ISBN 978-1-923156-75-3
PAPERBACK
Shepory Crossing: Jim’s Story
When the Shepherd family and the Gregory family pool their resources and talents the results are impressive and have repercussions far beyond the confines of the Kirconnell Valley.
Jim’s Story traces the growth of an Australian community from the 1890s through the global influences of two world wars and an economic depression. The story parallels the development of the Australian nation as it grew from a colonial outpost that rode on the sheep’s back toward the cosmopolitan society we know today.
Shepory Crossing’s characters experience floods, bushfires, economic growth and depression, the cannon-fodder controversies of WW1, the bitter divisiveness of conscription, the fall of Singapore and the horrors of Changi and the Burma railway. The story examines the effects of tariff protectionism in the 50s and the opening up of the outback by the motor car and the aeroplane.
Written in the first person by Jim Gregory, Shepory Crossing contains believable characters, historically accurate events and deeply moving romances.
Historical figures such as Breaker Morant and Henry Lawson stroll through its pages and touch on real episodes from my own family history.
ISBN 978-1-923214-47-7
PAPERBACK
Shepory Crossing: Christopher’s Story
This book continues the Shepory Crossing trilogy, commenced in Jim’s Story. It centres on the life of Christopher Gregory, son of Jim and Elise. It follows him as he joins the Australian war effort against the Japanese onslaught in 1941 and his subsequent incarceration as a prisoner of war in Changi and on the Burma Railway. Post-war he tries to settle down back home at Shepory Crossing. He marries Anne from Tarenvale and they eventually have a daughter, Jennifer.
The young family moves to the city and is soon swept up in the social, youth and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Christopher’s world is turned upside down when Jennifer sinks into a sexual morass of her own making. But more traumas are to come. He discovers the older daughter he’d unknowingly fathered during the panics of pre-invasion Singapore then faces the challenge of keeping his two families satisfied without compromising his marriage to Anne or his ongoing support to Jennifer. Anne’s growing feminism and the sexual revolution raging around them add more layers of confusion to Christopher’s life and add to the pressure he already feels from so many directions.
Like so many men of his generation Christopher is claimed by a sudden cardiac arrest, laying the foundation for Jennifer’s own story which forms the third book of the trilogy.
ISBN 978-1-923214-43-9
PAPERBACK
Shepory Crossing: Jennifer’s Story
Jennifer Gregory is the daughter of Christopher and Anne.
Inspired by her Auntie Gloria but brilliantly talented in her own
right, Jennifer’s story picks up where Book Two of the Shepory
Crossing trilogy left off. Jennifer and her family move to the
northern beaches of Sydney where her over-active hormones
run riot. Through her high school years her sole intellectual
stimulus comes from the school’s brilliant gardener Simon
Taylor. Despite the difference in their ages, Jennifer and Simon
spark off each other and manage to keep each other sane
A decade or so later they meet again, and resume their
friendship. In the process the two of them
re-write the political scene of the entire country