Australian Alps Walking Track


Book Description

Describes the 660 km walking track from Walhalla near Melbourne to the outskirts of Canberra. An all colour book, it includes 51 colour topographic maps, gradient profiles and many sidetrips and alternative tracks.




Walking the Camino


Book Description

"In May 2006, armed only with a small rucksack and a staff, Tony Kevin, an overweight, sedentary, 63-year-old former diplomat, set off on an eight-week trek across Spain. But this was not just a very long walk it was a pilgrimage."--Provided by publisher.




From Snow to Ash


Book Description

At the start of the hellish, fiery Australian summer of 2019/20, Walkley Award-winning journalist and suburban dad Anthony Sharwood set off on a journey. Abandoning his post on a busy news website to clear his mind, he solo-trekked the Australian Alps Walking Track, Australia's most gruelling and breathtakingly beautiful mainland hiking trail, which traverses the entirety of the legendary High Country from Gippsland in Victoria to the outskirts of Canberra. The journey started in a blizzard and ended in a blaze. Along the way, this lifelong lover of the mountains came to realise that nothing would ever be the same - either for him or for the imperilled Australian Alps, a landscape as fragile and sensitive to the changing climate as the Great Barrier Reef.




The Ways of the Bushwalker


Book Description

The first full length history of bush walking in Australia. Offers some marvellous pen portraits of the extraordinary characters that pioneered bushwalking in this country.




On Red Earth Walking


Book Description

In 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia' s Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red Earth Walking is the first comprehensive account of this significant, unique, and understudied episode of Australian history.Using extensive and previously unsourced archival evidence, Anne Scrimgeour interrogates earlier historical accounts of the strike, delving beneath the strike' s mythology to uncover the rich complexity of its history. The use of Aboriginal oral history places Aboriginal actors at the centre of these events, foregrounding their agency and their experiences. This history raises provocative ideas around racial tensions in a pastoral settler economy, and examines political concerns that influenced settler responses to the strike, to create a nuanced and engaging account of this pivotal event in Australian Indigenous and labour histories.




Yarra


Book Description

It was John Wedge, Batman's private surveyor, who named the Yarra Yarra. In September 1835 he was at the Turning Basin with some Kulin and heard them identify the river as it came over the Falls as, he wrote, 'Yarrow Yarrow'. It was only some months later that Wedge discovered they had been referring to the pattern and movement of water over the Falls, not the river itself. And ever since, it has been the Yarra's fate to be misunderstood- maligned for its muddiness, ill-used as sewer and tip; scooped, sculpted, straightened and stressed, 'cleaned up' to the detriment of its natural inhabitants; built-over, under and beside; worked mercilessly and then bridged almost to maritime extinction. In Kristin Otto's superbly entertaining new history, the whole sorry tale is laid bare. From the creation stories of Kulin owners and geologist blow-ins (and Robert Hoddle's bad-tempered expedition to the headwaters) to the twenty-first-century waterside building boom, Otto traces the course of Melbourne's murky river.




Following Burke and Wills Across Australia


Book Description

Every Australian has heard of Burke and Wills but few have travelled in their footsteps. In 2008, historian Dave Phoenix decided to walk across Australia from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria, following the track taken by the ill-fated Burke and Wills Expedition. Now you can follow them too. Following Burke and Wills Across Australia guides you on a road trip that follows one of history’s great transcontinental journeys, sharing the explorers’ experiences on the way. Maps lay out a route that takes you as close as possible to the Expedition’s track. As you travel the outback roads, you can learn all the details of the day to day journey of the Expedition from the explorers’ own words, and compare what you see with their descriptions of the country in 1860–61. Each chapter provides information about what to see now: the location and descriptions of the markers and memorials placed along the route over the 150 years since the Expedition, and places where you can stand where the explorers stood and look out over prospects they drew and described. The book is a perfect companion for those wanting to see outback Australia, and at the same time understand a journey that has attained mythic status in the history of Australian exploration. Even if you want to follow only part of the track, this is the book for you.




Hiking the Overland Track


Book Description

This guidebook covers the iconic Overland Track in Tasmania's stunning Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park. The well-maintained 80km route from Cradle Valley to Lake St Clair is described over seven stages, along with optional sidetrips to the area's many accessible peaks including Mt Ossa, Tasmania's highest mountain. The track can be completed in between 5 and 9 days, depending on fitness and whether hikers undertake sidetrips. Each stage features clear 1:50,000 mapping and profiles alongside detailed route description. The guide also includes essential practical information about booking onto the track and arranging permits, as well as comprehensive notes about the facilities available at each of the Overland huts. The extensive plant and animal section provides photos and descriptions of the eclectic range of wildlife that can be spotted along the track, and many of these fascinating species are found nowhere else on Earth. The Overland Track crosses Tasmania's spectacular wild landscape, travelling through buttongrass moorland and rainforests, passing tranquil lakes and impressive waterfalls. Although more physically and technically challenging than the main route, the track's sidetrips are well worth the effort in good weather for the panoramic views they offer of the stunning Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park.




Walking Free


Book Description

One man's phenomenal tale of escaping a death sentence in Iraq, surviving the Australian Refugee system and becoming a pioneering surgeon at the forefront of Orthopaedic medicine. In 1999, Munjed Al Muderis was a young surgical resident working in Baghdad when a squad of Military Police marched into the operating theatre and ordered the surgical team to mutilate the ears of three busloads of army deserters. When the head of surgery refused, he was executed in front of his staff. Munjed's choices were stark--comply and breach the medical oath 'do no harm', refuse and face certain death, or flee. That day, Munjed's life changed forever. He escaped to Indonesia, where he boarded a filthy, overcrowded refugee boat, bound for Australia. Like his fellow passengers, he hoped for a new life, free from fear and oppression, but for ten months he was incarcerated in what became known as the worst of the refugee camps, Curtin Detention Centre in Western Australia. There he was known only by a number, locked in solitary confinement and repeatedly told to go back to Iraq. On 26 August 2000, Munjed was finally freed. Now, fourteen years later, he is one of the world's leading osseointegration surgeons, transforming the lives of amputees with a pioneering technique that allows them to walk again. Walking Free is Munjed's extraordinary account of his journey from the brutality of Saddam Hussein's Iraq to a new life in Australia and a remarkable career at the forefront of medicine.




Walk Back Over


Book Description

This work is about listening to the past and walking back over it, step after step, to see what you missed the first time. It speaks to what has been left out of official records, recordings and documents--the emotions, the other sides of paper--and what is not said. These poems engage with the ongoing, interventionist nation-state and the crime scene that is Australia in the lives of Aboriginal people. In contrast to state archives, museums, libraries, universities and collection agencies--and their methods of 'recording the lives' of Aboriginal people--my work explores the body where memories are stored as an archive; anchored and etched. Writing is an act of remembering a dismembered past.