Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Australian Backyard Explorer B&W

Australian Backyard Explorer B&W

Macinnis, Peter

Paperback

Australia & OceaniaGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN13: 9798481633664
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 21 2021
Pages: 182
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.39 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
B&W cheap print version.

In 2010, the first edition of 'Australian Backyard Explorer' was acclaimed by the Children's Book Council of Australia as the best information book of the year. Sadly, the publisher, the National Library of Australia (that's like an Australian Library of Congress), allowed it to go out of print. That was a shame, because nobody else has ever looked at the methods and technology that the 'explorers' needed.

Before you can tackle a task like that, you need to have experience as a rough and ready bush surveyor, to have led a few wilderness walks, to have worked with camels in the arid centre, and survived in jungle situations. The author, Peter Macinnis, has done all of that and more.

He has also been a teacher, a bureaucrat and a fraud investigator who can get the truth out of violent criminals (by guile!). These days, he is a Sydney writer, bushwalker, naturalist and chatterer about sci-tech, small animals, rocks and such, and he had other fish to fry. In more recent times of lockdown, he has cleared his back-burner of a number of stalled projects, before turning to the deserted orphans. He has claimed back the rights to a number of his out-of-print books from their former publishers, and is now revising, redesigning and enlarging them.

This is one of those works, and it attacks one of the most hackneyed and boring bits of school history, the explorers and livened it up. This is no Dead While Male hagiography, there are no lists of dates to be memorised, but we do have a pregnant woman riding side-saddle across the Top End of Australia and serving up fly curry; we do have teenagers out in the wilderness, including a governor's daughter seeking fossils in 1839; and Mrs Lores Bonney, pioneer Australian aviator who, while supposedly deaf and almost blind, gave the author a two-hour interview.

That said, you will meet one dead white male, John Horrocks, who was shot by his camel, and others who really ought to have been dead, given what they ate, including dingo pups; crocodiles; partly-developed lowans' eggs; crows; horses; camel's foot (a delicacy); bats; goannas; eagles and even a greenhide (rawhide) case. One man found a fish choking in the shallows on a smaller fish, and ate them both. When they collected a scientific specimen and realised it wasn't new, that went in the pot as well.

And that was nothing to what they drank. Charles Bonney, an overlander, killed a calf so they could drink its blood. They drank mud; from pools of slime holding dead animals, water that the horses and camels would not drink. One strained water from mud that cattle and horses had been rolling in

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