Mary Poppins

I have just finished The Shiralee - a shiralee is a swag, a burden. Lovely story, some nice images of dusty, tough rural Australia. A bittersweet story about a drifter Dad with his little girl Buster. Made into a movie in 1987.

There are another couple of books to pick up from the library which I will try and do tomorrow. Meantime I have started reading Mary Poppins as an iBook on the iPad. PL Travers was born in Maryborough, just up the road in Queensland. The show Mary Poppins is currently on in Brisbane.

The Shiralee

Finished Dog Rock this morning (yes, I am on a week's break) and got The Shiralee from the library this morning. The Shiralee was published in 1955. Maybe it's about a girl who wears red ribbons at the ends of her plaits?

Project Gutenberg Australia (PGA)

I finished Obernewtyn a couple of days ago, now back to Dog Rock. I am thinking about ways to access some of the more difficult to find, out of print, rare books and found a couple of titles on PGA, including Out of the Silence, by Erle Cox. Cox's book is a very early example of science fiction; Obernewtyn is fantasy. Dog Rock is just plain comical, very funny.

Obernewtyn and Dog Rock

I did finish Cargo the second night of reading it. I started Dog Rock (funny story about very small town Australia in the '60s) but in the meantime, Obernewtyn has become available at the library. It is a fantasy story, not at all my thing I would have thought, but it's quite well written.

Jessica Au - Cargo

I finished Be Near Me so Dominic and I went to the library last night after dinner as this book became available - it's another from The Australian's Best Books of 2011 list. Its author is Australian, the book is most definitely Australian and I am two-thirds of the way through it already. I could have read until I finished it late last night but I am back to work now and thought I had better get some sleep. Hopefully I can finish it tonight!

Jessica Au has a website - click on her name.

Happy Reading in 2012

I finally finished The Pea-Pickers a couple of days ago. I did enjoy it even though I made heavy weather of it. As the back cover blurb says, "What love of words, and skill with words, what love of Australian earth and Australian people ..."

However, since I have the attention span of a gnat and I am fatally attracted to lists, I have started along another path of literary meandering. This list was recently in The Australian, Best Books of 2011 as chosen by a variety of authors, critics and the like. And each has nominated a clutch of books. So it's going to add bulk and spice to my current reading. I've started "Be Near Me" as it was the first available book on the list, sitting on the shelves in the Maroochydore library. I guess I am more or less planning to alternate between the 2 lists.

The garden photos are for fun, taken today on New Year's Day 2012 in our garden.

I sat out here for a little while reading today.


The basil has been extraordinarily vigorous and we've have several batches of beautiful pesto from it.

Then there are the Bloodwood trees and the banana palms...

Picking Peas, Slowly ....

I have been reading this book for a while now, and whilst it's a good book (set in the Aussie landscape of Gippsland, country-folk in the 40s) it has been slow-going...