'As a boy, David Cox lived in the dusty outback on a sheep station. His lessons came in a brown envelope from the Correspondence School, but out of doors his father was his teacher. David learned the stockman's skills of riding horses and mustering sheep and cattle, and when they were out riding his father would tell stories about old times. Sometimes they would repair stockyards or fences, and when the job was done his father would step back and say, 'Well, it's good enough for a sheep station.'
'David Cox concludes the moving story of his country childhood that began with The Road to Goonong and continued with The Fair Dinkum War.' (Publication summary)
The Road to Goonong
David Cox
(illustrator),
Crows Nest
:
Allen and Unwin
,
2011
Z1811234
2011
single work
picture book
children's
'The road to Goonong was just a pair of wheel tracks packed down by buggies and drays that had travelled that way over the years. It ran through forest and passed by farmhouses and the hut where the Schmidt boys lived. Goonong, our farm, was at the end of the road. We had beef cattle and dairy cattle, and there was plenty of room to play and plenty of horses to ride. It was a time when timber-cutters felled big ironbarks and blacksmiths' hammers rang out from the forge. The skies were always blue over Goonong...
The Fair Dinkum War
Crows Nest
:
Allen and Unwin
,
2013
Z1914571
2013
single work
children's fiction
children's
'That morning, something important happened. It began with a great rumble that came in through our classroom window and rumbled on and on. We all ran out into the school yard and hung on the fence and gazed in wonder. An endless line of trucks and jeeps and tanks and weapons carriers came around the corner and along our street, all of them with big white stars on their sides. There were big cannons, too. Soldiers in the trucks waved to us. We wouldn't have guessed there were so many trucks in the whole wide world. They rumbled right through the morning break and when we came out for lunch they still rolled by. Then they were gone, heading north to where the war was being fought.' (Publisher's blurb)
