Col Hood. Rosenberg Press.
"Let's go bush", said Big Nev, and that sparked a journey for two adventurous city kids spellbound by Banjo Paterson's poems about horses and men and the Australian outback.
Col Hood's story lingers affectionately on the men who shaped his early life - the horse traders who taught him how to pick a good horse, the blacksmiths he "struck" for while he learnt how to shoe them and, above all, the leather worker who became his teacher and mentor and set him on the road to becoming a western saddlemaker of high repute.
Col Hood was the first in Australia to build saddles for anyone who wanted a western one. The continuing thread through these yarns is his love of horses.