LAST ITEM HELD MATCHING THIS TITLE STATED:

Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983. Publishers original maroon boards with gilt lettering to spine. Minor shelf wear. Dustwrapper: unclipped. Map endpapers. No inscriptions. 256pp. including index. Profusely illustrated with magnificent b/w and colour photography throughout text. Pages clean and bright in firm binding. In vivid character sketches and anecdotes Thomas Keneally who has known and loved the outback all his life evokes a strange, harsh world where seemly to compete with the climate and landscape everything and everybody is larger than life. Above all the outback is a magic place. Only the Aboriginals can not be said to be immigrants having occupied central Australia for mke that forty thousand years. Their spiritual life is enriched by their mythology of The Dreaming. For them, central Australia is a complex network of tracks, Dreaming Trails, leading to sites of enormous sacred significance. The greatest is the Rock or as the non Aboriginal Australians call it Ayers Rock. For the non Aboriginal the outback can be a place of madness and violence. Women are few and murder occurs fourteen times more frequently than elsewhere in Australia. Floods and cyclones alternate with terrifying heat but white Australians can and do find solace there. A magnificent book. . First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall.