The Skyline Riders And Other Verses

"Against the light of a dawning white, My Skyline Riders stand, There is trouble ahead for a dark year dead, And the selfish wrongs of a land; There are hurrying feet of fools to repeat, The follies of Nineteen Eight, But darkly still on each distant hill, My riders watch and wait." Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest short story writer". 'The Skyline Riders and Other Verses' is a collection of some of his poems, featuring vivid descriptions of the Australian bush experience.

Biography of a Book traces the life of an iconic Australian literary work in the lead-up to, and for a century after, its initial publication: Henry Lawson's 1896 collection While the Billy Boils. Paul Eggert follows Lawson's gradual development of a pared-back bush realism in the early 1890s, as he struggled to forge a career, writing short stories and sketches for the newspapers. Lawson's famous collection came out at a decisive moment for the development of a fully professional Australian literary publishing industry, then in its infancy in Sydney. The volume's editing, design and production were collaborative events that changed the feel and nature of Lawson's writing. He had to give ground on his texts and their sequencing. The collection went on to be reprinted and repackaged countless times. Its production and reception histories act like a geological cross-section, revealing the contours of successive cultural formations in Australia. In unravelling the life of Lawson's classic work Eggert's book-historical approach challenges and clarifies established understandings of crucial moments in Australian literary history and of Lawson himself

Henry Lawson - Miles Franklin - Henry Handel Richardson - Kenneth Slessor - Eleanor Dark - Christina Stead - Kylie Tennant - Patrick White - Thomas Keneally - Mem Fox.

To Hell and High Water tells the story of the quest of two brothers to conquer the extreme conditions of outback Australia, recreating the Bourke to Hungerford `tramp' that influenced some of Australian literary legend Henry Lawson's greatest works. The book is part autobiography and part biography. It is an autobiography of the author's experiences with his brother overcoming significant obstacles to achieve his dream of walking in Lawson's footsteps. It paints a vivid picture of some of Australia's most remote country, the challenges and dangers, the heat, the distance, mosquitoes, blisters and thirst. At the same time it blends in the biography of Henry Lawson's captivating life including his marriage, struggles with alcoholism, his suicide attempt, influences upon his writing and his ideals of mateship. Extracts of Lawson's own writing have been carefully selected and woven into the narrative in a manner that draws parallels between the two experiences and offers fresh insights into his life.

This book examines the flight of young Australian writers to London in the decades before and after Federation in 1901. Peter Morton studies how their careers were shaped by shifting their country of residence, the expatriate experience, and how the loss of these expatriates affected the evolving literary culture of Australia.