Book excerpt: Once Upon A Hume Volume 4 pursues our journey down the ‘Great South Road’, as the Hume Highway was once known. We follow the original route, moving from personality to personality, catching up with some of the intriguing folk who lived near, or preyed upon, or prospered there, from the earliest days. Few of these folk or features are well-known. All have a story to share. In this volume, we explore the stretch of Old Hume highway between Gunning and Gundagai. We meet odd and interesting people and investigate intriguing places and events. Mountain-tops and murderers. Suicides and spooks. Flivvers and floatplanes and floods. Bushfire, pandemics, bunyips and bridges. Persons colourful, admirable, execrable and astute. Locales remote, abandoned, busy and becalmed: * Rapine, revels and reverence at Jerrawa. * The eight bewhiskered sons of Henry Manton. * Two doughty Yass ladies not to be trifled with. * Mount Bowning. Unlicked. * Deep waters at Burrenjuck. * ‘Spider’ Martin and the Bookham Battler. * The Mystery of Mary Mathews. * The Flivver and the Monkey Nose. * The Jugiong Rioters. * Apocalypse at Coolac. * The Parable of the Warby Brothers at Mingay. * Gunda-guys, Gunda-gals. One night in the Niagara Café. … and many other persons and prominences. Once Upon a Hume is a travellers’ companion. Anecdotal, informative, and chatty, it peoples the Hume Highway landscape with vivid characters and occurrences, profiles prominences, explains place-names, and makes an absorbing panorama of the passing show. This is the fourth of several volumes about the colourful humanity who dwelt Once Upon A Hume.