Album Notes

Brian Pettit grew up on a poultry farm west of Sydney, Australia. A scholarship to Wagga Wagga Teachers' College launched a career in education. His first assignment (1961) was to a fifty thousand acre sheep station in the outback where he had to build the school first before teaching in it. His experiences with the mostly Aboriginal students were the subject of his first novel, The Weilmoringle Kid.

In 1965, he and two friends sailed for Canada to 'have a look'. There, as their parents lamented, 'the boys forgot to come home'. After a year of teaching at Topley, B.C., Pettit ventured to Vancouver Island and found work setting chokers and scaling in a logging camp. He eventually moved to Nanaimo to teach and was principal of a number of elementary schools until retiring in 1997.

For his Masters degree at the University of Victoria he wrote the thesis Canadian Nationalism: With What Are We to Identify Ourselves? (1984), seen as sub-themes in his novels When The Curlew Cries (1998), Saturday's Hero (2000) and Cameron's Crossing (2006).