Off Down The Track: Racing & Other Yarns

'With the Banjo you can't get away from horses'... so said Norman Lindsay when preparing illustrations for an edition of The Man From Snowy River - and who would want to, he might well have added, for A.B. Paterson so celebrated the horses and riders of this country that both became as important a part of our culture as the squatter, the shearer, and the swagman and his dog.

This collection brings together verse, prose and journalism - much of it previously uncollected - in a selection of yarns, stories, gossip and recollections that stir the spirit and warm the heart.  Here are tales in verse about picnic races, jockeys and amateur riders, about steeple-chasing and droving and backblocks polo. Here too are memories in prose of old stables and the clatter of horses' hooves in city streets; of admirable equestriennes and roguish punters; of racing as it was in the days of Phar Lap and Carbine; and of the bonds between men and horses.

A.B. Paterson wrote too about horse painters, expressing his particular admiration for those who has mastered this difficult art. This collection has been lavishly illustrated with a gallery of the finest Australian horse paintings, prints, cartoons and sketches. Gathered together for the first, they provide their own tribute to the horse in Australia as well as admirably complementing and often illustrating the writing. Full of the images and sounds of a time when the pace was measured by a hore's tread, Off Down the Track is a collection to be savoured alone of read aloud for the family to enjoy. It captures the feeling of sitting at the knee of a favourite grandfather and listening to the stories only his generation knew how to tell.