A Country Idyl And Other Stories Esprios Classics

Sarah Knowles Bolton (September 15, 1841 - February 21, 1916) was an American writer. She was born in Farmington, Connecticut. In 1866, she married Charles E. Bolton, a merchant and philanthropist. She wrote extensively for the press, was one of the first corresponding secretaries of the Woman's National Temperance Union, and was associate editor of the Boston Congregationalist (1878-81). Bolton traveled for two years in Europe, studying profit-sharing, female higher education, and other social questions. Her writings encouraged readers to improve the world about them through faith and hard work.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "A Country Idyl, and Other Stories" by Sarah Knowles Bolton. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Under the Earl Grey immigration scheme, 1848-1850, over 4000 Irish female orphans were selected from Irish Poor Law Unions, from all counties in Ireland during The Great Famine, to go to colonial New South Wales to become domestic servants and wives. Of these, some 200 Irish female teenagers went to the Bathurst Immigration Depot for employment in Bathurst and the Central West. This book contains biographical profiles of 185 of these paupers and contextual chapters of Bathurst, the Irish in Bathurst, chain migration, colonial hostility towards this group of migrants and colonial life for women. The book contains illustrations, maps, references and an index. It was researched by a historian and family historian.

Soon after the declaration of war on Japan, a secret military reconnaissance unit was established, based on the British Special Operations Executive (known as SOE) and called the Inter-allied Services Department. The unit was tasked with the role to "obtain and report information of the enemy ... weaken the enemy by sabotage and destruction of morale and to lend aid and assistance to local efforts to the same end in enemy occupied territories." In 1943 it became known under the cover name Special Reconnaissance Department (SRD) and included some British officers who had escaped from Singapore. After arriving in Australia, they assembled in Melbourne, forming the nucleus of ISD and together with some Australians established what became the Z Special Unit. Training began in a number of locations around Australia including on Fraser Island off the Queensland coast, In Broken Bay near Sydney, at Careening Bay in Western Australia, at the “House on the Hill” in Cairns and at East Arm near Darwin. From these training areas and bases, Z Special undertook intelligence gathering and raiding missions throughout Southeast Asia including New Guinea, Singapore, Timor, Malaya, Borneo, Vietnam and the Dutch East Indies. The first operation was Jaywick in September 1943. Led by a 28 year old officer from the Gordon Highlanders, Captain Ivan Lyon. Using an old Japanese fishing boat renamed Krait this captured vessel was re-fitted and provisioned for a voyage from Australia to just south of Singapore where it released six commandos in three folding kayaks to attack Japanese shipping in the harbour. They placed limpet mines on several Japanese ships sinking 40,000 tons of shipping. After the successful attack, they paddled south, were picked up by the Krait and successfully returned to Australia. This was followed by Operation Rimau again led by Lyon but this time things went very wrong very early. Identified, they made a fighting withdrawal but all of the raiding party were shot or captured, with the last ten being executed just before the end of the war. Important in Z Special operations were a number of vessels designated “snake boats”. Four 66’ modified trawlers were constructed as well as a range of Asian vessels that allowed their operation in South East Asian areas of operation. One Z Special, the last in PNG, set out on the night of the 11 April 1945. Eight operatives were landed on the Japanese held island of Muschu about five kilometres off the coast near Wewak to determine the status of two 140mm Japanese naval guns that had been placed there. These guns would prove dangerous to planned naval landings at Wewak, and allied command needed to know if these were operational. The operatives were launched in four double folding kayaks from a HTML fast crash boat but the current carried them away from their landing position and the surf capsized their boats. The men swam ashore but both their radio and their signal torches had been destroyed and the men had no way of connecting with the return crash boat. Soon their lost equipment was found by the Japanese and a massive search with 1,000 troops scoured the island. Quite soon seven of the eight men had been captured, killed or died trying to swim to the mainland and only one man, Sergeant ‘Mick’ Dennis remained. Over the next three days he continued a one man war, fighting off Japanese patrols and living off the land. Unable to do this for long, he took to the dangerous shark and crocodile infested waters and with the aid of a log, paddled to the mainland. Landing on a Japanese controlled beach, he snuck ashore and after further firefights and a difficult journey travelling west, he finally was found by an Australian patrol. Mick Dennis was able to provide valuable information and for his service and bravery, was awarded a Military Medal. During the course of the war, Z Special Unit carried out 81 covert operations in the Southwest Pacific theatre. While the unit was disbanded after the end of the war, many of its techniques would be modified and used by Australian Special Forces to this day.

"Immigration of women to colonial Australia"--Provided by publisher.

Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 25,000 women were transported to Australia. For nearly 200 years, there has been a chorus of outrage at their vulgarity, their depravity and their promiscuity. Babette Smith takes the reader beyond this traditional casting of convict women, looking for evidence of their humanity and individuality. Certainly some were desperate, overwhelmed by a relentless chain of criminal convictions, drunkenness and despair. But others were heroic, defiant. Smith offers fresh insights: the women's use of sound and voice to harass officials, for example; the extent of their deliberate resistance against authority. This resistance, she argues, has contributed significantly to broader Australian culture. The women's stories begin when their fates are decided by the British Crown. We are introduced to women who stole, set fires, rioted, committed insurance fraud, murdered; mothers of six and 12-year-old girls; women who refused to show deference to the Court, instead giving mock curtsies, 'jumping and capering about'. 'A sailor', wrote ship's surgeon Peter Cunningham, was 'more an object of pity than wrath. To see twenty wicked fingers beckoning to him, and twenty wicked eyes winking at him, at one and the same time, no wonder his virtue should sometimes experience a fall!'. Among the hysterical accounts of bad behaviour aboard female convict ships written by concerned reverends, surgeons and others are scenes that show female camaraderie, fun and intrepid spirit. Washing clothes became 'a grand water party'; caught in a storm, women came up on deck to help their fellow convicts haul water; women sang and danced before bed, putting on concerts for each other, 'dressed out in their gayest plumage'. This camaraderie continued in Australia. In Tasmania's overcrowded Cascades factory, the superintendent complained about women 'corrupting each other' in nightly conversation laced with 'obscenity'. Another interpretation is that women sought the comfort of sharing their woes with one another, telling 'war stories' of life on assignment and generally enjoying each other's company in language that was everyday for them. Defiant Voices tells the story of the Crown trying and failing to make its prisoners subservient to a harsh penal system. Convict women challenged the authorities by living in perpetual disobedience, which was often flagrant, sometimes sexual and always loud. They were not all 'the most abandoned prostitutes', but their sexual mores were certainly different from the observers who labelled them. From factory rioters to individuals like Ann Wilson, whose response-'That will not hurt me'-provoked a magistrate to pile punishment after punishment onto her, the women of Defiant Voices fought like tigers and drove men to breaking point with their collective voices, the lewd songs and 'disorderly shouting' resounding from the page.

The history of Australia’s north coast is a story of ancient industry and international trade with tentacles that reached as far as China. It tells of travel to the far reaches of the world where an old, mid-19th century Groote Eylandt man, spoke of chasing huge fish across cold seas and hunting furred creatures on seas hard as stone. It’s a story of great, forgotten empires on Australia’s doorstep and rich Sultans who claimed that Australia’s north as their own long before Cook laid eyes on it. It’s a story very few Australians know about. When marine biologist Graeme Dobson asked elders about the origins of a strange stone structure in the middle of a bay, off a tiny island, near the coast of Arnhem Land they replied ‘Not ours’, and so began a remarkable quest that became a mystery wrapped in an adventure, folded into history. His research took him to the far corners of Arnhem Land and into the Seas and Islands to its north. It led him back through time, past missionaries, colonists, huge fishing fleets, Dutch map-makers, Portuguese explorers-come-slavers, unknown settlers and miners, and pearl cultivating tribesmen until he finally found the answer in another bay off another tiny island, this time in the remote Indonesian Aru Islands. This is a mystery/adventure with a difference, plus fascinating insights into little discussed history of northern Australia.