Roger McDonald

Slipstream

Teresa Cremin

Emma Longley

Louise Blakemore

Jumpstart! Drama contains more than forty engaging, practical, easy-to-do and highly motivating drama activities which will appeal to busy primary teachers who wish to enliven their practice and make more use of drama in line with the Framework for Literacy. All the activities connect to well-known texts, which are popular in primary classrooms, and the conventions described can be used in a variety of subjects, suiting a wide range of learning styles. The book is organised around four sections which can be dipped into, each providing rich and accessible ideas to stimulate drama in the classroom, helping teachers to: use stories as a basis for drama work use poetry as a stimulus for drama teach non-fiction through the use of drama develop role play areas and the drama opportunities they provide. Ideal for busy primary teachers who wish to encourage their pupils in drama, Jumpstart! Drama will help teachers to use literary and non-fiction texts in a dramatic and motivating manner.

Games and Activities for Ages 5-11

Jumpstart! Drama

Sea-Chase

In this tribute to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and the people they serve, Richard Woldendorp's exquisite photographs and Roger McDonald's sensitive and vivid evocations combine to create a book which celebrates the contemporary realities of the Australian outback and the indomitable spirit of the people who live and work beyond the black stump.

The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia

Australia's Flying Doctors

A tribute to the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the people they serve. Celebrates in pictures and words the contemporary realities of the Australian outback and the indomitable spirit of the people who live and work beyond the black stump.

Poppy Gibson

Inspiring Primary Learners offers trainee and qualified teachers high-quality case studies of outstanding practice in contemporary classrooms across the country. Expert authors unravel and reveal the theory and evidence that underpins lessons, helping you make connections with your own practice and understand what ‘excellent’ looks like, within each context, and how it is achieved. Illustrated throughout with interviews, photos, and examples of children’s work, it covers a range of primary subjects and key topics including creating displays, outdoor learning, and developing a reading for pleasure culture. The voice of the practitioner is evident throughout as teachers share their own experience, difficulties, and solutions to ensure that children are inspired by their learning. Written in two parts, the first exemplifies examples of practice for each National Curriculum subject, whilst the second focuses on the wider curriculum and explores issues pertinent to the primary classroom, highlighting important discussions on topics such as: Reading for pleasure Writing for pleasure Creating a dynamic and responsive curriculum Creating inspiring displays Outdoor learning Pedagogy for imagination Relationships and Sex Education This key text shows how, even within the contested space of education, practitioners can inspire their primary learners through teaching with passion and purpose for the empowerment of the children in their class. For all new teachers, it provides advice and ideas for effective and engaging learning experiences across the curriculum.

Insights and Inspiration Across the Curriculum

Inspiring Primary Learners

Frank Howson

Alister Webb

Published in 1992 this novel is based on a screenplay by Frank Howson and Alister Webb. The author's previous works include the prize-winning 1915, Slipstream and Rough Wallaby.. The novelisation is based on the racy scandalous adventures of the young Errol Flynn before he embarked on his successful Hollywood career.

A Novelisation

Flynn

'Roger McDonald uses language with the precision of a diamond cutter.' Publishers Weekly Another shed coming up on the horizon...a low, wide roof of galvanised iron the only landmark in a million square miles of flatness and glare... The sun blazed overhead like a nuclear pile. His hat smelt like a dirty sock. His body was sticky, itchy, tired. The tyres of his old yellow truck, sunk into the sand, gave out a hot, desolate, perished rubber odour, heatwaves ballooning from the bodywork. The impression he had, glancing back towards the vehicle, was of disintegrating material only just holding together. A split in his hat admitted a hot bar of sunlight onto his scalp. His eyeballs felt like pinpoint charred coals and he wanted to slide down into what shade there was... Yesterday morning he had left a tin-roofed farmhouse far to the south of here - Sharon, his wife, and his three daughters hardly stirring in their sleep as they said goodbye. Then while he was out at the truck tying down the last of his load they woke up more, stumbled from bed and huddled in jumpers, stamping their feet in the chill, hugging themselves in the greyness of first light. Sharon brought him a mug of tea and they stood looking at each other over the steaming rims. Well, there was more to this going away than met the eye. The talk of money. The talk of returning to the country of his childhood. It wasn't the full story... He took the cool, pre-autumnal, misty dawn track away - across sheep paddocks dotted with poplars. In a ground mist a flock of starlings formed a perfect heart collapsing into the tatters of a pine windbreak. It was a reversed image of emotion. He was leaving a house, making a break, following a pattern he barely understood. He only knew it was happening; that he was making it happen, and was going, and if he didn't there was a kind of death he would face, he couldn't name what it was. Into the hard-living world of travelling shearers in the Australian outback comes internationally acclaimed writer Roger McDonald, driving an old truck rattling with cooking gear. He has abandoned writing for a time and found work as a cook for a team of New Zealand shearers working through New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. He is determined to find a sense of belonging: somehow to join his life with the landscape, the places and the people he meets along the way; somehow to fill the inexpressible yearning he feels. Shearers' Motel is the story of that quest, of its triumphs and its failures - a story told with a heartfelt sense of of the profundity of ordinary lives. Written with an insider's affection and familiarity sharpened by an outsider's perception, this moving account of working life in a classic Australian industry gives a new twist to a long tradition of outback travel writing. It confirms Roger McDonald as one of our finest and most lyrical chroniclers of the land - and of the human heart.

Shearers' Motel

A novel which spans a lifetime and tells of the power of love and friendship. Tanner Hatton Finch is given a life-giving blow as a baby boy but there seems little promise in his life. He grows up wild in an isolated, windswept countryside, the child of misplaced artistic parents. Obsessed with fire and explosives he lies, cheats and steals his way through a childhood set on a course of opposition and destruction. When he meets Ruby his life is transformed, only to be changed absolutely with the appearance of Kel, a boy with a talent for loyalty and a love of knives. The author has written five novels including 'Slipstream', 'Water Man' and 'Rough Wallaby'.

The Slap

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award. In the early 1800s, out of the prison society of governors, redcoats, English gaolers, Irish convicts, and the few free settlers of Botany Bay, no one had ventured much farther inland than a few dozen miles from Sydney. Or so it was believed until the escape of Desmond Kale and the vengeance of his rival, the wildly eccentric parson magistrate Matthew Stanton. The Ballad of Desmond Kale is a broad-sweeping novel of the first days of British settlement in Australia. At the centre is Stanton's pursuit of Kale - an Irish political prisoner and a rebelliously brilliant breeder of sheep. The alchemy of wool fascinates, threatens, and transforms when it is discovered that fine wool thrives in New South Wales as nowhere else in in the world, producing veritable gold on sheep's backs. The Ballad of Desmond Kale is both a love story of unusual interest and an epic novel of greed, ambition, conceit, and redemption. The novel is rich in its characterisations and the rawness of its settings, vigour of language, and vividness of personality. The action moves from the early Australian bush to the halls of Westminster, the mills of Yorkshire, the sierras of Spain, the wilds of the Southern Ocean, and returns at last into the far outback for its finale. Once the ballad is sung, ordinary experience is heightened, the world can never be the same again. A brilliant and inspired recreation of the early days of white Australian settlement by one of Australia's finest writers working at the height of his powers.

The Ballad of Desmond Kale

Growing up in inland Australia, Judy, a young teacher, has rarely seen the sea. But when she flees a rioting classroom one dismal Friday, a dud and a failure, she gets drunk and wakes up on a boat. Overnight her life changes; she is in love with being on the water and in love with Wes Bannister who lives on the boat. Sailing was not something Judy had ever thought about wanting, but now she craved it. Wind was the best teacher she'd had, by far. From then on, Judy believes that the one trusted continuation of herself is with Wes, and always will be, but then events at sea challenge their closeness. Must they become competitors against each other in the push to be equals? It seems they must. A Sea-Chase is a novel that vividly tracks ambition, self-realisation, and lasting love tied up in a sea story. The idea that nobody who sets off to do something alone, without family, friends, rivals, and a pressing duty to the world, ever does so alone, finds beautiful, dramatic expression in Roger McDonald's tenth, and most surprising novel.

A Sea-Chase

Drawing on the extensive collection of the National Library of Australia, this book highlights the fingerprints humans have left on the landscape through the lenses of Australia's greatest photographers. Roger Mcdonald has written an insighful introductory essay as well as extended captions describing his response.

Australia's Wild Places

The Really Useful Drama Book offers busy primary school teachers a collection of step-by-step drama sessions, inspired by high-quality picturebooks, that will engage children and promote enjoyable learning across the curriculum. Lively and thoughtful, the interactive drama sessions are structured around a wide range of texts, including wordless picturebooks, postmodern picturebooks, short stories, well-known texts by recognisable authors and some you may not have come across before, all chosen for their power to foster curiosity. The step-by-step sessions can also be adapted to incorporate your own ideas and passions, allowing you to structure them for the topics you’re exploring with your class. Each session is structured around two texts and offers a guide to the drama strategies used, teaching objectives, ideas for writing opportunities, problems, emotions and challenges to explore, and a clear guide to exploring each text. Ten key themes are explored: Suspense Prejudice Friendship Rhyme and rhythm War and conflict Nature Overcoming fear Possessions and obsessions Dreams Short stories With a focus on the crucial role of imagination in the classroom, The Really Useful Drama Book helps reclaim a purposeful, passionate pedagogy and shows teachers how drama can place children right at the heart of a story, encouraging their desire to ask questions, solve problems and search out new information.

Using Picturebooks to Inspire Imaginative Learning

The Really Useful Drama Book

Life on the land is a study in contrasts: shadow and light, abundance and blight, the transcendent moment eroded by the persistence of time. And it's against this backdrop, in the shearing sheds of Eureka Station, across the sweeping hills and lagoons of the Isabel district and the fleeting camaraderie of the Five Alls pub, that men play out their fates, conduct their affairs and hope for the best. WHEN COLTS RAN, written in Roger McDonald's inimitably rich and piercingly observant style, charts the ebb and flow of human fortune, and our fraught desire to leave an indelible mark on society and those closest to us. It shows how loyalties shape us in the most unexpected ways. It's the story of how men 'strike at beauty' as they fall to the earth.

When Colts Ran

Syms Covington, the main character of Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, was Charles Darwin’s manservant for seven years, beginning with the historic voyage of the Beagle. Their relationship was an odd one, but it furnished exactly what Darwin needed in order to complete his groundbreaking work. Covington shot and collected hundreds of specimens (leaving him nearly deaf) which became fodder for The Origin of Species. The book tells the story of how Covington came into Darwin’s service -— his upbringing in Bedford, England; his departure at thirteen for the sea, in the company of evangelical sailor John Phipps; his flowering into manhood and (distressing to Phipps) wholehearted enjoyment of the sensual pleasures available to young sailors. It tells of the unusual relationship between Covington and his distant master, and the rift between them when Covington was unceremoniously dismissed when Darwin had finished his research. The story is framed by the elder Covington, who has retired to Australia in poor health and in moral crisis over Darwin’s forthcoming book —- its blasphemous thesis and his part in providing the proof. The arc of Mr. Darwin's Shooter paints a poignant and unforgettable picture of one man forging, then struggling to maintain, his faith in an era when it is constantly under attack — from science, from the daily brutality of life during colonial expansion, and from one's own cold, inexorable logic.

Roger McDonald

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