Cirrus@Austlit

'To take you down to the sea in ships, to go tramping over a thousand hills, to huddle against a man-made cyclone in the jungle scrub of the Lamington Plateau, to go film-making with Charles and Elsa Chauvel – that’s the object of this book.

'In these pages you will share Elsa’s dramatic years beside her film-producer husband, helping to pioneer a struggling motion picture industry. You will sail with them to lonely Pitcairn Island, where they face hazardous seas to bring back, for the first time, film footage of the hiding place of the Bounty mutineers. You will travel with the dedicated, adventure-loving pair to film in the rugged interior of the Northern Territory. You will listen to the thunder of hooves as they film the unforgettable, world-acclaimed charge of Forty Thousand Horsemen, and you will read of the stars discovered and created by Charles Chauvel: Errol Flynn, Mary Maguire, Chips Rafferty, Peter Finch, Michael Pate, Betty Bryant, Tudawali and Ngarla Kunoth of Jedda fame.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Australian Scholarly Publishing ed.)

'They are the veterans of the North African desert campaign, home for three weeks' leave after three long years at war – time to find the brothels, the black markets, the racketeers and the dollar-happy Yank servicemen.

'When a faceless madman in the War Office throws them into the shell-torn beaches, mountain trails and steaming jungles of New Guinea, they become creatures of the mud; walking skeletons racked with malaria. There are thousands of them.

'In the throes of battle, black clouds billow about the destroyers in the distance, piercing the darkness with savage explosions. In a merciless system of mutual slaughter, they must draw on every last ounce of their strength for a chance of survival against the raging fires of war, the endless jungle and the brutal enemy that lies within it.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Head of Zeus ed.)

'Upon a remote Pacific island, deserted and bombed, a nun and a soldier, derelicts of the war, live an uneasy primitive life. Realising that there is little chance of rescue, this incongruous pair face up to the exigencies of their position; Allison, a man of little or no religious belief, gradually losing the awe with which he has been invested by Sister Angela's sacred habit and by the transcendent faith which for a time obscures her feminine desirability.

At first living is reasonably simple: but the landing of a Japanese garrison obliges them to take to fox-holes, from which emerging only at night they subsist on roots and fish. This powerful first novel tells a moving, realistic story with sympathy and insight and advances logically to a dramatic conclusion.' (Publisher's blurb on front cover).