Brian Taylor – författare

Professional judgement and decision making are central to social work, both in everyday professional practice and in public perceptions of social work as a profession. This book examines key issues that are relevant today.

The chapters cover child protection, mental health, and elder care settings in Europe, Australia and Canada. They discuss organisational and cultural contexts for professional judgement; the role of experience in the development of expertise and professional discretion; understanding variability in decision making; and the role of legal frameworks in decision making.

This book will enable practitioners, managers, policy makers, and researchers to appreciate the complexities of professional judgement and decision making in different social work settings and to apply this understanding to their own practice. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.

The book is linked to sister text Risk in Social Work Practice: Current Issues, which examines key debates around the understanding of risk in contemporary social work practice.

Professional judgement and decision making are central to social work, both in everyday professional practice and in public perceptions of social work as a profession. This book examines key issues that are relevant today.

The chapters cover child protection, mental health, and elder care settings in Europe, Australia and Canada. They discuss organisational and cultural contexts for professional judgement; the role of experience in the development of expertise and professional discretion; understanding variability in decision making; and the role of legal frameworks in decision making.

This book will enable practitioners, managers, policy makers, and researchers to appreciate the complexities of professional judgement and decision making in different social work settings and to apply this understanding to their own practice. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.

The book is linked to sister text Risk in Social Work Practice: Current Issues, which examines key debates around the understanding of risk in contemporary social work practice.

The study of ‘risk’ in social work involves complex interplay between human behaviour, emotion, evidence of fact, professional values and organisational systems. This book brings together contributions from key social work researchers and theorists from the UK, USA, New Zealand and Italy, writing with a focus on aspects of risk within social work. It examines key debates concerning risk in contemporary social work practice, including ethical dilemmas, approaches to decision-making and the challenges of ignorance and errors. Contributions range from the perennial challenges of how one uses formal knowledge when assessing risk to emerging risks arising from the counterterrorism agenda. This book will enable practitioners, policy makers and researchers to appreciate the complexities of risk in different settings and apply this understanding to their own practice.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.

The study of ‘risk’ in social work involves complex interplay between human behaviour, emotion, evidence of fact, professional values and organisational systems. This book brings together contributions from key social work researchers and theorists from the UK, USA, New Zealand and Italy, writing with a focus on aspects of risk within social work. It examines key debates concerning risk in contemporary social work practice, including ethical dilemmas, approaches to decision-making and the challenges of ignorance and errors. Contributions range from the perennial challenges of how one uses formal knowledge when assessing risk to emerging risks arising from the counterterrorism agenda. This book will enable practitioners, policy makers and researchers to appreciate the complexities of risk in different settings and apply this understanding to their own practice.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.

A quintessential Australian bushman, Brian Taylor has spent most of his life on the land. Working as a drover, a stockman, a fencer, a shearer and a saddler, he has gathered a swag of stories over the years as he travelled way out past the Barcoo, along the dusty plains and beside the dry creek beds under the endless southern sky. In A SWAG OF MEMORIES Brian Taylor shares with us these stories, of the people he has met, the places he has been and the moments, long-gone, that define the traditions of the Australian bush. Like those bush poets and storytellers of days past, Taylor brings to life the characters and the creatures of the bush: men like Dangerous Dan Smith, a hard, self-reliant man who had a gentler talent; Father Peter, a parish priest and occasional hero; Charlie Gibson, an Aboriginal stockman who knew the land better than anyone; and Banjo, the ever-alert dingo watchdog. These colourful and evocative bush tales delightfully capture a slight of Australian life that many of us will never get to see. Luckily, with this collection, you can sit back with a billy of tea and read all about it.

The Brumby Mare is an engaging collection of reminiscences about traditional Queensland stockmen and bush workers in the 1950s and 1960s, before the days of motorbikes and helicopters.Brian Taylor knows and loves his country and his stories ring with the authority of experience. Some of the incidents he describes are laugh-aloud funny, some heart-stopping and some very moving. He is a close, thoughtful and warm-hearted observer – of people, of wild and working animals and of the country that sustains them. The Brumby Mare is sure to evoke nostalgia in bush folk and for city readers it will bring the old world of the outback and stockman to life. A quintessential Australian bushman, Brian Taylor has spent most of his life on the land. Working as a drover, a stockman, a fencer, a shearer and a saddler, he has gathered a lifetime of stories over the years as he travelled way out past the Barcoo, along dusty plains and beside dry creek beds under the endless southern sky.Also available, together with The Moonlight Stallion, as the single volume A Swag Of Memories: Australian Bush Stories.

This book of bush tales vividly evokes an era now gone, when people struggled in isolation to tame the land and when camaraderie and mateship were everything.Young Brian Taylor was a ringer on Queensland cattle stations some fifty-five years ago. He worked on huge properties where the big mobs used to run and many of the people he met there had a larger-than-life quality. There was Dangerous Dan Smith, a hard, self-reliant man who wrote bush poetry; Father Peter, a gentle parish priest and occasional hero; and Charlie Gibson, an aboriginal stockman utterly at home in his own country. And then there was the landscape – the plains and rivers and mountains – that shaped the lives of them all.The Moonlight Stallion is Brian Taylor''s second collection of reminiscences about a vanishing way of life in outback Australia – about people, wild and working animals, and country. Readers of The Brumby Mare have been clamouring for more and new readers, whether from the bush or the city, will be moved to laughter and to tears by these heartfelt stories. A quintessential Australian bushman, Brian Taylor has spent most of his life on the land. Working as a drover, a stockman, a fencer, a shearer and a saddler, he has gathered a lifetime of stories over the years as he travelled way out past the Barcoo, along dusty plains and beside dry creek beds under the endless southern sky.Also available, together with The Brumby Mare, as the single volume A Swag Of Memories: Australian Bush Stories.