Australia Books

I read this when I was a young man living in the U.K. Some friends had me read it to their child.

"Mr. Impossible can do anything... he can... That's Impossible! You try it!" I must have said those words a million times since I read it (whenever some engineer would want me to defy the laws of physics because that was what the project should make happen).

For some reason I thought of it this week and was telling my daughters about it. I am happily suprised that I am able to get it now in the USA.

Back in college I got a job as a summer janitor at the local elementary school. One of the things I had to do was clean up in the library. I took this time as an opportunity to catch up on some reading... in the form of the Mr. Men series. Mr. Impossible is the story of a man who can do it all. Assuming you define all as things that you can't do. He will delight and entertain with his antics!

A well told, well illustrated, children's book that explores the concepts of mass and water depth.

Mr Archimedes is puzzled at why his bath overflows when he has a soak with his animal friends. After eliminating each animal as the cause of his wet floor, "Eureka" Mr Archimedes discovers the answer.

A fantastic book. Highly recommended.

By the author of 'Who Sank The Boat?' This is a fun way of learning about Archimedes Principle. He hops in and out of a bath with, variously a kangaroo, goat and wombat, examining the water level each time, and trying to understand why when ALL the friends are in the bath it always overflows.

Well illustrated. And, yes, he shouts "EUREKA!"

Dr. Sven Wahlroos' book "Mutiny and Romance in the South Seas" provides a careful review of the Bounty mutiny without taking any sides. His analysis exposes the underlying tensions that ultimately led to the undoing of everyone involved. Reading this book cannot help but be an enriching experience for anyone who has pondered the situations that led to Bligh's epic voyage in an open boat and Christian's sad end on Pitcairn.

I truly enjoyed this book. I loved the way it was laid out in chronological order. It was easy to pick up and read for a few minutes, without getting so engrossed you couldn't leave. (But if you had a lot of time to spend, you could get engrossed then!) Each month is approximately 2 pages, and includes information on different scenarios--The Bounty, Tahiti, Pitcairn, Bligh's launch, England--wherever there is something important happening at the time that is known about, all of it is included. The author's views are presented in a manner which lets you know they are his views only, but are done in a very non-assuming way. This book is pleasant,exciting and very informational--it really draws everything together. Highly recommended!!!...

Armanno creates an atmosphere in this novel which feels somewhere between H.P.Lovecraft and Ernest Hemingway. There is an eeriness surrounding the scenes, all of which are set in Montreux, Switzerland. I couldn't wait to turn the page to see what would happen next and seldom before has a novel involved me enough to want to visit the place where the story is set. A story of love gone sour and the intrigue of a lust that can never be, My Beautiful Friend is one of the best books I have read for a very long time.

I became hooked on Armanno's writing with the incredibly sensual novel, Gabriella's Book of Fire. I have since undertaken to read all his work. Though his books are hard to acquire in this country, any motivated reader will find the effort more than rewarding. My Beautiful Friend is a gothic ghost story set by the banks of Lake Geneva in a cold, cold winter. There is a dead man around and he is working his way into the hearts of two estranged lovers, Rebecca and Aaron. During the course of this descent into a cold and lonely darkness we are slowly drawn into a world of broken dreams, ghostly visitations, and weird stories of the dead. Vladimir Nabokov even makes a (sort of) appearance, as does the artist and architect Gaudi. Barcelona provides a wonderful setting for a brilliant flashback: this novella within the novel called "The Story of the Dead Man" is one of the most brilliantly sustained pieces of creepy writing that I have ever read - and I have read and loved hundreds of the "classics". Armanno's world is a chilling yet strangely beautiful one. He writes like a poet - with the sensitivity to understand what dreams inspire us and what nightmares terrify us. And these aren't the nightmares of ghoulies or monsters - only the ghoulies and monsters of our own needs and desires. The dead writer, Marcelo Mansini, will stay with you and perhaps haunt you. If he doesn't, then Armanno's writing style certainly will. One day he will be discovered by a wide readership. My Beautiful Friend is a modern classic.

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What's it like growing up on an Aussie farm? Read Alison Lester's "My Farm" and you will be captivated by her reminiscences.

You will follow young Alison and her two brothers and sister through the highs (many) and lows (a few) of their young rural lives.

There's lots of Aussie bush humour shining through. Painting clay stripes on an old black horse gives you a "Native Australian Zebra" and entering your Kelpie sheep dog in the dog high jump is all part of the fun.

We are not shielded from the harsher realities of life in the bush. We are threatened by bushfires; round-up runaway cows and we even assist mum to deliver a newborn calf.

We enjoy the bounties of nature and go picking wild blackberries and field mushrooms.

There are some esoteric references to which only Aussies might relate, such as children swinging on the rotary clothesline, best known as the iconic Hills Hoist.

Alison's illustrations have a quirky charm. Faces are simply drawn, but the atmospherics of the landscapes and farm scenes are exquisite.

"My Farm" is the most sophisticated of Alison's works and neatly supplements her other works such as "Bouncing and Bumping" for the younger reader and "Imagine" her most successful book.

Some readers may want a glossary of Aussie terms eg chooks = hens, drover = cowboy, mobs = herd, but these all give a delightful flavour to a book which will have great appeal to all young children.

This book attracted me with its beautiful cover, and I expected a well-illustrated, serene pastoral. I was right about the pictures, they're uniformly superb but "My Farm" has a greater narrative and emotional range than its simple title suggests. Between the covers, Lester shows us the fun and the hard work of living on an Australian sheep and cattle farm.

"My Farm" skirts the boundaries between the picture book and the chapter book by using three pictures per page, acoompanied by Lester's tightly constructed, informative narrative. Lester is also capable of poetic images that match the soft visuals. This autobiographical book follows the seasonal chores and mischief on a mid-20th centure seaside Australian farm. Lester invokes another time and place through Australian terms (explained at the back of the book), and her pictures of the farm and its surroundings. While farm life (big family gatherings, humorous encounters with siblings, home grown games, horseback riding, community faires) are pleasingly light, Lester doesn't settle into an easy sentimentality. Baby and older animals don;t always make it, and sheep may be slaughtered for food. The latter is depicted by a soft version of something you might see in a butcher shop, nothing gory, but you know what you're seeing.)

A recurring subplot involves Lester's desire for a bigger, faster pony. It's no surprise when she finally gets on, but young kids not used to this formula may enjoy the suspense. Disappointed one summer Christmas (Lester reminds us later that the seasons are "reversed" in Australia), young Alison gets her dream horse one Christmas later, waiting for her under an apple tree just ready for plucking. With gorgeous pictures and funny, informative, and sometimes touching vignettes, this is a heart-warming piece of Australiana.

Humble family beginings to world champion, husband to father, party animal to entrepreneur. Through all this Nat Young was destined to be a surfer and one of the best the world would ever see. This book is a fascinating combination of surfing history (Australian in particular) and the history of a man who pushed to get every ounce of enjoyment out of life. This is a very informative, yet light hearted book with more than its share of incredible surfing tales. From surfing the best waves the world has to offer, the early days of the world tour and the unavoidable changes of the 70's. This book is nothing short of the ultimate life style a surfer could wish for. Reading this book inspired me on more than one occassions to get out in the waves and make the most of my life. A must read for all surfers.

This book is long overdue. As a surfer and skier who grew up in the 70's and 80's Nat Young was the inspiration to us then and to teenagers today. He was one of the front runners who not only showed us how to do it but he did it with a passionate, laid back style. This read gives you the chance to know Nat as a person and to be inspired by his youthful, adventurous soul.

NAT YOUNG BRODZIAK - CINCINNATI, OHIO (9/9/99)

...and it's dedicated to me, so I kind of had to read it. Still, I'm glad I did. It was more interesting than I expected, discussing the evolution of settlers to being "native" to North America and the Antipodes. About a chapter into it, I stopped reading out of fillial duty, and kept going because I was interested. (How could I resist the events on-board the H.M.S. Bounty being described as "a crisis in labor relations"?)

Now, I'm going to have to read his other books. So, in my unbiased opinion, buy lots of copies so that I can go to grad school.

...and it's dedicated to me, so I kind of had to read it. Still, I'm glad I did. It was more interesting than I expected, discussing the evolution of settlers to being "native" to North America and the Antipodes. About a chapter into it, I stopped reading out of fillial duty, and kept going because I was interested. (How could I resist the events on-board the H.M.S. Bounty being described as "a crisis in labor relations"?)

Now, I'm going to have to read his other books. So, in my unbiased opinion, buy lots of copies so that I can go to grad school.

From this book I learned more about the territory, the Pacific region, the United States, and Faleomavaega. This man has worked toward a positive direction for American Samoa with regards to the Pacific and U.S. Much of the content of this book can still be applied today in the territory. For Samoans in the U.S. we all have ties back to Amerika Samoa in one way or another. This book covers a few of the issues that effect Samoa, compromising traditional cultural values and the influence of the modern world.

Few Americans know that the United States still owns a relic from the Age of Colonialism below the Equator, and that this "possession" is not faring so well after 101 years of benign neglect. Congressman Faleomavaega is a gifted writer. Few people could cram quite so much information into 142 pages and still have the result highly readable. But it's not a happy story when for 51 years the proud people of American Samoa had their Governor appointed by the US Navy, and then for another 26 years their Governor was always a personal friend of the Secretary of the Interior. Yet the author is basically an optimistic person, and he continually cites the many accomplishments of Asian and Pacific Island Americans, and the success of local initiatives in agricultural development, commercial policy, and educational achievement.

I was really surprised that a Member of Congress could endorse the pagan and gruesome Ritual of the Tatau. The current medical literature suggests that severe physical punishments during initiation rites can be life threatening. And then after such a persuasive plea for Americans to take Pacific policy seriously, the Congressman asks for only half a loaf. After 101 years of being required to be Americans, the people of American Samoa deserve Commonwealth or Statehood status. If their price for joining the Union is permanent protection of the Samoan tradition of communal property ownership, it is doubtful that very many Americans would object.

The author of this book, Catherine Bull, is the Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Melbourne. She has a distinguished career as a consultant practitioner and subsequently at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane. She holds a masters degree from the University of Melbourne, and a doctorate in design from the GSD at Harvard, USA.

For many people, Australia is somewhat of an enigma- seemingly generously endowed with natural resources, enjoying a mild climate and fine cities, yet it is left conspicuously `unpopulated'. When asked about this, my best response is to say that the enticing shots of Sydney Harbor in the tourist brochures are but one aspect of a wondrous and intriguing landscape. I suggest they venture further afield, out west, beyond the package tour sites, and imbibe some of the quotidian landscapes of Australia- the suburbs, the country towns, the surf coasts, the eucalypt forests: these are places of every day landscapes. But exactly where: Australia is such a huge country?

With this book by Professor Bull in your backpack, and with sufficient time and resources, you could make a grand journey of revelation- and find in every corner of the Australian continent, some revealing place to explore. The book shows and discusses a very diverse range of landscape design projects, from Darwin in the north to Launceston in the south (but don't miss out on Hobart- arguably one of the most captivating urban settlements in the world), from Perth in the south-west to Palm Cove in the north-east, and many places in between.

One particular aspect of these projects is that most of them are about public use areas, in the `public realm', that is, free and open to the community. Certainly there are private gardens of merit in Australia, but arguably the projects shown in this book represent a far more important aspect of Australian culture: the quality and amenity of public spaces. This reflects a fundamental attitude and belief, that the ordinary lived -in public places are important, cherished and worth protecting. Despite contemporary pressures for reduced government spending and privatization of public assets, this commitment is generally being maintained. Perhaps for visitors, this is one of the joys of visiting places such as Sydney Cove, illustrating a principle that is not irrelevant to Korean cities.

There are certainly some gaps in the coverage of the book. It under-represents the influence and value of recent immigrant cultures from south-east Asia, which is very apparent in the larger cities. Aboriginal cultural traditions are minimally represented. I doubt that these omissions reflect the overtly retrograde mode, recently seen in contemporary Australian social and political processes! Some of the more remote locations, such as the Kimberley region in the north-west, or the west coast of Tasmania, regions where there are significant landscape projects, would have been valuable additions. But this is a small quibble, there are so many possibilities, and the projects that are included are many and varied.

From this book, it appears that Australia is seemingly and somewhat belatedly finding its bio-social `space'; and this through landscape projects. By this I mean that, in many of the projects, both `natural' space and `social' space can be discerned as melding and complementary. It may even be said that, in many of these projects, landscapes are prompting or initiating a pivotal re-orientation in Australian's cognition of itself.

The quintessential project that illustrates this point is the Riawunna Aboriginal Studies Centre, at the University of Tasmania's Launceston campus (p. 148). This tiny space, as much community facilitation as a design, by Sinatra Murphy and Urban Initiatives, exposes an essential primordial relationship of culture and environment. The design was developed with the Aboriginal community. But, as importantly, it addresses the wider immigrant community. We see a landscape of rocks, stone, shells (middens) and plants. In lesser hands, this may have amounted to a parody, but here it elicits recognition. We understand a representational space about extended time (dreamtime?), adaptation and subsistence with resources, and opportunity for social connections.

On the other hand, at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, in the Garden of Australian Dreams, there are a plethora of memetic signs, but not much signified. (p. 144). There is a cacophonous assemblage of words and objects- representations of the settlement of other places; the intent however is obscured by reliance on semiology which engages the viewer through metonymy, a trompe-l'oeil of signs, which verge on mere verbiage. The `marking out' of the garden also downplays a pivotal aspect of the process of occupation of land in Australia, then and now, and that is the overt `ethnic cleansing' which was and is a fundamental aspect of the European occupation of Australia. In this context, the naming of places, which is emphasized in the garden, whether using European names or under official policy employing Aboriginal names, is relatively unimportant. I am also drawing a direct analogy between the historic `ethnic cleansing' of Aboriginals and the current incarceration of recent immigrants; both processes directed at ensuring a white (only) occupation of preferred localities. But I guess that's an argument for another day.

For these reasons, Professor Bull's book is far more that an inventory for a tourist, and I really should not suggested that. The fundamental value of the book is the way in which it points toward designed landscapes as a vital aspect of self-cognition for Australians and along the way, it captures the knowledge and innovation, at the hands of landscape practitioners and clients, which make it possible.

This can be seen in the final chapter in particular. Professor Bull concludes the book at a high pitch indeed. Between the lines of the placid prose there is an impassioned plea, for what the author lays out is a challenge. Professor Bull asks for - and seeks positive answers through designed landscapes- a society that understands and enjoys its diversity and capacities, its natural processes and cultural adaptability.

This book received an Award of Merit from the American Society of Landscape Architects Professional Awards program in 2004.

You will want to go to New Zealand after you have visited the South Island through Mary Bull in her book New Zealand Tales and Tours: South Island Adventures. She draws the reader into the landscape through descriptions of land, sea, people and weather as well as history and stories of the region.The pictures are lovely and enticing to make the trip - a Mt. Cook Lily from the mystical area of their highest mountain to a successful fisherman showing the NZ fish "rig".

Bull invites the reader to become "family" as she quotes poems or includes personal photos from her own travels around the South Island. Small animal pictures bring the material alive. I want to put on my hiking shoes, sun hat, warm sweater and find some sheep to walk the back roads.

This book is well written by a local resident who loves her corner of the world and dares to share secrets of these warm and welcoming people; so as a traveler, you will want to return many times.

If you are planning a trip to New Zealand's South Island, you will want to take this book with you. I really like it.

I actually bought this for friends who plan to visit New Zealand soon, but found myself reading it cover to cover, loving the author's personal approach and regretting that we had not visited the South Island when we visited the North Island a few years ago. The author and her husband have spent half of each of their last 24 years living on the South Island and she recommends 4 road trips lasting one month for travelers who want to thoroughly familiarize themselves with the country's dramatic landscapes and unique history, culture, plants, and animals. The trips start and end in the city of Christchurch, but most of the travel is through fascinating small towns. The author provides helpful details about the lifestyle, accommodations, and unique activities of each community and tips about driving and changeable weather conditions. She also includes Maori myths, local legends, personal experiences, a glossary of New Zealand terms and information about topography, sheep farms, farm stays, fishing, winter and summer sports, and wineries, as well as original sketches of the flora and fauna, numerous photos, and listings of web sites. As a retired library director I would highly recommend this travel book.