Jerome Murif: Adelaide to Darwin in 1897

[bohwaz]

Hi! It's been a while, well I was busy working and stuff

Before I did my trip from Adelaide to Alice Springs following the Mawson trail and the Oodnadatta Track, I went to the State Library of South Australia to take photos of the book of Jerome Murif recounting his journey from Adelaide to Darwin in 1897. This was a good read, I liked the book, and thought it might be a good idea to republish it, as it is impossible to find it (except if you go at one of the few state libraries that have a copy of the original), and that maybe even other people might like to read it.

I thought it would be quick to just have the computer automagically transcribe the scanned pages to text and do an ebook from that. Oh boy, I was wrong. This was a long and tedious process of re-reading and re-typing and re-checking etc.

But I finally did it, and the book is now republished, including a map I drew of his journey, and a few photos from the same era of the places he visited. The book is available in a nice paperback edition and as an ebook as well.

You can get it from here: https://haere.net/books/murif/ or from Amazon

Due to the amount of work required I'm asking a few dollars (1.49 exactly) for the ebook edition, and I make approximately the same amount of money if you get it from Amazon. If you don't want to pay, fair enough, that's why I'm trying desperately to give it for free to Australian libraries so that anyone can just download it from their local library, but so far I've not been lucky (seems like most libraries use Overdrive, and that requires to have published at least 20 books). If anyone has an idea on how to do that I'll be happy to help.

I hope you'll find this read as interesting and motivating as I did and that his story will become slightly less forgotten and obscure

[tmac100]

Thank you. Got the pdf version and will print and read as time permits..

[bohwaz]

Thank you

The PDF format is A5 (so that you can print 2 pages per A4 page), if you need another format tell me and I'll produce it

[tmac100]

Thank you. Got the pdf version and will print and read as time permits..

Printed and started to read. At page 70 atm. Finish tomorrow or thursday. An easy and relaxed read. Not a LOT of detail, but I sure feel his angst when hardship hits him. Nice o know that even now Aussies are "out there" offering help (to me in 2006 and 205) as they did to Murif in 1897. He needed it a LOT more than I did... I expect there will be similar offers this July-August when we "do" Cape York.

Rural/outback Australia is quite the incredible country. Kinda like the help offered in N. Canada and Iceland.... (from what I have experienced - in Canada - and read about Iceland).

[Leaf T]

Nice work! I'll buy that!

I usually use kindle app on my android phone and like the way it works. Do I buy the Kindle or Android version?

[GJ_Coop]

Great work.

I can appreciated how much time and effort has been put into it. Thanks for all that.

I'll eventually write a review for my website and Amazon, well, once I've finished the book. Oh, there is a little thing of moving house this week as well.

Looks very professional at first glance.

Have you investigated Francis Birtles Lonely Lands: Through the Heart of Australia?

Maybe you need a new project . . .

[WarrenH]

If only we could all be as tough as Frank Birtles was when he toured, to all the points of the compass ... it would be a gift.



Warren.

[bohwaz]

@LeafT: not sure about the Kindle app, I just have a Kindle reader (the device). But I would advise to try with the MOBI version first. If it doesn't work you can download the EPUB version as well (the $1.49 give you access to all three versions actually, the selector is only there to show you which versions are available, but you won't have to pay again to download another version). The FBReader app on Android should be able to read either EPUB or MOBI.

@GJ: Thanks For Francis Birtles book, it is already available as it has been scanned by the library (available here: https://archive.org/details/lonelylandsthrou00birtiala ). It wasn't the case for Murif when I started my work, but they actually did it a couple of months ago too, but I think that my edition is better in that it's not just a scan but a real edition, compared to a simple scan of the original. The Birtles book is also available on Amazon, but like most things like that it's just automatic machines publishing the scanned book on paper, and a very bad OCR of that for e-readers Almost no work goes in there from the publisher, it's just a machine doing the work.

Amazon doesn't allow to have multiple copies of the same public domain work on the Kindle store, so even if I did produce a new better edition, my chances of it getting published on Amazon are slim. So unless I have a lots of free time I'm not sure I would go on, but I might change my mind. And it's not like that work would make me any decent money either: so far I did about 30$ of revenue from the sales of the Murif book (thanks everyone!), I'll be very happy if I do about a hundred bucks after a year, it will mean that at least my work had been useful to some people, which was the main point of that work

I'm now in NZ and hoping to get together a nice book about hikes around here, and that's not the last of my projects, so I'm already quite busy too

[Jezz Machado]

Just finished the book. Thank you for the effort you put into this and good luck with the next project!

[bohwaz]

Thanks

[Leaf T]

Thanks Bohwaz.

[Mulga Bill]

awesome thanks

[bohwaz]

As promised the book is now available to read for free in the NLA: http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-423325211/view

If you want to get a nice paperback or e-book you can still get it from my website: https://haere.net/books/murif/
The price of the paperback should drop to about ~$9 in the next few days, depending on how long Amazon takes to update the price.

I want to thank everyone who paid for the book so far (about 20 people, I'm not gonna get rich this time ), and for the reviews.

To everyone who is interested, someone did a very thorough investigative work on Jerome Murif and found his trace… in the US, it's all on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_J._Murif

Very interesting.

[Scintilla]

I rode the Oodnadatta Track in 2010, from Geelong, heading for Alice Springs. Sadly took a dumb fall in sand and dislocated my shoulder about 100 kms north of Oodnadatta (near Mt Sarah Station). Local aid and medical care came in mighty handy for me

Thanks VERY much to the folks at Mt Sarah, the Oodnadatta mail-lady, and the male nurse at the medical clinic there.