Brisbane’s liveliest columnist are in your Indie!

Ann Brunswick From My Corner

Mungo MacCallum Politics

Tim Milfull Film

David Bray Wine

Ivor Thurston My Shout

Don Gordon-Brown Life

Horace Cope Star Signs

Book set to make history

Step aside Steele Rudd. Decades before you penned On Our Selection in the dying days of the Nineteenth Century, a fellow Queenslander wrote a novel of life in those hard times – and we’ll soon get a chance to see if it’s any good.

And thanks to some ancestral sleuthing work by a descendent many generations removed, that work – Tom Hurstbourne or a Squatter's Life written by John Clavering Wood (1837-1910) will finally be launched later this month – a hundred years after the author’s death.
But for the dogged detective work of Newstead residents, Gloria Grant and Gerard Benjamin (authors of Reflections on New Farm), this precious Queensland heirloom might have been lost to oblivion.
Where did they find the manuscript? Well, that’s a story all of its own but here's a hint: J.C. Wood was Gerard's great-great-grandfather. Gerald uncovered the unpublished Queensland manuscript dating from 1865, and Gloria took up the painstaking task of unravelling and recording the faded manuscript.
Retired High Court Justice and author, Ian Callinan will deliver his own verdict in the matter of Tom Hurstbourne when he launches the book of Hurstbourne’s exploits at the Mercy Heritage Centre, All Hallows' School on February 28.
The event is being hosted by the Brisbane History Group. After the launch, high tea will be served, followed by tours of the Heritage Centre and a seminar exploring the novel’s literary and historical virtues. For details about the launch, please phone 3351 6371 or email: bhg@brisbanehistory.asn.au. All are welcome but an RSVP is essential.
So, is it a gripping drama of an early settler’s life. A man’s brave battle with the elements? A bodice ripper even? Gerard and Gloria think you should read it and make up your own mind.
The softback edition is available locally at Mary Ryan's Bookstore and New Farm Editions, both at Merthyr Village, New Farm. The hardback edition is available online from www.boolarongpress.com.au.

Wrestling life to its fullest

Review by Toby Oakes

Anyone with even a remote interest in public affairs would have seen, heard, or read about Hughie Williams at some time over the past 30 years on our TV screens, radios, and in newspapers.

Williams has been a long-serving official of the Transport Workers’ Union, and has for more than a decade held the position of its Queensland branch secretary. As an outside observer, he has always come across in the media as a tough union boss, ready to stand up for his members.
What most of us would not know is how tough Williams’ own life has been. Williams begins his autobiography by detailing his dirt poor upbringing, the death of his father, and how his mother one day just walked out on her children. Some of the stories he tells are heartbreaking.
Intriguingly he relates his deep feelings of inferiority as a boy and young man, and the role his chosen sport of wrestling helped overcome them. The book is full of anecdotes of his involvement in the Police Citizen Youth Clubs and the good and bad cops that went with it.
There are also plenty of tales of the fights he endured as a TWU organiser. Some of the most intense battles were with officials within his own union. Then there were the fights with the Bjelke-Petersen government and its anti-union laws and attitude.
Williams also covers the woeful state of the Labor Party in Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s, along with his own role as a member of the reform group that eventually put the party in a good enough shape for Wayne Goss to be elected premier in 1989.
This is not self-serving book. It is a frank account of a colourful and intriguing life. The book has been published by Williams himself and is available from the TWU by ringing 3890 3066.