"The Shearer's Colt" is a horseracing novel. It tells the tale of upper-class Londoner Hilton Fitzroy who is attempting to establish himself in Queensland, a frontier state. He gets hired as Red Fred's "seckitary," a shearer who struck it rich in the gold mines and now needs help spending his millions. Hilton Fitzroy is described as someone with a " violent temper and his stubborn refusal to bear himself lowly and reverently towards anybody, all marked him out as a throw-back to some (possibly royal) ancestor who had helped himself to everything in sight in the dim and distant past." Will Fitzroy squander the shearer's money on gambling or invest it?
Henry Plantagenet Somerset's Trombone's Troubles depicts the first three decades of his life, including his early childhood days with his family in India at the time of the Indian Mutiny, his schooldays at Wellington College and his years spent as a jackeroo and a station manager in Queensland. Through his eyes, we relive Queensland pastoral life in the 1870 with its rich tapestry of people and events. Henry arrived at Moreton Bay in the barque Polmaise in 1871 after three months at sea. He began his station life in the Brisbane Valley while working for the McConnel family at Cressbrook Station. Henry won the heart of Katharine McConnel daughter of David Cannon McConnel. On their engagement, they travelled overseas and were married at the British Legation, Berne, Switzerland in 1879. Henry established his home property at Caboonbah in 1890 and he and Katharine became an integral part of their local community. Henry days as a jackeroo and stockman left an enduring love of Queensland. which is reflected in his memoirs. Above all his account of his experiences in the bush shines a light on his personality and reveals him to be a man of action and compassion, a capable and caring individual, a grazier, politician and visionary. The reader will delight in the specially selected appendices which highlight their lives and dramatic times at Caboonbah in the Brisbane Valley. Henry is most famous for his role in the 1893 Great Brisbane Flood which is vividly described in Appendix B. The Somerset Dam and the Somerset Regional Council now bear his name, worthy and enduring tributes to the memory of a man of substance, whose favourite quotation was Write me as one who loves his fellowmen.
"In Bad Company, and other stories" by Rolf Boldrewood s a collection of short stories and prose essay. The tales in this volume's collection are: "In Bad Company" "Morgan the Bushranger" "How I Became a Butcher" "Moonlighting on the Macquarie" "An Australian Roughriding Contest" "The Mailman's Yarn : An Ower True Tale" "Dear Dermot" "The Story of an Old Log-Book" "A Kangaroo Shoot" "Five Men's Lives For One Horse" "Reedy Lake Station" "A Forgotten Tragedy" "The Horse You Don't See Now" "How I Began to Write" "A Mountain Forest" "The Free Selector : A Comedietta" "Free Hospitality" "Lapsed Gentlefolk" "Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales" "Ancient Sydney" "After Long Years" "In the Droving Days" "The Australian Native-Born Type" "My School Days" "Sydney, Fifty Years Ago" "Old Time Thoroughbreds" "The First Port Fairy Hunt" "Bendemeer" "Sport in Australia" "Old Stock-Riders" "Mount Macedon" "Walks Abroad" "From Tumut to Tumberumba" "In the Throes of a Drought" "A Spring Sketch" "New Years Day 1886" "A Dry Time" "In the Bloom of the Year" "Fallen Among Thieves" "A Transformation Scene" and "In Bushranging Days".
This is a unique new reference book to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world - from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. The survivors of the Victorian age who feature in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English - writers such as Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Rabindranath Tagore, Henry James - could hardly have imagined how richly diverse `Literature in English' would become by the end of the century. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are celebrated in this informative, readable, and catholic reference book, which includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors. All the great literary figures are included, whether American or Australian, British, Irish, or Indian, African or Canadian or Caribbean - among them Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Patrick White, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, D. H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Wole Soyinka, Sylvia Plath - as well as a wealth of less obviously canonical writers, from Anaïs Nin to L. M. Montgomery, Bob Dylan to Terry Pratchett. The book comes right up to date with contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Carol Shields, Tim Winton, Nadine Gordimer, Vikram Seth, Don Delillo, and many others. Title entries range from Aaron's Rod to The Zoo Story; topics from Angry Young Men, Bestsellers, and Concrete Poetry to Soap Opera, Vietnam Writing, and Westerns. A lively introduction by John Sutherland highlights the various and sometimes contradictory canons that have emerged over the century, and the increasingly international sources of writing in English which the Companion records. Catering for all literary tastes, this is the most comprehensive single-volume guide to modern (and postmodern) literature.
