Skirmish Hill exists in remote and off-limits Aboriginal land in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia. The book generally encapsulates the time from the Second Fleet, the Death Fleet, from England to Australia, up to the sailing in 1914 of the First Convoy that carried 34 troopships of the original Anzacs to Egypt and Gallipoli, while being escorted by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The narrative's central figure, William Whitfield Mills, made his mark in colonial Australia as an outback surveyor, explorer and gold prospector and was thus selected for his participating role. He crossed paths with men and women of interest, Europeans and Indigenous alike. Together they engendered the Australian way of life and achievement since the arrival of the white man in this country. Mills is the thread that links the pages of history and allows the events to flow on the tide of revelation. The book smacks strongly of the colonial days as they were, for better and sometimes for worse. It doesn't attempt to judge but to tell it as it was, for there were endless hardships to overcome.
In his explorer days, Mills blazed a tree out in the Great Victoria Desert. The author and a fellow student of Australian history set out to find that tree. It is on sacred Aboriginal land, forbidden country to enter for the white man today. That episode is described as is the return journey, on which they are granted rare permission to pass through the usually off-limits land of the Pitjantjatjara Aborigine tribe in the north-west of South Australia. Having by now learned that Mills died and was buried in an unmarked grave on an island in the midst of a salt lake in the vast Western Australian goldfields, the author and his wife undertake a wonderful journey of contemporary exploration to hopefully find his final resting place.
Stanford, Bill: - About the AuthorBill Stanford was born in Orange, New South Wales and educated in Moss Vale and Sydney. He started work with a stock and station agency in Mudgee, before being a jackaroo at Wingadee, Coonamble, and Ebor, east of Armidale, NSW, and then a driller in a mining camp in the Kimberley of Western Australia. The latter exposure to men from a great variety of lands encouraged him to buy a one-way ticket to Europe on a Russian ship. For two years he travelled, with stops in Italy, working on a Chianti vineyard; Germany, where he was a civilian assistant to a four-star General at an American Army base and England as a tour guide before accepting the position of a club manager. Along the way he was unfortunately stoned by a crowd of Muslims at the main mosque in Mashad, Persia, stopped by the police in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for speeding in a horse-drawn cart, chased on foot by four Afghans, two of whom were wielding their knives over an economic mis-understanding in Kabul, mugged twice in Brazil and detained for five days by the KGB in Russia.Next, he met and married Janice, settled down and they raised their family at Dubbo, NSW. Then, over 14 consecutive years he and Janice explored at ground level but first-hand the lands, cultures and histories of peoples around the globe, in total more than one hundred and twenty countries. They undertook camping trips from Alaska to Mexico, Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul to Cairo, overland journeys from St Petersburg to Shanghai, five visits to the African continent, to the Americas and Asia, to North Korea, Moldova, Cuba, Syria, Bhutan and others along with a horse-riding expedition across western Mongolia. The highlight has most likely been aboard a Dutch Tall Ship, a three-masted, square-rigged barquentine constructed in 1911, working as voyage crew on five adventures including from Argentina to Antarctica and onto South Africa and later sailing 5,163 nautical miles non-stop from northern Brazil to go around Cape Horn from east to west, the first such rounding in a barquentine since 1939, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first rounding of the Horn.Having seen something of the history of other lands Bill has now traversed those of his own country and wishes to pass on as best he can, some of the happenings and characteristics of our colonial era forebears that made Australians who they are today, wherever they originally came from.
