Physical description

White hardcover book covered in a white dust jacket. The dust jacket has a red box, with the heading printed in red text inside, at the top half of the page. The lower half of the page shows a black and white photo of a man and woman with six children standing in front of them and another child sitting on the man's shoulders, they are all standing in a field of tall crops. There are two horizontal red lines running along the top and bottom of the cover.

Publication type

non-fiction

Inscriptions & markings

'B2' [Handwritten in pencil in the top corner of the first page]
'A. Healey / Tarcoola / Shepparton.' [?] [Handwritten in blue ink on the inside cover]
'RETURNED NURSES CLUB OF VICTORIA / CLUB SUB BRANCH R.S.L.' [Stamped in purple ink on multiple pages throughout the book]

Summary

This ia a genuine people's history of Australia. When Australians were asked to name our unsung heroes and heroines, these are some of the people we chose. Their lives cover the last 200 years of Australia's history, a history that they shaped in the living of it. Their names do not appear in conventional histories - they did not direct what are usually regarded as 'great events' and are not history's traditional 'great men'. They are 'the people'. They are convicts and inner-city welfare workers, war heroes and mothers of twelve, children and old-age pensioners. They are bush nurses and fire-fighters, suffragettes and explorers, circus performers and poets. Some perform single acts of great bravery; other reveal different kinds of couragem enduring and surviving through years of hardship. Some of their stories are amusing, many are deeply moving. There are the stories of women, children, Aborigines, immigrants from many oother countries, 'ordinary' people. These are our stories. (Inside cover)