Tales Old and New from Stanwell Park: Reminiscences of a Local

Stanwell Park is a village some 60 kms south of Sydney, where the author has lived for 50 years. The first part of the book is a history of the region from when the first British fleet arrived in 1788, until the death of the aviation pioneer, Lawrence Hargrave in 1915. The history deals with Aboriginal dispossession, the ambivalent relationship between the Aboriginal people and the colonists, the Frontier Wars, the Appin massacre in 1816 and the historical amnesia by mainstream Australia to these events. Included are the stories of two shipwrecks, the Sydney Cove in Bass Strait in 1797 where three survivors walked back to Sydney, past Stanwell Park, with the assistance of the Aboriginal people, and the wreck of the Stefano off Western Australia in 1875 where two 17-year-old Croatian survivors were cared for by the Aboriginals for six months. The strong Australian culture of looking after those in distress predates the arrival of the Europeans. The second part of the book is a series of short stories about the author’s life as a resident hang glider pilot, lawyer, potter, traveller, bush carer, writer and translator from the time of his arrival in Stanwell Park in 1972. — ISBN13: 9780645221763