Beyond the Black Stump - Nevil Shute Audiobook

Written by Nevil Shute
Read by Laurence Kennedy
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

• Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
• Release date: 01-07-13
• Publisher: Audible Studios

When Stanton Laird, American geologist, goes prospecting for the Topeka Exploration Company in the savage Australian outback, he finds something a good deal more precious than oil.

If somewhere is said to be ‘beyond the black stump’, it is in the deepest darkest wilds of the Australian outback. This is the sun-baked setting for Nevil Shute’s novel of a romance that is tested by the differences between two young people’s home lives. Stanton Laird is sent from his small town in America to work in a remote outpost in Western Australia. While out there he befriends the unconventional Regan family and falls in love with the daughter, Mollie. However, when Mollie travels to America to visit Stanton, the two realize that their differences in background make their plans for a future together difficult to envisage.

Readers comments…..“This book is dated, but fully shows the bigotry that was rampant back then, before the civil rights movement here in the States. If you can get by that, and not want to re-write the way things were, it’s a great story about two people who fall in love, about Australia in its time of just starting to be civilized and about the excitement of the oil speculator and the misery of an arid land with no water.”

“….Shute has this area of NE Oregon during the mid 1950’s wired right down to 2nd Ave and the Safeway supermarket. Having never been to Australia, the lesson in this for me is to trust the author’s descriptions of the Outback which are most likely great snapshots of that period in Western Queensland.”

”This is an inquiring look into human values from the perspective of two different English speaking sub-cultures. We get a good look at an Australian Frontier mindset as well as a Puritanical post war American outlook on issues of personal responsibility and how quickly we sometimes judge others in our day-to-day lives. Ego-centrism and ethnocentrism give a solid framework by which to consider this plot and set of characters.”