Description

Outward Bound is a familiar outdoor educational organisation to millions of people around the world. It originated on a rugged piece of Welsh coastline in 1941 with an unlikely partnership between a shipping line owner and an innovative educator who had fled Nazi Germany.

But the Australian story of Outward Bound seems even more unlikely. The combination of a Royal prompting, a challenge by an English gentleman to an Australian Changi POW survivor in a Sydney hotel, and a retired Australian Rear Admiral resulted in the birth of Outward Bound Australia in 1956.

This book scours archives and public records and combines them with personal stories from past and present OBA founders, staff and participants to follow this colourful social history of an organisation that in the past fifty years has touched more than 250,000 Australian lives.

About the Author

Helen Klaebe lives in Brisbane and is currently a Public Historian at the Queensland University of Technology, where she is undertaking doctoral studies in oral history and life-writing. This is her first book.