This book breaks Sydney into shopping districts that can be covered in an afternoon or a day. Brief descriptions are sufficient to get a feel for whether you would be interested in visiting certain stores, or even whole districts, so that you can more efficiently plan your trip. Hours of operation are included. Colorful pictures of the interior of stores and their merchandise are helpful, but a relative indicator of prices (like a 1 to 5 dollar sign system) would be extremely helpful. Also, mileage indicators on the maps would be a big plus.

Like any international city,Sydney has a wealth of retail outlets, but it never struck me as an intriguing shopping town until I saw this engaging guide. Grouping stores by neighborhood, Ms Matthews steers buyers beyond the Benettons and other international chains so they can make a beeline for the most unusual wares Sydney has to offer. Complementing Ms Matthews's snappy writing style are the crisp, almost tactile photos by Rupert Lorhaldar.

Many of the products on offer here are indigenous to Australia. There is an espresso bar where the handmade furniture you sit on is for sale, and a store specializing in anything made from Australian cotton, for example. Yet the book also tells you where to find the best French imports, Soviet memorabilia and Swedish designs. Among the 113 rather esoteric businesses to choose from are an upscale sex shop; a boutique of unusual buttons; a lounge where you can go with friends and a bottle of wine to make your own pottery; a bottled-water purveyor with 100 varieties; and a consignment shop for recycyled designer clothes.

Information on each store includes address, telephone and fax numbers and hours, but does not include prices. The latter are apt to change; besides, as in a store window, a lack of price tag can draw you into the store to ask. For richer or, more likely, for poorer, this fashionably slim book should accompany the acquisative to Sydney.

After the success of her foray into the clique that is Melbourne's shopping secrets, I was anxious to see how Michelle treated Sydney. Again, this formula delivers sensational results. Just how does she find these places? The little vignette on each store is certainly enough to get you through the door where the charm and uniqueness of the proprietor and her/his wares is sure to clinch the sale. Hot on the heels of the Melbourne edition, is this the niche retailer's answer to Lonely Planet? Like Steve Jobs and Apple, Michelle encourages you to think (and buy!) different. Even if you don't, she can take you to places you've never dreamed of. A great companion guide for Olympic visitors.

There are so many wonderful moments in this book - the feeling of being surrounded by massive power everywhere, the stories of the fishermen in New Zealand, and the surmounting of life threatening obstacles. Reading the Duff's description of Fiordland National Park took me back to this wonderful place as few could. But most of all, Duff presents an epic human journey full of wonder and the power of man. Yet at the same time, Duff sees the sea and knows how small man really is.

There is also a passage or two where Duff speaks about the meaning of his life - how he wants to look back and say that he took advantage of his short time on earth. After reading Southern Exposure, there is no doubt he did.

On the down side, the book's maps could be better. The rudimentary maps in the book have several instances where Duff capsizes but the reader never learns about these instances save for one. I want to know! How did he get back in the boat!? Was he on the ocean?! Also, vast parts of the journey are left off and I want to know more. Like what happened in Christchurch? Tell me more about Fiordland.

Chris Duff continues to forge into new frontiers. What I enjoy so much about this book and his previous book "On Celtic Tides" is that he is not only exploring coastlines. He's exploring human limits with nature, with solitude, with culture. Chris has discovered (and vividly describes for us) that some of the most valuable things in life can be found by changing our perspective. Chris' style is very introspective. I think the most profound statement he makes is that 'if you know where you are from, and you know where you are going, the conditions you are in become irrelevant.' What matters is our determination in reaching our destination. Thanks Chris for taking us along for another amazing journey and expanding our horizons.

We're just a few weeks from setting out on a sea kayak expedition of our own, and the stresses and fears grow more intense by the hour. Many times I've wondered why I've taken on this challenge--just planning the trip has been the most complex, consuming project of my life. Then yesterday Chris's new book showed up. I'm going to save it until we're out on the water and in the wilds, but I opened to some random page and read some random paragraph, and what I read instantly vanished the stresses I've been feeling. Everything made sense again, after one little paragraph. That's the magic of Chris's writing. Thanks again, Chris, and good luck to you guys in Iceland. I can't wait to read the rest of the story...
Brandon and Heather

To say I enjoyed the reading experience of "Starvinsky's Lunch" would be a gross disservice to the achievement of the writer. I felt that the artists' minds (both Stella Bowen¡¯s and Grace Cossington Smith¡¯s) were uniquely explored - not exposed with a terminal completion, but explored and searched with a satisfyingly partial understanding.

The majority of Modjeska's understanding of her two subjects comes from their art - and not from letters, diaries or interviews with contemporaries - although these also figure large in the total insight. By making the majority revolve on their art means that the two things can be said about the understandings offered - (1) they are highly personal and interpretive to the writer, and (2) force us to see and think of these women artists through their art rather than through any other window of our view of them.

On the first point - that the insights are personal to the biographist - this is a delight in the hands of such a gifted writer and observer, but it also leaves the reader with the privilege of sharing a more emotively insightful understanding of the subjects. It is like having a biography written by a lover/spouse/parent ¨C it leaves us with two impressions ¨C both an understanding of the person and the relationship between them and the biographer. Of course we achieve this at the expense of objectivity, but with the benefit of a more intimate, more contextual, more sympathetic view. For me Drusilla Modjeska¡¯s sharing of her interpretations and impressions of her two subjects - based mainly on looking at their art - has given me an unforgettably intimate insight into the hearts and minds of two fine artists. And her interpretations ¨C nearly always matched by illustrations of the art under discussion ¨C are convincing to me. I believe her interpretations.

On the second point, I have been left with an action plan out of reading this biography ¨C I want to look at the paintings. I think that is a very positive outcome after reading biography of artists!! Yesterday I saw Grace Cossington Smith¡¯s ¡°Harbour Bridge¡± at NGV in Melbourne. Stella Bowen¡¯s work is harder to see ¨C but there is a traveling exhibition in Australia at the moment. It¡¯s not so unique for a biography of an artist to send us to look at the paintings ¨C but in this case my thirst is to find the two women in their paintings ¨C not paintings that illustrate events in their lives.

To return to my original observation. Stravinsky¡¯s Lunch is a marvelous reading experience. It communicates an incomplete understanding of its subjects and therein lies one great strength. It is intriguing, up-lifting but not didactically complete. But it sets us off the want to know the subjects better ¨C by looking at what they must have seen as the heritage they wanted to leave ¨C their art.

"For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me, in saying it, to understand it." Rilke.

Stravinsky's lunch, and that of his wife and children, was taken in silence when he was composing. The slightest sound, it seems, "could destroy his concentration and ruin an entire work". Is family life, then, incompatible with great art? Is compromise impossible? Could Stravinsky not have taken his lunch on a tray in his room and left his wife and children free from such restraint?

And what about women artists? Can they possibly juggle family, love and art?

Questions of compromise lie behind all the lives in this book, including Modjeska's, but this does not make it a dry book of philosophy or polemic.

On the contrary, it is a rich and engrossing book about the lives of two Australian women artists, Stella Bowen (1893-19470) and Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) whose lives and art were very different and who dealt with this problem in very different ways. It is also a book which is richly illustrated. And Modjeska has a superb ability to describe paintings in such a way that the viewer/reader sees them anew with her, noticing subtle details and sharing the empathy she has developed with the artist through exploring that artist's life.

Unusually for a modern biographer, Modjeska is careful to distinguish between speculation and fact. Occasionally she does weave imaginary lives for her subjects but she makes it clear that these are her own fantasies and that myth is a dangerous indulgence. This is especially so in the case of Grace Cossington Smith, who "left little trace of herself. Her private personal self. There are few interviews, few letters, few photos, no diaries". All there is to work on is her art, which, in its directness and modernism is tantalizingly at odds with the description of Grace given at her memorial service as "a sweet Christian lady". "Sweet", Modjeska notes, "is never the word for an artist; or if it is, you can be sure it's not a compliment". Such pithy comment is typical of Modjeska's style.

Neither Stella Bowen nor Grace Cossington Smith are well known outside Australia, although Stella Bowen shared a decade of her life with Ford Maddox Ford, worked with him to establish and fund _transatlantic review_ in 1924 (Tristan Tzara, e.e.cummings and Havelock Ellis featured in it), and brought up their daughter Julie. At the same time, her own art was exhibited in Paris, she wrote a weekly column ('Round the Galleries' ) for the London News Chronicle and, after leaving Ford, took portrait commissions in America and, during World War II, was commissioned as a war artist by the War Memorial in Canberra. Altogether, she led a very full and independent life in which she successfully managed to juggle mundane work, love and family with her commitment to fine art.

The life of Grace Cossington Smith took quite a different course. Apart from two years spent with family in England and Germany as a young girl, and a later visit to Europe in 1949-50, Grace spent all her life in Australia. She was supported by her family. Even domestic duties did not impinge on her time: a younger sister took on this role for the family and Grace "managed never to master" the kitchen arts (the position of that 'never' is subtle and telling).

Grace was artistic and talented. She won art prizes at school; and her father built a studio for her in their suburban garden and paid for her to attend the Sydney art school run by Italian artist Dattilo-Rubbo. Unlike Stella Bowen, she had "No husband. No babies. No affairs. No scandals. No cafes in Paris.". Yet Grace Cossington Smith was one of the first and best modernist artists in Australia, and she achieved this in spite of the critical antagonism of the powerful male art-establishment: "the buggers' union" as Naomi Mitchison, an Australian friend of Stella Bowen, called them. She achieved it, too, in spite of the fact that the work of artists like Picasso, Cezanne, Gaugin, Matisse, Van Gogh and Watteau (all of whose work seems to have influenced her own) was unavailable to her in Australia, except as reproductions. This was true, too, of the work of masters like Fra Angelica, whose work she first saw and loved on her visit to Italy when she was fifty-seven.

It is shocking to be reminded that Australian artists were so cut off from the art of Europe for so long. In 1936 the director of the National Gallery of Victoria still spoke of "modernist filth"; and the first exhibition of 'French and British Contemporary Art' was seen in Australia in 1939 - although none of it was bought by Australian public galleries, two of which refused even to host the show.

Grace Cossington Smith succeeded by dedication as much as by talent. Many other artists felt the need to leave Australia in order to succeed: this, too, is a question Modjeska ponders.

Other artists, literary and figurative, appear in this book. Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker set the scene. Ford Maddox Ford, Edith Sitwell, Virginia Wolf, Vanessa Bell, Sinclair Lewis and (in Australia) Dattilo-Rubbo, Ethel Anderson, Julian Ashton, Margaret Preston and others become part of Modjeska's investigation of the relationship between art and life. She is erudite and intelligent but she wears her knowledge lightly. Above all she brings her two main subjects to life and shows their importance as artists and, particularly, as women artists who succeeded in the male-dominated art world in which they lived and worked. Their stories are inspiring, fascinating and thought-provoking and Modjeska tells them wonderfully well. ...

Women artists were leaders in the Modernist movement in Australia between the two World Wars. This books looks at two, whose lives are like a mirror image of each other, Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith. More than a straightforward biography, it addresses the dilemma of love and art. Do women have to sacrifice one for the other?

Modjeska's motif is a story she first heard from a friend. She says: "It isn't much of a story, simply that when Stravinsky was in mid-composition, he insisted that his family ate lunch in silence. The slightest sound, a murmur, even a whisper, could ruin his concentration and destroy an entire work."

"It's not a particularly unusual story - great male artists have demanded more than that in the name of Art - and yet it has worked on me, and in me, in ways that it has taken me a long time to understand. What began, for me, as an argument has become taken into my life as a kind of meditation."

At the time Bowen and Smith were developing as artists, Virginia Woolf was writing that in order for a woman to succeed as an artist she needed A Room Of One's Own and 500 pounds a year - ie an income sufficient for self-support.

Stella Bowen was born in 1893, Grace Cossington Smith in 1892. They led extremely different lives. Bowen went to europe, met and fell in love with a writer, Ford Madox Ford, spent a decade keeping house for him, and raising their child (which she continued to do after they separated). She lived in England and France from the evee of WW1, and never returned to Australia. Smith, on the other hand, lived for most of her life in a (then) semi-rural, outer suburb of Sydeny, bucolicly middle-class. She had the financial support of her encouraging family, who facilitated her art. One sister remained unmarried, and for most of the time kept house.

Modjeska said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald:

"It is very tough to be a woman and an artist. It has always been tough to be a woman and an artist. I have had a pretty good run as a writer, but even I have tasted enough of it to know what it has been like for women before. Life intrudes. Love intrudes. Women don't seem to be able to separate the two, women don't seem to be permitted to separate the two, like the blokes are able to do. And what is interesting, the more I explored this, the more I realised that women are complicit in the whole thing, too. The whole question became very complex."

The book is beautifully illustrated, with colour plates that are a pleasurable enhancement to the text. It is an engrossing and highly engaging read.

Thunderwith is a very good book. It is about a girl named Lara and her mom dies so she goes to live with her dad. Her step-mom and half-sisters and brothers don't like her. She is feeling unexcepted and runs into the woods during a storm. She meets a dog that she thinks came out of the storm. She names it Thunderwith and it becomes her friend. But, something bad happens to Thunderwith, to see what happens read this book!

This is a emotional story about a adolescent called Lara who is lonely because her mum dies from cancer and her stepmother does not help her get threw the tough stages. She finds this dog and calls it Thunderwith. She treats it like a good friend. Meanwhile at school she gets bullied by Gowd Gadrey about her mother's ring and she gets told aboriginal stories by an aborigine. Later, Gowd shoots Thunderwith and gets put into a boarding school far away. Gladwyn(the stepmother) realises she has been harsh on her. Lara recieves a new adorable puppy.

THE END

I thought "Thunderwith" was a beautifuly written story about a girl named Lara who is coping with her mother's death while living with her father and hostile step-mother. She befriend's a dog named Thunderwith who she beleives was sent from her mother in heaven.This book made me feel as I was going through all the emotions Lara was experiencing. I cried reading this book so that tells you how good it is. A great drama story for young-adult readers

A lot of history is the history of the decisions of government. Blamey has written a book which looks at why in the early history of Australia this is only part of the story.

In the late 18th Century a number of European countries knew that a large landmass existed south of what was to become Indonesia and that parts of it looked as though it was good agricultural land. The reality was however that there was no particular reason to colonise the land. Blamey explains why in some detail. The reason relates to the economics of the time.

Australia was an immense distance from Europe and the only reasons for colonising it would be if there were goods to trade. To move people there to farm staples such as wheat was simply not economic considering the price of transport. The sorts of goods, which were attractive at that time, were those produced by local natives and which could be traded for European goods. Australia at that time was inhabited but its natives were hunter gathers who did not produce large volumes of exotic goods. For that reason most European powers ignored the continent.

England however developed a problem after the American Revolution. That was a surplus of convicts. Prior to the revolution England had exported convicts to America as labourers. This meant that she did not have to pay for the cost of guarding or feeding those convicted of crimes. With the loss of the colonies the number of convicts in England began to explode. England decided to set up a penal colony in Australia as a means of getting rid of the convicts and also perhaps to be able to use the flax and pines which grew on Norfolk Island to provide naval stores.

A large number of convicts were sent to the colonies and they developed some subsistence agriculture. This was not a great success and the colonies were not self sufficient in food until the 1840?s. What developed was a network of settlements that were part of a prison network. Sydney cove and Hobart took most of the convicts and places of punishment were set up for those convicts who continued to commit offences at Norfolk Island and Port Macquarie.

Australia might then have simply stagnated as a sort of Devils Island except for a number of developments. The first of these was the discovery of large numbers of whales close to the coast. In the early 19th Century whales were the source of lighting (Europe was illuminated by whale oil lights until the commercial discovery of kerosene), material for making soap and perfumes and lastly whale bone was an important ingredient of women?s clothing. Whale products were valuable and the costs of transportation did not destroy their profitability. The second development was the growth of the market for wool. Australia turned out to be a country ideally suited for raising sheep. Whilst sheep started to spread through Australia, European demand started to skyrocket. This was in part due to a decline in European wool production due to using sheep more for meat production.

The development of whaling and sheep herding occurred far ahead of the spread of lawful authority in the country. Men of capital would arrive in Sydney buy sheep and head off into the interior of the continent. They did not purchase land but simply put their sheep on it. Farmers in Australia have developed the name ?squatters? as a result. Within twenty years most of the Eastern seaboard of Australia was occupied by sheep farmers who hired convict labour to tend their herds. Wool was moved to river ports and then to major cities to be shipped to Europe. At this time the population of indigenous people started to fall catastrophically.

Blamey explains the process in a simple entertaining and clear way. It is no surprise that his history won an award for Australian literature. He then goes on to talk about the development of the railroad and the use of clippers on ocean routes and how they shaped the development of Australia. The book is interesting as it provides an innovative an interesting way of narrating history mixing up the economic and causative factors and breaking free of a dull chronological record

Almost every history book, whether on France or on China, takes a certain period, then sketches out, in greater or lesser detail, the main characters and events of that epoch. Better history books also concentrate on economic trends, movements of ideas and people, cultural styles and artistic creativity. Some historians write on a period through the life of a particular historic personage. History writers that march to a different drummer are scarce, perhaps because of the requirements of publishers and promotion committees. Geoffrey Blainey is one of a small band indeed.

Those familiar with contemporary Australia will recall the heaps of scorn poured on this gentleman by all kinds of people when he made some public comments against Asian immigration. No doubt these were unfortunate, but they do not in any sense take away from the quality of his work (which is free from racist remarks). THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE takes geography as the main "character" in Australian history---that is, the fact that Australia is so far from the colonizing country, Britain. Blainey opens with a discussion of isolation. Instead of establishing colonies along a seaboard, as they did in America, the British founded "limpet ports", clinging to the vast continent at the very edge. While the early settlers in these widely-separated ports needed to import all forms of equipment from Britain, there was little in the way of cargo for the return voyage, neither wool nor gold weighing much. Thus, there was not much incentive to send ships to the distant continent. The story then turns to whalers, gold seekers, and the rising necessity to manufacture many items locally since importing them was too slow and too expensive. Why didn't this beautiful, resource-rich land attract more settlers like the USA ? Mainly, Blainey argues, because of distance. The long-lasting "assisted passage" plan (government paying for immigrants' voyage) came into existence when the other kind of "assisted passage"---sending convicts, tapered off. The second part of the book examines how Australia tamed the tyranny of distance through steamships, railways, airplanes, and through the other developments of the 20th century. This well-researched book is written in a most readable style, in fact, it is hard to put down. There are 5 useful maps and many interesting illustrations. If you would like one book that gives you an idea about Australia's history, that tells you why it was never just "another America" (and never will be), I strongly recommend THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE.

Reads like a Paul Johnson history book. Lots of interesting insites to Australia (for the non-Australian). What could be argued as the most important date in Australian history? Answer: July 4, 1776. When the U.S. declared independance England needed a new place as a penal colony. The next interesting question is why Australia - the other side of the world. I picked the book up several years ago in Sydney and enjoyed it on the plane rides. I've recommended it several times to Americans visiting Australia.

This guide's major advantage is its size. The guide highlights all of the major New Zealand attractions with a terse, yet comprehensive, style. It may not have all of the information you need in New Zealand, but it will certainly help!

Whether or not I agree with its top ten list, I cross-checked it over and over in planning my upcoming trip. Compact, well-written and informative -- it may be the only guide I put in my suitcase.

Beautifully written and illustrated, a must read for budding earth scientists from high school level through to grandparents. Reveals evidence that for the last million years, the sea level is not a steady state and more. Just Fascinating....

Few authors have such a comprehensive grasp of so many diciplines, and can deliver their summary in clear terms, and with such good pictures. Required reading for any who live in or exploit southern hemisphere countries.

Daniel Rodgers' thesis in Atlantic Crossings is simple and direct: "the reconstruction of American social politics was of a part with movements of politics and ideas throughout the North Atlantic world that trade and capitalism had tied together." (3) He concludes that from the 1870s through World War II, America was not an internalist or an imperialist nation, but instead these years saw an "opening" for social reformers in the U.S. to import foreign models and ideals from other North Atlantic countries. Furthermore, these imported policies and reforms (mostly from Britain and Germany) were not adopted in America (if at all) unchanged upon reaching the Atlantic's western shores, but instead were adapted to the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of American society and political structure. Finally, Rodgers argues, the seeds of the New Deal can be found in the activities and positions of the social reform activists of the last two decades of the 19th century and the first thirty years of the 20th century.
Rodgers convincingly supports his thesis by describing "a largely forgotten world of transnational borrowings and imitation, adaptation and transformation" (7) from the 1870s through the 1940s, a time during which Americans had an abundance of solutions to the myriad social problems of their day. This "borrowing" was a process that changed significantly over time. Initially, Americans were primarily recipients of reform ideas from abroad. Later, during the prosperity of the 1920s, a more even exchange of social solutions took place among North Atlantic countries, which eventually led to "a great gathering...of proposals and ideas" in the New Deal. Finally, by the end of World War II, the differing experiences of the nations of the North Atlantic world and the varying effects suffered by each from the conflict largely ended the former transnational exchange, and saw the Cold War rise of American exceptionalism.
Rodgers provides numerous convincing examples of the cross-national exchange process of ideas and reforms to illustrate his arguments. Workmen's compensation insurance in America, for example, was based upon a pre-World War I British model, a "ready made solution with a history of success behind it" (248) that made similar acts in the U.S. possible. Additionally, housing, health and streetcars were a major concern of American social reformers in large cities, who often borrowed ideas about municipally-guided urban and industrial projects from experiments and visions in Berlin and London. As Rodgers notes regarding the new "self-owned" city, "municipalization was the first important Atlantic-wide progressive project...[that] borrowed experience and transnational example." (159) European precedents gave American progressives "a set of working, practical examples." (144) "He describes, however, in chapters 5 and 6, the impossibility of wholesale American import of strong European municipality due to the unique and equally strong traditions in the U.S. in favor of property rights, a tradition buttressed and maintained by legal tradition and the courts. One need only look at excess condemnation, widely practiced in Paris and London, to see an example of reforms disallowed by the courts, which held that public interests of taste and beauty did not surmount the rights of property owners. Housing in America "was a private matter," (196) unlike the European examples progressives saw.
Although some reviewers have taken exception with Rodgers' claim that within the progressive movement's ideology one can see the footers of the New Deal, his argument is convincing. What New Dealers "did best," he asserts, "was to throw in to the breach, with verve and imagination, schemes set in motion years or decades before." (415) A large number of New Deal projects came out of the old Atlantic progressive connection, and in "gathering in so much of the progressive agenda, the New Deal gathered in large chunks of European experience as well." (416)
Perhaps the weakness in Atlantic Crossings is that which is left out, not in the arguments Rodgers articulately presents. First, it is surprising that Rodgers presents no detailed discussion regarding education reform, particularly when this issue was so important to the Germans at the time. Second, one would never know that there was an American South during this time period, a region where progressives were active even despite a lack of urban areas there. Nevertheless, Rodgers has done a masterful job of comparative history by emphasizing trans-national borrowing and cooperation.

This is the policy-side answer to Kloppenberg's UNCERTAIN VICTORY. While that book focussed on intellectual links between European (esp. German or French) thought and early American pragmatism, Rodgers seeks more practical applications, well into the 20th century. He is so well versed in the literature that scant references are made to secondary sources. It is rich in the literature of the time, particularly journals, magazines, and newspapers from several different countries. Interestingly, unlike Kloppenberg this book examines England and Scotland which provide springboards for American reforms. Rodgers' thesis is that the Europeans tried numerous policies which Americans learned about and then implemented, almost always later than their counterparts across the Atlantic--and sometimes with very limited success. The book is also noteworthy for some of the most practical applications of MODERNISM yet seen in contemporary scholarship. This is a hot topic, largely seen in discussions of art or literature. Here Rodgers takes all that knowledge, absorbs it, and then demonstrates it in action across the POLITICAL spectrum. Despite the enormous research behind it, Rodgers has written an enjoyable, readable work that is of considerable importance. After all, this is the author of the famous article, "An Obituary for the Progressive Movement," (1970) which claimed that there NEVER WAS such a movement. Here Rodgers answers his own claim, saying that the American reform impulse built upon a European foundation and produced policies which survive to the present. My only complaint is that this book is slanted TOWARDS Europe, with maybe 60% of the discussion dwelling across the Atlantic ... the format gets a little tedious, with most chapters beginning in Europe, then the Americans pick up on the policy (welfare, municipal gas/water etc) and then they try it themselves. This is nitpicking, though, for such a substantive, well-researched, lucid work that defines this generation's scholarship on the Progressive Era.

"Beyond the Labyrinth" is a refreshingly intelligent book for teenagers, offering much to both strong and reluctant readers alike.

Dealing with "the big issues" of environmental disaster, family disharmony, third world poverty, death and sexuality, Rubinstein offers a heady mix of realism and science fiction.

When her teenage protagonists meet an androgynous alien named Cal, they are offered a new, apparently objective view of human life. This encourages the reader to question notions of gender identity as well as bringing racial prejudices and family dynamics to the fore.

"Beyond the Labryinth" allows for an unusual level of reader interaction with the text. In "Choose Your Own Adventure" style, the reader is asked to throw the dice in order to choose one of two seperate endings. This is an engaging tactic which helps to draw the teenage reader in, at the same time allowing for a greater complexity of meaning.

"Beyond the Labyrinth" is a rewarding read from one of Australia's finest writers for young people. It raises interesting questions for teenage readers and their parents alike.

Named 1989 Book of the Year for Older Children by the Australian Children's Book Council.
The author writes an adventurous, fast moving tale of a young man, Brenton Trethewan, who's favorite past time is reading "Choose Your Own Adventure" books --a toss of the dice decides the ending. Brenton tosses the dice to determine all of life's choices. In this story "Fourteen-year-old Brenton learns to question the choices in his life when an alien anthropologist arrives to study an ancient aboriginal tribe that once lived in the area around his home." Toss the dice yourself to discover the ending to this story.

This is not an easy book to read--for more than one reason. The story follows the odyssey of the kid, his pup, and his pony as they search for the Christ-like figure, Cabel Singh, a traveler who sells wears to, and spins yarns for, the occupants of a brutal, sparsely populated landscape.

The pain and solitude of the characters is palapable. Meehan's poetic style captures the drudgery and hopelessness that surrounds the characters--all of whom seem to have given up dreams of happiness. It's rather bleak, sometimes violent and a little grusome, and in that way, hard to read.

The other difficult element is Meehan's style. The stream-of-consciousness style he uses (long sentences stringing together lots of "ing" verbs to keep the action perpetually in the present) is not difficult to follow, but so repetitive at times that it feels heavy-handed. He'll repeat the same word, for example "salt" or "blood" or "struggling," up to four or five times within a couple paragraphs--sometimes within the same sentence. After a while you start to think, "I get it..."

His repetition isn't limited to words. There is a three page stretch when Meehan lists everything in a family's wagon. EVERYTHING. After one page the point is clear--the family is carrying around all the baggage of their former, civilized life when the merciless landscape requires completely different accoutrements.

Even with the heavy-handed symbolism, constant repetition, and never-ending pain the characters experience, this was a readable book, worth it, if anything, for the portrayal of a landscape most of us haven't experienced.

We've just read and discussed this book in our local bookclub and what a lively discussion we had! I was one of the few who loved the book so perhaps I should get one of the other members to write about what they hated about it - some gave up reading it, one used up a whole box of tissues in sopping up her own tears as the tradgedies so related to where she was in her own jounrey of life, some found it very heavey reading (as I did in places and had to re-read several sections), others coundn't understand it or found the chaacters unreal, especially the barefoot lass walking out of the desert - and what did happen to her in the end? we all had our theories!!
I have only skirted the areas described in the book in North-West Victoria but have certainly travelled and stayed in the Salt Lakes country of Western Australia and lived 10 years in the Pilbara in the N-W of Western Australia (1976-87) on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert and we are now reaping the environmental destructive desserts of the massive clearing of the marginal lands for wheat and sheep. I have experienced the dust storms of the denuded and overgrazed land, bought fresh produce from an itinerant Mohommad and bought feral camel, kangaroo and donkey meats from a hunter/"character" of the N-W, had my fence built by the part aboringinal wife of a "dogger"(dingo hunter), lived next door to retired jockey/horsetrainer of the country race meetings, camped in a dry riverbed with an aboriginal "mob" as my husband conferred on government busines with them (he was an Aboriginal Affairs Officer), my husband's father was given a block of land as a returned soldier (he left after a few years - he wasn't a farmer) at a marginal place called Doodlakine. I read the book and it's all true. These people exist. These places exist. The hot headed racism and tragedies exist. The kindness and community exists. The "yobboes" like Joe exist. The lonely, isolated women "holding it all together" exist (one of our bookclub members[with the tissues] worked as a single 20 year old teacher in a desert school (1970s)- she knows]. The Government policies that look good on paper but are utter idiocy in "The Bush" exist. The isolation, not as extreme now, still exists (people recently lost in the desert have been rescued because they had their mobile phones with them!!)
The one thing the book brings out brilliantly, is the mysticism of the land, the desert, its' people and creatures. When you've lived there, you can't not be affected by it. And the magic of the rivers when they are full of water and the snow-white massive saltlakes.
When we (bookclub)got bogged down with the seeming unreality, especially of Eileen, I said "but she isn't real". If you look at the book as an allegory, Eileen represented what everyone in their hearts wanted most of what as missing in their lives:- the mother freedom and carefreedom; Joe a woman of his own; Hannah a soulmate; the boy stepping stones to awareness and adulthood; Aunt Aggie acceptance; Cabel Singh a fellow wanderer; the father understanding of the deep scars left by the terrors of war. This made more sense to more of us. Eileen represented a godess or person who made us too aware of where we had missed out. Have we ever had someone come into our lives and change it all so completely, and out of the blue?? Yes was the answer. But most of us don't want to know what we may be missing out on, do we? We have to make the best of what we have. But not at the end of the story - the boy (with his horse and dog) was stark naked, as if born anew, cleansed of his old life, ready and strong for the new. One of our bookclub people had lived in India (and several of us have an abiding interest in things Eastern),so, after much discussion, she said "Eileen is like the Indian godess Kali". Especially as Meehan makes Cabel Singh such a central character, this allusion to Hindu mythology was very apt and had us all thinking all ovcer again. Kali is the godess of creation and destruction - a very vigourous and violent entity depicted as a female with many arms, each carrying a different object of life and death. She wears a ncklace of human sculls and has the face of a demon. She stands upon the corpses of those she has killed. Great relationship to the wars the father and Cabel Singh have had to endure and the pains of others of the characters. But Kali also represents the life force of new creation, the blood and pain that accompany birth into the world, and after Hindu tradition, which supports re-incarnation, the re-birth and growth and energetic life and motivations that this brings. And "the boy" has all this at the end - and maybe some of the others on the way have tasted the "salt of broken tears" of the visit of Kali into their lives - which of us haven't? I may be way off in what Meehan intended but I share his love and awe of these so called "marginal areas" ,deserts and salt lakes and have wallowed in the mystic of it all. In fact, my husband and I are going on a trip out to Lake Ballard 100 km north of Kalgoorlie and camping up through the desert areas to Wiluna and then across west to Paynes's Find (go on, look up a map.) Anthony Gromley, the famous international English sculptor, has placed 51 elongated cast-iron statues of the residents of the local desert town of Menzies in this massive salt lake(this installation is part of the Perth International Arts Festival - PIAF). The statues have already begun to rust and the salt crystals are slowly creeping up the legs of the statues to look like encrusted boots. How's that for Kali-like birth and destruction? It's our winter and the desert will be pleasant during the day (26 Centigrade) and freezing cold at night (can get down to minus 4 centigrade). May your dealings with "Kali" be of light and life!

I have to agree with one point made by the reviewer below -- Michael Meehan's darkly powerful novel is a difficult read. I can usually finish a book of this length in 2-3 days -- this one took me over a week. Upon reflection, after I completed the book, I believe that this effect might well have been part of the author's purpose in choosing the style in which he composed this work. His descriptions are intense and lenghty at times -- in many ways they are as relentless as the harsh environment in which the story takes place. They necessitate the reader taking a more leisurely pace. Things change slowly, imperceptably, in the Australian bush, and the style in which the novel is written hammers that home in the mind of the reader -- parallelling the way the characters' lives are pounded into shape by the forge, hammer and anvil of the world in which they live.

Set in the sparsely-settled Ausstralian bush country, THE SALT OF BROKEN TEARS is a heart-wrenching, moving coming-of-age story. The boy who is the focus of the novel -- we never learn his given name, and only toward the end of the book is even a nickname revealed -- lives on a farm with his parents, his sister, his silent aunt and a couple of motley workmen. One day, in the killing heat of the afternoon, seemingly out of a dusty whirlwind, a young woman wanders into the yard, clad only in a thin, torn dress. She is taken in by the family -- ostensibly on a temporary basis -- and soon becomes a fixture, touching the lives of everyone who lives there in ways they will not soon forget.

The girl -- Eileen -- is beautiful and alluring, a free spirit unlike anyone they have ever met. The boy's sister Hannah sees in her a friend and older sister for whom she has ached. Auntie Argie -- silent and believed lost in a world of her own for many years -- finds a kindness in Eileen's touch that brings back memories from her youth, full of joy and sadness and love. The mother eyes Eileen with suspicion and derides her for her 'loose ways' as a bad example for the children. Joe Spencer, one of the farmhands, strong and mostly silent, full of the pent-up loneliness and rage that comes along with the isolation in which the farm exists, finds in her an outlet for his lusts and aches. She is an enigma, a mystery to all.

The boy is smitten by Eileen from the moment he sets eyes on her, the day she wanders in out of the bush. He is a young teenager, entering into manhood in an unbelievbaly harsh environment, whose only experience with women has been within his own family. Eileen is keenly aware of her affect on him -- she pushes him gently down a sensual path, but kindly. I never got the impression that she was teasing him or treating him with any sort of cruelty or thoughtlessness.

Tensions build up on the farm -- it becomes increasingly clear to all concerned that Eileen's presence there is something that must end if order is to be restored and maintained. However, when she disappears, leaving only a bloodied dress and bits of other clothing, arranged like a deflated doll in the barn, any order that was expected to return to their lives is effectively blown to bits.

Convinced that she has left in the company of Cabel Singh, a travelling Indian peddler who wanders the vast wasteland from farm to farm, town to town, in his horse-driven cart, the boy takes his old horse, his pup, his rifle and what provisions he can carry and sets out to find them. The journey he takes -- and the incredible array of characters he meets -- through a landscape that Meehan describes in amazing, photographic detail, forms the bulk of this novel.

The boy experiences things he has never imagined -- and through it all we slowly learn more and more about him. The author metes out this information like rationing water on a desert journey. As the book progresses, we come to know him intimately -- and we come to understand more and more about his relationship with Eileen, and about his need to find her, to reach some sort of closure.

The book is apparently set in the years between World War I and World War II -- there are references to battles in Turkey, horrific memories of combat by veterans of that theatre of conflict -- some of the descriptions of the treatment of prisoners are gut-wrenching. Australia was still sparsely settled in this era -- the distances between farms and towns in the region was great. Many of the areas were not even connected by telephone wires yet. There were law enforcement authorities, to be sure -- but their resources were stretched to the limit, and in many instances things were 'handled' by those involved. The times were hard, the land was harsh -- and these things and more begat horrible violence in people. There is violence in this novel -- but there is also reality, and tenderness, and yearning, and love, and knowledge, and truth.

A difficult read, definitely -- but one I think that merits attention, which is ultimately both a richly rewarding and entertaining experience.