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Outback

by Lawrie Kavanagh, Hugh Sawrey

This volume records thirty years of travel through the Australian outback by writer Kavanagah and illustrator Hugh Sawrey. It documents the people and landscapes encountered throughout their journeys.

Accession 9780702225598 ISBN 9780702225598 Publisher University of Queensland Press

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position_updated_at: 2026-05-11 11:05
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binding_type: Hard Back
dimensions: none captured
spine_text: JACK DAVIS NO SUGAR Kavanagh OUTBACK Sawrey UQP A

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Topics and Themes

1. **The Australian Outback as Landscape & Place**
The book is a record of journeys through the Australian outback, capturing the physical character of remote and vast inland Australia — its geography, distances, and isolation. The landscape itself is a central presence, shaping every story and encounter.

Connect to books about: Australian geography, desert landscapes, wilderness travel, regional Australia.

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2. **Friendship, Travel & Shared Adventure**
The book grows out of a 30-year friendship between writer Lawrie Kavanagh and artist Hugh Sawrey, documented through their many journeys together. It is as much about what it means to share a life on the road with a close companion as it is about the places they visit.

Connect to books about: travel memoir, friendship narratives, road journeys, collaborative creative partnerships.

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3. **Bush Characters & Oral Tradition**
The book is populated with authentic characters from outback life — shearers, drovers, black trackers, gold miners, bushrangers, and bush teachers — whose stories carry the flavour of a living oral tradition full of honesty and irreverent humour.

Connect to books about: Australian folklore, bush yarn tradition, vernacular storytelling, colonial character types.

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4. **Australian National Identity & Mythology**
The outback has long functioned as the symbolic heartland of Australian identity. The book engages with this mythology — the idea that the bush, the stockman, and the battler define something essential about what it means to be Australian.

Connect to books about: Australian cultural identity, the bush legend, nationalism and landscape, settler mythology.

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5. **Art as Cultural Documentation**
Hugh Sawrey was a painter and draughtsman whose prolific visual output was dedicated to preserving the memory of outback people and places in danger of being lost. His illustrations throughout the book function as visual records of a vanishing way of life.

Connect to books about: documentary art, Australian visual arts history, art and memory, folk portraiture.

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6. **Pioneer & Pastoral History**
The people and places encountered in the book belong to a world shaped by the pastoral industry — droving, mustering, station life — and the broader history of European settlement and pioneering in remote Australia.

Connect to books about: Australian pastoral history, pioneering life, the cattle and wool industries, frontier history.

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7. **Indigenous Australia & the Outback**
Sawrey's journeys brought him into contact with Indigenous Australians living in the regions he travelled, and the book touches on their presence in outback life, including the role of black trackers — figures who existed at a complex intersection of colonial power and Indigenous knowledge.

Connect to books about: Aboriginal history, Indigenous land connection, colonial encounter, reconciliation narratives.

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8. **Humour, Irreverence & the Australian Voice**
The book is described as full of honesty and humour, written in the tradition of the larrikin Australian voice — comic, self-deprecating, and grounded in the everyday absurdity of outback life. Kavanagh's columns-turned-stories carry a distinctly vernacular wit.

Connect to books about: Australian humour writing, newspaper column collections, bush comedy, satirical memoir.

Outback

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Topics and Themes