ISBN: 9780980797169
Blackgum Item Code: FS09
Title: Cider Gums & Currawongs -2nd Edition
Author: Gwen Hardstaff
Imprint: Forty South
RRP: $65.00
More information:
Gwen Hardstaff spent much of her childhood at St Patricks Plains in Tasmanian's Central Highlands. She has happy memories of a time when you made your own fun and learned to live close to and love the natural world. Gwen has assembled a plethora of information about the largely vanished life of the people of the high country horsemen, shepherds, fur trappers, the people who constructed Tasmania's revolutionary hydroelectric power schemes and the pioneers who preceded them in this tough but beautiful part of Tasmania. And before Europeans there were the first Tasmanians: the Aboriginal people who for a thousand and more generations moved from coast to high country as the seasons dictated.

It would be easy to think of the plateau as a man's world, yet women accompanied their menfolk from very early days. These women gave birth, raised families and battled loneliness. They also learned to love the high country with its burning summer sun and winter blizzards.

Gwen Hardstaff has assembled a wealth of photographs and other material and has used it to create a detailed history of the high country up until the 1950s when roads, cars and modern communications brought rapid and permanent lifestyle change.