About The Furneaux Press
The Furneaux Press was established in Canberra in 1998 to publish books on unusual subjects that might interest a specialized audience. Since 2013 it has been based in Melbourne.
In 2000 it published 444 Hungarian Verbs, 222 conjugations by Donald Kingsmill which provided teachers and students of the Hungarian language with a useful learning tool that had been largely lacking until then. It is in libraries at the University of Vienna and, in the United States, at Cornell University, the University of Florida and the University of Ohio.
Donald Kingsmill with Head of the Australian Foreign Ministry Dr Ashton Calvert (right) launching 444 Hungarian Verbs in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, on 22 June 2000.
In 2015 it published There Are Roumers, a Country Boy at War 1914-1919. Donald Kingsmill edited his father's letters and a memoir, and in his own words Ken S. Kingsmill tells the fascinating story of his life, from the age of 19 until he was 24, in "the War to End All Wars". As an account of wartime life, often in the front line, it is at times amusing, disturbing and touching.
In 2018 it published the two volumes of Donald Kingsmill's autobiography: Descent and Rise tells of some interesting ancestors and recounts stories of his own childhood in Australia. A Chanceable Path is about the demands and challenges of his career in Australia's Foreign Service.
Donald Kingsmill was born in Sydney in 1934 but moved immediately to Melbourne where he attended the first two of his eight schools. On leaving the North Sydney Boys' High School he went to work in the Bank of New South Wales (later Westpac). After more than three years there he returned to studies and graduated B.A.(Hons) from the University of Sydney in 1959. That was when he joined the Department of External Affairs (later Foreign Affairs, then Foreign Affairs and Trade). During his subsequent career he served in increasingly senior positions on postings to Laos, New Caledonia, Egypt, Lebanon, Cambodia and Jordan. He was Australian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (1976-9), Ambassador to Greece (1984-7) and, finally, Ambassador to Hungary (1992-5). He retired in 1996.
His linguistic studies began at school, where he acquired a little Latin and rather more French. He used this French in much of his professional career; and as he moved from country to country he made valiant attempts to learn their languages: firstly Lao, then Arabic, Cambodian, Greek and German, and finally Hungarian. Arabic he learned at the Jesuit University in Beirut where the tutition was in French. He is a learner of languages rather than a philologist, and it was as a student rather than as an academic – and with the practical experience of a student's needs – that he compiled his book 444 Hungarian Verbs.