AustLit

'A delightful story about a blue - tongued lizard that dreams of visiting Antarctica to see the penguins.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Something big is about to happen in the eastern Mediterranean; potentially a crime against humanity. It will be soon, and in many places but the target and the means are far from clear. Emma Jazy is a twenty-nine-year-old Swiss agent with IIB, the Netherlands-based International Investigations Bureau. IIB’s brief is to obtain court-admissible evidence about criminals operating across international borders. It is 2013. Can IIB get inside the mind of the ageing former Irish revolutionary, Padraic Hennessy, to sift through a complex fear campaign and unlock a criminal plan? For Emma, it is also personal. Hennessy’s involvement with her family goes back decades, long before her birth. From Ireland, to Cyprus, Croatia, Lebanon, Germany and Israel, to a gripping climax near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, 'The Run' goes inside the psyche of the revolutionary fighter … the willingness and need to kill or die for a cause.' (Publication summary)

'Searching for Siobhan, on the surface, is a story about a Queensland high-school teacher, Harry Boyd, searching for his missing lodger. But that expands into a geo-political crime mystery of global potential – due to a wealthy man’s ego. It is a tale about trust, façades, the abuse of power and society looking away.

'Set in the Brisbane of 2009, Harry is a mathematics teacher whose Irish-reporter tenant, Siobhan Doyle, disappears in puzzling circumstances. He reluctantly becomes the amateur detective to find her.

'Harry struggles with the apparent inaction of the police and employs his own private investigators: local sleuth, Mike Grant; and, on Grant’s recommendation, an up-market Sydney PI, Jane Winston, who introduces him to the big end of town.

'It is the confident attractive Winston who invites Harry to Sydney to meet a wealthy investment consultant, Geoffrey Bryson. This opens a whole new awareness of high-level corporate crime and the activities of Brisbane-based global entrepreneur, Basil Stannard. The elephant in the room is the subterfuge around Stannard’s multi-billion-dollar visionary project for the nation.

'It is Harry’s skill with mathematics that eventually resolves the dangerous mystery.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The year is 2030. The population of the world is well over 8 billion. Someone has sabotaged all the silicon-based electronics on the planet. No modern technology is working – no phones, no computers, no navigation systems, no Internet, no television and there is minimal distribution of food – the world, as we know it, is grinding to a halt.

'Arthur Blair, the eighty-two-year-old retired director of the Netherlands-based International Investigations Bureau (IIB), is back in this spell-binding thriller. Can he solve the mystery, expose the culprits and lift this dystopian scenario?

'This is a story of how vulnerable any society can be when control is given away to powerful, faceless people. But it is also a tale of how a vigilant few can bring the sunshine back into the world. 

'Roller Coaster gives you a glimpse of a potential future. You may not like what you see. What can you do now to make sure that future never happens?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The book about a man who has become a legend from the tip of Cape York to the southern end of the country! Michael Fomenko is the man who dared to live his own exotic dream, which was anything but typical for a boy from the city. The mystery surrounding the man who lived a hermit's existence grew year by year as people came to know the man who would be seen trundling down the high roads and byroads of Far North Queensland. Through perhaps his only friendship struck up with local man Harold Jung, the story of this quiet and reclusive man was revealed. When Harold passed away, his family ensured his wish to see Michael Fomenko's story told, and asked accomplished author Peter Ryle to take the information and images Harold had gathered over the years and complete the task. This book is a compilation of the research and conversations Harold Jung gathered over the many years of his friendship with Michael Fomenko.'  (Production summary)

'Alfredo (Fred) de Faino uses his great-uncle’s coded diary to chat his girlfriend, Julia Tsai, at their Rockhampton high school – and a whole two-year-long intrigue opens up across Queensland, Singapore, Scotland and New Zealand. The twisting story-line unravels a painful mystery of lost Scottish children; it searches for World War 2 loot hidden in a Central Queensland Aboriginal burial ground; and it solves the conundrum of a Malay artefact called the Suci Kancil. All the parts of the story are connected, weaving like the strands of plaited hair, to the climax.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A story of life growing up on an Aboriginal mission in Queensland told by an Aboriginal Elder.' 

'Tells of traditional Cape York life in verse and drawing.'

As George Skeene explains 'I wanted to write this story on the Aboriginal Camps and Reserves and their people because up until this time, there has not been a lot written about their inhabitants. I wanted to include the people who visited there too, to show their descendants that their Grandparents and Great-Uncles were visitors to the camps, or at some times, lived there, and to show the wider population how the Camps and Reserves functioned, including the day to day life of the people who lived there. '

Skeene 'describes with great humour and sensitivity the joys and pains of his early childhood, his school years, and his working life in various jobs, but especially on the railways, much of it at his father's side. Skeene recounts stories such as 'old man crocodile', 'black tongued lizard' and 'mother black bream and the spotted eel' that were told to him as a child by his elders. He also tells of cultural practices and beliefs that were part of life on the Cairns reserves, many of which continue today.' Source: Two Cultures: Children from the Aboriginal Camps and Reserves in Carins City (2008)

'This unique songbook draws from a well so much part of Australia's everyday landscape it was overlooked by our early folk song collectors. These are not songs about shearing, goldfields or bushrangers but rather they are songs actually sung by shearers, gold-miners and, in all probability, bushrangers like Ned Kelly and Ben Hall.

There are songs here about love and betrayal, family life, volunteer rifle brigades established during the Crimean War to repel the feared Russian invasion of Melbourne, and of brave Aussie boys going off to fight mother England's wars. There's Sweet Mary of Kilmore, Miss Hooligan's Christmas Cake and Mrs McSorley's Twins, as song of the Blessed Zulu War, one of a wife gone off to be a Mormonite, and another referred to by Rudyard Kipling, for which scholars have searched in vain for over 100 years. They're all here, reconstructed from fragments published in the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial in 1940, drawn from the memories of the paper's readers. These are Australia's lost folk songs and it is time they were heard.' (Publisher's Blurb)

'The is the fourth volume of this work, and takes in the last period of bush exploration to more recent times, and the move from the beach to the mountain.'  (Production summary)

'The third volume in a four volume work, and takes in the period from 1963 to more recent times, exploring Cape York, collecting bush crafts and folk songs, and having a generally enjoyable time as an artist on a tropical beach.'  (Production summary)

'The second in a four volume work, this volume of Edwards' autobiography takes in the period from 1959 to 1965, exploring Cape York, collecting bush crafts and folk songs, and having a generally enjoyable time as an artist on a tropical beach.'  (Production summary)

'The first in a four volume work, this volume of his autobiography takes in the period from 1930 to 1951, from life in a rural backwater of Victoria to sleeping in a hammock in the Dandenongs, hand printing and the art world of Melbourne.'  (Production summary)

'All those little places around Australia that have won the Tidy Towns competition have had to thank Mister Spud for his work in bringing their town up to award winning standard.'(Publication summary)

'The story of one-arm Archy, the careless lion tamer.' 

'A children's story written for the children of Pormpuraaw school, Cape York.

'Part of a program producing local stories for Indigenous children.'  (Publication summary)