Rabbiting on Nowingi - a coloring book

Heather Traeger grew up in the Mallee region of northwest Victoria in Australia. She spent the first few years between the remote 'bush' and her home in a country town, Mildura. During this time, her parents sometimes lived in a caravan up the bush for weeks at a time to earn extra money to buy a vineyard.

Eventually, when her parents, Alan and Nola Traeger, had purchased their first vineyard, her father would still go bush on weekends to trap rabbits and bring in additional cash for his young family. Heather's siblings were a younger brother, Keith, and a younger sister, Lynley. Every now and then, her father would ask her and sometimes her younger brother to go bush too, to go rabbit trapping, which meant staying overnight and getting up at 4:00 a.m. to eat breakfast to go around the traps.

This story is about recalling those sensory moments when, as a child, you see, hear, taste, feel, smell, and experience everything around you as a rich orchestral tapestry. These days in the dry, dusty bush left Heather with memories of pleasure around a loving family, wide open spaces, and the joy of life. This story is set on a special part of the Mallee, on a station called Nowingi, where Heather's maternal grandfather, Hugh Johns, worked, including taming wild horses ready for riding, and her grandmother, Winifred Foreman, cooked the biggest tastiest apple pies for the shearers and her family.