In Volume 1 of this two volume set, outback historian and bush poet Jack Drake wrote about the white European invaders, gunfights, law officers, settlers, land-grabbers, bush rangers, outlaws, stockmen, cattlemen and buffalo hunters in both Australia and America.

In Volume 1 of this two volume set, outback historian and bush poet Jack Drake wrote about the white European invaders, gunfights, law officers, settlers, land-grabbers, bush rangers, outlaws, stockmen, cattlemen and buffalo hunters in both Australia and America.

In this volume, Drake focuses on the famous pastoral explorers, drovers and trail drivers; the poddydodgers, horse-thieves and rustlers; the wars of the land grabbers with Australian Aborigines and the American Indians; the clashes of lawless western entrepreneurs with the laws of the bit cities in the east; the colourful females who ventured our into a man¿s world and made thier names, the transport by puffing billies and famous stage coach lines and buckjumpers, roughriders and rodeos.

The Australian Outback and the American Wild West were two of the last frontiers in the territorial conquests and expansions of the 19th century. In each chapter Drake takes a theme and compares true stories and real life characters - which Wild West was wilder and more colourful?

The Outback—so called because it is literally out the back of all major cities in Australia—has been the setting of many of Australia’s exported culturally defining stories and cinematography. Cattle stations or ranches in the Outback provide ample settings for tales to be dreamed up and shared through poem, song, and story. Two Years in Australia’s Wild West explores one man’s journey into this famed landscape. In this entertaining memoir, author, D. Alexander Steel shares the often harsh, and sometimes amusing, ways life can take us to unexpected but necessary places. Travel from Adelaide to the extreme and wild western edges of the Australian continent via sometimes humorous, sometimes serious vignettes. This book examines a young man’s coming of age and discusses the myriad ways God intervenes to help us grow into the people we’re meant to become. Through tales of brotherhood, family, and friends, be reminded that we each have a role in God’s grand design; it might just take a bit of wandering to find the way.

Outback and Out West examines the ecological consequences of a settler-colonial imaginary by comparing expressions of settler colonialism in the literature of the American West and Australian Outback. Tom Lynch traces exogenous domination in both regions, which resulted in many similar means of settlement, including pastoralism, homestead acts, afforestation efforts, and bioregional efforts at “belonging.” Lynch pairs the two nations’ texts to show how an analysis at the intersection of ecocriticism and settler colonialism requires a new canon that is responsive to the social, cultural, and ecological difficulties created by settlement in the West and Outback. Outback and Out West draws out the regional Anthropocene dimensions of settler colonialism, considering such pressing environmental problems as habitat loss, groundwater depletion, and mass extinctions. Lynch studies the implications of our settlement heritage on history, art, and the environment through the cross-national comparison of spaces. He asserts that bringing an ecocritical awareness to settler-colonial theory is essential for reconciliation with dispossessed Indigenous populations as well as reparations for ecological damages as we work to decolonize engagement with and literature about these places.