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Why the name, Riverton Press?

Riverton was the name of the farm purchased by my grandfather in the 1920s and farmed by my father when I was growing up. That is, it is my childhood place called home. It was on the Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales between Wagga Wagga and Narrandera. There were river flats and sandhills, orchards, sheep, a few cows, horses, dogs, chooks, cats and possums, the river provided fish and yabbies. You’ll learn something about Riverton from my mother’s poems in Me in the Middle, and in the Bedrock section of sprinting on quicksand.

It was too the place where I developed a reading habit and a love for music. I used to sneak off from daily chores with a book and sit on a log under the shade of the gum trees. The kookaburras would laugh at me as I scratched mosquito bites, the neighbour’s heavy red Hereford cattle would stare, sometimes the grey cat joined me. I read the Australian childhood classics of the time – Ethel Turner, Henry Handel Richardson, the bush poets, as well as Enid Blyton, of course!

When I decided to publish Me in the Middle, I found I had to register as a publisher. The name Riverton came to me quick as a flash, I was thinking of Riverton Publications but my friend Eileen suggested Press, and I was immediately convinced, Riverton Press it is!

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How Riverton Press began

Riverton Press began with my mother’s poetry book, Me in the Middle. We had a publisher but when they sent the draft of the ready-to-print book, Nita Buswell said, in her decisive no-two-ways-about-it fashion, “the font’s too small, I can’t read it, that’s no good”. As the editor refused to change his “house style”, and under pressure from Nita: “we’d better hurry up with this book, I’ll be dead by Christmas”, I decided to publish it myself. This was September, 2017. In October Nita saw we had control of the product and said, “I always wanted illustrations with my poems, I’ll ask Denise”. My cousin Denise McKenzie responded nobly with wonderful colour drawings by November, and we had a wonderful book launch in Wagga Wagga on a hot air-conditioner-melting day in January 2018.