Bøker av Ernest Hunter

Millions of years in the making, sustaining human voyagers and societies for millennia, a couple of centuries of that by Europeans - the Great Barrier Reef - in maybe five or six decades the largest living structure visible from space will have become the largest dead one. Vicarious Dreaming documents a series of personal voyages between Cooktown and the Torres Strait that are interwoven with accounts of exploration, exploitation and escape. The travels and tales coalesce around the works of Ion Idriess and the lives of solitary men at the edge of the world, drawn to the wild by folly and obsession, and to an island in the Howick Group that Idriess knew well and which was the site of his first book - Madman's Island. And as with the slow-motion ecological catastrophe that is the Reef's agonal decline there are players - and bystanders; stories of people and places, of life and death, of arrivals and departures, and of journeys that involve even the most remote, uninhabited spaces - the necklace of islands scattered along more than two thousand kilometres of Queensland's Coral Sea coast. At once a journey into the far north of Australia and into the furthest depths of the human mind. A tale of Cape York's past and a new chapter in the exploration of its present. A dream narrative - maybe; a case study - perhaps; literary art, yes, absolutely, in its purest and most ambitious form. - Nicholas Rothwell

It's a tale that doesn't seem like it would be a winner; an improbable proposition of a ten-mile reef of gold in the middle of the continent, a cabal of scheming investors, a farrago of poor planning and preposterous publicity, the fiasco of the prematurely celebrated triumph of technology over unforgiving terrain, a dead prospector - and no gold. The Central Australian Gold Exploration Company had it all, and Lasseter's Last Ride was in the stores before the final chapter of the real-life debacle had closed. It was a runaway success.Angus and Robertson sold three million copies of Ion Idriess' sixty-some books before he died in 1979. But in 1931, as he was working on what would be Lasseter's Last Ride, he was looking for an angle. In filling the gaps between the few facts with detailed descriptions of lands and people he had never seen, he found it - and promoted it - in Magic and Mystery. Idriess' fictional account of the last months of the life of Harold Bell Lasseter gave birth to a legend that has repeated in dozens of books, films, poems, podcasts, websites and exhibitions, is memorialised in the names of a highway and a casino, and has spawned searches and scams that continue nearly a century later. Idriess was probably surprised at its success and chose not to tamper with a winning formula when inconvenient material soon emerged. To do that he had to control the evidence and continued to insist on his narrative's unimpeachable adherence to fact. Reef Madness exposes how Idriess confected his first successful book and why the story of a failed prospector became a quintessentially Australian myth.

An analysis of how the effects of social disruption, cultural dislocation and loss of power suffered by Aboriginal people have manifested themselves in certain behavioural patterns.