Shavings & Scrapes from Many Parts

Jules Joubert was never going to stay put. Born to military stock in a world rapidly shrinking under British dominion, this Australian wanderer left Bordeaux (where he'd perfected the art of youthful mischief) and set off across colonies that stretched from New Zealand to Ceylon to India. What unfolds is not a dry travelogue but a man looking back at his own life with sharp eyes and sharper humor, skewering his younger self even as he marvels at the strange luck that carried him from one adventure to the next. The Savage Club in Dunedin receives his dedication, and through these pages march ancestors, fellow travelers, and the peculiar characters who populate any borderless life. This is Victorian memoir at its most human: unsentimental about the past but genuinely delighted by it, aware that the world he's describing is already vanishing. For readers who crave the lost art of the well-told journey, where a single anecdote about a misadventure in Bordeaux reveals more about a man than chapters of sober reflection.