‘Of course you’ll take a gun,’ they said to me when I left Melbourne, ‘even if it’s only one of those little mother-of-pearl things the vamps used to carry in their evening-bags. Apart from wild blacks there will be crocodiles, and Malays running amok, and men that haven’t seen a white woman in thirty years. There might be three hundred miles of desolation on a truck with a drunken Afghan, and you’ll be alone in the night-time, in those pearling-towns of sand and sin, with a half-caste woman keeping the shanty—’ ‘Yes,’ I reflected, ‘I had better take a gun.’ So begins Ernestine Hill's great journey in and around the heart of Australia, the tale of a decade of travelling across and around the continent in the 1930s, accompanied by her young son Robert. This "strange otherwhereish creature with big beautiful eyes" as Katherine Susannah Prichard has noted, collected the tales of the making of the Territory as a centrepiece, allowing the world at large a chance to travel in the mind through the complexity, duress, and larrikin nature of an Australia-in-the-making. An Australian travel classic.
