Hard Country, Hard Men: in the Footsteps of Gregory

Augustus Charles Gregory, Australia's greatest explorer, left a powerful narrative of his 1855-6 expedition to northern Australia - but that was never enough for Kieran Kelly, Sydney stockbroker hero-worshipped Gregory from boyhood. This book tells how Kelly turned an extraordinary dream into hard, backbreaking reality, to take men and packhorses along the same dangerous and exciting trail that Gregory blazed 144 years before.

To meet the challenge of the harsh Northern Territory landscape, much of it unvisited since Gregory's heroic exploration, Kelly retrained himself in endurance riding, mastered nineteenth-century navigation equipment, obtained exact replicas of the Grey pack saddles and worked tirelessly to inspire the individuals and officials who would make this explorer's dream come true.

Hard Country, Hard, Men tells the story of his achievement - a story of toughness, humour, courage and ingenuity, as a gritty, sometimes skeptical group of today's men of the outback battled the same unforgiving landscape that Gregory rode through and, in the process, rediscovered its grandeur.

This gripping account of their adventure is skillfully interwoven with the vivid narrative of Gregory's expedition, day by day we follow both parties, separated by time but united by place. In this book, written in the very footsteps of Gregory, heroism and passion combine to create a classic of the Australian outback.

Kieran Kelly was born in 1952 in Wellington in western New South Wales and grew up on a sheep and cattle property. He has a degree in economics and is a chartered accountant and a member of the Securities Institute of Australia, spending most of his career in stockbroking. He has traveled widely, hitchhiking around the world in the 1970's. He is married with three children and lives in Sydney but has maintained a passion for the Australian bush. He began riding at the age of seven and is now an experienced Endurance Riding competitor. He is a keen swimmer and skier and he is especially interested in Australian history and literature and in the breeding and training of Arabian horses. He is a member of the Australian Geographic Society, the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Foundation for the Promotion of Navigation.