As Hitler's war looms, famous Australian artist Roland Griffin returns home from London with his family to live a simple life of shared plums and low-cut lawns in the suburbs. In the yard: a daughter, and a son, Hal, growing up with a preoccupied father who is always out in his shed stretching canvases and painting outback pubs. An isolated man obsessed with other people and places. Everything is a picture, a symbol. Even Hal, the boy in the boat, drifting through a strange world of Incred...

"He didn't look like he could jump a bull, but she knew he could. It was all in the hands, he'd often explain. The will. The bloody mindedness." On a cattle station that stretches beyond the horizon, seven people are trapped by their history and the need to make a living. Trevor Wilkie, the good father, holds it all together, promising his sons a future he no longer believes in himself. The boys, free to roam the world's biggest backyard, have nowhere to go. Trevor's father, Murr...

From Stephen Orr, the former editor-in-chief of Better Homes and Gardens, comes a collection of essays and photographs that examines the restorative power of gardening, while revealing his own challenges in the garden and offering advice on growing plants and vegetables at home.The road to great gardening is littered with dead plants.Stephen Orr has written about gardening for most of his decades-long career, and now, in The Gardener’s...

Wilf Healy lives in the wheatbelt town of Selwyn, works in Monk's Irish pub, delivers letters, drives the school bus, holds the place together. But he's had enough, wants to retire - to forget his nephew Connor, at war with the world, his brother Brian, visiting from America, his niece Orla, sick with blood cancer. Although he plans, and tries, he can't leave. Something is holding him back.As the young people flee, the old people die, the drugs arrive in Selwyn, Wilf has to decide ...

Age range 9+The slide clunks into the lantern, and Phantoms come alive on the wall. The father-and-son Magic Lantern team of Bert and Tom Eliot are masters of The Art of the Story. The only problem is that they are missing a wife and mother. Then one morning eleven-year-old Tom wakes to find his father missing, too.The Lanternist’s apprentice is thrown out of home, forced to work for the arch-criminal Jimmy Sacks, arrested and impr...

Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages hi

A long-deserted drive-in, waiting for a rerun of the one story that might give it life; a child who discovers his identity in a photograph hidden in his parents' room ... Stephen Orr's stories are happy to let you in, but not out. In "Datsunland", his characters are outsiders peering into worlds they don't recognise, or understand: an Indian doctor arriving in the outback, discovering an uncomfortable truth about the Australian dream; a family trying to have their son's name remo...

Blues and birdsong flamenco and flowing rivers rain and restless feet storms and Southern "patois" The poems of a young Southern boy who joined the military, travelled the world, got an education, made a whole big bunch of friends, came home to the woods and walks there often, happily watching birds and watching the world pass by, occasionally saying a few words at it, with a laugh and a shake of the head.

"Dissonance" begins with piano practice. Fifteen-year-old Erwin Hergert is forced to tackle scales and studies for six hours a day by his mother, Madge, who is determined to produce Australia's first great pianist. To help Erwin focus, Madge has exiled her husband, Johann, to the back shed. Jo is diagnosed with cancer and Madge allows him back inside, but only for long enough to die. Madge takes Erwin to Hamburg to continue his studies. Erwin prospers in Germany with his new teac...

A masterful, gorgeously photographed A-to-Z introduction to the full spectrum of herbal plants, including recipes, growing tips and tricks, DIY crafts, and moreFor centuries, herbs have been prized for their beauty and utility in the garden, kitchen, and medicine cabinet. Modern garden master Stephen Orr’s lushly illustrated guide is the definitive resource for identifying, cultivating, and using these fascinating and varied plants.With information on almos...

A plane in the distance, artillery, his father waiting, and the boy wonders what to do. As with every story in this collection, the child born into a world he can't comprehend, but stands waiting for answers, overcome with possibilities. The Boy in Time charts this child's progress from the Outer Hebrides to a Mongolian desert, from war to kidnapping, a Midwestern American nightmare, falling from the wheel-well of a Dreamliner. Stephen Orr's impressionistic take on the short story...

"The Fierce Country holds no malice, but neither pity. It just sits, and bakes, and waits. We do the rest. We provoke it when we mine above its aquifers. Weaken it, and ourselves, when we leave mountains of asbestos to blow away in the wind. Misunderstand it when we see it as nothing more than a resource. Resent it when it takes our children." The open spaces and isolated places outside Australia's cities have unsettled us from first European settlement to today - often with very good reas...