In the tradition of great family migration stories, Midnight Sun to Southern Cross continues the saga of the Back brothers' flight from Russian occupied Finland to Australia as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. From frozen Finland to the lush rainforests of northern New South Wales, to the dry and dusty sheep country of western Queensland, you follow the highs and lows of their new life under the Southern Cross. It is an extraordinary tale of success, failure, hard work and dreaming. What drove the wheeler-dealer Wilhelm Anders Back, known as WA, to become in his time Australia's richest Finn? And what stirred his eccentric writerly elder brother Karl Johan, KJ, pacifist and political dissenter? What of those who stayed behind in Finland, and bravely struggled to oust the Russians from their homeland? This book, and its predecessor, Burn My Letters, are timely in the centenary year of Finnish Independence. WA's granddaughter Ruth contrasts his and KJ's formative years in Finland with her own upbringing in outback Queensland. Her voyage of discovery and self-discovery uncovers research in Finland and Australia, and interweaves her own transformation from shy bush girl to speaker and musician.

In 1928, Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm made the first trans-Pacific flight in the Southern Cross - an aircraft constructed largely of wood and fabric. They made the trip from Oakland, California, in nine days, during which they faced electrical storms, torrential rain, equipment failure, and fuel shortages. Navigational aids were primitive - contact with the outside world was by Morse code only - and safety measures were non-existent. After many close calls, they triumphantly landed in Brisbane, where a crowd of 15,000 welcomed them as heroes. Throughout this extraordinary journey, Ulm kept a logbook in which he recorded his raw impressions of the flight. Using Ulm's logbook, plus contemporary newspaper accounts and official documents, Flying the Southern Cross tells the gripping tale of this history-making flight, and the aviators who made it happen.

Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans. More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently. Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development.

St Lucia, the Brisbane suburb famed for its university campus, emerged despite world wars, Spanish Influenza and Depression. In the 1950s, kangaroos hopped across open paddocks; snakes slithered through scrub. The sanitary cart, ice man, milkman and whistle-tooting postman traversed rutted dirt roads to service the community. And, each morning, sun-warmed milk churned the stomachs of the students at Ironside State School. Then, as bold new scaffolding reached for the sky, people watched, amazed, and asked Who could build this huge mansion-with an elevator in it-amid post war building constraints? In this St Lucia setting, a wide-eyed child of the outback overcame her terror of big schools, big cities, and big universities. A man of vision, faith and love inspired Ruth to rise above such challenges. This is the story of her grandfather. The third book of Ruth Back Bonetti's Midnight Sun to Southern Cross trilogy gives his own voice from interviews and voluminous correspondence, to answer the question: What drove this Migrant-Made-Good?

1965 One of the most important booklets we've ever published (Anthropology). If you have visited Petroglyph Park, Nanaimo, Canada; Painted Desert, Arizona; the Dalles, Oregon; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Spokane, Washington; Billings, Montana and var.