AustLit

'On a fateful day in Hills End, a timber-milling town in the mountains of Victoria, seven children and their teacher set off to explore caves in the nearby mountains said to contain ancient Aboriginal rock art. While they are deep inside the mountain caves a storm of tremendous violence all but sweeps the town away and threatens to leave them stranded on the mountain.

'Tackling flooded creeks and washed out paths and fallen trees, the children make their way back to Hills End injured and exhausted, only to face a new battle to survive in the denuded town. ' (Publication summary)

'It's hot, dry and sweaty on Ash Road, where Graham, Harry and Wallace are getting their first taste of independence, camping, just the three of them. When they accidentally light a bushfire no one would have guessed how far it would go. All along Ash Road fathers go off to fight the fires and mothers help in the first aid centres. The children of Prescott are left alone, presumed safe, until it's the fire itself that reaches them. These children are forced to face a major crisis with only each other and the two old men left in their care.

'The best selling Ash Road is an action-packed adventure story, so evocative of rural Australia you can taste the Eucalyptus.' (Publication summary : Text Classics)

'No one had talked about fuel; what was the use of talking, anyway? But they all knew that engines which run on fuel have to run out of fuel sometime, and that the Egret just couldn’t keep on going for ever. They seemed to have been sitting in this plane, imprisoned, for days, waiting to die. Gerald just flew on and on as though he wanted to fly away to another world, almost as though he didn’t want to go down, almost as though he didn’t know how to go down.

When the Egret’s pilot dies suddenly mid-flight six teenagers, the only passengers on board, face a terrifying situation. Gerald has had some flying lessons, but he has never flown alone, and he has never landed a plane. Lost and afraid, they fly on as the fuel gauge drops and night closes in. Will they find a clear landing place? Could they land in the sea? If they do somehow land safely how will they find their way back to civilisation?'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Text Publishing edition).

An accident on a foggy Australian country road brings together the lives of five children and five adults.

The Kirkus Review in 1969 offered the following synopsis:

Four children alone in an isolated lakeside cabin on a cold, foggy night, the oldest, Max, an edgy fifteen, the youngest, David, infantile at nine; the sound of a crash, of repeated thuds from the hairpin road on which their parents should be returning . . . the situation is so portentous, its demands so exacting and conflicting, subsequent occurrences so compelling that one wishes Mr. Southall had foregone a proclivity for simultaneous plot strands and intersecting paths, past and present. Along with the Shaw children waiting tensely in the cabin, there's Alison McPhee and her father approaching warily in his truck, their relationship as explosive as the cyanide it carries. The impact when the Shaw car overtakes and overturns the McPhee truck is more than a matter of strong parents cut down tragically, of a weak father cut away, perhaps fortunately; more, too, than the lightning tenderness between Alison and Max. For it seems–though there's little reason to anticipate it, less to accept it–that Alison is also the abandoned daughter of a television personality–a selfish, shallow type–who has a cabin near-by, and that her father was on his way there before the accident.

Source: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ivan-southall-5/finns-folly/ (Sighted: 28/5/2014)