Their Shining Eldorado


Book Description

Travelog information on Australia's cities, territories, industrial and desert lands, peoples and wildlife, from Sydney to the South of Capricorn.










By the Book


Book Description

"By the Book is an indispensable history of the literature of Queensland from its establishment as a separate colony in the mid-nineteenth century through major economic, political and cultural transformations to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Queensland figures in the Australian imagination as a frontier, a place of wild landscapes and wilder politics, but also as Australia's playground, a soft tourist paradise of warm weather and golden beaches. Based partly on real historical divergences from the rest of Australia, these contradictory images have been questioned and scrutini.




Selected Poems of Henry Lawson


Book Description

Henry Lawson's poems narrate the rawness of life in the Australian bush between the late 19th and early 20th century, among humble herdsmen, sheep shearers and itinerant labourers, the compassion for the fates of others, the active solidarity, the austerity of the situations in which women and children live at the mercy of an impervious landscape. Lawson portrays them with great empathy and is able to capture the strenuous struggle to survive in a hostile world and the courage to face the unknown.




Before Environmental Law


Book Description

This landmark book unveils the history of defending Australia's natural environment and examines the subject's legal and political contexts from the birth of the nation in 1901 until the advent of the so-called modern era of environmental regulation in the late 1960s. It rejects the mythology that Australia lacked environmental law before the late 1960s in revealing how many of today's environmental laws, from pollution control to nature conservation, emerged from precedents or events much earlier in the 20th century. This history however reveals a discrepancy between lawmakers' greater efficacy to exploit rather than protect the environment, a discrepancy that grew as nature's backlash intensified in a rapidly degrading continent colonised to build the Australian nation. In exploring these dynamics, the book offers a rich tapestry of case studies illustrated with historic photographs that show the origins of Australia's environmental laws and how they borrowed from international precedents or furnished lessons for other nations. Through its multi-disciplinary enquiry, the book offers scholars and students of environmental law, legal history and the environmental humanities a unique story about the failures and successes in the making of environmental law.




Eldorado


Book Description

The City of Kings is the second part of the three-book Eldorado series. In this novel the beautiful Monica has been kidnapped by the Peruvian terrorist group, The Shining Path. Peter Martin, a young American geology student is dedicated to finding his true love and her mother. As the sinister plot of Monicas evil uncle is uncovered, Peter finds himself immersed in the middle of a battle between good and evil. It is a race against time to find Monica before the Shining Path does. The winner will get the coveted Inca treasure that Pizarro and the conquistadors found in their conquest of Peru. In the process Peter really discovers himself and his true feelings for Monica. The treasure is safely hidden in the ancient tunnels underneath the Incan capital city of Cusco, Peru, but will it stay safe? Peter is frustrated by the red tape and government bureaucracy that he has to wade through to get the help that is required. Time is of the essence and Peter knows that the terrorists will not hesitate to kill Monica if they receive the information they need from the Sacred Quipu to find the treasure cache. The parallel story of the conquest of the Incas is intertwined in the novel because of its historical importance to the location and quantity of the treasure. Francisco Pizarro the governor and conqueror of Peru is murdered in his own presidential palace in Lima. A struggle for control of the empire takes place between the remaining Pizarro brothers and the Men of Chile. These terrible civil wars between the Spanish conquistadors become not only a fight for power and the right to govern, but also agreed for Inca gold. Peter becomes entangled in a much larger plot that threatens more than just his life. He realizes that the terrorists arent really after a rich American kid, but this very special Peruvian beauty. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it would prove to change the direction of his whole life. This fictional history is about their adventure together and if their love will overcome the differences between their modern day cultures that become entwined with the past and the search for Eldorado and Inca Gold.




White Beech


Book Description

For years I had wandered Australia with an aching heart. Everywhere I had ever travelled across the vast expanse of the fabulous country where I was born I had seen devastation, denuded hills, eroded slopes, weeds from all over the world, feral animals, open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans... One bright day in December 2001, sixty-two-year-old Germaine Greer found herself confronted by an irresistible challenge in the shape of sixty hectares of dairy farm, one of many in southeast Queensland that, after a century of logging, clearing, and downright devastation, had been abandoned to their fate. She didn't think for a minute that by restoring the land she was saving the world. She was in search of heart's ease. Beyond the acres of exotic pasture grass and soft weed and the impenetrable curtains of tangled Lantana canes there were Macadamias dangling their strings of unripe nuts, and Black Beans with red and yellow pea flowers growing on their branches ... and the few remaining White Beeches, stupendous trees up to120 feet in height, logged out within forty years of the arrival of the first white settlers. To have turned down even a faint chance of bringing them back to their old haunts would have been to succumb to despair. Once the process of rehabilitation had begun, the chance proved to be a dead certainty. When the first replanting shot up to make a forest and rare caterpillars turned up to feed on the leaves of the new young trees, she knew beyond a doubt that at least here biodepletion could be reversed. Greer describes herself as an old dog who succeeded in learning a load of new tricks, inspired and rejuvenated by her passionate love of Australia and of Earth, the most exuberant of small planets.




Nine Faces Of Kenya


Book Description

In this marvelous anthology, Elspeth Huxley, our best and most popular writer on Africa, has drawn on her unparalleled knowledge of Kenya and its literature to present a fully rounded portrait of one of the most fascinating countries in the world. In nine sections focusing on exploration, travel, settlement, war, hunting, wildlife, environment, life-styles, and legend and poetry, using only first-hand accounts, she guides the reader through the story of Kenya from AD100 to the present with her characteristic candour and directness.




Elspeth Huxley


Book Description

A portrait of the conservationalist and chronicler of colonial Kenya describes her childhood in east Africa and wartime Britain; marriage to Thomas Huxley; roles as a farmer, writer, and government advisor.