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).
You can find his best selling book “The Weilmoringle Kid” anywhere audiobooks are sold like iTunes, Amazon, CD baby etc.
His second book titled, “When a Curlew Cries” is based on a true story of Brian and his son returning to Australia together to track down his long lost Aboriginal students he taught in the outback 20 something years earlier.
It’s a great and very funny read.
For more info on all his books and more, please email Brian directly. HERE.
CHECK OUT THE AUDIOBOOK
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B.J. Pettit
280 Calder Road
Nanaimo, British Columbia
Canada V9R 6J1
Phone/Fax: 1-250-754-4876