Mick and the Manager: Two Goondiwindi Cattlemen by Meg Vivers

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with external stickers, protective plastic covering and stamps on inside page.

This is the story of two very different men - an Aboriginal stockman, Mick Lynch, and a station manager, Tom Atkinson whose lives touched during the first half of the 20th century on a cattle station in southern Queensland. It is also Meg Vivers' story, or at least partly as Tom Atkinson was her father.

The book can be read too as a historical account of life in the Queensland bush during a period that followed the early conflict between the indigenous people and the new settlers, well before the advent of television, computers and mobile phones.

The author has found it necessary in some chapters to call on her memory and imagination to recreate certain details about the lives of Mick and Tom and their interaction with each other. Such chapters appear in the present tense. All stories are structured around events that actually happened.

A dual biography interspersed with autobiography and some history, both Aboriginal and European. However, there is a fourth protagonist that stands behind this book and determines the lives of all those who pass across its pages. That protagonist is the Queensland bush. (Preface)