Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1855 talented astronomer and scientist Charles Todd had a dream to build a telegraph line across Australia to connect it to the world. This dream was a bold one and he would have to wait for technological advances to catch up with his ideas. By 1870, however, Singapore and Indonesia were joined to the world's growing telegraph network and it was Australia's turn. Todd and his men would have to erect thousands of telegraph poles across the entire expanse of the country, from Adelaide to the northern coast - one pole every 80 metres - across land that was relentlessly inhospitable and largely unknown to them. They overcame every obstacle and, as well as reducing the transmission of information to the country from months to hours, revealed the splendour of the continent's interior to its rapidly growing population. This is their story, now in paperback.' (Publication summary)

'Those who like their history wrapped in light, jocular prose will warm to Garry Linnell’s Moonlite. It’s the story of George Scott, sometime preacher, sometime conman, sailor, adventurer and eventually notorious bushranger.' (Introduction)

'In 1823, cockney sailor and chancer James Porter was convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs and transported halfway around the world to Van Diemen's Land. After several escape attempts from the notorious penal colony, Porter, who told authorities he was a 'beer-machine maker', was sent to Macquarie Harbour, known in Van Diemen's Land as hell on earth.

'Many had tried to escape Macquarie Harbour; few had succeeded. But when Governor George Arthur announced that the place would be closed and its prisoners moved to the new penal station of Port Arthur, Porter, along with a motley crew of other prisoners, pulled off an audacious escape. Wresting control of the ship they'd been building to transport them to their fresh hell, the escapees instead sailed all the way to Chile. What happened next is stranger than fiction, a fitting outcome for this true-life picaresque tale.

'The Ship That Never Was is the entertaining and rollicking story of what is surely the greatest escape in Australian colonial history. James Porter, whose memoirs were the inspiration for Marcus Clarke's For the Term of his Natural Life, is an original Australian larrikin whose ingenuity, gift of the gab and refusal to buckle under authority make him an irresistible anti-hero who deserves a place in our history.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.