Peter Macinnis turned to writing after his promising career as a chiaroscuro player was tragically
cut short by a caravaggio crash during the Trompe L'Oeil endurance race. He recently did remarkably
well in the early rounds of the celebrity underwater cooking program, Moister Chef, but he was
disqualified for using dried fruits and desiccated coconut.
He has a pet slug named Gladys, living in a jar on his desk, and he is an expert possum and echidna handler and ant lion wrangler. He wrote both the score and the libretto for the acclaimed opera Manon Troppo ('Manon Goes Mad'). His off-season hobby is composing fake CVs.
He blogs at Old Writer on the Block, where these books are discussed and samples appear, and he is mildly active on social media, using either his own name or the handle McManly. Some of his books are listed below, and the full list of his books may be purchased through his bookshop page.
He has recently reclaimed and revised many of his best titles, having persuaded or coerced lazy publishers to allow the rights to his out-of-print works to revert to him. All of the books on the next few pages are available there, and Polymoth also supplies books with a standard trade discount.
The USB stick (or CD) is available for $50 (including GST) from his bookshop page
Written for adults, but suitable for teens, a challenging look at what it meant, and what it cost,
to go exploring in Australia. Drawing on the records left the explorers themselves, this is far more
than "dead white men": the explorers included women, teenage boys and girls and many Indigenous guides,
along with friendly Indigenous Australians who had, of course, already discovered everything, and
even if they had no maps on paper, they still had maps.
Written for ages 10+, this was commissioned by the National Library of Australia, and intended to
be based on the title above. It concentrated on the how and why of exploring, while also looking
at some of the lesser-known explorers. Readers learn how the explorers operated, how they got
their food and water, how they drew maps, how they coped with disasters and problems of many sorts.
It won the 2010 Children's Book Council of Australia Eve Pownall Award for Information Books.
Another National Library of Australia title, and joint winner of the W.A. Premier's Award for
Children's Literature in 2012, this reflects the author's most popular pastime, poking around
in the bush, among ant lions and other insects, spiders, reptiles, frogs, birds and mammals.
As a science graduate with majors in botany and zoology, this is the sort of book he wanted as
a child. Like ABE (above), recommended for 10+ and also for grandparents.
How Crooked Mick's scratch team of station hands beat the MCC; how Mick rode four bulls at once;
his dog's mathematical skills; the Speewah girls' snake circus; the world's only Möbius dog; how
Mick sank German submarines and downed the Red Baron; how Flash Jack drove four hundred 44-gallon
drums from Speewah to the Big Smoke, and more. Then there are the inventions and discoveries of
Henry Cruciform, Australia's greatest scientist who accidentally blew up Professor Moriarty while
working with Sherlock Holmes to perfect Cruciform's new explosive, nitrogum. He also invented radio,
X-rays, relativity, the transistor and a fiendishly devastating form of psychological warfare.
Classic Australian tall tales for adults.
This is the story for some of the curious minds who came to Australia, or in a few cases
were born here, people who cared about the natural history of the place. Some were artists,
some scientists, some collectors, some explorers, and some just enjoyed natural history. The
author planned this to showcase the collections of the National Library of Australia, and that
was a coffee table book, now selling at a premium in arty second-hand shops. This is the
Director's Cut, and written mainly for adults.
Black Dog Books (now Walker) commissioned this, and because I had, at 17, been on
the lower part of the Track, I jumped at it. With a bit of time as an Officer of Cadets,
I explain the military mind and language, and he evokes the atmosphere that militia soldiers
of his (then) age experienced. Written for teens, this places the Kokoda Track in its context.
This was an Eve Pownall Honour Book, 2008 Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards.
A science teacher in 1970, I threw my lab open each morning for boys who wanted to master microscopy.
Together, we discovered many handy wrinkles. Half a century later, I did a pro bono guide to how to
use clip-on microscopes in the classroom, and having done all the hard work. I decided to make it a
book, just as covid made publishers despair, and parents to wail in anguish at the lack of resources
for home learning. This is the book I wanted, when I was seven, and grandparents love it!
Any zoologist needs to know what the animals eat, any botanist needs to know about the rocks that
the soil comes from, so every biologist needs to know where the soil comes from, so we all need
earth science, and that means climate as well. An avid rock botherer since my youth, I decided that
adults and teenagers need a better grounding (no pun intended). Richly illustrated with rocks from six
continents, this book offers the reader of any age the basic stuff.
In 2009, we reached the sesquicentenary of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and the air was thick
with claims that the book "changed the world", but 1859 was a year of amazing progress, and this
book, published by Pier 9, outlined what else happened that year, in chemistry, physics, medicine,
meteorology, mathematics, biology and technology. Written for adults, the book is suitable for bright
high-schoolers, or people planning to go on Mastermind with "the year 1859" as their specialty. Mainly
for adults.
These were more than 2000 bushrangers who never became famous. For the first 50 years of settlement,
there were significant numbers of convicts. Some of them escaped into the surrounding bush, but having
no idea how to survive, they preyed upon settlers and the other convicts. One got a pardon for being
good at escaping, another stole a ship's bell on the orders of the governor, and some of them were
violent thugs: this provides a good sample of the people and their methods.
This began as a look at crazy inventions, but over the years that I was researching it, in between
writing other books, I realised that many weird inventions must have seemed like a good idea at the
time. Here, you will meet also the shark-proof suit; the shoe gun; the combined cigarette lighter
and perfume dispenser and much more. Also, a combined grocer's package, grater, slicer and mouse
and fly trap; a steamship based on the rolling pin, and an egg dropped by parachute.
These are the other stories about finding gold. The first real gold find was in 1824; the first working
gold mine was in South Australia in 1843; a shepherd, Hugh M'Gregor regularly sold gold in Sydney in
the 1840s; the first gold rush was in Victoria in 1849, but the authorities choked it off; and Hargraves
never discovered gold. What Hargraves did was to provoke a gold rush that could not be stopped, by
declaring that there was gold over wide area, stretching from the site of the 1824 find to where
M'Gregor was collecting gold.
This book helps you to understand where orthodox medical practitioners were coming from when they applied
leeches and dosed people with millipedes, spiders, dog droppings and worse, far worse. Tapeworm traps,
lowered down the gullet, artificial limbs and the efficient uses of mummies and hanged men's thigh bones
are there as well as boiled puppies and electric shock. Learn about a half-plucked duck placed on the belly,
a hot onion on the crotch, or a fried egg on the bite of a mad dog.
This is social history of an entertaining sort. Some early Australian villainy was low grade, like the
practical women who wore trousers, and the people who went swimming: a few of the swimmers wore decorous
clothing, but the rest skinny-dipped. We need to mention the Sabbath breakers, the convicts and debtors
who "ran", and Lola Montez, described as "a very simple-mannered, well-behaved, cigar-loving young person...".
This is a volume I produced for my grandkids, because I like to read poetry to children. One of them
told me all grandparents should do the same, so here's what you need. This is the third edition of a
canonical collection of English verse that young people of all ages can benefit from encountering. It
is for grandparents to buy, and the selections are mainly intended for reading aloud: adult to child;
child to child; child to adult. The poems are followed by brief notes on the poets, just in case.
This began as a website that pulled in 4 million hits over 18 years. It is a practical introduction to
the art of curiosity across Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics, or STEAM to the
cognoscenti. The book aims to nurture curiosity, wisdom and joy in learning. There are no po-faced lists
of "facts" to be learned. prior knowledge is required of readers, but each and every one of the 300+
activities and explorations described here has been used by the author many times before. The image on
the cover is a granddaughter operating a turbine. Good for kids 11+ and grandparents.
The key enabling technology, the device that made things possible, the invention that let grass dominate
our environment was the lawn mower. Without the mower, the emerging professional middle class might admire
the lawns of the aristocracy, but lawns remained out of reach to people who could not command the efforts
f a veritable army of menial servants, armed with scythes and directing grazing animals. Modern sports
would not have been possible without the lawn mower. Good for adults.
This is a potential choke hazard for adults, due to the sly literary references that are hidden there.
Bright children above 12 will never be the same again after reading it, and they will be going Aha! for
years. The stipple style was learned as a biologist, and the monsters emerged from being a bureaucrat
who sat through interminable meetings. I found that if I sat between two droning bores and doodled, they
became distracted by the weird creatures that emerged from my dotting pen. They would fall silent, leaving
the rest of us to get on with formulating policies. You see, I could walk and talk at the same time...
My thoughts and footnotes about North Head, at the entrance to Sydney Harbour. Less than 10 km from the
central business district of a city of 5 million people, this island of wilderness has animals and plants
that reflect what the area was before my mob invaded it in 1788. You can read about the geology of the area,
history and Indigenous past, and life forms that live here: bacteria that make manganese stains, lichens,
slime moulds, fungi, mosses, liverworts, ferns and flowering plants including orchids and some carnivorous
plants, plus the spiders I gave met on the headland, the insects ditto (including the bird of paradise fly!),
birds, frogs, reptiles and mammals. For all ages.
For teens and adults, this tells you how to tell how fast a whale or a salmon leaps out of the water, how
fast you will be going if you jump off the (missing) nose of the Sphinx, or how fast a botfly really flies.
It also deals with the challenges of outrunning bears, bulls, buffaloes, elephants, emus, black mambas,
crocodiles, and assorted dinosaurs, snail and slug racing, the speed of cockroaches, chameleons' tongues
and spherical horses, the speeds of assorted couriers and messengers, telegraphs, ships, trains, land
vehicles, satellites, time travel and travelling faster than light. In short, nearly everything.
This is a curated selection from the essays, articles, stories, talks and chapters I have delivered across
half a century of science activism, with some bridging passages thrown in. Here, you will find background
on most aspects of science, from stable isotopes to black holes; from what Darwin got wrong to magic numbers;
climate change to difference engines; the Antipodes to liquid crystals; scientific fraud to the other six
types of science; plate tectonics to slime moulds; unconformities of a geological kind to steam turbines;
statistics to killing cancers with germs; perfect numbers and imperfect, fraudulent scientists; who Wimshurst
was and why he mattered. This is a lively potpourri of science, a gentle flood of understanding the whys and
wherefores of science.
This is Australian social history with teeth. If you question conservatives, they may name five of the more
than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished, they know nothing of convicts, they could not locate a single battlefield
on the world map, they would be lucky to name more than four explorers worthy of note (and no, Burke and Wills don't
count), they have no understanding of the harm done to country by agriculture, and their "history" of gold is
codswallop. This is the Good Oil, from the author of the National Library of Australia's The Big Book of Australian
History (5th edition coming).