Great Australian Journeys

AUTHOR: Graham Seal PUBLISHER: Allen and Unwin RRP: $22.99 REVIEWER: Mary Ann Elliott

FROM the comfort of your armchair you can join some of Australia’s most intrepid (and sometimes foolhardy) men and women in epic adventures.

Many stories like those of Burke and Wills, and Lasseter’s First Find are relatively well known.

However master storyteller Graham Seal introduces the reader to fascinating, lesser known journeys.

The great American writer Mark Twain arrived in Sydney in 1895. Famous for his quips, he declared: “My greatest efforts are directed towards doing the world with as little hard work as possible. In this regard I am phenomenally lazy .... travelling from the Rocky Mountains to Jerusalem in order to escape hard work, I have come to Australia with the same idea.”

Travelling by train across the NSW-Victoria border to attend the Melbourne Cup, Twain needed to change trains due to the different gauge tracks. He commented, “Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth”.

Other journeys by Charles Darwin in 1836 (when he encountered the platypus) fed his radical and controversial theory of evolution published in 1859.

Epic journeys by Leichardt, Cobb and Co, tales from the convict ships, the goldfields, Ned Kelly and his troupe of bushrangers and other colourful characters come together in these tales of exploration, discovery, survival and tragedy.

This is an engrossing compendium of some of Australia’s most dramatic journeys in the 19th and 20th centuries.