Crossing the Dead Heart

Crossing the Dead Heart PDF Author: C.T. Madigan
Publisher: ETT Imprint
ISBN: 1923024078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book is a classic narrative of modern exploration; a story of adventure, enterprise and patient scientific exploration, illustrated by photographs taken on the expedition. The Simpson is a sand-ridge desert extending 200 miles (322 km) west to east, the ridges running parallel from north to south at roughly quarter-mile (0.4 km) intervals, some reaching as high as 100 feet (30 m). Madigan planned a ground crossing in the winter of 1939. A party of nine, including a biologist, a botanist, a photographer and a radio operator, with nineteen camels, made the exhausting crossing from Andado station in the Northern Territory to Birdsville in twenty-five days. It verified Madigan's previous conclusions that the area was a wasteland. This last classic Australian exploration adventure pioneered the use of mobile radio communication; national broadcasts were made through the Australian Broadcasting Commission from desert camps. The scientific results were published and also a popular accound, Crossing the Dead Heart (Melbourne, 1946). He saw the 'Dead Heart' as a land of everlasting sand-ridges and salt-encrusted clay-pans; while his conclusions seemed correct then, within twenty years the area was criss-crossed by petroleum explorers. - Australian Dictionary of Biography

Crossing the Dead Heart

Crossing the Dead Heart PDF Author: C.T. Madigan
Publisher: ETT Imprint
ISBN: 1923024078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book is a classic narrative of modern exploration; a story of adventure, enterprise and patient scientific exploration, illustrated by photographs taken on the expedition. The Simpson is a sand-ridge desert extending 200 miles (322 km) west to east, the ridges running parallel from north to south at roughly quarter-mile (0.4 km) intervals, some reaching as high as 100 feet (30 m). Madigan planned a ground crossing in the winter of 1939. A party of nine, including a biologist, a botanist, a photographer and a radio operator, with nineteen camels, made the exhausting crossing from Andado station in the Northern Territory to Birdsville in twenty-five days. It verified Madigan's previous conclusions that the area was a wasteland. This last classic Australian exploration adventure pioneered the use of mobile radio communication; national broadcasts were made through the Australian Broadcasting Commission from desert camps. The scientific results were published and also a popular accound, Crossing the Dead Heart (Melbourne, 1946). He saw the 'Dead Heart' as a land of everlasting sand-ridges and salt-encrusted clay-pans; while his conclusions seemed correct then, within twenty years the area was criss-crossed by petroleum explorers. - Australian Dictionary of Biography

Crossing the Dead Heart

Crossing the Dead Heart PDF Author: Cecil Thomas Madigan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781876247034
Category : Northern Territory
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
A true story of one of the epic adventures of desert exploration. In 1939 Dr. Cecil Madigan led his party of nine men and nineteen camels into the trackless and waterless Simpson Desert on an exciting mission never before attempted. This is a great Australian story of enterprise, scientific investigation, determination and human courage.

Australia's Muslim Cameleers

Australia's Muslim Cameleers PDF Author: Philip Jones
Publisher: Wakefield Press
ISBN: 1862548722
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Between 1870 and 1920 as many as 2000 cameleers and 20,000 camels arrived in Australia from Afghanistan and northern India. Australia's Muslim Cameleers is a rich pictorial history of these men, their way of life and the vital role they played in pioneering transport and communication routes across outback Australia's vast expanses. Many of the images and artefacts in this fascinating account are published here for the first time, and this new edition contains additions to the biographical listing of more than 1200 cameleers.

Flaws in the Ice

Flaws in the Ice PDF Author: David Day
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493016261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Douglas Mawson was determined to make his mark on Antarctica as no other explorer had done before him. What really happened on the ice has been buried for a century. Flaws in the Ice is the untold true story of Douglas Mawson’s 1911-1914 Antarctic Expedition, mistakenly hailed for a century as a courageous survival story from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Prize-winning historian David Day takes off on a five-week odyssey in search of the real Douglas Mawson, famed colleague and contemporary of Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. Beginning his book on board an expedition ship bound for the Antarctic, Dr. Day asks the difficult questions that have hitherto lain buried about Mawson —, his leadership of the ill-fated Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14, his conduct during the trek that led to the death of his two companions, and his intimate relationship with Scott’s widow. The author also explores the ways in which Mawson subsequently concealed his failures and deficiencies as an explorer, and created for himself a heroic image that has persisted for a century. To bolster his career and dig himself out of debt, Mawson would have to return from Antarctica with a stirring story of achievement calculated to capture public attention. South Pole expeditions, by-among others--Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen--were going on at same time With Amundsen having reached the South Pole-- and Scott having died on his return--Mawson would be forgotten if he did not return with an exciting story of achievement and adversity overcome. Mawson obliged, though the truth was something entirely different. For many decades, there has been only one published first-hand account of the expedition —Mawson’s. Only now have alternative accounts become publicly available. The most important of these is the long-suppressed diary of Mawson’s deputy, Cecil Madigan, who is scathing in his criticisms of Mawson’s abilities, achievements, and character that he instructed that his diary was not to be published until the last of Mawson’s children had died. At the same time, other accounts have appeared from leading members of the expedition that also challenge Mawson’s official story. While most historians ascribe the deaths of the two men to bad luck, the author’s re-examination of the existing evidence, and a reading of the new evidence, reveals that the deaths of two men on the expedition were caused by Mawson’s relative inexperience, overweening ambition, and poor decision-making. In fact, there’s some suggestion that Mawson was consciously responsible for one’s starvation so that Mawson himself could survive on the limited food rations. After the death of his companions, Mawson’s bungling of his return to the ship forced a team to remain for another full year during which he recovered his strength and began to craft an image of himself as a courageous and resourceful polar explorer. The British Empire needed heroes, and Mawson was determined to provide it with one. In this compelling and revealing new book, David Day draws upon all this new evidence, as well as on the vast research he undertook for his international history ofAntarctica, and on his own experience of sailing to the Antarctic coastline where Mawson’s reputation was first created. Flaws in the Ice will change perceptions of Douglas Mawson—one of the icons of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration— forever.

Night Parrot

Night Parrot PDF Author: Penny Olsen
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
ISBN: 1486302998
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
For well over a century, the Night Parrot lured its seekers into Australia's vast, arid outback. From the beginning it was a mysterious bird. Fewer than 30 specimens were collected before it all but disappeared, offering only fleeting glimpses and the occasional mummified body as proof of its continued existence. Protected by spinifex and darkness, the parrot attained almost mythical status: a challenge to birdwatchers and an inspiration to poets, novelists and artists. Night Parrot documents the competitiveness and secrecy, the triumphs and adventures of the history of the bird and its followers, culminating in the recent discovery of live birds at a few widely scattered locations. It describes what we are now unravelling about the mysteries of its biology and ecology and what is still left to learn. Complemented by guest essays, illustrations and photographs from a wide variety of sources, this book sheds light on Australia's most elusive bird.

Bibliography of Natural History Travel Narratives

Bibliography of Natural History Travel Narratives PDF Author: Anne S. Troelstra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004343784
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Anne Troelstra’s fine bibliography is an outstanding and ground-breaking work. He has provided the academic world with a long-needed bibliographical record of human endeavour in the field of the natural sciences. The travel narratives listed here encompass all aspects of the natural world in every part of the globe, but are especially concerned with its fauna, flora and fossil remains. Such eyewitness accounts have always fascinated their readers, but they were never written solely for entertainment: fragmentary though they often are, these narratives of travel and exploration are of immense importance for our scientific understanding of life on earth, providing us with a window on an ever changing, and often vanishing, natural world. Without such records of the past we could not track, document or understand the significance of changes that are so important for the study of zoogeography. With this book Troelstra gives us a superb overview of natural history travel narratives. The well over four thousand detailed entries, ranging over four centuries and all major western European languages, are drawn from a wide range of sources and include both printed books and periodical contributions. While no subject bibliography by a single author can attain absolute completeness, Troelstra’s work is comprehensive to a truly remarkable degree. The entries are arranged alphabetically by author and chronologically, by the year of first publication, under the author’s name. A brief biography, with the scope and range of their work, is given for each author; every title is set in context, the contents – including illustrations – are described and all known editions and translations are cited. In addition, there is a geographical index that cross refers between authors and the regions visited, and a full list of the bibliographical and biographical sources used in compiling the bibliography.

Subverting the Empire

Subverting the Empire PDF Author: Paul Genoni
Publisher: National Library Australia
ISBN:
Category : Australian fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This paper examines the way in which contemporary Australian novelists use various tropes derived from exploration in order to embellish themes of personal search in their fiction. By doing so they have borrowed from the language and myths created by what was essentially an exercise in imperialism, and applied them to the quest by individuals in the settler society to find a permanent spiritual home in the new country. The exploration imagery proves to be apposite, in that just as the empire's hopes were dashed when exploration of the inland was repelled by the barren heart of the continent, so too has the metaphysical exploration of the same spaces foundered on uncompromising and withholding landscapes.

The A to Z of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia

The A to Z of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia PDF Author: Alan Day
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081086326X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This engaging reference examines the history of, the search for, and the discovery of Australia, taking full account of the evidence for and the speculation surrounding possible earlier contacts by the Ancient Egyptians, Arabs, and Chinese seamen. Day brings the expeditions to life, expressing the desires that drove great sea captains deeper into turbulent waters searching for caches of spice, silks, and precious metals. Covers a wide variety of topics, including _ Seamen from eight nations _ The recovery of storm wrecked ships _ Diplomatic treaties _ Priority of discovery disputes _ Military and civil explorers and surveyors _ Topographical features _ Geographical terms and places _ Rivers and river system

Race Matters

Race Matters PDF Author: Gillian Cowlishaw
Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Press
ISBN: 0855752947
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Annotation pending.

Inter-Basin Water Transfer

Inter-Basin Water Transfer PDF Author: Fereidoun Ghassemi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139463047
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
Using the experiences of large water infrastructure projects involving the transfer of water from basins considered to have surplus water to those where the demand for water has exceeded or is expected to exceed supplies, this book examines case studies within diverse geographical, climatic, economic, and policy regimes.