AustLit

'Every living thing, large or small, plays a very important role in the workings of our environment. To protect the world’s declining biodiversity, all children must understand the environment to make sure it is saved for future generations.

The fantastic art of Helen Leitch triggers curiosity in all age groups. Combined with Janeen Brian’s humorous verse the book offers a valuable device to help today’s children understand nature’s way of the environment and how it works. While the children appreciate these charming images - ants, frogs, bush crickets or grass hoppers and many more - they will learn to have a better understanding of them and may instil a desire to search out the woods, witness and appreciate these small animals at work.

The artist portrays our small fauna at play, feasting, at school or participating in an orchestra or circus act, and dressed in the delicate components of the forest fl ora from buds, petals to stamens.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
 

'Successful author, Jack Crane has written a book set in the beautiful garden of the house where he lived as a ten-year-old: a garden full of mystery, secrets and challenges. The story is of an unhappy child who discovers that the ornaments in this special place come to life when night falls and how they welcome him into their world of magic, hope and friendship. Jack's children believe their father when he tells them that the story is just a fantasy, until one day when Mia, the six-year-old daughter, confronts her father: 'Daddy, I saw one of them. She ran away when I said your name. But she was real. I know she was!' (Publication summary)

The story of a bilby who leads a peaceful life, until the the feral animals take over. A sanctuary is finally made for the endangered species, and they begin to rebuild their lives.

'In 1957, having graduated in Medicine at the University of Adelaide three years previously, Dr Mary Guntner (née Fritsch) accepted an urgent call to serve as a doctor with the Lutheran Mission in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea).

'Setting out in 1958, she served first at Yagaum, near Madang, and then at Finschhafen at the Buangi and Butaweng hospitals. Later, she became the 'flying doctor' as she commuted frequently, incorporating Yagaum hospital again into her workload while being based in the Finschhafen area.

'Her work revolved around emergencies of all descriptions, from caesarean sections to fractures to treating massive goitres and various tropical diseases; and inspirational work such as treating a child with contractured limbs following inactivity over several months owing to illness, and 'plastic surgery' requiring many operations on a man who had suffered burns to his face and neck, without treatment, with resulting contractures. And all the time the continuing fight with tuberculosis and leprosy was waged, Mary being responsible for many patients at any one time; the Butaweng hospital alone had 600 beds!

'Not only was Mary practising medicine, she was also teaching, as her many helpers were mostly indigenous, learning nursing and all it entailed as they went along. Coping with floods, lack of transport, medical supplies, fresh food, and unreliable communications also added to the vagaries of life in a developing Third World country.

'The regular, newsy letters Mary wrote home during the nine years she spent in New Guinea were preserved faithfully by her mother and, together with her own memories, they form the basis of this informative account. With quotes from her letters interspersed throughout this narrative, we experience Mary's enthusiasm and the excitement of each moment as it unfolds.

'It is a lively, true account of her fascinating, fulfilling, but often perilous, experiences, her love for this beautiful, challenging country and her devotion to the people whom she had vowed to serve.

'Together with her fellow-workers, she can rightly claim that there was 'never a dull moment'!'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Lloyd Hurrell writes vividly of his experiences in war and in peace. This is an account of his early adventures, firstly when he went to New Guinea in 1939 as a cadet patrol officer in the Rabaul, Salamaua and Morobe areas, followed by his service in World War II, then his subsequent return to New Guinea in 1945 and his years of ‘big bush’ patrolling.

'Lloyd Hurrell and his elder brother, Les, were members of the AIF’s first contingent to enlist in New Guinea. They served with the elite 2/31st Infantry Battalion in the Middle East (including Syria), and later in New Guinea in the vital Kokoda Track campaign, during which Lloyd was decorated with the Military Cross: Lloyd’s brother, Les, was killed in this campaign. The Lae and Markham-Ramu campaigns followed. Later, Lloyd was accidentally wounded in the leg by a burst from a sub-machine gun on Bougainville. He spent a year down south recovering in hospital. Later, he married his nurse, Margaret Crowther.

'Lloyd, together with Margaret, returned to New Guinea, and for six years conducted a series of notable patrols, in such places as Bogia, Mumeng, Siassi and Finschhafen. His main feat was the opening up of Menyamya station in 1950, in the then uncontrolled Kukukuku country. Hurrell recounts many absorbing and interesting observations of the Kukukuku and their customs. Joined by a group of intrepid Lutheran missionaries, Lloyd, Margaret and PO Gary Keenan forged new trusts and friendships in this hitherto hostile area.

'Lloyd subsequently became a farmer and planter near Wau, entered national politics, and served for many years as Chairman of the PNG Coffee Marketing Board, receiving a CMG and an OBE for his work.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It is the story of three men in the early days of Adelaide - John Hart, Peter Egerton-Warburton and Augustus Short - men from very different backgrounds but all in Adelaide at the same time and eventually connected by the intermarriages of their children.

'John Hart was born in Devon in 1809 the year his fatherwas convicted of libel and sent to Teneriffe. John whent to sea at the age of 12, and reached Australia in 1828 where his knowledge of the eastern and southern coasts later enabled him to provide sailing directions for Colonel Light. Settling in Adelaide in 1846 he turned to commercial projects and politics. He was an astute businessman and a shrewed polititian. He was a member of nine ministries, treasurer six times and premier three times.

'Peter Egerton-Warburton, went into the navy at the age of 12, but left to join the 13th Native Infantry Battalion in Bombay. On resigning this post he came to Adelaide as the appointed Police Commissioner. He made several successful expeditions but was fired for being too often away, though he had always travelled at the Government’s request and his journyes provided much information. He was later exonerated but never reinstated. In 1872 his last and best known expedition took him from Alice Springs across the Great Sandy Desert to Roebourne on the north coast of Western Australia. He was hailed a hero, honoured by the Queen and awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal.

'Like Hart, Augustus Short was Devon born but his family tree was rich in highly placed legal men and church dignitaries. Augustus chose the church and arrived in Adelaide as its first Anglican Bishop in 1847. His see was enourmous, including all of South and West Australia and what is now the Northern Territory. He travelled over as much of it as he could. In Adelaide he was responsible for building the catherral, St. Peter’s College and Adelaide University.

'The story of all three is told here by one of their present-day desendants, using information from letters, diaries and family lore.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Charles Thomas Johnston (‘Bill’) Adamson was born on 17 January 1901, between the proclamation of Australian Federation on 1 January and the first federal election in March. His father was an Australian surgeon living in England and his mother was from the Scottish aristocracy. Despite an excellent public-school education, Bill turned away from privilege. After learning the wool trade, he emigrated to Australia in 1923 to work with a shearing team. He spent the next few years doing the rounds of the sheds in Queensland. The year 1926 was a bad one on the land and after a period cutting cane in far north Queensland, Adamson left for Papua (an Australian Territory since 1906) to try his luck on the goldfields.

'He prospected with variable success for the next decade, often the only European, many days from assistance in precipitous terrain. In 1935 he joined the Papuan Government service as one of Sir Hubert Murray’s ‘Outside Men’, and achieved a measure of fame for his part in the epic eight month – and completely bloodless – Bamu-Purari Patrol into the Southern Highlands. This was the longest exploration in Papuan history. He then helped to open the Lake Kutubu Patrol Post in the Southern Highlands, where he spent two continuous years involved in the business of ‘first contact’ on a daily basis. At the beginning of World War II, Bill joined the RAN and served first on minesweepers in the English Channel and Western Approaches, then a corvette in the Indian Ocean. After Japan entered the war, Bill returned to Papua, where he served as beachmaster at Oro Bay, and in command of a survey ship assisting the Allied offensive in New Guinea. In the final year of the war he assumed command of HMAS Taipan, one of the ‘cloak and dagger’ snake-boats of the Services Reconnaissance Department. After demobilisation he returned to Papua in the government service, and later as a plantation owner, before retiring to Cooktown in 1964. His health began to fail, and in 1978, shortly after he was married, he shot himself.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories of his travels in the South Seas have inspired countless readers to follow in his footsteps and experience for themselves the seductive beauty of the Pacific Islands and their peoples. One of those readers was the twelve-year-old Harry Maude, adapting painfully to lonely boarding-school life in England after a childhood spent within a large household in the heat and noise of India. He in turn would arouse the enthusiasm of the young Honor King who, like Stevenson, was troubled by respiratory problems after a childhood spend in Edinburgh, and in search of a kinder climate and persuade her to join him.

'So in 1929 the newly wedded Harry and Honor Maude set off for the Pacific, with little more than a yearning for a life together, free from the constraints and prejudices of England, in Stevenson’s innocent isles. They found their youthful dreams more than fulfilled, not in lush Tahiti or Samoa, but in the remote and little-known coral atolls of the Gilbert Islands, ‘where every day was to prove a fresh and joyous adventure of living’. Unlike Stevenson, the Maudes would not end their days in the islands, and no memorial stands to their lives there. Dietary deprivations, long periods of separation, war, philosophical and strategic differences with service colleagues, financial security considerations, and the uncertainties engendered by a changing economic and political climate were ultimately to take their toll. Yet the islands where they spent twenty years were always to be as Honor wrote from unhappy exile in Zanzibar in 1936 where our hearts still lie, and they would spend the rest of their long lives researching and writing about them.

'This story of their lives was begun when the Maudes realised they had left it too late to write their autobiography. Harry’s failing eyesight and Honor’s increasing frailty as they reached their nineties precluding further research and writing. In 1995, I had prepared an exhibition and brief publication about the life and work of the Maudes, to commemorate the gift of their papers to the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide, which had previously acquired their extensive Pacific library. With their support, that brief publication has been extended to a fuller account.

'While independently researched, this ‘life’ is based largely on the Maudes’ extensive collection of personal papers, supplemented by interviews and by additional notes dictated by them between 1996 and 1998. The periods and incidents given emphasis are those they chose to observe, record and recall: the Maudes are the principal source of and commentators upon the matters presented. The personal characteristics, childhood and educational experiences, social background, class status and political leanings that may have motivated their choices in life, and their reactions to the challenges of authority, isolation, cultural contacts, friendships, conflicts and losses, failures and achievements, are depicted in the text without overt mediation or interpretation. Readers may use the account to make their own judgements and conclusions, or perhaps to write their own stories or interpretations. This karaki is for Honor and Harry.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Ill-Starred Captains describes the French and British voyages of discovery to Australia between 1801 and 1803, led by Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders. The voyages took place amid the global war between France and Britain, which lasted (with two short breaks) from 1792 to 1815. The narrative derives in large part from contemporary sources - the journals, reports, letters and books of participants, including the two captains, their officers and scientific staff. It interweaves the stories of the expeditions as they explore and survey the Australian coast.

'The expeditions met twice - at Encounter Bay, near Adelaide, in April 1802, and again at Port Jackson later the same year. (The first of these meetings will be commemorated nationally as Encounter 2002.) The book discloses fresh information about relations between French and British in the colony during Baudin’s five-month stay.

'Flinders and Baudin, between them, filled in most of the gaps remaining on the map of New Holland - especially the unknown south coast stretching from the Great Australian Bight to the present South Australia-Victoria border. Baudin surveyed many of the little-known areas of the west coast, and also charted the south-east of Van Diemen’s Land. Here his scientists made invaluable observations of the life and customs of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Flinders, for his part, followed Cook’s path up the east coast, then charted Torres Strait and the Gulf of Carpentaria, before returning to Sydney and completing the first circumnavigation of the continent.

'Caught up in an increasingly bitter war, the French and British governments gave little recognition to the geographic and scientific achievements of the expeditions. Both voyages ended in personal disaster for their commanders. Detested by most of his staff, and terminally ill with TB, Baudin died in disgrace on Mauritius (then a French colony) in September 1803. The history of his voyage was written by his enemies on board, who portrayed him as malicious and incompetent.

'Flinders too met his nemesis in Mauritius. After a shipwreck in the Coral Sea, he sailed for England in a small schooner, but was forced to call into the French colony for repairs. Detained at first as a spy, he antagonised the governor, General Decaen, and was held on the island for six years. He returned home in poor health in 1810, and worked on his charts and the history of his Voyage to Terra Australis. It was published on the day before his death, in July 1814. Through their words, the author gives the present-day reader some understanding of what life was like for the men of Flinders and Baudin, crammed together in their leaking, overcrowded ships, and reveals the relationships and tensions on board, the individual hopes and fears, and the rivalries between the expeditions. He seeks to remain impartial and leave readers space to draw their own conclusions.

'Ill-Starred Captains is published in association with the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.