In this richly detailed novel based on the life of Syms Covington, Charles Darwin's hard-working shipboard assistant and later his house-servant, Roger McDonald shines a light on a man forgotten by history, capturing the breathtaking excitement of the historic voyage of the Beagle and brilliantly...
The celebration had a theme of English pastoral glee in which came musical and spoken poem recitals, and a choice of old-time games: skittles and shove halfpenny, leapfrog, blind man’s buff, hunt the slipper, hot cockles and snapdragon so that children could learn how things were in the youth of ...
Sailing ships came this way last century, beating up from Antarctic waters, following the Great Circle route from England over thousands of miles of inhospitable sea. It was a place of wind-flattened cypress pines and small-windowed weatherboard houses — cold, wet and miserable for much of the ye...
Kyle, our eyes are on you Coo-ee, the future’s sound Hear, the stockwhip’s fracture Kyle, you’re homeward bound. Not the world’s greatest poem, agreed, but note the third comma down, the pause before the whipcrack. You’d need a microscope to see how one comma differed from another down a page, ye...
It was for his usual circuit of the minerals’ map, Geiger counter crackling, radio direction-finder turning as he rotated its small black handle through a hole in the vehicle roof. At four that afternoon Veronica, a decade younger than he was, a stringy old bird, active ph...
All the way up the hill, guiding the newly-arrived light horsemen to a high trench in the terrifying darkness, the few times he’d spoken, there’d been a quack of laughter: “You’ll come under fire, so don’t wet your jodhpurs — drift left — talk and you’ll lose your teeth.” The mouth that issued th...
The way he grabbed a spade from my hand, and raced up the hillside knocking thistles from the ground and levering up phalaris tussocks, it was coming then; it was coming in the jumble of gear in the back of the station wagon; in the way he wouldn’t stop planting trees, even in the dark, especiall...