Books like High, Wide and Handsome — picked by fans

Jump for Joy was written by my favourite showjumper when I was growing up in London, Pat Smythe. One of the first two women to compete in the Olympics, Pat was a household name in England in the 1950s and 1960s and was awarded an OBE. Jump for Joy is one of several books she authored, and tells stories about some of her most famous horses, including Prince Hal and Tosca. I was thrilled to own this book in my teenage years. 

Teenagers will love The Outback Riders series by Leanne Owens. An Australian author, Leanne is an English/History teacher who also writes freelance for horse magazines. Her experience with horses growing up in the outback is combined with stories about teenagers in her very popular Outback Riders series. She has also written the Dimity Horse Mysteries for readers who like mysteries, crime, romance, and horses. 

Free Rein is the autobiography of two-time Australian Olympic champion, Gill Rolton, who famously remounted at the Atlanta Olympics with a broken collarbone to finish the team event. Gillian was a late starter to eventing at the age of twenty-one but went on to compete for thirty years. This autobiography reveals the injuries to herself and her horses which meant missing the LA and Seoul Olympics, the success she achieved with her wonderful horse, Peppermint Grove and her inclusion in the Australia Sporting Hall of Fame.

Dick Francis combines the wonderful world of horses with crime mystery. Dick Francis wrote many books and later combined with his son, Felix, who continued the dynasty after his father’s death. This is exciting and factual fiction. In Come to Grief, Sid Halley, an ex-champion jockey turned investigator, uncovers an obnoxious crime committed by a close friend, whom he had held in high regard. 

A kid’s novel about wild horses (known as brumbies in Australia) might seem a strange choice for recommendations about Australian animals, but Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby was the first book I read that really captured the Australian landscape and its plants and animals. It was also one of the few books that told a story from the perspective of a wild animal without anthropomorphizing.

It’s a wonderfully evocative homage to the Australian alps and the creatures that live there and it reflects a lot of the dilemmas facing Australian conservation today. Wild horses, or brumbies, do a huge amount of environmental damage in Australia and yet a lot of people love them. In some ways, this book is symbolic of the difficult decisions we have to make to rectify some of the damage we have done, and continue to do, to our wildlife.

This amazing book is about Oblivia a girl who survives gang rape living in a swamp with thousands of black swans who is promised to Warren Finch the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia an indigenous man.

In her journey we meet many out there characters told in mythic style in a future Australia devastated by climate change. This book is a potent mix of speculative fiction and magic realism featuring indigenous communities and characters. I admire it for the breadth of its vision and the intimacy of Oblivia and of course the swans.

Written by the revered god-daddy of Australian songcraft, Shots is a beat peek behind the curtain of what it is to be a young band on the road and on the rise, all lens flare vignettes; dry, brutal, and perfect, as cool as The Don himself. His uncanny way with words lets us bear witness to the country hall dances, Kings Cross streets, and back of the van like a poetic spy cam.

What is it in the life of a person that deserves the light of language? This question is far and away the most important question a writer faces. Very few writers seem to be acutely aware of this fact. Very few writers are rigorous enough to remain with the challenge of the question; once a writer begins to write, that is, there is so much that asks for it to be forgotten.

I marvel at Murnane’s capacity to resist such forgetfulness.

Ken Inglis, an Australian who began as a scholar of religion in Victorian Britain, discovered in the 1980s that he wanted to understand the way war (which had been neglected by Australians more interested in organised labour or ‘the Bush’) had shaped the nation in the twentieth century. He found that war memorials, a pervasive feature of the Australian landscape, provided a key to that question. Based on a huge national survey and the labour of willing volunteers, in 1998 he, at last, published his magisterial Sacred Places, a study of ‘war memorials in the Australian landscape’. Rightly revered by those fortunate to have known him as a wise and humane scholar, Ken’s book – successively revised as anniversaries and war memorials proliferated – appeared in three prize-winning editions. Ken died in 2017, mourned as a key pioneer in understanding how war has permeated Australia’s modern history.

Every Sunday night for nearly a decade between the mid-70s and early 80s, most young Australians could be found in one place – in front of the TV, watching Countdown. Countdown was the most powerful force in the local pop/rock scene, the maker and breaker of hits. Published in 1993 in the afterglow of the show’s long run, Glad All Over, by former Age journalist Peter Wilmoth, is an appropriately loving tribute, which includes acknowledging the many (like me!) who loved to hate the show but still always watched it! As mostly oral history, it’s a sparkling story, and if the Countdown phenomenon still begs harder analysis – because as much as it was a great booster for Australian music, it actually blocked just as much – that’s the nature of a new historiography: the field has to get opened up first, and then is subject to increasingly… show more.