The El Questro Story
Australian History Indigenous Studies Cultural History Aviation History Adventure Travel Memoir & Autobiography Pioneer & Frontier Studies Conservation & Eco-Tourism
The El Questro Story by Meg Hornabrook is a first-edition 2012 paperback that delivers an intimate, on-the-ground chronicle of one of Australia’s last great frontier adventures. Centered on the spectacular Kimberley region of North-Western Australia, the book traces how a working cattle station morphs into an internationally known wilderness tourism icon while still retaining its pioneer soul. Hornabrook—who lived the transformation—writes with the authority of an insider, giving readers everything from heart-stopping aviation tales and mustering yarns to quiet moments among 30,000-year-old rock-art galleries. The result is a vivid cultural history that balances Aboriginal perspectives, European settler grit and modern eco-tourism hopes in one addictive narrative.
Collectors prize this volume because it is the only authorised biography of El Questro and remains the sole printed record packed with never-before-published photographs, station diaries and oral histories gathered before many of the old-timers passed away. First-edition copies in very-good condition—like the clean, tight copy described here—are already scarce; Book Pod’s small regional print run sold out quickly and was never re-issued in the same format. For anyone fascinated by Kimberley pioneers, Wyndham’s aviation past, or the larger-than-life characters who opened the Gibb River Road, owning the debut printing is the equivalent of holding a piece of the landscape itself.
Young-adult and adult readers alike will appreciate Hornabrook’s cinematic prose: you can almost taste the red dust, hear the creek crackling at dusk and feel the floatplane lift off the Pentecost River. Beyond adventure, the book quietly explores how tourism can fund conservation, how Aboriginal custodianship can coexist with pastoral leases, and how one family’s dream became a blueprint for sustainable travel in remote Australia. Whether you are planning a Kimberley holiday, researching Australian rock-art sites, or hunting a culturally significant memoir that reads like fiction, The El Questro Story offers an inspiring, authoritative and highly collectable window into the heart of Australia’s last frontier.
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