The Cattle Dog S Revenge

Comic bush ballads and yarns from the funniest bush poet in Australia ¿ Jack Drake. ¿You¿ll split your sides laughin¿! Winner of the 2004 Australian Bush Laureate Award!

Shadows of Revenge continues the story that began with Days of Purgatory. The sequel is an adventure mystery set in and around Abilene, Kansas, in 1872. Deacon Coburn, a realist galvanized by his past, is startled when remnants of yesteryear track him down. Longing and brokenness are everywhere. A headstrong orphan girl seeks to live out her dreams; a childless widow pursues meaning; a reformed prostitute desires a return to her childhood faith; a young man makes tragic choices. It's a tale of hope and redemption. No matter how ugly our past, every individual can choose new beginnings. In the words of a stealthy drifter, Hope is always nearby, as sure as thunder follows lightning. Search your heart. Hope is there to lead you onward.

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 scrutinised in Queensland literature for 150 years, and writers today maintain that complicated imaginative relationship with the idea of Queensland as both different and paradoxical. By the Book looks at Queensland literature in terms of its regional cultures, while also devoting chapters to Indigenous writing, writing for children and travel writing. In the process it rediscovers lost literary traditions and forgotten writers to stir the imagination. Re-evaluations of early writers like Rosa Praed and George Essex Evans set contemporary writers like David Malouf, Janette Turner Hospital and Venero Armanno in a new context.

Revenge was an all important part of the ancient Athenian mentality, intruding on all forms of life - even where we might not expect to find it today. Revenge was of prime importance as a means of survival for the people of early Greece and remained in force during the rise of the 'poleis'. The revenge of epic heroes such as Odysseus and Menalaus influences later thinking about revenge and suggests that avengers prosper. Nevertheless, this does not mean that all forms of revenge were seen as equally acceptable in Athens. Differences in response are expected depending on the crime and the criminal. Through a close examination of the texts, Fiona McHardy here reveals a more complex picture of how the Athenian people viewed revenge.

In this volume of The Wild West, Drake tells stories about the squattocracy, the cattle kings and the land barons; mounted police, sheriffs and posses in the pursuit of their elusive prey; bushrangers and outlaws and why they are so loved in popular fantasy; stockmen, ringers and cowboys; early white settlement and both friendly and hostile contact with indigenous peoples; and six shooters, gun slingers, snider rifles and infamous shoutouts.

In this volume, Drake focuses on the famous pastoral explorers, drovers and trail drivers; the poddydodgers, horse-thieves and rustlers; the wars of the land grabbers with Australian Aborigines and the American Indians; the clashes of lawless western entrepreneurs with the laws of the bit cities in the east; the colourful females who ventured our into a man¿s world and made thier names, the transport by puffing billies and famous stage coach lines and buckjumpers, roughriders and rodeos.

Noreen Clark has provided a history of the Cattle Dogs that fits snugly with colonial history. Her current research reveals a far more credible account of the development of Australia's Cattle Dogs than any previous publication.