Australian Backyard Explorer

This is a title that won awards, but that was not enough to persuade the publisher to explore it further, so I took it back, and improved it.

This was the first of my three Australian Backyard books, which all treat young readers as inquisitive adults.

When we discuss "exploring", we credit people for doing things they never did, like being "the first to cross the Blue Mountains", or "discovering the Warrumbungles". Blind Freddie knows that the Blue Mountains were regularly crossed by Indigenous people, and the first humans to see and discover the Australian landscape weren't white men. What the explorers usually did was follow "native roads", the clear paths worn into the land by a thousand generations or more of Australian feet, and the "explorers" were commonly led by Australian guides. By Australian here, of course, I mean Indigenous feet and guides, Aboriginal feet and guides. Nobody ever said that when I was a lad...

The winner of the prestigious 2010 Children's Book Council of Australia Eve Pownall Award for Information Books, this work combines history with science and technology to show young readers who the 'explorers' of Australia were, what they did and how they did it. It was commissioned and published by the National Library of Australia, at a time when nice people worked there (and they are still OK, just).

This is the new edition

Again, nobody allows young young people to get first-hand experience of how the explorers operated, how they got their food and water, how they drew maps, how they coped with disasters and problems of many sorts, like crossing rivers, or travelling along coasts. In short, there are activities that could only be written by somebody who knew the science and the technology, which is why only Australian Backyard Explorer can tell you why Harry the Camel shot John Horrocks. This is the sort of warts-and-all history that my history teachers, John Rae, Sheila Harrison, and Oz Worboys, encouraged me to write, 60 to 65 years ago.

This was the best book in its field in the year, yet the Library let it slide! Well, no matter: a book that draws strong attention to the Indigenous role in 'exploration' needs to be kept out there, and if some ugly Conservative apparatchik in Canberra thinks I can be muzzled, it won't work. I was an anarchist/surrealist bureaucrat before they were toilet- trained (and I think Freud might have a few words to say on how that took place).

Try to constrain me, and I walk around you. And because I know what the nasty hyenas hate, I ramped up the details of the women explorers, the teenagers and the original Australians who went along, but were never mentioned when I was at school. The book is now back out there in three formats.

An ebook in full colour for Kindle, AUD  $6.00;

A print paperback in full colour from Amazon print-on-demand. AUD $50.00; 

A cheaper black-and-white/half-tone paperback from Amazon  AUD$25.00.

The base page for all of these is here.