About Us.

This is our ninth year homeschooling. We are convinced of the benefits of the homeschool and have seen all our four children flourish.

Over the years we have used many homeschool resources and tried different homeschool styles. Most of my homeschool resourses were bought from the US. These homeschool resources were good, but they lacked the Australian flavour that I desired. The literature, history and science all had a North American "flavor". My kids were learning about; The Star Spangled Banner, the Mayflower, Mustangs, and American Indians and not Advance Australia Fair,The First Fleet, Brumbies and Australian Aboriginals.

After a few years homeschooling I discovered the Charlotte Mason homeschool method. This revolusionised my homeschool. It became much easier to give Australian content to my homeschool children when I used her ideas of living books. We enjoyed reading aloud and discussing our books. I couldn't seem to pass a second hand bookshop without going in to see if they had one of the literary treasures I was hunting for.  I started collecting booklists and homeschool recommendations of good Australian living books. We began nature journals and a book of centuries.  Our homeschool continued to evolve and now we incorporate a number of methods into our homeschool. If I had to place a label on my homeschool style I would call it eclectic with Charlotte Mason leanings.

Downunder Literature began in 2006 over coffee. Margaret (another homeschool mum) and I were discussing the great lack of Australian homeschool material that supported our homeschooling method. Many of the books we wanted to use, and recommend to friends, were out of print. So we decided somebody needed to do something about it, so it might as well be us. So as we sat in Margaret's kitchen, with kids running around us Downunder Literature was birthed.

What started as an afternoon tea hobby, putting together an Australian copywork book, quickly expanded into a small homeschool publishing business, which I (Michelle) now run with the assistance of Ken my husband and our four children.

Our homeschool products have been published because we feel passionately that you should have access to this great literature. Since the homeschool market in Australia and New Zealand is so small, it is not economically viable to produce all these books as hard print copies. So we have decided to launch out into modern technology and give you some of our books as ebooks. Now I know that it is much nicer to look at a professionally bound book, but we thought it was better to give you the book as an ebook, instead of no book. I hope you will take the step and try these ebooks. These ebooks are available at a much lower price than it would cost you for a hard copy, so take the plunge and buy one and go to your local print store and have it bound with the money you saved on purchase & postage.

Ebooks also have the advantage of being reusable. So for multiple children you can save a considerable amount of money. We know that you might want to pass these great homeschool resources on to your friends for free to save them money. We ask that you do not. Refer them to us instead. We have tried to make our homeschool resources very reasonable in price. It took us a lot of time to put these homeschool resources online and we ask that you respect our copyright and use them only within your family. If you are a school teacher we ask that you purchase your products with a school licence, which allows you unlimited usage within your school.

We have developed homeschool products for sale but we want to be more than that. We want to serve homeschoolers, teachers and parents by giving access (for free when possible) to distinctly Australian and New Zealand books and resource materials.

We are a Christian homeschool family and our products support a Christian education, but our resources are basically secular in nature. You will find reference to God in our literature in context with our Christian heritage as a nation and you will also find some references to the theory of evolution in The Wonderland of Nature and Nature Talks to New Zealanders. You as the teacher can choose how these ideas are presented to your student.

To find out more about how our homeschooling journey visit my blog enduringprize.com