The Great Australian Loneliness

<p><em>'Of course you'll take a gun' they said to me when I left Melbourne 'even if it's only one of those little mother-of-pearl things the vamps used to carry in their evening-bags. Apart from wild blacks there will be crocodiles and Malays running amok and men that haven't seen a white woman in thirty years. There might be three hundred miles of desolation on a truck with a drunken Afghan and you'll be alone in the night-time in those pearling-towns of sand and sin with a half-caste woman keeping the shanty-' </em></p><p><em>Yes' I reflected 'I had better take a gun.'</em></p><p>So begins Ernestine Hill's great journey in and around the heart of Australia the tale of a decade of travelling across and around the continent in the 1930s accompanied by her young son Robert. This strange otherwhereish creature with big beautiful eyes as Katherine Susannah Prichard has noted collected the tales of the making of the Territory as a centrepiece allowing the world at large a chance to travel in the mind through the complexity duress and larrikin nature of an Australia-in-the-making.</p><p>An Australian travel classic.</p>