The Good Country: Cranbourne Shire by Niel Gunson (Secondhand Book)

SECONDHAND BOOK

Cranbourne Shire occupies almost a quarter million acres north of Western Port Bay, some thirty miles south east of Melbourne. Hitherto rural, it seems destined by developments on its northern boundary and along the Bay to participate in metropolitan and industrial expansion in the next twenty-five years.

Cranbourne Shire has already contributed to Victoria’s development by establishing primary industries in singularly difficult country. The people who did this are the heroes of this centenary history. Dr Gunson writes their story with due respect for significant detail in country life and a scholar’s perception of forces that mould men and regions down the years. His account is precise and well-proportioned. He has enlivened and illuminated it with extracts judiciously chosen from unpublished contemporary material. All in all, this is a model of how such histories should be written.

Nevertheless, Dr Gunson does not consider it definitive. He hopes its publication will encourage others to study records he did not have time to search and others, again, to preserve and make public records still untraced. As stories in his Preface indicate, valuable and surprising finds may be made.

Meanwhile, Cranbourne has a History of which it can be proud. It has, moreover, a precedent for sponsoring sound historical scholarship which it may invoke in years to come as it increasingly shares the nation’s developing material wealth.

Specifications:

Condition: Good – plastic wrapped, some dirt and scratches to cover, inscribed with former owner’s name

Publisher: F. W. Cheshire Publishing

Year: 1968

Format: Hardback with dustjacket

Pages: 308pp

ISBN: n/a

$14.00

1 in stock