Me And Gus. By Frank S Anthony, Francis Jackson.

Publisher: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1956.

Acceptable hardback with jacket. Piece split at bottom of spine, name inside, boards are a little rubbed; bumped and faded at edges minor tanning. Jacket is torn and piece missing, rubbed; marked and chipped.

About the author: Frank Sheldon Anthony Born at Matawhero, near Gisborne in 1891, Frank was the son of Frank Sheldon Senior and Anna Jane (Annie) Anthony. The family moved to south Taranaki a few years later where Frank Snr ran the Manutahi Hotel and In 1902, he bought a farm at Whakamara. The young Anthony went to school at Kakaramea and Whakamara. After a couple of years at Hawera High School, from 1909 he spent a decade at sea and travelled around the world. On the outbreak of World War I he joined the Royal Navy where he was seriously injured in an accident which affected his lungs. He returned to New Zealand in 1918 and, in 1919, bought a 76 acre (30 hectare) rehab farm on Denbigh Road near Midhirst. The farm proved to be only partially cleared, cold, swampy and difficult to develop and was immortalised as Mark Henrick's Mossy Road farm. It was during these farming years, that he wrote ten classic Me and Gus stories, which delightfully captured the somewhat squalid and arduous conditions that many Taranaki cow-cockies of the time had to endure. It was generally accepted locally that a neighbour of Anthony's on the Denbigh Road, Ralph Charles ('Charlie') Carroll, was the inspiration for the "Gus" of his stories, and "Me" was either Mark Henrick (of the 1938 stories) or Mark Hendrick (of the 1950s stories).

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