Late in 1930, a cricket team from the West Indies visited Australia for the first time. It arrived at precisely the time when Australia’s modern iconography was being forged: Don Bradman was in the ascendant, Phar Lap dominated the racetrack, Nellie Melba returned home, Charles Kingsford Smith was breaking aviation records and the construction of ......
With the success of The Desert Column in 1932, Idriess wrote this series of mini-biographies on Australia's World War One Flying aces - John Duigan, Harry Cobby, Ross Smith, Oswald Watt, Gordon Taylor, Frank McNamara - our first V.C. aviator, and the post war acrobatics of Macintosh and Paper. Introducing the lot with a background piece on ......
In this book, Ion Idriess reflects on his life prospecting in far North Queensland from 1912 to 1914, and coincided with his earliest writing as “Gouger” for the Bulletin. In Back of Cairns, Jack gives the reader a picture of what life was like when the peninsula jungle was falling under the settler’s axe.
The Desert Column is based on the diaries that Idriess kept throughout the war. Published in 1932, it is one of Idriess' earliest works. Harry Chauvel noted in the foreword that it was the only book of the campaign that to his knowledge was "viewed entirely from the private soldier's point of view..." Idriess served as a sniper with the 5th ......
Harold Bell Lasseter claimed to have found an immense reef of gold in Central Australia and he dissapeared while searching for the reef in 1930. Lasseter claims in his diary that he had rediscovered the reef and had pegged and claimed the area (but gave no date or no location); however, suffering from starvation and sandy blight he recorded his ......
A memoir from one of Australia's most prominent lifestyle influencers, Babette Hays edited Belle and wrote several books on Australian food and house style. This book touches on her life from Damascus to Europe to Australia in the 1960s, and offers some classics of French food for an Australian palette, this time with colour photographs and the ......
The Sentimental Bloke tells the story of Bill, a member of a larrikin push (or gang) in Melbourne's Little Lonsdale red-light district, who encounters Doreen, a young woman "of some social aspiration", in a local market. Narrated by Bill, the poems chronicle their courtship and marriage, detailing his transformation from a violence-prone gang ......
