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I was lucky enough to be born a Catholic and fortunate enough to be Irish. What more could anyone ask? Well, my mother asked much more than that. She wanted a charming, polite, intelligent well-mannered youngest child - instead of the off-beat, rebellious child she had... So began the education proper of Jane and her friend Mary - an education that included illicit smoking. skipping classes, illegally conducting paid tours around the cloisters and sighing after the boys of St. Giles...an education which often strained the patience of Mother Superior but which always holds the delighted attentions of the reader. Filmed as The Trouble With Angels. -
Roden Cutler's list of honours is long and impressive, but it is his sole decoration, the Victoria Cross, that marks him as a hero. Over 800,000 men and women served in the Australian armed forces during the Second World War, but only twenty were awarded the V.C. Here are is the vivid life and times of the young soldier with the dashing good looks, the laconic humour and dislike of pretension who came back from the war determined to continue to support his mother, but, having lost a leg, with no idea how to do so. Yet by the age of 29 he was the Australian High Commissioner to New Zealand and his future diplomatic career would include stints to Ceylon, Egypt during the Suez crisis of 1956, Pakistan and New York. In 1966 he was appointed Governor of New South Wales; during his 15 years in the office he shared with Captain Arthur Phillip and Lachlan Macquarie, he earned his own niche among them as the `people's governor'. Much loved, still remembered as a man equally at home in the company of royalty or trade unionists. His story is embedded in Australian history, and part of it. But it is also the story of a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to serve his country with courage and dignity in the face of all obstacles. -
Frank Clune, Australia's answer to H.V. Morton, makes a flying trip from Australia to Europe with some 'Quixotical' peregrinations in the Iberian Peninsula in quest of facts. And so he does - accompanied by his wife now that the boys are more than old enbough to be left on their own. No trip to Spain in 1952 would have been complete without a bull fight, but the Clunes also look into many out-of- way and off-the-tourist-track places. With black and white photographs. -
In Victorian England there was only one fail-safe authority on matters ranging from fashion to puddings to scullery maids: Beeton’s Book of Household Management. This biography pulls back the lace curtains to reveal the woman behind the book - Mrs. Beeton, the first domestic diva of the modern age - and explores the life of the book itself. Isabella Beeton was a twenty-one-year-old newlywed with only six months’ experience running her own home when - coaxed by her husband, a struggling publisher - she began to compile her own book of recipes and domestic advice in a day and age when such books where very few and far between. The aspiring mother hardly suspected that her name would become synonymous with housewifery for generations. Nor would the women who turned to the book for guidance ever have guessed that its author lived in a simple house in the suburbs with a single maid-of-all-work instead of presiding over a well-run estate. Isabella would die at twenty-eight, shortly after the book's publication, never knowing the extent of her legacy. As her survivors faced bankruptcy, sexual scandal and a bitter family feud that lasted more than a century, Mrs. Beeton’s book became an institution. For an exploding population of the newly affluent, it prescribed not only how to cook and clean but ways to cope with the constant social flux of the emerging consumer culture: how to plan a party for ten, whip up a hair pomade or calculate how much money was needed to permit the hiring of a footman. This is also a vivid picture of Victorian home life and its attendant anxieties, nostalgia, and aspirations - not so different from modern life today. -
A charming account of life in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, the recollections of a girl, the child of Yorkshire parents, who saw the world with a wry sense of humour and an irrepressible vitality. This was a time when children were shushed if they asked awkward questions and were encouraged to emulate the feminine in all things - an ideal too restrictive for a girl with a vivid imagination and a strong sense of self. 'We had art once a week and although I loved drawing, the lessons were so unimaginative I hated them. The teacher gave out books of rough dark paper and thick coloured chalks. Every drawing had to be exactly the same. A landscape was a line of dark blue hills across the middle of the paper ("Roslyn Downes, your hills are too high"), a straight road in bright brick red ("Stop winding that road!"), a tree and some grass ("A haystack? What on earth do you think you're doing?") It's no wonder that Taylor went on to write the quintessential rebellion poem Please Don't Ask Me To Your Tupperware Party Sharleen. -
When Robert Andrews stepped into the morning cold of the timber village of Brown's Landing, he could never have imagined how his life would change. With the demons of his wartime experiences dogging every step, the very last thing he wanted was a confrontation with the richest man in town - especially since he was falling in love with the man's fiancé. This is the story of the hunt for the last of the fabulous red cedar trees in the wild mountains of Australia's Great Dividing Range where stoic pioneers and eccentric bushmen join forces to fight the tyranny of one man's rule. Based on true stories that accurately portray life in the 1920's, showing the old and the new, woven into a story of love, perseverance, courage and humour.
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It takes more than a fit of the vapours for a giant airline to ground a multimillion-dollar jumbo jet. What investigative writer John Fuller stumbled upon was a jet-age ghost story – crews refused to fly the plane because of the recurring apparitions of a dead pilot and flight engineer from a crashed sister ship. It was the famed Lockheed Tristar; the first jumbo jet ever to crash, in the Florida Everglades, with the loss of 101 persons. In his investigation, Fuller is led inexorably to repeated eyewitness experiences of the dead men’s reappearances before flight crews. After a classic reconstruction of the mysterious crash itself, he interviews scores of airline flight personnel and explores every facet of every “ghost” report. A confirmed skeptic who has always written with professional thoroughness on both scientific and life subjects, Fuller uncovers startling evidence of contact with the spirit of the dead flight engineer Don Repo. It is a spine-tingling, persuasive account with implications of spiritual realities that are of increasing interest in today’s world of ever more extraordinary scientific breakthroughs. -
Into the hard-living world of travelling shearers in the Australian outback comes internationally acclaimed writer Roger McDonald, driving an old truck rattling with cooking gear. He has abandoned writing for a time and found work as a cook for a team of New Zealand shearers working through New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. He is determined to find a sense of belonging: somehow to join his life with the landscape, the places and the people he meets along the way; somehow to fill the inexpressible yearning he feels. This is the story of that quest, of its triumphs and its failures - a story told with a heartfelt sense of of the profundity of ordinary lives. Written with an insider's affection and familiarity sharpened by an outsider's perception, this moving account of working life in a classic Australian industry gives a new twist to a long tradition of outback travel writing. -
Augustus and his brothers Francis and Henry left Yule's Station (60 miles north-east of Perth) on August 7, 1846 with four horses and seven weeks' provisions and explored a considerable amount of the country north of Perth. The party returned after 47 days, having covered 953 miles. Two years later there was an expedition to examine the course of the Gascoyne River in order to find good pasture land; further explorations followed during his time as Assistant Surveyor of Western Australia. In 1857 he also led a party in a search for traces of Ludwig Leichhardt, a fellow explorer who had disappeared. Both Augustus and his brother were presented with gold medals by the Royal Geographical Society. This facsimile reprint of the 1884 original is a fascinating diary of their adventures and explorations.
