Cirrus@Austlit

Deceptively straightforward, this is the story of a young English migrant, Bluey, and three ill-prepared friends, who arrived in Australia in 1910 and struggle to adapt and send down roots in the rough but astonishingly vibrant and colourful Australian outback of the time. Representatives of the poor and dispossessed of industrial Britain, the four hump their swags throughout New South Wales and Queensland, searching for fortune, adventure and, in Bluey's case, adulthood.

Artless as the book appears to be, Lewis in fact had a miraculous eye for significant detail and a fine grasp of human relationships and cultural oddity, and captures with understated vividness the experience of working in the vanished rural industries of Australia's extraordinary outback past.