AustLit

'A novel about life, death, sex and strudel. Benjamin Grey comes out of a failed marriage vowing that life will never surprise him again. So in keeping with this vow of caution he chooses an occupation which is safe and predictable. He becomes a paramedic. On a routine day, Ben and his partner are called to a suburban house where an infant is in cardiac arrest after falling into the family pool. Their attempts to revive the child fail. Shattered and exhausted, Ben escapes to the Blue Mountains for a weekend away with close friends to rest and recuperate. At dinner with his friends on Saturday night, he meets Kay, who will come to need more from Ben in the future than he or she could ever imagine. On Sunday afternoon, before leaving to go back to the city, Ben notices an ad for a house for sale in a real estate agent's window. Strangely drawn to it, he decides to go have a look, encountering the owner, old Mrs Coombs, and her house - a very special house, as it turns out, and - just like that - Ben Gray becomes the owner of a house in the mountains. Ben has a gift that Mrs Coombs recognizes. And his impulsive decision to buy her house and seek a measure of peace and sanctity in the mountains becomes for him - and the array of misfits he will encounter along the way - a journey of love, heartache and a rediscovery of the power and beauty of the human spirit. Not to mention: A street full of lesbians. A toothless carpenter. Brian the real estate agent who likes it rough. A Canadian Indian called 'Fire Catcher' who has visions. Mrs Coombs who knows a kindred spirit when she sees one. Sex. Death. Drug abuse. And the healing power of strudel.' (Publication summary)

The sequel to Stillways, Steve’s acclaimed first memoir. Wine bars and strip clubs. Girls with flowers in their hair. Lust, and the best music the world has ever heard.

A thousand steps from the farm to the blue black highway, the adventure continues... In the sequel to his highly acclaimed first memoir Stillways Steve Bisley lands smack dab in the middle of Sydney. It’s 1966. High-waisted bell bottom pants, paisley body shirts, velvet jackets, platform shoes and a lust for everything life has to offer him. And it offers him a lot.

From cadet graphic artist to private eye, lover, fighter, dreamer, milk man, truck driver and everything in between and then some. Till the day he auditions for the acting course at The National Institute of Dramatic Art and to his dismay is accepted, along with fellow classmates, Judy Davis and Mel Gibson. Three years later, on their graduation day, Mel and Steve are cast in a film that will change their lives forever. The Iconic Australian cult film Mad Max.

In this sensory and poetic memoir, actor Steve Bisley reflects on loving, losing, wrecking and running – the bridges burned – in the decades since hitchhiking away from the small family farm on the central coast of NSW in the 1960s. He explores with confronting honesty what it is to live on the edge of uncertainty, regret, despair and depression as an actor, lover and father, a life held together at times 'by bits of frayed cotton and Perkin’s paste and hope.'

'From one of Australia’s favourite actors comes a classic memoir of an Australian childhood in the sixties. Young Steve was a larrikin, happy-go-lucky, resilient kid, coming of age in a simpler time. Growing up on a farm cut from virgin scrub at the end of a lake, a farm called Stillways, Steve daydreamed about cars and escape. His story is about him hero-worshipping his older brother with Brylcreem in his hair; going to school as a young kid with bus money knotted into a hanky and clutching his Globite schoolcase; fighting bullies at school and dreaming about girls; being amazed at the first television in town; remembering where he was when Marilyn Monroe died... But there’s a darker thread running through the story: the father who’d take out his frustrations by savagely belting his young children; a struggling mother who’d do anything to protect her kids; a young boy irrevocably marked by his father’s anger.

'Endearing, funny, honest and unflinching–this memoir will become an Australian classic. ' (Publisher's blurb)