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This memoir is set during a time long before the independence of Zimbabwe from Britain. My father and mother (he being a magistrate and local governor) lived in Southern Rhodesia throughout the '40s and '50s, and this is a story of what life was like in those days. Mother and her family were from South Africa and my father was born in Cornwall. I have tried to capture time and place as seen through my eyes, the eyes of a child. I wanted to get all of this down; the society, cultural norms, our family history etc., before everything about that time disappears for ever. It is no a political treatise, but an account of a life as seen through the eyes of a child. The names of the towns have all changed since African independence. I have kept to the names we whites used during that time for authentication.

Buntley was a little black and white dog who wished that he could fly. His dream came true in a very exciting adventure.

Enraged bulls in a shed full of bananas, near collisions at sea, whisky-soaked roses on coffins, weapons discharged on Sydney trams, tenacious trouser presses, lost cakes, trade conferences and searches for sewing machine parts - these and so many more incidents, the places they occur and characters that are involved in them are all threads in the tapestries of a life recalled and related in these recollections. As well as a memoir of a full and rich life, the stories in this collection provide glimpses of Australian social history. Not the history of momentous events, great persons (although their author was one) and cultural shifts, but the history than can be found in the odd, the eccentric, the unexpected amidst the on-going demands of the everyday. The voices found in these stories, the voices that tell these stories, are not only that of the author but those of people he met, sometimes only once, people he worked with and, occasionally, people he lived with. They are nearly all Australian voices.

A characteristic of high fantasy literature of the latter part of the twentieth century has been the writing of multi-volume, complex series. This book uses Robert Jordan's 'The Wheel of Time' sequence to explore the role and purpose of epic-style high fantasy, and that of fans, as storytellers and pattern makers. The book focuses on the mediaeval technique of interlacing as the key structuring device of 'The Wheel of Time' to unlock the intricate patterning of Jordan's narrative. Close readings of Jordan's novels offer answers to key questions: What are the patterns in Jordan's texts? How do they feature in the work? What functions do they serve in the work in regard to narrative, meaning and in relationship to the reader?

A comic-horror story of the aftermath of a cover-up in the London Blitz and the investigation of the resulting presence of a cannibalistic monster in the Underground, carried out by the unlikely pairing of a veteran policewoman and a young historian, against a background of the development of London's Docklands in the 1980s.

The story of the misadventures of a young Australian during the late seventies and early eighties, mainly in London. The naïve young man sets out with vaguely politically intentions on a 'working holiday' but spirals down through alcohol and drug abuse into criminality. Paddy Jacaranda recounts unique experiences and observations that reflect the place and the era.

Already in her forties in 1954 when she married Patrick Casey, a grazier from southern New South Wales, Pamela Swift came face-to-face with unanticipated realities of living in the Australian bush. More quickly than she may have liked, Pam learnt to adjust to an entirely new - for her - mode of existence. An existence which, over the course of nearly a quarter of a century, saw her come to terms with and then to be entranced by the joys and hardships of life on the land.With a sardonic sense of humour coupled with a keen sense of duty to her husband, the land and, in a broader sense, to Australia, Pam coped with the usual disasters - flood, fire and famine - as well as the myriad everyday annoyances - ramshackle houses, lack of domestic appliances, a laconic, sometimes uncommunicative husband, visitors invited and uninvited, and a shifting collection of workers and acquaintances. At the same time, she revelled in the environment, the landscape and the wildlife.All this and much more the author recalls with a sense of the absurd but also with affection albeit not through rose-tinted glasses. She is critical of what she came to consider the City/Country Divide, especially the lack of awareness and empathy she attributes to city-dwelling Australians. The 'adventures' here are ordinary rather than extraordinary but the author relates them with an authentic voice, with humour - occasionally self-deprecating - but always with a clear sense of love for her husband, for the land they struggled together to make productive, and for the creatures, domestic and wild, that were a constant presence in times good and bad.The Bascule Bridge is not only a memoir of an Australian life well lived but a paean to way of living largely lost.

In the early 1990s, Bill Lyon (who twice stood as an Australian Labor Party candidate for election to the Western Australian parliament) adopted the persona of 'Sir Bruce Fernargle-Jones' in order to provide satirical commentary on local, national and international politics from the 'inside', so to speak. In his weekly radio broadcasts on the Australian Broadcasting Commission, he turned a humorous, knowledgeable and sceptical eye on the foolishnesses, foibles, failings, faults and frailties of prime ministers, premiers and presidents as well as many others of greater or lesser significance - questionable businessmen, trendy fashionista, errant Royalty - as well as on passing social issues and mores.This book gathers together for the first time the scripts Lyon prepared for the broadcasts he made late at night, which originated in Perth but which were relayed throughout Australia. The Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times', although probably bogus, seems nonetheless to have been visited upon Sir Bruce Fernargle-Jones, and his perspective upon those 'interesting times' provided the substance of the commentaries reproduced in this book. Together they represent a comic time capsule of the twists and turns - and occasional lunacies - of Australian (and sometimes international) politics and society during a stimulating era.In addition to Sir Bruce's talks, the book contains material 'drawn from the archives of the Rottnest Island Film Commission' of which fictional organisation Sir Bruce Fernargle-Jones was the fictional chairman (a 'fact' to which he often refers in his broadcasts). This material mainly consists of radio and television scripts for comedy programs based on the idea of the incompetent operations of the said Rottnest Island Film Commission - scripts that were written by Bill Lyon and Neil Rattigan a decade earlier than the Sir Bruce broadcasts but from which he arose like a middle-aged, paunchy, self-opinionated Botticelli Venus. There are also reproduced some related correspondence, memoranda and assorted trivia.

In a saga that follows the changes in fortune of the Gregory family over several generations, Janet Robertson combines fictional characters and events with elements taken from the true story of her great-great grandfather Captain Allen Gardiner RN as well as other aspects of her family history and her own life. The story spans two centuries and takes place in locations as far apart as England, Australia and New Zealand. Running like a thread throughout this family saga is the aftermath of a tragic incident that took place in the nineteenth century. This fateful event, whose echoes reverberate down the generations, is brought finally to a conclusion in the twenty-first century, thus healing a long unrighted wrong. Key to the lives and events of each succeeding generation is the presence of a beautiful, red-haired, green-eyed daughter.

An anthology of articles that range over an eclectic collection of topics in the areas of film and television. Considered are a variety of aspects of cinema in different places and at different times: Australian cinema and culture; American Cold War musicals; Hollywood father-and-son films in the 1980s; British Second World War films and class; the earliest American films and their use of location. In addition, there are essays on television: Situation Comedy narrative; and Soap Opera spectacle.