CQU Press will launch in April its new book, Australian Cowboys, Roughriders and Rodeos, at Beef 2003, the international beef-industry conference located in Rockhampton. Visitors will find it in the Central Queensland University CQU tent.

CQU Press (Outback Books) will also feature fifty or so books it has published on the cattle stations of northern Australia. "We're consolidating our position as the only publishing house in Australia dedicated 100% to outback and bush books and specialising in the history and heritage of our cast cattle stations from Far North Queensland to the Kimberley," said CQU Press Publisher David Myers.

----- Book Review.

Australian Cowboys, Roughriders and Rodeos.

by Jenny Hicks.

Central Queensland University Press.

RRP:$25.95 .

This is a very comprehensive and entertaining history of Australia rodeo and yet author Jenny Hicks wears her scholarship lightly. She makes the point that even though our Australian 'cowboys' have been winning the major roughriding competitions in the USA and Canada for over forty years, Australian rodeo has been largely ignored in the Australian media both by urban sports journalists and by sporting historians. Hence the need for this book. Australian rodeo is a 200 million dollar a year industry and it is a sad reflection on the huge gap between metropolitan Australia and country Australia that metropolitan TV viewers and newspaper readers know virtually nothing about it. But in country towns, from Tumbarumba to Townsville and Tamworth to Rockhampton, rodeo shows with buck-jumping, bull-riding, steer-wrestling, barrel-racing, roping and bull-fighting clowns are big events with big prize-money.

Long ago I was taught by my outback authors that in Australia you don't use the word 'cowboy' with its memories of Tom Mix, Hi Ho Silver and the Lone Ranger. We say 'stockman' or 'ringer'. But the World Rodeo shows with their pageantry, their fancy costumes and their big top circus atmosphere owe much to Buffalo Bill Cody and American notions of show-biz, so in rodeo we can and do talk of cowboys. In any case the Americans borrowed rodeo from the Mexicans and the Spanish who in turn inherited stylish horsemanship from the Moors who invaded Spain in the sixth century. So it all goes back a long way.

But this book is about Australian rodeo. And Jenny Hicks clearly loves it. She evokes the carnival atmosphere, the costumes, the country music, the loudspeakers and the thundering hooves brilliantly. But she does far more than that. She goes right back to 1809 when Irish emancipists from County Wicklow duffed 3,000 head of the government's wild cattle on the western bank of the Nepean. By the 1880s there were public roughriding competitions and bullock-throwing exhibitions in Victoria and Tom Lloyd Snr was proclaimed 'Australian Champion' in Wangaratta. The legendary Lance Skuthorpe Snr was roughriding in Kirk's Bazaar in Melbourne by 1901. Herb Wharton and Hugh Sawrey and Gordon Beetham all recall the rogue buckjumpers and the virile competitiveness of the musters in the Queensland bush in the 1950s.

Australian Cowboys Roughriders and Rodeos traces Australian rodeo's development from its roots in the cattle business, through travelling circus, buckjump & Wild West shows, to the international rodeo arenas of today. Thoroughly researched and incorporating colourful slabs of oral history, Australian Cowboys, Roughriders and Rodeos captures the romantic and adventurous lifestyle and the excitement and drama inside the ring, as well as being packed with information and explanations from 'behind the chutes'. It is a treasure trove of folklore, anecdotes and facts distilled from interviews with 130 old timers. Readers will meet a colourful cast of characters, from Barry Gravener to Lindsay Black; from 'Miss Kemp', the lady rider with the shady past to non-law abiding showman John Daly of the many aliases; from the Gills, Australian rodeo's most abiding dynasty, to world champion bull-rider Troy Dunn and saddle bronc Calgary Stampede winner Glen O'Neill. But I especially enjoyed meeting the bulls: Dr Jeckyl, Cream Puff, Crime Time, Undertaker, Bambi and the unique Chainsaw.

This fascinating book is illustrated with over 100 photographs of the champions along the way. Indeed it is a veritable hall of fame of past and present champions in a sport that has borrowed heavily from American western and popular culture, yet remains uniquely Australian.

Professor David Myers -'Old Silvertail', Publisher, Central Queensland University Press CQU-Gold Coast; 60 Marine Parade, Southport, Q 4215 Phone: 07-5552-4960; d.myers@cqu.edu.au; www.outbackbooks.com