An English boy of eighteen, sent out because England has no use for him, arrives in Western Australia in the 1880s to work cattle, and discovers a country that will let a man be anything he is strong enough to be. Mollie Skinner, an Australian nurse, wrote the draft from a settler's life she knew; Lawrence rewrote it entirely and insisted her name stay on the title page. The result is neither writer's and better than either would have managed. Newly typeset for this edition. Fifty-five plates, from George Catlin's grizzly bears and Pawnee robes to Edvard Munch's portraits, carry the wild new world the boy rides into.
