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Terry Walker's Around the Houses CD-Rom. Link
to Terry Walker's Round the Houses home page Welcome to the CD-ROM Edition of "Around the Houses" About the Book / Why CD-Rom? / What's New? / The Critics Raved..! / About the Author About the Book AROUND THE HOUSES was published in 1979 in a small edition of only 1500 copies, which explains why, more than twenty years later, it is very hard to find a copy. It was an encyclopedia-format book, divided into three main sections: INTRODUCTION: A compact narrative story of road racing in WA. CIRCUITS AND EVENTS: An alphabetical encyclopedia of all racing circuits and all major events from 1902 to 1979. DRIVERS: An alphabetical encyclopedia of competitors who won major events, giving an outline of their racing careers and a summary of their achievements. This CD-ROM contains the original text, with a few minor corrections and amendments, organised in much the same way as the original book, but with the added advantage of many more photos - nearly 800 pictures all up, including many in colour. Finding Your Way Around the CD-ROM This CD-ROM is in effect a web site on a disc, and is navigated in the usual way, using blue underlined text links, such as those underneath the picture on the top of this page on within the body of the text, thumbnail pictures to link to full-sized images, and other links such as the Key Topic links in the gold-coloured table in the left margin. To navigate around the CD-ROM, chose the key topic by clicking on the buttons in the left margin. HOME is this page. INTRODUCTION takes you to the narrative story. (Don't skip this bit: there are lots of photos as well as words.) CIRCUITS and EVENTS takes you to the alphabetical index to all the circuits and major events 1902-1979. Clicking on a topic takes you to an article and a set of thumbnails. Clicking on thumbnails enlarges the illustrations. DRIVERS takes you to the alphabetical index to the competitors, which works the same way as the CIRCUITS page. If you have never read Around the Houses in book form, I recommend you start with the Introduction, then move onto Circuits and finish with Drivers. The Story Behind the Book I wrote the book as a result of my very short racing career ar Wanneroo Park, consisting of entering three consecutive Six Hour races in a 1500cc Ford Anglia 105E. The results were 1970 DNF (101 laps, blown piston), 1971 DNS (engine problems), and 1972 DNS (car totalled in practice). At which point I was fairly broke, so I thought it would be cheaper to write about racing than do it. I had a copy of Nick Georgano's very impressive Encyclopedia of Motor Sport (Ebury Press, 1971, now a collector's item) and it occurred to me that it would be a very convenient format for a history of Western Australian motor sport. Much easier than a continuous narrative. And since I was, and still am, very photography-minded, it was a format which provided for lots of photographs. I worked on it intermittently for several years as a hobby, during which time I moved to Canberra, naturally slowing the project down. Somehow, and I'm not absolutely sure how this happened, Max Stahl of Racing Car News got wind of the project through Graham Howard, and before I knew what was happening I had a publisher and a deadline. Max wanted to publish it as a one-shot in magazine format. The deal was sealed on a handshake, the terms being the then standard author's contract. It was decided to end the story with the 1979 Australian Grand Prix at Wanneroo Park, which meant that I had to have everything done, pictures gathered and all in the hands of Max Stahl as soon as possible after the AGP. The editing and layout, and writing of the photo captions, was handled by Racing Car News, of course, as the publishers, and the need to squeeze 100 articles, 400 photographs, and 20 odd maps into 144 pages meant that one or two of the driver articles were dropped out at editorial stage. Naturally I was thrilled to bits when the book appeared, the thrill marred when I discovered several minor errors which had escaped me over all the years I'd been working on it, and which were now permanently preserved in print. However, it was a pretty good effort and it got surprisingly good reviews in the motor sport press. I rushed off and had some of my free copies hard-bound, which shows I must have known something: the glue used in the book's binding is famously bad, and most well-used copies have since fallen to pieces. Acknowledgements The best feature of the book version of Around the Houses was the photography. Around 400 pictures appeared in the book, many of them published for the first time. They came from a variety of sources. BP Australia, who had long supported motor racing in WA, supplied me with a large bundle of obsolete glossy prints which they'd commissioned from local photographers such as the late W Nelson. The WASCC loaned an assortment of prints from the Caversham and early Wanneroo Park eras. The publishers who own the rights to the long extinct Australian Motor Sports (AMS) magazine gave me the right to reproduce pictures from that magazine. The main sources, though, were the drivers themselves. Some of them had quite remarkable albums, specially Jack Nelson. I dislike borrowing treasured mementoes, so my technique was to photograph their photographs with a 35 mm camera fitted with a macro lens. I used a fine grain black and white negative film, and weighted the pictures down on the ground with coins at the corners. No tripod, just hand held. So I had my own new negatives ready to hand. I still have them. Among the many older drivers who shared their memories with me were Noel Aldous, Neil Baird, Arthur Collett, Ossie Cranston, Clem Dwyer, Jack Nelson, Dave Sullivan, Alan Tomlinson, and Colin Uphill. I interviewed face to face, or by phone, or by letter, as many of the drivers as I could, and copied their photographs industriously. I used some old Caversham and early Wanneroo Park photos of my own, and then went to Wanneroo Park one day in the late 1970s and ambled around the pits snapping informal portrait shots of as many drivers as I could who were to appear in the book. For this CD-ROM version I have been lucky enough to have more photographs. I am very grateful to Ken Devine, Peter Longley, Bob Biltoft, Milton McCutcheon, the late Dave van Dal, and Don Hall, among others, who have given me access to photos in their collections or to photos they took themselves. Both Peter Longley and Milton McCutcheon took colour slides of the 1962 AGP, as well as regular Caversham meetings. Dave van Dal, who was a fine photographer, took many Kodachrome slides of motor racing in the mid-1950s, including of the 1957 Australian Grand Prix at Caversham (but only of practice; he drove in the GP). Finally, motor racing photographer Mick Oliver has provided colour photographs of the 1979 AGP. Terry
Walker, Perth, 2005 |
