The wet came that year with a cock-eye-bob; loud thunder, ragged streams of lightning and a wind of awful fury ... Now there was nothing in the whole wide river but tossing water, uprooted trees, a few bandicoots and kangaroo rats feebly struggling still, and an old wooden cradle carved with grapes and acanthus leaves in which a dirty brown baby sat drooling with bubbles at his mouth, snatching...

Jane and Alice Melville are looking for a living wage. Although well qualified with a ‘boy’s education’, neither can find a suitable position. They are disinherited by an uncle who believes that money will turn their heads and make them too independent. Driven to desperation in their struggle to support themselves, eventually they look abroad for new opportunities. But life in the new world...

Based on the highly successful ABC television documentary of the same name, this book excavates the history of thousands of women who worked on farms during World War II. City-bred, in the main, and only reluctantly taken on by farming communities, the women proved themselves to be tough, resourceful and indefatigable workers whose efforts kept Australian agriculture alive at a critical time. ...

… the Great Barrier Reef is still the closest most people will come to Eden.

–Judith Wright

The Great Barrier Reef lies off the coast of Queensland: 2000 kilometres of spectacular coral reefs, sand cays and islands, Australia’s most precious marine possession. Teeming with life, it covers 350,000 square kilometres.

In the late 1960s the Reef was threatened with limestone mining and oil...