Two outstanding CQU Press books will be launched at this year’s Multicultural Fair.

The first book to be launched comes from author Marion Houldsworth, titled From the Gulf to God Knows Where: Living in Australia’s Outback Volume 1.

Lively and entertaining, the book tells the life stories of 14 men and women who have lived and worked in some of the harshest country in Australia’s north.

From the Gulf to God Knows Where is an immensely readable addition to the social history of the outback.

Houldsworth’s enthusiasm for recording the lives of cattlemen, drovers, station-workers and their wives and families offers readers a chance to share in their experiences: the shock of waking face-to-face with a rock-python, of near drowning in a water-tank, of the claustrophobia of cleaning wells a hundred years-old, of running brumbies down the Sylvester.

Volume Two, due for publication in July 2007, will recount the lives of other outback identities, including Toby Rogers, Ross Leake, Tom Masso, Ab Teece, Kate Darcy Teece, Clargie Saltmire, Brian Beveridge and many more.

Noted oral historian Marion Houldsworth, who spent much of her own life in some of the remotest places in the outback, has previous best-sellers including Barefoot through the Bindies: Growing Up in North Queensland in the Early 1900s and Red Dust Rising: The Life Story of Ray Fryer of Urapunga; both published by CQU Press.

Also being launched at the Fair is CQU’s own Professor David Myer’s title Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes: Swashbuckling Tales from the Greek Myths.

This is a very funny book about the Classical Greek Outback 3000 ago. Where we Australians have bunyips, rainbow serpents and Min Min lights, the Greeks had nymphs, flying horses, gods in winged chariots, monsters with six heads and sphinxes.

The average Australian thinks that the classical Greek myths are only for white-bearded scholars and academic eggheads. This need not be so. The myths are the greatest fantasy stories ever told and here they are here presented with comedy and suspense and down-to-earth language by short story writer David Myers.

Professor Myers' Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes is a splendid addition to the library of retellings and reinterpretations of classical mythology.

Professor Myers is the author of the short story collections, Storms in a Japanese Teacup and Cornucopia County, and of the fictional memoir, The Bohemian Bourgeois. He is a former dean of CQU’s Faculty of Arts and is currently publisher and founding director of CQU Press.

Both books being launched will be on sale at CQU Multicultural Fair and Open Day this Sunday.