Carl Warburton's Buffaloes: Adventures In Arnhem Land

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges.

In the 1920s, Kakadu in Australia's Top End was the domain of the buffalo-shooter. These frontiersmen came to the north seeking adventures and fortune beyond the borders of white settlement in a wild, hostile land and still governed by its traditional Aboriginal owners' the Gagudju.

Originally published in 1934, Carl Warburton's Buffaloes is a memoir of the exploits of two ex-Gallipoli veterans who, unable to return to an ordinary life at home, journeyed north to procure buffalo hides from the wetlands and plains of what is now Kakadu National Park.

This laconic and engaging story of mad adventures, mateship and survival captures the high action and extreme dangers of shooting buffalo from horseback.

A classic example of early twentieth-century Australian frontier literature, Buffaloes takes us to the fringes of the Northern Territory economy and into the zone of contact between white and black Australians. It offers a valuable account of an Aboriginal society in a state of transition. It expresses the dreams and delusions of those white pioneers who sought to exploit and domesticate Australia's last frontier. (back cover)