This is the story of Charles Sturt's trip to penetrate Australia's mysterious centre. South Australia is sliding into bankruptcy and the colonials look to Sturt. As "Father of Australian Exploration they needed him to find rich lands to rescue the South Australian economy. As one perishes, others wondered who would be next. Could their steely resolve force the Inland to yield its secrets? The explorer's original diaries and letters are quoted from freely, to enable you to ride into the fierce, blazing deserts with them and to feel what they felt and picture what they saw.

WHO REALLY WAS EYRE? In every way Eyre was great, but also an enigma. This book tackles who he really was as much as taking you along with him in remarkable explorations and adventures. But how can you account for his extraordinarily positive relationships with Aborigines? Imagine yourself as the Aboriginal warrior named Pulcanta who had been captured during a bloody skirmish with colonials. You are being carted to Adelaide by the victors, who have manacled you. There is no time to mourn the friends and relatives you lost during the battle: your yearning to be free is what consumes you now. The cart’s wheels squeal as it lumbers along the cliff top high above the lazy Murray River. Without warning, the longing to escape overpowers your logic and you leap from the cart, tumbling through the air and crashing down into the water far below. Shocked policemen grabbed their carbines and a hail of lead poured down after Pulcanta as he struggled in the water, wounding him in three places. He was bandaged up and placed back in the dray before being taken to Adelaide, where against all expectations he recovered. Charles Sturt described Pulcanta as “the most fearsome-looking warrior I had ever seen and who hated the colonials.” Yet Pulcanta declared later to Sturt, Daniel Brock and others that Edward John Eyre had caused him to now love the white man! How had Eyre wrought this amazing change of attitude in a man so filled with hate? Might we learn some principles about how to bridge the relational gulf that still exists between many Aborigines and other races by reading this book about Eyre’s life and worldview? READ ON!

An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us — and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak. Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man. Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.

Edward John Eyre was one of the bravest explorers to tackle the unforgiving Australian outback - and one of the youngest. Lake Eyre, the Eyre Peninsula, the Eyre Highway that traverses the Nullarbor between Adelaide and Perth, and many other landmarks are named after him - so why do Australians know so little about him today? Based on original documents, letters and previously unpublished material, this fascinating portrait of a forgotten hero of Australia reveals a young explorer who lived a dynamic and adventurous life in the early years of the colonies.

This unique book is the only fully interdisciplinary and comprehensive study of the Australian desert and its pivotal role in the cultural history of Australia. Beginning with the prehistory of the continent, it engages with geology, the Aboriginal Dreaming narratives of origin, the arrival of the first Australians, Aboriginal culture of the Dreaming, anthropology, colonial history and the cult of the inland explorer-hero, and integration of the central deserts through the responses of writers, artists, and filmmakers into the national identity. Chapters explore the unique way Indigenous artists have evolved a method of expressing their spiritual relationship to Country, while hiding from uninitiated eyes the secret-sacred meaning beneath the paint. It takes us on a journey through the politics of Land Rights for First Nations peoples, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and an analysis of Indigenous ecological principles which may suggest a new and radical approach to navigating climate change in the Anthropocene. The Australian Desert is written for scholars of fine arts, anthropology, literature, film studies, cultural history, Indigenous studies, ecology and tourism, and for anyone interested in deserts.

Terra Australis - the southern land - was one of the most widespread concepts in European geography from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, although the notion of a land mass in the southern seas had been prevalent since classical antiquity. Despite this fact, there has been relatively little sustained scholarly work on European concepts of Terra Australis or the intellectual background to European voyages of discovery and exploration to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through interdisciplinary scholarly contributions, ranging across history, the visual arts, literature and popular culture, this volume considers the continuities and discontinuities between the imagined space of Terra Australis and its subsequent manifestation. It will shed new light on familiar texts, people and events - such as the Dutch and French explorations of Australia, the Batavia shipwreck and the Baudin expedition - by setting them in unexpected contexts and alongside unfamiliar texts and people. The book will be of interest to, among others, intellectual and cultural historians, literary scholars, historians of cartography, the visual arts, women's and post-colonial studies.

The Road to Botany Bay, first published in 1987 and considered a classic in the field of cultural and historical geography, examines the poetic constitution of colonial society. Through a far-reaching exploration of Australia’s mapping, narrative description, early urbanism, and bush mythology, Paul Carter exposes the mythopoetic mechanisms of empire. A powerfully written account of the ways in which language, history, and geography influenced the territorial theater of nineteenth-century imperialism, the book is also a call to think, write, and live differently.