By Bob Maumill
Letters from a Hard Country
Letters From a Hard Country is a sweeping tale of conflict, murder, action, adventure, family bonds, politics, romance, love, and loss. A story of heroes and villains, good and evil, and a tragic genius who left a lasting legacy.
Award-winning broadcaster and master storyteller Bob Maumill takes readers from a beautiful part of Wales to the hard country of the eastern goldfields, Kimberley region, and arid outback of Western Australia.
About the Author
Bob Maumill
Walter Robert (Bob) Maumill was born in 1938 in Western Australia, the son of a dock worker. Bob grew up in Fremantle.
Bob left school at age fifteen years. A wanderer during his teenage years, he worked in a variety of jobs, often with livestock and thoroughbred racehorses.
In 1956 aged eighteen years, Bob was droving cattle in northern Queensland. At age twenty years he was working on a Norwegian cargo ship servicing ports in south-east Asia, China, Japan, Western Canada, the west coast of the United States of America, and the Philippines.
Returning to Australia Bob worked in an abattoir, various labouring jobs, and with thoroughbred horses before becoming the licenced trainer of a small team of racehorses. When success came, Bob Maumill was offered a guest appearance on radio to discuss horse racing; a brief stint led to a successful fourty three year media career in newspapers, television, and radio.
Bob won a prestigious national radio award in 1992 for his work in current affairs and talk-back on station 6PR Perth. He has written a feature film script, had short stories, innumerable columns, opinion pieces, and news stories published, and wrote the original story and screenplay for the film Blue Fire Lady. The film has been shown in cinemas, on Australian television, and BBC2.
After retiring from broadcasting Bob turned to writing short stories for a podcast on Curtin Radio. A CD titled ‘Through the Eyes of a Boy’, a collection of stories Bob wrote about his childhood growing up in Fremantle in the years after WW2, was marketed via Curtin Radio and deemed ‘an outstanding commercial success’.
Recovering from serious illness at age eighty three years, Bob Maumill decided to write a novel in the historical fiction genre, set in the late 1890s early 1900s, a turbulent period in Western Australian history. Two years later his novel, ‘Letters From a Hard Country’, was published.
Bob Maumill is a cancer survivor who wrote, researched, and self-published ‘Letters From a Hard Country’.