Her is the essence of Australia's unique folklore: tall tales and true of our legendary characters; deeds, ballads and songs of bush heroes; stories of shipwrecks and outback sagas - and the echo of the convict days. Shearers and drovers, squatters and selectors, bushrangers and troopers are all here as well as our Diggers, sports heroes, Dad and Dave and much more. Illustrated.
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A nation is fractured, torn apart by ore internal fighting than the threat of Viking invasion. The ruler of Mercia is dying, leaving no legitimate heir. His wife is a formidable fighter and great leader but no woman has ever ruled over an English kingdom. And she is without her strongest warrior and champion, Uhtred. The scene is set for an explosive battle between elders and warriors for an empty throne. While the kingdoms are in disarray the Vikings, this time coming from the West, will go on the rampage. A hero is needed, one that can destroy the threat to Mercia and who will ultimately decide the fate of a nation. Cover art by Lee Gibbons.
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London, 1880. Lucas Jarmyn struggles to make sense of the death of his beloved youngest daughter; his wife, Aurora, seeks solace in rigid social routines; and eighteen-year-old Dinah seeks fulfilment in unusual places. Only the housekeeper, the estimable Mrs. Logan, seems able to carry on. A train accident in a provincial town on the railway owned by Lucas claims the life of nine-year-old Alice Brinklow, and amid the public outcry, her father Thomas journeys to London demanding justice. As he arrives in the Capital on a frozen January morning, his fate and that of the entire Jarmyn family will hinge on such strange things as an ill-fated visit to a spiritualist, an errant chicken bone and a single vote cast at a boardroom meeting.
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These two novels were found among Shute's papers after his death -written in the 1920s, they are his first works. Stephen Morris: Stephen Morris studies mathematics at Oxford but when he finishes, the good job in rubber in Malaya he expects has fallen through. He sets his fiancee, Helen, free of any promise of marriage to him He gets a low paid job as a pilot /mechanic in the Isle of Wight Aviation Company with her cousin Malcolm and his partner Stenning. The firm fails after the wartime ministry hangar they are occupying is taken back, and he goes to Captain Rawdon’s Rawdon Aircraft Co. He becomes head of the technical department, studying aeronautical engineering. He turns down an offer from an armament firm Pilling-Henries and gets a rise when Rawdon gets an order for their new two-seater fighter from Denmark. He finds that Helen is shortly to marry Lechlane, who is going into politics and needs a hostess wife. Morris gives up hope of Helen, but is he being premature in abandoning hope?Pilotage: While on holiday in England,Peter Denniston proposes to Sheila Wallace, who he has known for four years; he has a job in Hong Kong with his uncle, as a maritime solicitor. She turns him down, saying she could not live in China. While yachting on the Solent, his yacht Irene collides with Sir David Fisher’s large yacht Clematis which fails to give way to him. Fisher realises that he was in the wrong and takes him on board the Clematis to recover. Two other men, Rawdon and Morris are also on board, discussing a secret aeronautical venture, a proposed transatlantic urgent cargo service that will reduce the transit time from 7 days to 5. Denniston is offered the position of navigator in this bold new venture.
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At the Cauldron we don't generally go in for romance, but a romance written by a man and set in the provincial middle-class at the turn of the century was just too interesting an idea to pass up. George Pearson, the traveling draper, thinks his friend school-teacher Freddie Bates needs to get married - to a nice little widow who 'knows the ropes'. Freddie gets his nice little widow but the next ten years of his life are not all plain sailing. He gets involved in troubles such as never occurred in his bachelor days but the delicate silk strands that bind him to the unpredictable little woman who has taken him for her second husband are firm. Less of a romance, and more of a satire on 'respectable' life in the early 1900s.
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An awesome collection of 87 of Lawson's best known stories, that will take the reader from the Sydney slums to the shearing sheds of northern New South Wales - stories peopled with drovers, buckjumpers, seamen, diggers, drunks and lovers. Some of the stories herein: An Old Mate of Your Father's; Arvie Aspinall's Alarm Clock; Mitchell Doesn't Believe In The Sack; The Drover's Wife; Two Dogs and a Fence; Baldy Thompson; Andy Page's Rival; Bill, The Ventriloquial Rooster; Mr. Smellingscheck; The Shanty-keepr's Wife; Two Boys At Grinder Bros; Mitchell on 'Sex' And Other 'Problems' and so much more.
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Such Is Life: Joseph Furphy
$20.00Usually published under the pseudonym 'Tom Collins'. Here the reader can meet the real Aussies of the 1880s - the bullockies and swaggies, the squatters and teamsters, the remittance men and the 'foreigners' who eked their existence from a harsh and begrudging land. Allegedly the diary of one 'Tom Collins' - a mythical figure to whom were attributed the tall tales and wild rumours of the outback - and based on Furphy's own experiences in the "adventurous and profane occupation" of a bullock-driver. This book has been described as a 'great slab of Australian earth, rather than a novel'. -
Dusty: Frank Dalby Davison
$12.00–$22.00Sired by a farmer's kelpie on a dingo mother, Dusty has been raised by Tom Lincoln since he was six weeks old. He is magnificently swift and alert - the ideal sheep dog, winning sheep dog trials and a trophy coveted by farmers near and far. But one evening Dusty, yearning to roam the night bush and sniff the scented earth, yields to the call of the wild. When Tom discovers blood-stained wool on Dusty's muzzle the next morning, he fears that his loyal companion has reverted to the dingo side of his nature.
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The gold-plated Babylon of a Florida pleasure resort contrasts with the work of a group of archeologists who are unearthing the remains of a primitive settlement in the area. Tom Sorrento, a one-time football hero of humble origin, bewildered his family by becoming an anthropologist. Ira deKay is the PR man, the smart operator with a hand in every racket and and a rake-off in every deal, the pleasure merchant who can 'arrange' anything and anyone. The clash between these two men is inevitable; tense and ironic, since they are both in love with the same woman. There is plenty of sex, drinking, affairs, politics and archaeology - and illustrates how Florida was transformed from its natural beauty into today's Mecca for the rich, famous and tourist.
