Musician and former em PRESS author Craig Horner is gathering some impressive reviews for his biography of the rise and fall of one of Australia's favourite rock and roll bands, Daddy Cool.

A review by music critic Ian McFarlane raves:
"There are many fabulous tales to be told in Australian rock’n’roll and the story of Daddy Cool must surely rate as one of the most entertaining. This is the kind of book that I had hoped to read one day... and now musician and author Craig Horne has delivered the goods.

" Horne has the musician’s sense for the minutiae of life on the road and the author’s flair for telling a good story. He also provides great insight into the music of the 1960s and 1970s which gave rise to a band such as Daddy Cool, by placing it within the political milieu of the day, a time of enormous social change and cultural revolution.

"There are many great passages throughout. When Wilson wrote the prototype ‘Eagle Rock’, coming up with the finger picking, country blues guitar lick in A that he was sure he’d stolen subliminally from somewhere, he asked anyone who would listen, “have you heard this before?”. He finally realised he’d come up with something unique when no-one could quite pinpoint the connection.
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"He took the title ‘Eagle Rock’ from a picture he’d seen in a newspaper article; it showed African Americans dancing in a Juke Joint during the 1930s and the caption said they were “Doing the eagle rock and cutting the pigeon wing”.

​Craig wrote two early novels about a young public servant who wants to become a rock star. He does, and the consequences are dire! While there's a certain amount of semi-autobiographical wish-fulfilment in the pair of novels, they're essentially black comedies. Both were published by em PRESS and you can purchase Bureaucracy Blues and its sequel Alpha Jerk by visiting the SHOP ONLINE

The People Budj Bim has been reprinted with minor changes. It is hoped a revised edition will come out next year to coincide with the Budj Bim landscape gaining World Heritage listing as Australia's first cultural landscape.

Copies of the book are also on sale via the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation in Heywood.

Last copies of The People of Budj Bim in stock were sold by em PRESS in early April 2018. Some stock is still held by the Melbourne Museum  bookshop and at Windamara in Heywood.

A decision on World Heritage listing of the Budj Bim landscape is expected next year. So far the application has cleared every hurdle.

Twenty years on from the Goldfields Track's humble beginnings, the 2nd edition of the Goldfields Track guidebook not only brings the colourful history of the region together, but also, for the first time, brings together mountain bike riders and walkers. No longer simply a walking guide, it’s now the Goldfields Track Walk or Ride Guide, providing comprehensive coverage of the longest shared use track in Victoria.
 
The 1st walking guide edition won a community history award for its in-depth coverage of cultural heritage and reading the landscape. Wiro bound, it’s proven tough enough for on-track usage.
 
“This new edition stands on its shoulders and raises the bar to new heights,” says Peter Skilbeck, Chair of Goldfields Track Inc (GTI). “It has totally revised maps and track notes, and new essays from local experts.

The publishers have deliberately fostered ‘a sense of place’ by sourcing the guide’s author, designer, essayists, cartographers and photographers from the goldfields region. Land managers from Parks Victoria to DELWP and local government have embraced the track.
 
“What makes the Goldfields Track truly unique is its cultural heritage, diverse natural beauty from mountain tops to golden plains, and its easy accessibility from Melbourne and regional towns,” comments Peter Skilbeck.

Published by Em PRESS for the GTI & the Great Dividing Trail Association Inc
Gib Wettenhall (author)
Goldfields Track: Walk or Ride Guide
210km from Mt Buninyong to Bendigo, central Victoria
172 pages, fully illustrated             35 maps
RRP $29.99         
ISBN 9780975777886 (pbk.)

Online orders: www.gdt.org.au au or www.goldfieldstrack.com.au
On sale at regional Visitor Centres (Creswick, Daylesford, Castlemaine and Bendigo) and selected bookshops and retail outlets – see the websites

In January,  the Prime Minister and Premier of Victoria came together on the banks of Lake Condah to announce that the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape was being officially nominated for recognition by UNESCO as a World Heritage site.

"It is the first area in Australia exclusively listed for its Aboriginal culture and heritage," said PM Malcolm Turnbull. "It is absolutely an appropriate recognition of its significance and its values." 

A 2nd edition of the authorised version of the Goldfields Track guidebook is planned for publishing by em PRESS at the end of 2017. The 1st edition was reprinted with minor changes   last year.

The new edition will more fully incorporate mountain bikers as well as  walkers. It will be jointly published by the Goldfields Track Inc and the Great Dividing Trail Association. It will include some re-routing of the track and five circuit walks and rides associated with five regional towns.

We're now in a sodden true spring, which in the Wombat Forest six season calendar is appropriately symbolised by a frog. Flat pack versions of the calendar are available for sale. The calendar, A2 in size, usually reverses out of the dustjacket of the Daylesford Nature Diary.  

The Sustainability Coordinator at the Ballarat Grammar Junior School, Blake Curran, has just bought a bunch of  the wall poster calendars to laminate.

"I am trying to align a variety of elements of local Indigenous culture with our sustainability curriculum and your seasonal calendar works beautifully," he said. "It also makes a lot of sense to the younger students given the current weather situation!" 

​Contact em PRESS here – for sale at $5 each plus p&h; no postage for orders of 5 and over.

In August, I travelled to Bogor in Java for the launch of a farm forestry book documenting the results of ten years of research by a team of 30 Australian and Indonesian researchers led by Digby Race. Digby commissioned me to co-edit and publish the book Adding Value to the Farmers' Trees, which was sponsored by the Australian Centre for Agricultural Research (ACIAR)  based in Jakarta.

Adaptation of Rowan Reid's Australian Master TreeGrower program to suit Indonesian small holder farmers played a central part in the research project. The project's aims were to increase the silvicultural skills of smallholders (i.e. with farms less than 4ha in size) and to better connect them to local markets for their timber. Not that dissimilar from farm forestry extension projects which once existed in Australia.

Half of ACIAR's $9.4 million annual budget is focused on forestry research in Asia, investigating the sustainable use of forests – not just for reafforestation, but as ACIAR's Forestry Research Program Manager, Tony Bartlett, said at the launch, "so as it makes a difference to people's lives." 

After the launch, Digby, Rowan and I flew to Sulawesi with a  group of Indonesian forestry researchers  and visited a boat building village at Bulukumba, which has long lasting ties and resonance with the Yolngu people of NE Arnhem Land. Traditional Indonesian phinisi boats have been constructed at Bulukumba to the same template for almost 1,000 years. For much of that time, Macassan sailors from Sulawesi sailed east on the monsoon winds to moor off beaches in NE Arnhem Land to collect trepang or sea cucumber and peaceably trade with the Yolngu people. Their annual visits were banned by the new Commonwealth Government at Federation at the turn of the 20th century.

Beautiful, handcrafted wooden boats, the phinisi boats are now highly valued worldwide for the tourist trade. And they still ply the cargo routes between the Archipelago's thousands of islands. The ACIAR forestry research project is linking smallholder farmers to the boatbuilders of Bulukumba, so that the right sort of trees continue to be grown and can be sourced locally.  

Click on the gallery of pix below to open and see captions.
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