Out of Time

A tough but true tale of an 18-year-old travelling through outback Australia in the late sixties "I was enjoying a joke told by Greg when Gazza tapped my arm and nodded with a grimace. I looked in the direction he was indicating to see Chalky standing with his back to us. In front of him was an angry-looking Knuckles, who was prodding the schoolteacher in the chest. A surge of anger shot through me. 'Who do you think you're talking to?' I said, pushing myself in between the two of them. I hit him hard with a short-left jab that landed flush on his nose. There was the briefest flicker of surprise on my adversary's face before he punched the side of my head with a hefty round-arm swing." 'Toughen up' had become the catchcry for an eighteen-year-old youth travelling rough throughout the back blocks of Southern and Western Australia, but nothing could have prepared Bruce for the testosterone-driven shearing sheds of outback Queensland in 1969. Following on from Bruce's first memoir Catch the Wind – From The Nullarbor To The Far Northwest in 68, this new memoir records his sometimes brutal, but often hilarious travel adventures. Meet feared shed fighter 'Knuckles' as he bullies his way through the shearing season with overwhelming menace and physical violence, while rouseabout car racing fiends Gaz and Bluey make the regular 50-kilometre trip to the pub a hair-raising experience. Meanwhile, the extremes of the hard work in the shearing sheds demanded a high protein diet that was as difficult to describe as it was to digest. Bruce had left his home in Melbourne in search of an adventure and respite from a broken heart: what he found was some of the wildest characters to be found in the Australian bush during the astonishing sixties. Join Bruce in this rowdy coming-of-age tale set against the dramatic backdrop of rural Queensland.