Life on the Daly River

by Nancy Polishuk and Douglas Lockwood

Rigby, 1967, [First Edition thus], black and white photographic plates, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, minor rubbing to edge and corners, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows a little edge and shelf wear bumping to top of spine (see photographs)

“The narrator of this remarkable true story is Nancy Polishuk, a young Australian girl who had left a sheltered city existence to join her adventurous American husband in trying to build a home and raise a family in the remote tropical wilds of northern Australia.
Nancy, her husband John, and their two-year-old daughter left civilisation behind and set off in a 1929 Dodge truck with nothing but a few possessions and a deed to a square mile of outback land on Australia’s Daly River.  The river was turbulent, tidal, and beautiful, and the country around it rich with vegetation and animal life.  There were friendly, though far distant, neighbours, and many aborigines, who introduced the Polishuk family to “bush tucker”.  But there was also danger from many sources: the crocodiles and sharks which infested the river; the poisonous snakes which overran its banks; and, as it turned out, the treacherous river itself.  Nancy and John had a second child, and the Polishuk family was becoming accustomed to life on the Daly when the river broke into the worst flood in its history.  How they escaped seemingly inevitable destruction is the high point of an authentic, exciting, and truly unusual story of a brave family.”