Books with author mary grant bruce

Norah is now 14. She, Jim and Wally do their best to put up with Cecil, the 19-year-old cousin from town who has come to stay at Billabong for the Christmas holidays and tries to show off to his Bush relatives with his disdainful city airs. But the results are invariably disastrous and highly amusing until he does the unforgiveable and takes Norah’s much-loved pony for a wild ride...

Norah, Jim and Wally have to grow up, but that is always the order of things. Growing up brings its own attractions and its own romances. One of the best books in the Billabong series, Billabong's Daughter delves a lot more into the emotions of Jim, Norah and Wally than previous books, using Wally's experience in Queensland and his bonding with Norah as examples.

It is the height of the gold rush when Dick and his sister Betty make their first visit to stay at Billabong and encounter rather more excitement than they’d bargained for. News of the gold strike has brought hopeful prospectors into the Billabong hills, among them an unscrupulous ex-prize fighter named McGill and Lee Wing, the Chinese gardener turned cook, whose ingenious plan to outwit McGill makes him the hero of the day. At the end of the adventure, everyone agreed with Dick - it certainly was something they’d never forget!

THE trench wound a sinuous way through the sodden Flanders mud. Underfoot were boards; and then sandbags; and then more boards, added as the mud rose up and swallowed all that was put down upon it. Some of the last-added boards had almost disappeared, ground out of sight by the trampling feet of hundreds of men: a new battalion had relieved, three nights before, the men who had held that part of the line for a week, and when a relief arrives, a trench becomes uncomfortably filled, and the ground underfoot is churned into deep glue. It was more than time to put down another floor; to which the only objection was that no more flooring material was available, and had there been, no one had time to fetch it. It was the second trench. Beyond it was another, occupied by British soldiers: beyond that again, a mass of tangled barbed-wire, and then the strip of No-Man’s Land dividing the two armies—a strip ploughed up by shells and scarred with craters formed by the bursting of high explosives. Here and there lay rifles, and spiked German helmets, and khaki caps; but no living thing was visible save the cheeky Flemish sparrows that hopped about the quiet space, chirping and twittering as if trying to convince themselves and everybody else that War was hundreds of miles away. The sparrows carried out this pleasant deception every morning, abandoning the attempt as soon as the first German gun began what the British soldiers, disagreeably interrupted in frying bacon, termed “the breakfast hate.” Then they retreated precipitately to the sparrow equivalent to a dug-out, to meditate in justifiable annoyance on the curious ways of men. In the second trench the men were weary and heavy-eyed, and even bacon had scant attractions for them. It was their first experience of trench-life complicated by shell-fire, and since their arrival the enemy had been “hating” with a vigour that seemed to argue on his part a peculiar sourness of temper. Now, after two days of incessant artillery din and three nights of the strenuous toil that falls upon the trenches with darkness, the new men bore evidence of exhaustion. Casualties had been few, considering the violent nature of the bombardment; but to those who had never before seen Death come suddenly, an even slighter loss would have been horrifying. The ceaseless nerve-shattering roar of the big guns pounded in their brains long after darkness had put an end to the bombardment; their brief snatches of sleep were haunted by the white faces of the comrades with whom they would laugh and fight and work no more. They were stiff and sore with crouching under the parapets and in the narrow dug-outs; dazed with noise, sullen with the anger of men who have been forced to endure without making any effort to hit back. But their faces had hardened under the test. A few were shrinking, “jumpy,” useless: but the majority had stiffened into men. When the time for hitting back came, they would be ready. Dawn on the fourth morning found them weary enough, but, on the whole, in better condition than they had been two days earlier. They were getting used to it; and even to artillery bombardment “custom hath made a property of easiness.” The first sense of imminent personal danger had faded with each hour that found most of them still alive. Discipline and routine, making each officer and man merely part of one great machine, steadied them into familiar ways, even in that unfamiliar setting.

Enjoyed by generations of young Australians since its publication in 1910, A Little Bush Maid is the ultimate, idyllic tale of an adventurous girl growing up in the Australian bush. Billabong, a large cattle and sheep property in the Australian countryside, is home to twelve-year-old Norah Linton, her widowed father and her older brother, Jim. Norah's prim and proper aunts, who live in the city, consider she is in danger of "growing up wild" - riding all over Billabong on her beloved pony, Bobs, helping with mustering, and joining in all the holiday fun when Jim and his friends come home from boarding school. A fishing trip results in unexpected drama when they discover a mysterious stranger camped in the bush. Who is this stranger and why is he there? Norah's resourcefulness is tested to the full!

A VERY tall boy came up the gravel path of Beresford House. It was “breaking up” day, and an unwonted air of festivity and smartness was evident, even to the eye of a stranger. The garden looked as though no leaf had ever been out of place, no sacrilegious footmark ever imprinted on the soft mould of its beds, where masses of flowers still bade defiance to the heat of an Australian December. The paths were newly raked; the freshly mown lawns were carpets of emerald, soft underfoot and smooth as bowling greens. Aloft, on the square grey tower, fluttered the school flag—a blue banner, with a device laboriously woven by the fingers of the sewing class, and indirectly responsible for many impositions, since it was beyond the power of the sewing class to work with its several heads so close together as the task demanded, and yet refrain from talking. It was a banner of great magnificence, and the school was justly proud of it. Only the sewing class regarded it with what might be termed a mingled eye. It was early afternoon—too early for guests to be seriously thinking of arriving. A couple of motors were drawn up in the shade of a big Moreton Bay fig; but they belonged to parents who lived at a distance, and had come earlier in the day, to talk solemnly to the head mistress, and then to whisk emancipated daughters away to an hotel for lunch—which necessitated a speedy whisking back, so that the daughters might be apparelled in white, in readiness for the afternoon’s ceremonials. In the garden, little groups of girls might be seen already clad in festive raiment and walking with a seemliness that in itself showed that this day was different from all other days. They turned interested glances upon the newcomer, who, resenting the gaze deeply, stalked on up the path, his straw hat tilted over his brown face. Girls in general had not come much in his way. It was distinctly embarrassing to run the gauntlet of so many frankly curious eyes.