Coaches, Carriages & Carts: Horse-Drawn Vehicles in Australia by Peter Foster

Coaches, Carriages & Carts covers the first hundred years of Australia's initial land transport conveyances. It is a wonderful history of a period, but sadly overlooked in connection with its forms of land transport.

Here we revisit a world of horse-drawn vehicles, so much a part of our history from 1800 to 1920. The intriguing information is enlivened and supported by many rare photographs and accompanying ephemera. Coaches, Carriages & Carts provides an exciting visual record of an era now passing from living memory.

It was a time of horses, coachmen, Cobb & Co. stables and a cluster of now forgotten trades - wheelwrights, coach painters and blacksmiths. All kinds of wheeled vehicles - Hansom cabs, Charabancs, Horse-trams, Wagonettes and Jingles - moved the masses to work six days a week, and on weekends took them to picnics and sightseeing.

Little visual or written evidence remains of this period of Australia's history, and very few representative collections of vehicles have been developed to inform and educate.

This book will in some way overcome this lack of exposure to the days of horse, carriage and cart, allowing our current generation a unique insight into an enthralling period in our transport history.

Written by Peter Foster