Outback Penguin: Richard Lane's Barwell Diaries edited by Elizabeth Lane

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Ex library copy with no external stickers. Partial date due slip on inside page is now covered with blank ex libris bookplate sticker. Minor wear to book edges and corners. Dust jacket is in fair condition with tears to top edge. Dust jacket is now enclosed in protective covering. Body text and bidning are still very good.

Richard Lane was one of three brothers who founded Penguin Books in 1935. But like all great stories, his life didn't start there.

After sailing to Adelaide in 1922, Richard began work as a boy migrant – a farm apprentice living in rural South Australia as part of the Barwell Boys' Scheme. In Australia, he deepened his appreciation for literature and understood how important it was to make good writing widely accessible.

Richard's diaries are the honest and moving words of a teenager, so very far away from home. They capture his life vividly: his love, the characters he met, the land he worked, the families he depended on, and his coming-of-age in a new land.

They are a remarkable social record and one of the best first-hand accounts of the child migrant experience; the diaries also capture the ideas and the entrepreneurship that led to the founding of the twentieth century's most famous publishing house.

With a foreword by eminent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, Richard Lane's diaries are an important document for the history of rural Australia and global publishing.