Philip Hodgins
Dispossessed

It is 1988, the year of celebrations. But not everyone feels invited. During the last weeks before eviction from their land, a farming family is dispossessed more than once. Against the myth of idyllic rural life, Dispossessed gives another vision. Here is a stark account of this family losing their identity, as well as the more familiar images from the bush: the birth and death of animals, the rhythms of working the land, and the excesses of nature. In this vivid novella, written in blank verse, Philip Hodgins finds powerful metaphors for Australia's recent past.

Michael Keenan
Last Horse Standing

In 1971 bushman Jack Camp went mustering wild cattle - 'cleanskins' - in a vast and isolated stretch of the Kimberley coast. Everything was going according to plan when out of the blue a cyclone struck, flooding the area and wreaking devastation. Jack, his young son and a teenage stockman were left without food, fire, shelter or a means of escape. As time passed without rescue and they grew weaker, Jack decided their only chance was to head for a cattle station some fifty kilometres away. The trouble was, to reach it they would have to strike out across the shark- and crocodile-infested tidal estuary. And so began a journey that would take them to hell and back. How they made it out is a gripping yarn and an inspiring testament to the grit and determination of the outback spirit.

London, 1865. Lydia Frankland finds a love letter from her late stepmother, Jane, to Louis Lempriere, an amateur botanist in Port Arthur. The letter suggests Jane had an affair with Lemprière in Van Diemen's Land twenty years before, when Lydia's father was governor there. Compelled to uncover the truth about her family's past, Lydia sets sail to the colony, now named Tasmania. There, she is horrified to realise that her 'heroic' father presided over a penal colony so cruel that prisoners chose death over incarceration. Will the price of her curiosity put her own longed-for love in jeopardy? In this gripping historical novel Simpson has drawn upon real nineteenth-century diaries to inspire her fiction and give voice to the silences that history has left behind.