It took over twenty years for Australia’s first consignment of wool to be sold at auction following John Macarthur and the Rev. Samuel Marsden’s importation of Spanish merino sheep to Australia in 1797. And when that transaction occurred in London in 1821 it wasn’t in a fancy exchange with hundreds of interested buyers but at [...]
I’ve been infatuated with Ernest Hemingway from an early age. It was he that swept me away in my early teens with For Whom The Bell Tolls and later, The Old Man and the Sea. His economical word usage and understated style struck a chord with me and at some deeper level I wanted his [...]
In 1837, forty-nine years after the arrival of the white man in Australia the suggestion was made that Australia was a country sorely in need of camels. Considering the extent of Western and Central Australia it turned out to be an excellent idea. The first record of imported camels is in 1840, when the lone [...]
In the late afternoon of October 31, 1917 around 800 men of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade looked from a ridge across six kilometres of sloping ground towards Beersheba. Behind them were thousands of troops desperate for water and a never-ending desert, in front of them, the heavily fortified town of Beersheba. The 4th [...]
Yesterday I had my first foray into live television cooking, via Skype. It was all lights, camera, action with liberal assistance from my mother, Marita who along with the savvy technicians and producers at Studio Ten helped get things set up both at home and virtually. What an experience. I was asked to share rural [...]
The woolshed at Jondaryan on Queensland’s Darling Downs is one of the oldest and largest shearing sheds in the world. Heritage listed, Jondaryan Station dates to 1840, when English born Charles Coxen sent his nephew off on an expedition to find suitable pastoral land for his rural aspirations. The lad had a good eye for [...]
It’s said that everything and everyone is interconnected in some way. I often find when I’m sleuthing for facts when writing that some snippet of information will pop up and I’m left pondering the events that link people and places together. This happened about twelve months ago when I was reading up on the Strzelecki [...]
Great news during tough times with The Cedar Tree hitting the no. 4 spot on the Australian fiction list. My latest novel joins last year's Stone Country in the Top Ten ranks. A big thankyou to everyone supporting Australian writers in this new world we're living in.
The Marquis de Rays. What an exotic name. It conjures wealth, European lands and a noble linage. But names and appearances can be deceptive and the Marquis de Rays, a French Nobleman was a scoundrel and con-artist supreme. The Marquis ripped off poor settlers in the late 1800s offering the ‘promised land’ but eventually after [...]
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