Bøger af Graham Seal

It's much more fun to say 'What's the John Dory?' instead of 'What's the story?' and 'Give me a Captain Cook' instead of 'Give me a look', and wonderfully cheeky to remark 'Who made the apple tart?' instead of 'Who made a fart?' But there is also a darker side to rhyming slang - it can be used like a secret code (perhaps that's why criminals have always been fond of it!). Since colonial days, Australians have used rhyming slang with great style. And as the addition of Britney Spears (beers) goes to show, rhyming slang is still very much alive. In DOG'S EYE AND DEAD HORSE, Graham Seal shares his long-held fascination with this aspect of everyday language. As well as including an A to Z section, he groups the rhymes by themes - 'the body plus its functions, its adornments and its afflictions' has the most entries. Expect irreverence, whimsy and wit. You may be shocked but you will also laugh out loud.

We like to think that we live in an age of reason and rationality, that uncertainty and the unknown have largely been eliminated by technology and science. But it seems that we have nagging doubts. Continually, we tell each other odd tales about ankle slashers and hairy-armed women in the shopping mall. We hear about phantom hitchhikers and headless bikies on the highways. Dreadful things are reportedly done to small pets at home. tummies explode at work, garden gnomes take international holidays, and what certain celebrities do with gerbils should be nobody's business. these tales are usually called ' contemporary legends' or 'urban myths'. Given their often macabre subjects, most of us hope they are just myths, but whether we believe them or not, these stories are constantly spread around the world by people who apparently believe them to be true. In this revised edition of 'Urban Myths', author Graham Seal tracks down over one hundred contemporary Australian legends guaranteed to fascinate readers with their gruesomeness and their absurdity.

'Graham Seal has the knack of the storyteller.'>Graham Seal takes us back to Australia's ignominious beginnings, when a hungry child could be transported to the other side of the globe for the theft of a handkerchief. It was a time when men were flogged till they bled for a minor misdemeanour, or forced to walk the treadmill for hours. Teams in iron chains carved roads through sandstone cliffs with hand picks, and men could select wives from a line up at the female factory. From the notorious prison regimes at Norfolk Island, Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour came chilling accounts of cruelty, murder and even cannibalism. Despite the often harsh conditions, many convicts served their prison terms and built successful lives for themselves and their families. With a cast of colourful characters from around the country -- the real Artful Dodger, intrepid bushrangers like Martin Cash and Moondyne Joe, and the legendary nurse Margaret Catchpole -- Great Convict Stories offers a fascinating insight into life in Australia's first decades.

This comprehensive collection of folk hero tales builds on the success of the first edition by providing readers with expanded contextual information on story characters from Australia to Zanzibar.

For centuries before the arrival in Australia of Captain Cook and the so-called First Fleet in 1788, intrepid seafaring explorers had been searching, with varied results, for the fabled "e;Great Southland."e; In this enthralling history of early discovery, Graham Seal offers breathtaking tales of shipwrecks, perilous landings, and Aboriginal encounters with the more than three hundred Europeans who washed up on these distant shores long before the land was claimed by Cook for England. The author relates dramatic, previously untold legends of survival gleaned from the centuries of Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Indonesian voyages to Australia, and debunks commonly held misconceptions about the earliest European settlements: ships of the Dutch East Indies Company were already active in the region by the early seventeenth century, and the Dutch, rather than the English, were probably the first European settlers on the continent.

This book is an overview and analysis of the global tradition of the outlaw hero. The mythology and history of the outlaw hero is traced from the Roman Empire to the present, showing how both real and mythic figures have influenced social, political, economic and cultural outcomes in many times and places. The book also looks at the contemporary continuations of the outlaw hero mythology, not only in popular culture and everyday life, but also in the current outbreak of global terrorism.

A wide-ranging and detailed investigation of folk heroes, both fictional and historical, from the earliest times to the present, taken from societies throughout the world as they exist in folktales, folksongs, customs, speech, and other folklore genres.