THE BREATH OF ULURU
The Breath of Uluru is an exciting and fascinating read from start to finish. Capturing the dreamtime of an ancient aboriginal tribe, this sweeping saga goes from the spirits of the past to the present time of 2007.   Destiny draws the two main characters Charlie and Kate to Uluru where they meet two nurses wanting to build a medical centre hundreds of kilometres from Uluru. As Charlie and Kate fall in love he finds out that his grandmother was a stolen generation child who had a unique skill with herbal medicines. When Kate’s wheelchair-bound daughter arrives, she falls in love with a young aboriginal man who later discovers a cure for cancer.   All their lives become enmeshed with the people and the region along with danger, death and an alarming spiritual connection to the past.  The author has truly captured the harsh landscape and powerful spirit of Uluru and the ancient tribes with a creative and moving tale. The various settings and movements from one to the other maintain the pace of the story development and the author keeps up the intrigue that takes the reader through the book. This is a work of considerable scope that will appeal to a wide variety of readers..	In Store Price: $AU27.95  Online Price:   $AU26.95   ISBN: 978-1-921731-75-4 Format: Paperback Number of pages: 270 Genre: Fiction  Buy as a pdf or epub Ebook version - $AUD9.00.   Cover: Zeus Publications
Author: David Thirgood Publisher: Zeus Publications Date Published: 2011 Language: English

Author Profile 

David Thirgood has been creating stories for his children and now his grandchildren for over thirty years and has been encouraged to write with comments from his eager audience like, ‘Dad, you have to write a book’, and more recently, ‘Poppie, you have to write a book’.

David has a degree in Management and this has proven valuable throughout his working career.

During an overseas posting, he put his skills to work and wrote and directed a set of satirical children’s plays.

After retirement, David and his wife, Lynne, worked for some months in the Central Desert Region. He immediately fell in love with the Red Centre and this wonderful area inspired the idea for his first adult fiction, The Breath of Uluru.

There is no cure for old age is there?” he smiled at his loving wife who was also feeling the difficulties of being in her ninth decade. She returned his smile and handed him his cup of tea. He stared out of the window to the bright sunlit sand dunes dotted with his favourite of all plants, the spinifex. Beyond the dunes was the township, now prosperous partly because of a single species of medicinal plant found only here and because his people made it happen. Even he was unsuccessful in cultivating the plant in other parts of Australia and he also knew that hundreds of others had also tried elsewhere in the world. ‘Perhaps it has its own spirit,’ he mused thinking of his ancestors.

On days like today when all was quiet he could hear the gentle hum of the desalination plant, less than a kilometre from his study. What a masterstroke that was. The initiative and toil of his people had brought about its planning and construction.

‘Why?’ The doubters kept asking, then ‘How?’ He thought about the ingenuity of his people. When they developed Australia’s first geothermal power plant their lives were transformed forever. How quickly it all changed after that.

Students flock to witness and study the social transformation. Tourists visit the plantation, so rare and valuable to medicine and the world, a plantation like no other, inspired by his people. ‘Where is it?’ tourists ask even though they’re standing in the heart of it. Only three species of indigenous plant with an average of five sub species each are planted here in our 2,000-square kilometre plantation. Unlike with monoculture plantations, we removed the buffel grass and other weeds and replaced them with over a million trees and shrubs selected for their healing qualities and planted them amongst the native vegetation of the central desert.

The plantation nursery is also a learning institution, an outlying campus of the Alice Springs University. Nowhere else in the world is a campus dedicated exclusively to the study of Australian Native Plant species. His people are leaders in the field with the university producing graduates in a range of Agricultural Science and Horticultural studies in native vegetation. They have moved on in his lifetime and he can see the forward motion accelerating into the future. The division that once set them apart from the rest of Australia has all but disappeared. Their culture is strong and is an integral part of all Australian culture, so much richer now.

His brows wrinkle as he thinks of his childhood, the poverty, dependence on others and despair. A few good people with vision, strength and understanding set in motion a revolution fuelled by education and empowerment. He thinks of his wife, his uncle, his parents, his mother and father-in-law and too many relations and friends to count.

A gentle breeze ruffles the curtains and he looks out beyond the dunes to the south east and thinks about his ancestors again and how it all began.

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