The Moonlight Stallion

This book of bush tales vividly evokes an era now gone, when people struggled in isolation to tame the land and when camaraderie and mateship were everything. Young Brian Taylor was a ringer on Queensland cattle stations some fifty-five years ago. He worked on huge properties where the big mobs used to run and many of the people he met there had a larger-than-life quality. There was Dangerous Dan Smith, a hard, self-reliant man who wrote bush poetry; Father Peter, a gentle parish priest and occasional hero; and Charlie Gibson, an aboriginal stockman utterly at home in his own country. And then there was the landscape – the plains and rivers and mountains – that shaped the lives of them all. The Moonlight Stallion is Brian Taylor's second collection of reminiscences about a vanishing way of life in outback Australia – about people, wild and working animals, and country. Readers of The Brumby Mare have been clamouring for more and new readers, whether from the bush or the city, will be moved to laughter and to tears by these heartfelt stories. A quintessential Australian bushman, Brian Taylor has spent most of his life on the land. Working as a drover, a stockman, a fencer, a shearer and a saddler, he has gathered a lifetime of stories over the years as he travelled way out past the Barcoo, along dusty plains and beside dry creek beds under the endless southern sky. Also available, together with The Brumby Mare, as the single volume A Swag Of Memories: Australian Bush Stories.