Peter Davies, Сьюзан Лоуренс0.0 Everyone knows gold made Victoria rich. But did you know gold mining was disastrous for the land, drowning it in floods of sand, gravel and silt that gushed out of the mines? Or that this environmental devastation still affects our rivers and floodplains?
Victorians had a name for this mining waste: ‘sludge’. Sludge submerged Victoria’s best grapevines near Bendigo, filled Laanecoorie Reservoir on the Loddon River and oozed down from Beechworth to cover thousands of hectares of rich agricultural land. Children and animals drowned in the sludge lakes that collected in mining towns. Mining effluent contaminated three-quarters of Victoria’s creeks and rivers.
Sludge is the fascinating story of the forgotten filth that plagued nineteenth-century Victoria. It exposes the dirty big secret of Victoria’s mining history – the way it transformed the state’s water and land; and also how the battle against sludge helped to lay the ground for the modern environmental movement.
Скотт Паттерсон0.0 At the end of the First World War, there were 270,000 demobilised Australian soldiers in Europe. Getting them home after the Armistice was a task of epic proportions that would take more than two years. In the meantime, how to keep these disgruntled, damaged men with guns occupied? In a word: sport.
The Oarsmen tells the story of the servicemen who survived the war to row for the coveted King’s Cup at the 1919 Royal Henley Peace Regatta. Competing against crews from the US, New Zealand, France, the UK and Canada, the Australians were a ragtag bunch of oarsmen thrown in an old-fashioned boat and expected to race. Many had seen the worst of the action during the war at Gallipoli and the Western Front, and carried scars both physical and psychological. The baggage they brought to the boat would soon threaten to capsize the whole endeavour.
Combining first-hand accounts with lively prose, this never-before-told story approaches the First World War from peacetime and illuminates history in vivid and compelling detail. Interweaving the soldiers’ personal stories from before, during and after the war, The Oarsmen paints a fascinating picture of how these men, and society, transitioned from an unprecedented war to a new sort of peace.
