Along The Western Road: Bush Stories and Ballads

In the 1920s Angus & Robertson Publishers launched an inexpensive range of books in the Platypus series, and Percy Lindsay was the happy choice of artist to design many of the dustjackets for the series. The original watercolour illustrations were recently unearthed in an old, brown paper parcel from the company archives. The string untied, the pictures were revealed and the office was filled with the irresistible images of those golden days of outback Australia. Here were light-hearted pictures of drovers and shearers and squatters' daughters, lively scenes of bushranging and gold-rush days and subtle landscapes of the wide brown land.

This books brings them all together, inside the covers for the first time, and alongside many of the sketches, stories and poems they originally illustrated. The selection includes some old favourites from Henry Lawson, "Banjo" Paterson, John O'Brien and many others. It also includes other snippets, sketches and ballads that are less well known but which introduce to us some of the people - "the teamsters, drovers, swagmen, lags; the lovers and the thieves" - who could once be seen Along the Western Road.