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Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? When Bony noticed something odd in the background of a police photograph, he begins to piece together the secrets of the sands of Windee. Here is the original background to the infamous Snowy Rowles murder trial.

 

Napoleon Bonaparte my best detective. - Daily Mail

Throughout all the game of war, in every Age, there has been no task so fascinating, so alive with thrills, as that of the scout. Against an enemy army he plays a lone hand as does the sniper. But the scout's job is not to hide and kill, his is to press forward and see, but never be seen. And - he must return.

Ion Idriess's Australian guerrilla manual presents a rare insight into one of the most vital functions of small-unit combat intelligence - scouting. Despite great technical achievements in modern military science, the small-unit commander must still rely heavily on the eyes, ears and stealth of his scouts. Details obscure techniques often overlooked in most U.S. Army and Marine scouting texts.

The sixth book of the Australian Guerrilla series, The Scout, by Ion Idriess is now available. It is packed with knowledge and bush lore, and gives to any soldier who studies it most of the data necessary for the job of scouting. With the rest of the series it provides a small compact little work that, carried in the haversack, is a means of learning as you go. - Hobart Mercury, 1943.

Joan Lindsay's classic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock is a subtle blend of mysterious and sinister events set in a period of Australian social life drawn with loving nostalgia. The final chapter of the novel was removed at the request of her publishers, creating a mystery to which thousands have begged to know the solution.

The missing chapter reveals what did happen to the schoolgirls who vanished from the Rock after a St Valentine's Day picnic in 1900, and holds commentaries by John Taylor, Yvonne Rousseau and Mudrooroo.

Joan Lindsay's classic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock is a subtle blend of mysterious and sinister events set in a period of Australian social life drawn with loving nostalgia. The final chapter of the novel was removed at the request of her publishers, creating a mystery to which thousands have begged to know the solution.

The missing chapter reveals what did happen to the schoolgirls who vanished from the Rock after a St Valentine's Day picnic in 1900, and holds commentaries by John Taylor, Yvonne Rousseau and Mudrooroo.

Its theme is simple: a tale of Miss Susan Brady, a woman with ideas above her station, who is spurned, and whose jealousy corrodes her life and drives her to try and sabotage the happiness of John Iredale, the prosperous South Australian grazier who has broken her heart... Classy stuff, this - the fruit of delighted observation, of a sensuous and irrepressible joie de vivre. You cannot fake this quality, it is remarkable... there lingers in one's mind the rare and special pleasure of the sense-texture which Wenz has created a poignant gift from a Frenchman to Australia, his adopted country. - Helen Garner, from her Foreword.

Paul Wenz (1869-1939) arrived in Australia in 1892 and worked as a grazier in the Forbes district at 'Nanima' from 1898, where he wrote several popular novels and many short stories of Australian bush life that were published in Paris. Close friends with Miles Franklin, Andre Gide and Jack London, this first English translation of a classic French novel was translated by Maurice Blackman.

These stories re-create a strange and fascinating world, where a child may look through squares of lattice enclosing a garden of Indian jasmine and Kasmiri roses to the sheepyards and paddocks of the Australian countryside. They are unique in their depiction of life of an Indian family in rural Australia, but they would be distinguished in any case by their quality - their crystalline images and lyrical feeling, their sensitive perception of light and shade, of human suffering, exile and joy.

 

Mena Abdullah and Ray Mathew have created a beautiful new world in Australia: the gay, touching and agonising life of an immigrant Indian family as seen by their younger daughter. - The Australian

 

Never has the other fellow's point of view been put forward with more gentle suavity than in this tale of Indian children growing up in rural Australia ... The style throughout has a simplicity and purity of language that is a delight to read. - The West Australian

 

...a jewel of a book. - Nancy Keesing

Martin Flanagan, journalist at the Age, has often written of the great Wonders of Australian Sport, his love of the AFL, of the importance of Aboriginal players in the highest echelons of Australian sport. A few years ago he threw himself at the mysterious and distressed figure of Tom Wills - our early Colonial cricket celebrity, who put together the Aboriginal Cricket Team set for Great Britain in 1868 - and helped write the original Code for Australian Rules. A hero for several original clubs - Melbourne, Collingwood and Richmond for example. Yet things fall apart, as things have often done for our sporting stars...

So Flanagan went deeper: "I dared myself to actually picture Tom Wills in the various situations I knew him to have been in during his life and backed my fancy. It was like entering a creative delirium. Pictures appeared before me which I wrote down in scenes. If I do the same thing in ten years' time, I may come up with a different story but I doubt that will happen. I doubt the energy that accompanied the writing of this treatment will ever return."

And so we have his TOM WILLS PICTURE SHOW, shedding light on a most complex character...

The first book written on the natural history of life on the Nullabor Plain, was written by station-master A.G. Bolam and first published in 1923. The author recollects his times with Aboriginal trackers and workers in and around Ooldeah, as the great railway progressed from South Australia across to Western Australia, and in doing so looks at animal and bird life and the unique geographical feature of the Plain. Bolam studied the Ooldeah tribe and records their nomadic social life, their attitude to clothes and footwear, smoking, bartering, marriage, weapons, tools, whip making and water carrying. He records their approach to fire-making and smoke signals, medicine and surgery, amusements, decorations, corroborees and ceremonies, as well as deaths and burials. Of especial interest are his notes on message sticks, writing, tracking and procuring water in desert conditions.

A daring and thrilling journey into a fantastical world of shamans, vampires and werebears where aboriginal Dreaming and Gothic horror are woven together to create a powerful and seamless narrative.

I, the stranger with strange habits which make me avoid the full light of day, enter into the warm circle of your fire and will exchange my yarn for your company...

The stranger, George, tells a story of wonder and horror. Jangamuttuk, his father and Master of the Ghost Dreaming, is a shaman with ceremonies to send the white ghosts back to their own world. But the ghosts keep coming, settling on the land and destroying the local people.

Initiated into the Dreaming, George learns the secret of transforming into his animal companion, Dingo, and discovers the thrill of the hunt. But he is not alone in his lust for blood. Amelia, the white woman, shares his appetite, feeding on humans and animals alike to maintain her terrible power. Moving into the white settlement, she creates a psychic barrier around it to protect herself and her slaves. The aboriginal people must draw on every resource, both physical and psychic, to overcome this threat to their existence.

ABOUT MUDROOROO'S MASTER OF THE GHOST DREAMING:

'A real page-turner. The prose is lyrical, yet simple, the images real and ironic... an exciting, moving and engaging novel.' - SOPHIE MASSON, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

'A most original contribution to Australian literary style... probably the first instinctively Australian magical-realist novel.' - ROD MORAN, WEST AUSTRALIAN

Broome is a little sun-drenched town on the barren north-west coast of Australia, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else's business, where all the little bungalows might be glass for all the secrets they hide. How then had the murderer of Broome's two most attractive widows got away without leaving a single clue? Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte investigates, with his usual calm precision - but the murderer strikes again, and Bony realizes he is dealing with a madman - that time is running out...

 

Bony - a unique figure among top-flight detectives - BBC

This true story came from the ship's log of the HMS Rattlesnake under the command of Captain Owen Stanley... who was searching for the Kennedy expedition... sailing the Coral Seas searching for men in the peninsula ranges, and Barbara Thompson was captive on Murralug; Billy Winn, an escaped convict from Norfolk Island, had, through a reign of terror and treachery, cowed the most fearful of all peoples - the Coral Sea headhunters. He had taken power on Badu as the feared demi-god Wongai. Hearing that a white woman was to be found on Murralug, he gathered the Badu headhunters to raid Murralug... However Barbara, after being held on Murralug for five years, succeeded in escaping from the Murralug people and Wongai, and incredibly, was rescued by Captain Owen Stanley and taken back to Sydney.

- Beverley Eley, from her biography Ion Idriess.

It is in a harsh and eerie landscape - the crater formed by the meteor they called "The Stranger" - that another stranger is found... dead. In an area where the presence of every outsider is announced by the bush telegraph, how had this man passed unreported? Who was he? How had he died? No tracks around the crater and no stranger in town. It soon becomes obvious to Bony that both the locals and the Aboriginals are guarding a secret - untill the will of the Tribe breaks their silence...

 

This is undoubtedly Upfield's strongest book, for a number of reasons: 1) Bony is at his best in his detective work; 2) Upfield is at his best in studying the social and cultural situations of the white and the Aboriginals; 3) though the physical setting is less intense than in some other works, it is strong here; 4) Upfield's symbolism - especially in the use of the metaphor of clothes vs nakedness - is extraordinarily complex. There is no doubt that this particular book is a masterpiece in every way. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

It is in a harsh and eerie landscape - the crater formed by the meteor they called "The Stranger" - that another stranger is found... dead. In an area where the presence of every outsider is announced by the bush telegraph, how had this man passed unreported? Who was he? How had he died? No tracks around the crater and no stranger in town. It soon becomes obvious to Bony that both the locals and the Aboriginals are guarding a secret - untill the will of the Tribe breaks their silence...

 

This is undoubtedly Upfield's strongest book, for a number of reasons: 1) Bony is at his best in his detective work; 2) Upfield is at his best in studying the social and cultural situations of the white and the Aboriginals; 3) though the physical setting is less intense than in some other works, it is strong here; 4) Upfield's symbolism - especially in the use of the metaphor of clothes vs nakedness - is extraordinarily complex. There is no doubt that this particular book is a masterpiece in every way. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

Out of print for nearly 70 years, more classic tales from Ion Idriess, who explored Australia, chasing down the stories of a changing continent: "The stories in this volume record happenings or incidents in men's lives which interested me during years of wandering among the bushmen and natives of Cape York Peninsula; the pearlers, trochus and beche-de-mer getters of the Coral Sea; the native islanders of Torres Strait; the "beachcombers" of the Great Barrier Reef; and along the eastern coast and in the Arafura Sea towards the west."

With authenticity that sometimes surprises the reader, Idriess introduces us to Aboriginals from Northern Australia, Papuan head-hunters, and Islanders around the Great Barrier Reef, all still in the colonial phase of European contact. Chinese gold diggers appear too, well before the rise of China. Idriess knew these individuals; he met them, lived with them, before the contemporary world had a chance to make so much difference. The first peoples in the stories are in their tribal state, infused with age-old traditions and behavioral norms, proud but fearful of the white colonialists. It wasn't so long ago - barely three generations. That closeness in time can be said to offer a benefit to the reader; to some extent it helps us understand better their descendants who are alive today and within our society's reach.

- Tony Grey, from his Introduction.

In this WW1 novel, published in English for the first time, Jim and Dick are two lively boys from the bush, along with 20,000 other Australians and New Zealanders, who embarked on what seemed to be a great adventure when they enlisted in the 1st AIF - to fight for 'King and Empire'. Their experience is cut short when both are seriously wounded on the Gallipoli peninsula. They find themselves in beds next to each other on a hospital ship headed for England. As they slowly recover, they discover the 'old country' of their ancestors. Unfortunately, they fall for the same young English nurse and a love triangle emerges to trouble their futures.

French/Australian author Paul Wenz based his novel and short stories on personal experience as an immigrant grazier in central NSW and working for the Red Cross in France and London during World War I. The writing is simple, at times poetic and humorous, instinctively seductive, devoid of convention and banality.

'Wenz is a brilliant noticer - a talent one is born with... and without which no novelist can draw us into the world he is making.' - Helen Garner