Technology, Engineering & Agriculture

Professor Noel Fitzpatrick shares more heart-warming and uplifting stories from his life as The Supervet. The follow-up to the massive No.1 bestseller, Listening to the Animals.

The heartwarming true story of an extraordinary homeless dog who would change the lives of everyone around her

In Tasmania, John Cook is known as: 'The Keeper of the Flame'. John's renowned as one of the last of the kerosene keepers : he spent a good part of his 26-year career in Tasmanian lighthouses tending kerosene, not electrical, lamps. He joined the lighthouse service in 1969, after... a spell in the merchant marine. Far from reviling work on isolated islands such as Tasman and Maatsuyker, Australia's southernmost lighthouse, he discovered that he loved the solitude and delighted in the sense of purpose that light keeping gave him. He did two stints on Tasman, in 1969-71 and 1977, and was the head keeper on Maatsuyker for eight years. Tasman's kerosene light was a pressure lamp fuelled by two big bottles that had to be pumped up to 75 pounds per square inch (about 516 kilopascals): It was the equivalent of pumping up a tyre every 20 minutes, John says. Then you had to wind up the weights - they went down the tower and turned the prism around like a big clockwork. If the weights went all the way to the bottom, the light would stop. The main thing was that 365 nights of the year you sat in that tower, 100 feet up, and you had to stay awake, John says of Tasman. If you fell asleep the light would stop and then you were in trouble. Keepers took watches around the clock, in a system similar to that on a ship. Day watches weren't a chance to slack off: standing orders required the watchkeeper to look seawards at least every half-hour and to log sightings of any vessels, and their course, in the area. But the main thing was there was always maintenance to do, John says. Because Mother Nature was your boss. She'd blow gutters off, that sort of thing - she was always stickin' her bib in, and you were repairin' it. Tasman keepers also ran a herd of up to 500 sheep. They didn't have a freezer, so they'd kill and dress a sheep every fortnight. John supplemented his bulk stores, delivered every three months by the lighthouse supply vessel, with extras brought on the bi-monthly mail bo
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For more than 25 years Practical Beekeeping in New Zealand has been the bible for New Zealand beekeepers. The only comprehensive guide to keeping bees in NZ, it provides beekeepers with details on honey bee management throughout the year, advice on handling hive products and info...rmation about many other beekeeping subjects. Now in full colour.
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In this joyful novel, our narrator is Charles Dickens's tenth child, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn. Sent, as his brother Alfred had been before him, at sixteen years of age, to Australia to learn to 'apply himself', we follow his early Australian adventures in outb...ack NSW learning to become a man from the most diverse and toughest of men. Part of Dickens' motivation was to separate these younger of his children from the Dickens family schism, where Charles had expelled his wife from the family home, keeping her sister Georgie there to run the household and taking up with the actress Ellen Tiernan. Plorn arrived in Melbourne in late 1868 carrying a terrible secret. He has never read a word of his father's work. After a very brief stopover he is sent out to become a gentleman stockman on a 2000 square mile station in remotest, semi-arid parts of NSW. Here he inevitably gets enmeshed in a tribe named the Paakintji and various other folk, colonists, colonial-born, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women - though he is struck by each one he does encounter. Plorn did not expect he would encounter the same veneration of his father and familiarity with his work in Australia that was rampant in England. Against this backdrop, and featuring cricket tournaments, horse-racing, bushranging, sheep droving, shifty stock and station agents, frontier wars and first encounters with Australian women we follow Plorn, and sometimes his brother Alfred, through wonderful adventures as he works to apply himself. This is Tom Keneally in his most familiar terrain. Taking historical figures and events and reimagining them with verve, compassion and humour. It is a romp.
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