Australian Recent Release: My Life by Ted Egan. Outback Songman: The Remarkable Story of a Tasmanian Legend.
Ted Egan, the quintessential bush storyteller, has kept company with some of the best-known and least-known of his fellow countrymen and women. In Outback Songman, Egan tells his extraordinarily rich life story, spanning his childhood during WW2 though to teaching in an outback school and working with Aboriginal communities in the Gulf country, to his performances in Alice Springs and around Australia. Despite never having had a music lesson in his life, Ted has composed some of the most iconic songs about Australian history, many of which are now classics, such as The Drover’s Boy and Land Down Under.
“Ted Egan is a gifted, natural-born storyteller and a wonderful writer” – Geraldine Doyle, singer and comedian.
Tasmanian Recent Release: Continental Shift – a memoir of landscape and voices by Megan Schaffner.
In 1961, Megan Schaffner traveled from South Africa across the Indian Ocean, which now separates two continents that once were part of Gondwana land. With her she carried her two children, the voices from her childhood, and in her memory the wild South African landscapes. In prose and poetry, Megan has, for over five decades, observed and recorded her adopted Tasmanian environment. In this transportive, lyrical memoir, Megan has captured a deep, heartfelt sense of place. It is a wonderful addition to anyone’s library.
Kids Recent Release: The Second Adventures of Princess Peony, In Which She Doesn’t Want A Prince But Gets One Anyway. But Not For Keeps by Nette Hilton, illustrated by Lucinda Gifford.
Princess Peony is far too busy to wait around for fairy princesses or unicorns to turn up. She is especially uninterested in waiting for a silly prince to come and visit. That is until the Troll (her brother), says she’ll never get a prince anyway because she’s not even a real princess. So, Princess Peony decides that a Prince on a horse, who also owns a huge hound that can leap amazing distances, and maybe a ferocious lion or two, would be very handy. Trolls are to be ignored of course, but sometimes, they’re asking for it.
Princess Peony, in her own hilarious way, manages to prove that she is in fact a Princess and make her brother think he’s a Prince to boot, much to his disgust. But only Peony can transform him back into a Troll and restore order to the kingdom.
Tasmanian Classic: Tasmania – an island dream by Don Defenderer.
Don Defenderer, a native of San Francisco, travelled to Alaska as a young man, seeking wilderness. While in Alaska he met an Australian who suggested that, if wild places were what he sought, Tasmania was the place to be. He heeded this advice, and fell in love, both with Tasmania and with a local woman. That was over thirty years ago.
Don Defenderer is a brilliant writer, his poems and articles beautiful and poignant, just like the wild places he has spent his life exploring.
“Tasmania has rarely been so sensuously massaged with words” – 40 South Publishing.
You can read more about Don Defenderer here https://taswriters.org/writers/don-defenderfer/