Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian
Author: GARNER BILL
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/10/2013
Imprint: NEW SOUTH WALES UNI PRESS
Price: $40.00
Publishing status: Active
Love it or loathe it, camping is part of the?Australian experience. At some stage in our?lives, most of us will head into the bush or?to the beach with a tent, a trowel and a roll-on?tube of insect repellent. For Bill Garner,?camping is an enduring passion, and his?history of camping in Australia is a thoroughly?researched and entertainingly told testament?to this fact. Garner reminds us that in the early?colonial period, settlers colonised the country?by living under canvas. It gave them a feel for?the place, a can-do attitude and a lasting taste?for equality. Born in a Tent doesn’t ignore the?fact that the continent had been a camping?place long before the arrival of the First Fleet,?but its focus is on the past two centuries and?it uses photographs, reproduced artworks and?evocative prose to tell a great story.
Bill Garner reminds us that Australia was settled as a campsite—the nation was born in a tent. But while Europeans brought tents, they did not bring camping. Australia had been a camping place for millennia, and so it continued to be. For more than a hundred years, settlers—women as well as men—colonised the country by living under canvas. It changed them into a new sort of native Australian. It gave them a feel for the place, a wry can-do attitude, and a lasting taste for equality. And it led to a sense of belonging. Born in a Tent takes the story from the campfire to the gas bottle, from a tarp slung on saplings to polymer tents and aluminium poles. It reveals how deeply our camping holidays connect us to the land, to the past, and to one another.
ISBN: 9781742233345