New Zealand

Read by the author
Nine CDs, 10 hours

Just in time for the 2000 Olympics-the bestselling quthor of A Walk in the Woods takes listeners on a truly outrageous tour Down Under.

Compared to his Australian excursions, Bill Bryson had it easy on the Appalachian Trail.  Nonetheless, Bryson has on several occasions embarked on seemingly endless flights bound for a land where Little Debbies are scarce but insects are abundant (up to 220,000 species of them), not to mention crocodiles.

Taking listeners on a rollicking ride far beyond packaged-tour routes, IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY introduces a place where interesting things happen all the time.  Leaving no Vegemite unsavored, listeners will accompany Bryson as he dodges jellyfish while learning to surf at Bondi Beach, discovers a fish that can climb trees, dehydrates in deserts where temperatures leap to 140 degrees F, and tells the true story of the rejected Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House.

North Korea today is one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Western historians and researchers have had little access to information about North Korea apart from official Party documents and propaganda. This book marks the first time that a victim of the regime has provided a personal and documented insight into the labour camps, the organized famine, and the political conditioning within this "hermit kingdom". Kang Chol-Hwan was arrested at the age of nine along with other members of his family when his grandfather made remarks about life in a capitalist country that were judged to be too complimentary. He grew up in the camps and has escaped to South Korea to document his personal life as a testimonial to the hardships and atrocities that constitute the lives of some several hundred thousand people living in the gulag today. Kang's account of this internment reveals the life-and-death conditions of the camp. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this book brings together unassailable firsthand experience, setting one young man's personal suffering in the wider context of modern history.

Nowhere else in the world is there anything quite like it; and nothing is more beloved by Australians. Its appeal leaps across the generations, the sexes and all the social, political and religious persuasions. It is the one thing we all have in common: it is the great Australian meat pie.

We all carry in our minds a picture of the perfect pie: its glowing golden crust, its mouth-watering aroma of baking pastry and rich beef filling drifts across the inner landscape of Australian psyche. It is irresistible.

The object of our desire is round, oval, square or even oblong. The pastry lid is probably a little flaky but not so much that the flakes will break away and stick around the mouth. The base is firm and beautifully smooth to the touch, lighter in colour than the top, the pastry shorter and more solid.

The sides rise from a corner curve and the pie sits neatly in the hand snuggled alongside thumb and forefinger, the base resting on the long middle finger to hold it steady.

Slowly the true pie lover raises it to the mouth, breathing in that glorious aroma to the trembling taste buds, selecting just the spot to take that first gorgeous bite that will open up the little treasure house of flavour and…oh, the wonder of it, that first taste of luscious minced beef and gravy lapping round the tongue and mixed with the buttery pastry that almost melts in the mouth. Oh heaven…

Distinguished Australian author Robert Macklin, a pie lover of many decades, lifts the pastry lid of this very Australian icon to reveal the history and affection Australians have toward the great Australian pie.

The history of the birth of Australia which came out of the suffereing and brutality of England's infamous convict transportation system. With 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps.

The Wayward Child is the true story of an Australian family, set in the WWII years and beyond. You will instantly warm to Rita, the wayward child, and her older sibling Joan. These two children share the common bond of a pitiful existence, played out with a rough diamond father who clearly wanted sons instead of daughters.

Their ladylike, demure mother was instrumental in the keeping of matrimonial harmony, with her sweet genteel nature, but lacked the fortitude to oppose any unfitting decisions that served to make their lives more difficult in times of tremendous hardship. With a strong-willed paternal Grandmother, whose love and loyalty to her only son knew no bounds, this story will keep the reader entranced from start to finish. The WWII era in Australia is a sadly neglected piece of history in the literary world. It is a story that needs to be told with passion, and deep respect for the love of a nation.


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~Review by Warwick Fry, Nimbin Good Times Journal, Australia~

It’s not often that you get the unsullied memories of a child growing up in the Australian countryside during the years of the Second World War published raw and unvarnished over sixty years later. This is the achievement of long term Nimbin resident, Rita Carter (Lowther).

A Wayward Child begins with Rita’s country girlhood in Tumut where her father worked as a guard at the open prison farm. It describes the traumatic effects of the Second World War years on her mind and on her family, and the harsh values that informed a generation that was emotionally and intellectually starved. Rita survived with those values. This is a testimony of how difficult it is for precocious children to try to grasp problems that adults have difficulty in grasping themselves – a situation not uncommon in the isolated communities of the Australian country.

She has a writer’s eye for detail. Some of her descriptions are almost Dickensian. A writerly touch is apparent in the last sentence of a paragraph devoted to a magnificently detailed description of her grandfather and his clothing: “I think I liked him most for the way he dressed…”

We get these flashes of ‘child’s eye views’ throughout the book, all the more poignant for being written over sixty years later. And the wealth of iconic Australiana (country meals, social settings) should be mined by any producer worth his salt, of an Australian period film.

And just when you think this is a catalogue of social country life, with schoolgirl tiffs and jealousies, Rita introduces her ‘imaginary friend’ Edna, and the narrative of the Odyssey across the Australian countryside, when her father is forced to seek work, first as a shearing supervisor, and then as a rabbit trapper.

Over all this is the background of the Second World War. It looms over Rita’s childhood, it is the trauma she sees as being to blame for hardship that hard work and endurance could not prevent. The propaganda newsreels of the time had her running out of the theatres in a panic that the Japanese were on our doorstep, a constant state of childhood anxiety that voided her of any compassion at an accidental sight of Japanese prisoners during a visit to Sydney, and perhaps affords us a sympathetic glimpse of the roots of One Nation xenophobia.

It is a remarkable achievement by a remarkable, local, all Australian mature aged resident of Nimbin. As someone approaching mature age myself, I can only admire Rita’s achievement.

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

Esteemed Australian author Hugh V. Clarke recreates a period in our history between two catastrophic wars as it follows the struggles of one family to emerge from the almost universal poverty which blanketed Australia during the dark days of the Depression. The story moves through Mulgowie, Gatton, Haden to Toowoomba before reaching Brisbane in the Depths of the economic crisis of 1930.

It is enlivened by that peculiarly Australian sense of' humour that has sustained Australians through the hardships of war and the disappointments of peace.

As the story unfolds and people at last begin to emerge from the gloom of the Depression, it portrays in subtle overtones the growing threat beyond our shores which inevitably erupted and lured our society along other roads.

No other Australian city suffered as much from the impact of World War II as did Brisbane. By the time the war ended the distinctive way of' life, portrayed in this book, was gone forever leaving only memories of the Depression days and nostalgia for the many blessings enjoyed by the people of the north.

Hugh V. Clarke is also author of The Tub: A Story of Australian POWs on the Burma-Thailand Railway. That book starts off where The Broke and The Broken finishes.

Fairness and Freedom compares the history of two open societies--New Zealand and the United States--with much in common. Both have democratic polities, mixed-enterprise economies, individuated societies, pluralist cultures, and a deep concern for human rights and the rule of law. But all of these elements take different forms, because constellations of value are far apart. The dream of living free is America's Polaris; fairness and natural justice are New Zealand's Southern Cross.

Fischer asks why these similar countries went different ways. Both were founded by English-speaking colonists, but at different times and with disparate purposes. They lived in the first and second British Empires, which operated in very different ways. Indians and Maori were important agents of change, but to different ends. On the American frontier and in New Zealand's Bush, material possibilities and moral choices were not the same. Fischer takes the same comparative approach to parallel processes of nation-building and immigration, women's rights and racial wrongs, reform causes and conservative responses, war-fighting and peace-making, and global engagement in our own time--with similar results.

On another level, this book expands Fischer's past work on liberty and freedom. It is the first book to be published on the history of fairness. And it also poses new questions in the old tradition of history and moral philosophy. Is it possible to be both fair and free? In a vast array of evidence, Fischer finds that the strengths of these great values are needed to correct their weaknesses. As many societies seek to become more open--never twice in the same way, an understanding of our differences is the only path to peace.

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1887 Original Publisher: Blackie Subjects: Australia Fiction / Historical Juvenile Fiction / Action

This edition features
• illustrations
• a linked Table of Contents

CONTENTS
PURGING OUT THE OLD LEAVEN.
FIRST SETTLERS.
WRECK OF THE CONVICT SHIP "NEVA" ON KING'S ISLAND.
DISCOVERY OF THE RIVER HOPKINS.
WHALING.
OUT WEST IN 1849.
AMONG THE DIGGERS IN 1853.
A BUSH HERMIT.
THE TWO SHEPHERDS.
A VALIANT POLICE-SERGEANT.
WHITE SLAVERS.
THE GOVERNMENT STROKE.
ON THE NINETY-MILE.
GIPPSLAND PIONEERS.
THE ISLE OF BLASTED HOPES.
GLENGARRY IN GIPPSLAND.
WANTED, A CATTLE MARKET.
TWO SPECIAL SURVEYS.
HOW GOVERNMENT CAME TO GIPPSLAND.
GIPPSLAND UNDER THE LAW.
UNTIL THE GOLDEN DAWN.
A NEW RUSH.
GIPPSLAND AFTER THIRTY YEARS.
GOVERNMENT OFFICERS IN THE BUSH.
SEAL ISLANDS AND SEALERS.
A HAPPY CONVICT.