The Brumby Mare

Book excerpt: The Brumby Mare is an engaging collection of reminiscences about traditional Queensland stockmen and bush workers in the 1950s and 1960s, before the days of motorbikes and helicopters. Brian Taylor knows and loves his country and his stories ring with the authority of experience. Some of the incidents he describes are laugh-aloud funny, some heart-stopping and some very moving. He is a close, thoughtful and warm-hearted observer – of people, of wild and working animals and of the country that sustains them. The Brumby Mare is sure to evoke nostalgia in bush folk and for city readers it will bring the old world of the outback and stockman to life. A quintessential Australian bushman, Brian Taylor has spent most of his life on the land. Working as a drover, a stockman, a fencer, a shearer and a saddler, he has gathered a lifetime of stories over the years as he travelled way out past the Barcoo, along dusty plains and beside dry creek beds under the endless southern sky. Also available, together with The Moonlight Stallion, as the single volume A Swag Of Memories: Australian Bush Stories.