Australian children of this new millennium take for granted a lifestyle that includes videos, TV soapies, DVDs, computer games, rock concerts, brand-name clothing and Mum's taxi service.
But the Australian children of a hundred years ago, the Federation era, had a different set of expectations. Many of them walked barefoot through the bindi-eyes to school. Their homes were bark-huts with ant-bed floors. They harnessed their billy-goat carts to fetch wood and water, and on starting work at thirteen, gave their pay-packets to mothers struggling to feed large families.
Narrators of this book remember mothers who cooked on open fires, and made bread, or damper, that staple of bush life, in camp-ovens. Evenings at home were lit, not by electricity but by kerosene-lantern or candles. When times were hard they improvised with fat-lamps.
This earlier generation of North Queenslanders lived with floods and droughts. They knew grinding poverty and they knew hard work. But they revelled in the freedom of the bush and the mateship in engendered. They were proud of their independence and self-reliance; of their resilience. It was the spirit that the boys of the period took with them to the heights of Gallipoli and the mud of France, and which came to embody all that was finest about their newly-formed nation, Australia.
Contents:
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A Hardier Type: Cashmere Station
2. Threepences in the Pudding: Ross Island
3. On the Burdekin: Building the Macrossan Bridge
4. Two Days into Charters Towers: Pajingo
5. Maytown Girl: On the Palmer Goldfield
6. Battlers: Majors Creek to the Somme
7. A Chance of Taking Articles
8. To Get to the Beach You Had to Climb the Sandhills: North Ward
9. The Wheelwright's Story: Charters Towers
10. It Was All Cinee Apple and Lagoons: Aitkenvale
11. Born to Floods and Droughts: Bulliwah Station
12. Bars Across the Fire to Put the Billy On: Mount Spec
13. A Love of Printers' Ink: Charters Towers
14. Never Much Time to Play: Stanton Hill
15. Mother Always Lives a China Teapot: West End
16. Just One Big Open Paddock: Belgian Gardens
17. The Eldest Boy in the Family: Ravenswood and Inkerman
18. Boyhood at Koorboora
19. Any Fish is a Good Fish: The Boble
Appendix A. Federation
Appendix B. The Plague in North Queensland
Appendix C. Cyclone Leonta
Appendix D. The Loss of the 'Yongala'
Bibliography
Index
Reviews:
'Poignant and captivating ... a joy to read' - Professor Kett Kennedy, JCU
'An important contribution to our understanding of earlier generation of North Queenslanders' - Dr Dorothy Sheridan, Sussex University
