BONVILLE author Wilson McOrist has published his third book, ‘The Boy from Long Gully’.

It’s the true and remarkable tale of Richard Richards, a young man from the small rural town of Long Gully in central Victoria, who takes on a momentous role with explorer Ernest Shackleton in the early 1900s.

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The author takes the reader from the life of a young Richards collecting bird’s eggs in the Australian bush, to his life in the Antarctic with five Englishmen: the party leader who makes several calamitous errors of judgement, two British Navy Petty Officers, a mild-mannered padre, and a clerk from London.

We learn how these six men overcome serious mishaps, of their toil and hardships on the Great Ice Barrier, of each of their thoughts when they appear to be facing certain death, and then their heroics as they attempt to stay alive; particularly those of Richards the lone Australian.

“My writing scene in Bonville is so far removed from the people I have written about; far far removed,” Wilson told News Of The Area.

“Since I was a young boy, I have been fascinated by explorers who risked their lives traveling into remote places, and here I am writing about them with every modern-day convenience on hand, and in the luxurious sub-tropical setting of the Coffs Harbour area.

“For some inexplicable reason it has been explorers of 100 – 200 years ago that have attracted my interest.

“Men like Burke and Wills, Ludwig Leichardt and Edward Eyre in Australia, Scott, Shackleton, and Mawson in the Antarctic, Burton and Speke in Africa and Wilfred Thesiger in Arabia.”

However, considerable research was required to write something new and appealing about these explorers, which took Wilson out of Bonville and into museums and libraries around the region.

“I self-published my first book, ‘The Scruffy Martyr and the Resplendent Gentlemen’, which is a light-hearted look at a friend and me kayaking the Murray River, in the ‘footsteps’ of the explorers Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt, but my first work taken up by a publishing house was ‘Shackleton’s Heroes’.

“The book writing is not the hard part, the big hurdle comes with trying to find an agent to represent you, because respected publishing houses usually only listen to an agent.

“Being a new author makes it even harder to win over an agent, let alone a publisher.”

Wilson’s advice to budding authors, “try and try, again and again”.

By Andrea FERRARI