Two men from Sydney decided to take a holiday with a difference.

A true adventure story about two young men who, in 1929, decided to ride around Australia on a motorcycle.

Jim Fitzpatrick

This book looks at the nature and widespread use of the bicycle in the outback by shearers, clergymen, boundry riders, cycle express messengers, kalgoorlie pipeline and WA rabbit fence patrols, swagmen, kangaroo shooters, drovers, commercial travellers and dentists.

The author recounts the major events and developments in Australian cycling history.

Bulloo Downs Drover

Peter Hall. 

Stories about droving and station life on the upper Ashburton River of WA. A way of life now past forever. 74 pp.

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H.M Barker. 

A book that captures both the capabilities and limitations of using camels in Australia, as well as the characters that drove the strings. S/c. 196pp.

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The Drovers: Stories behind the heroes of our stock routes.

'For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.'

From the High Country to the Outback, there are extraordinary stories of the men and women who have travelled across Australia behind mobs of cattle, sheep and horses. These quiet achievers, of every race and creed, forged an Australian legend.

Evan McHugh bring alive the hapless convicts attempting to round up the First Fleet's escaped cattle on foot; overlanders blazing through trackless wilderness to supply the vast stations carved from the bush; stockmen who risked blizzards to bring cattle to alpine pastures; and drovers who crossed the continent behind the largest mobs of cattle the world has ever seen.

These stories overflow with colourful characters: cattle-duffers like Harry Redford, renowned boss drovers like Nat Buchanan and strong women like Edna Zigenbine and Red Jack, who could measure up to any man. They lived a life most of us only dream about and came to love the beauty of Australia's most famous and infamous stock routes, including the Birdsville, Murranji and Strzelecki tracks, and the Canning stock route.

McHugh's meticulous research and vivid eye for detail is the closest you'll get to saddling up your moke and poking a mob of cattle off camp.

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The acute powers of observation and vivid recollection of years spent in the bush that characterised his Camels and the Outback are again delightfully shown by H.M. Barker. 

After highlighting the achievements of some of the best known of the early pioneers - Hawden, Tyson, de Satge, Sutherland, Gray, Buchanan, Christison and Cotton - he introduces the pleasures, rigours, vagaries and discomforts of droving as he experienced them.

There is the same richness and variety of incident, the same strange and expert knowledge - this time cattle, sheep, horses and the men whose job it was to get them from place to place - and the same simple yet nonetheless philosophical reflections that were so marked a feature of his earlier book. S/c. 117pp.

Droving Down the Cooper                 A Saddlemaker's Yarns

‘Let’s go bush’ These laconic words were to spark the beginning of a journey for two adventurous city kids under the spell of Banjo Paterson, and his tales of horses and men in the Australian outback. So this yarn unfolds. In his introduction to this book, Col invites the reader to ‘ride stirrup to stirrup’ with him while he tells his stories. Mad if you don’t. Their adventures take place at a time when Australia was very much in transition —having got TV, Olympic Games, rock ‘n’ roll, and going truly urban. It is a period that also pretty well marks the end of a distinct chapter of the postwar world.

Fifteen Hundred Down the Murranji

Bob Lunney, an adventurous 17 year old, already with Buffalo and Crocodile hunting experience, meets the Little Brothers. They convince him to join their droving team as they are about to commence a momentous movement of cattle from Willeroo station, west of Katherine to Rocklands station, near Camooweal, close to the Qld/NT border.

Young Bob Lunney’s learning curve takes a dramatic and sudden lift. He writes in brilliant fashion of his 113 days on the trip. The dramas, the dangers, the humour, the conflicts, the beauty, are graphically and realistically set out for the reader. To wet your appetite,

‘I felt I was on an immense merry-go-round, with the animals moving up and down, but to the thunderous roar of stampeding cattle instead of the harmonious sounds of an organ. The herd was stretching out as though it was an elastic lump of toffee, the fast moving bullocks dragging a long, thin strand of cattle from the milling confused mass that was the herd.’  Remember that this life is now part of our rich outback history. Although the drovers have been replaced with huge road-trains, they will never be forgotten. 200 pp.

now

19.95

The story of the men who constructed a railway through country explored by John McDouall Stuart between 1859 and 1862 as he searched for a way to cross Australia.

The research for this book was done by the author who travelled the line in a brake van and talked with the old timers who remembered those epic days

Bill 'Swampy' Marsh has been writing about the Australian outback and its people for many years. But as well as being a writer and storyteller he is a collector of rich outback characters -- and Jack 'Goldie' Goldsmith is, he says, a gem among many. Born in the Blue Mountains more than seventy years ago, Goldie was a troubled, reckless boy. When he was fifteen he left home and school and took off for the bush with his mate Bluey. It was just after World War II and there was massive unemployment, and he had to take whatever job was going. In his travels throughout western New South Wales and Queensland Goldie worked at everything: he picked potatoes, trapped rabbits, was a shearer, roustabout, railway fettler and ringer, among many other jobs. And before long Goldie became known as the kind of bloke who could do anything -- and who probably would. Bill 'Swampy' Marsh tells Goldie's story in his own words, and the result is a rich and vivid account of a fast-vanishing Australia, with its values of mateship, willingness to give anything a go, determination not to let the bastards get you, and spirit of daring and adventure.