Books published by G.P. Martin Publishing

What happens when you go back to a place you visited forty-six years ago? Tasmania. Do the ghosts rise up, or has the past all been erased? What if you now knew that some of your ancestors had lived there? Convicts. And another branch of your family settled there and came to prominence? Colonialists. It might start to look like a patchwork instead of a simple story. And then the patches might be stitched together and make a quilt. Thirty-two stories stitched together with meaning. The quilt approach.

"A Modest Quest" describes the author's quest to find out about his family's past. It was intended just to find out the basic facts about his parents' brothers and sisters, and his grandparents. Growing up, he had thought that all his grandparents had died before he was born. This was not the case, but it took some serious research and more than two years to bring the facts to light, and by then the lives of the ancestors had pulled him in. The quest was extending far beyond its initially modest aims. "You don't understand a person until you know something about their parents", and so the quest has to continue. This is probably the first of several books. The book explores the ancestors of Glenn Martin, looking back from the present to about the late 1800s. Most of this book takes place in New South Wales, with some excursions into Victoria and South Australia.

A young man who should have found a corporate ladder somewhere and climbed up it, turns his back instead and goes off into the bush. Years later he comes back to the city that he left. In this book he rakes over the ground: the search for a viable livelihood living close to the earth, the search for an alternative community. He asks himself, was the questing anything more than loss and failure? What do those young-man dreams look like now? And what does business look like? This is personal archaeology, not a work of tidy history. The only records he has to call upon are a stack of papers, folders and exercise books in a box. We have to glean the history from what comes out of the box - poems, short stories and notes on scraps of paper that ignite memories. This is archaeology that brings us face to face with ideals and desire, loss and hard circumstance, and passions that endure.