A great-value bumper edition combining the hugely popular Bruce Simpson classics Packhorse Drover and Hell, Highwater & Hard Cases.

Based on Where the Outback Drovers Ride, the much-loved memoir of bushman and drover Bruce Simpson, Drover celebrates a way of life that has all but vanished - and records how it's changed with time. From saddling up at dawn, through long days of heat, dust and sheer hard graft working cattle, to evenings spent joking around the campfire, photographer Darren Clark was there to record contemporary outback life. In doing so he has captured the spirit of Bruce Simpson's yarns and memories in more than 150 images of the historic properties, landscapes, droving routes, towns and people of outback Northern Territory and Queensland.

Heroes, visionaries and eccentrics! Outback writer Marie Mahood is the author of the much loved Icing on the Damper and A Bunch of Strays. In the 1960s she raised cattle and kids on the world’s most remote cattle station, Mongrel Downs, in the Tanami Desert. Here she writes about the heroes, visionaries and eccentrics of Australia’s vast outback. Her thirty-two characters include the greatest drover and Gulf trekker of them all, Nat Buchanan: prince of poddy-dodgers Harry Readford; the cattle king Sidney Kidman; outback surveyor supreme and all-round good bloke Len Beadell; Aboriginal warrior Jandamarra; Mat Wilson at the NT Depot store; gun shearer Jackie Howe; drover Edna Zigenbine on the Murranji Track; explorer and goldmine Christy Palmerston in the heartland of Cape York Peninsula; eccentrics such as the Gulf Hero and the Barkly Hermit; and drovers who were also painters and poets of repute.

'The Outback isn't a place on a map; it's a place in your heart. It's an attitude, how you treat people, a way of behaving. It's your belief system, and how a whole nation of Australians often long for a time when life was simpler, less complicated, more genuine . . . ' Sue Williams has long been fascinated by the Outback – its striking landscapes, the salt-of-the-earth characters it breeds, its wonders and its weirdness. But to date, her focus has been on others' lives. Now putting her bravest foot forward, Sue sets out to see our country as it really is, warts and all. She accepts every new challenge that comes her way, including pregnancy-testing cows at a remote property, joining a cattle drive across Queensland, visiting the deadliest town in Australia, and fronting up to a ferocious fighter in the last boxing tent in the world. It's tough for a city slicker, but she won't stop until she discovers what the 'real' Outback is all about.

Vignettes of Australian bush life.

An ideal book for those interested in things and people Australian, as well as travellers to Australia.