilyn Monroe, Aristotle Onassis. . . and many more. -
Book III in the Bum trilogy. Dedicated by the author to anyone who has or who has ever had a bum, the last instalment promises the reader: Bums! Action! Adventure! Romance! Robots! Time Travel! Prehistoric Bums! Giant Brown Blobs! A Huge Arsteroid! Plenty of scope for bum, fart and poo jokes here, for the young and the young at heart. -
The son of the chief of Maia Island has taken Ati Manu, a jewelled collar which is their only valuable, to exchange for food for its starving people. Two men follow him through the jungle but he manages to hide the collar in a hollow tree before he is cornered and killed. The Brevitt family take up the search for the valuable collar despite the armed murderers who wait for them in the jungle. They are robbed of vital skin diving equipment and are attacked by sea creatures in their efforts to find Ati Manu and help the natives. Danger stalks the family as they search for the treasure, with plenty of adventures before the hunt ends. Illustrated by Stuart Tresilian. -
Poor Mr. Banks. His cutaway is too tight, he can't get a cocktail, and he's footing the bill....He's the father of the bride. Stanley Banks is just your ordinary suburban dad. He's the kind of man who believes that weddings are simple affairs in which two people get married. But when Daddy's little girl announces her engagement to Buckley, Mr. Banks feels like his life has been turned upside down. And any man with a daughter can appreciate Mr. Banks's feelings. To say the least, Mr. Banks isn't taking it well, and to make matters worse, he must host cocktail parties with the in-laws-to-be, initiate financial planning talks with Buckley, and moderate family conferences on who will be invited to the reception. Who can blame him when he sinks so low as to offer Kay $1500 to elope? But Mr. Banks holds his peace, and when the last wedding guest has departed from his confetti-carpeted house, he has his memories, and you have a merry record of his tribulations. Classic comedy that was considered so classic that it has been filmed twice and a 50th anniversary edition of the book was issued. Illustrated by Gluyas Williams. -
A fascinating blend of Biblical commentary and travel narrative that characterised its predecessor, In The Steps Of The Master. Morton set himself the task of following the the Missionary Journeys of St. Paul and tracing the route by which Christianity came to the West. He made four journeys to the Near East, covering Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece, Cypress, Malta, Rhodes and the City of Rome. Morton wanted to portray St Paul as a Saint and a man, and what problems he would have encountered as he set out to Christianise the pagan world, to describe the world in which he lived and to contrast the cities of his day with their modern equivalents. Photographic illustrations. -
The story of Judah Ben-Hur did not end with the Crucifixion. In its terrible aftermath, Judah joins with the gentle Joseph of Arimathea to bring Christianity to the Romans. Fate intervenes again, and Judah must fight and strive through adventure, heartbreak and danger before he finds peace and love again. The cast of characters include Nero, his incestuous mother Agrippina, the passionate Leah and General Seutonius in the settings of Rome, Ancient Britain and the Mediterranean. https://cosmiccauldronbooks.com.au/p/ben-hur-lew-wallace-2/ -
A young woman finds herself pregnant 'on the wrong side of the blanket' in 1961. The attitude to single mothers was very different then; her father kicks her out of their home and she moves into a dingy rooming house. Against her will she becomes involved with the characters who live there, some of them who are outcasts in their own way - Toby, the budding Jewish writer; John, the huge, gentle Negro musician and Mavis, the old dear living in a room stuffed full of souvenirs of a theatrical past. When she decides that she will keep her baby rather than offer him for adoption or have an abortion - highly illegal then - she begins to receive unexpected help from this odd assortment as well as her boss, an eccentric in his own right. A very well told story.
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Back Of Sunset: Jon Cleary
$12.00Dr. Stephen McCabe has a partnership in a fashionable practice in Sydney and a very beautiful, very ambitious fianceè and when he comes to the lonely Flying Doctor outpost of Winnemincka, he only intends staying for a short holiday. Yet he is aware that his true vocation is escaping him and that feeling becomes more acute when an old friend of his father comes from the Outback to visit him. The discovery that many lonely people desperately need him takes him out of his comfortable rut and presents him with a challenge and he must face the greatest personal problem of his life with a completely new set of values.
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The Norwegian freighter Gangerolf leaves Subic Bay in the Philippines with a motley assortment of passengers. In the hold, under armed guard, is the entire crew of a sunken U-boat. In the first class cabins are Bill Derby, a British submarine commander on his way back to England for a medical board; Lt-Commander Witheringham - 'Withers' - a useless little man whose existence the Admiralty has forgotten over the years; and Captain Spatter, the American commander of the prisoners' guard. He's always broke becuase he plays craps with the enlisted men and never wins. But the most important passenger is Wren (Womens' Royal Navy Service) Mary Lou Smith - an unconventional young woman. Every character, from Wren Smith to Captain 'Happy' Christiansen, the Gangerolf 's huge, whiskey-guzzling Master, is real and alive, from the moment they board the freighter to the day they are marooned on a deserted island. -
East Is East: George Mikes
$12.00Mikes visited Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Siam (Thailand) India and Turkey. At once he came up against an awkward truth - if you are in the East then it stops being the East. The glamour of the Orient is automatically transferred to California - or even to Illinois. So he stopped bothering about points of the compass and concentrated on the people instead. Contrary to expectations, he found them pretty scrutable. Like Londoners, New Yorkers and residents of the village of Siklos in Hungary, they seemed to Mikes to be endearing and funny. None of them liked being oppressed, although some liked oppressing other people when they got the chance. Most of them said they detested Europeans, which often seemed to mean Americans but at the same time were as friendly as could be. They enjoyed criticising themselves but didn't like other people criticising them. In such familiar circumstances, Mr Mikes felt free to be as funny as he liked and so he has been - as well as being humorous and wise. English humor. Illustrated by Nicholas Bentley.
