At the age of eight, Louise Baker lost her right leg above the knee as a result of a road accident; she was on her very first bike ride. With a grand sense of humor and great spiritual courage, she faced life with a seemingly irreconcilable handicap. OUT ON A LIMB, her personal story, is not only one of the most stimulating and amusing books; but even more, it will be a revelation to all who have at any time been faced with personal disaster. Louise Baker mastered her tragedy and had a whale of a lot of fun doing it. One moment, she would play the part of a dare-devil female parachute, the next, a fearless alpine skier whose foot had been frozen rescuing a snowbound child—she had to fabricate the most fantastic tales to crush the typical little boy question, “Hey, Lady! Where’s your leg?” She made her very crutches a part of woman’s vanity—using different colors for different ensembles. She did everything a normal woman could do and more: competed with other reporters on a news beat, discovered her own and highly unconventional means of holding her beaux in college, went to live with her new husband in the wilds of Arizona, set out on a hilarious trip to Europe. Whenever the world seemed totally against her, she could console herself with Webster’s definition of “handicap”: “A race...in which an artificial disadvantage is imposed on a superior contestant.” OUT ON A LIMB has a special significance for these times. Louise Baker’s story is told with sympathy and an understanding for all who have suffered similar misfortunes. Her life was not one colored with unhappiness, but filled with energy and purpose—the picture of a woman who enjoyed each day to the fullest.

“LITTLE did I suspect what I was grooming myself for when I used to sit up straight at table and eat my spinach like a good girl. I thought I was minding my Ps and Qs and my mother so I could have my dessert. But, actually, what I was unwittingly doing was nourishing my blood and sinew and building the Body Beautiful for sacrifice on the altar of Pedagogy. So help me—in my dewy innocence, I was growing up to be a schoolteacher...” In Snips and Snails, first published in 1953, the author of the hilarious bestseller Out on a Limb, Louise Baker, finds herself in an even more precarious position as teacher, “mother,” and town marshal at a boy’s school...

Out on a Limb plot -- At the age of eight, Louise Baker lost her right leg in a bicycle-meets-car accident. Out on a Limb is her story of her subsequent life as a uniped. Throughout the book she maintains a fine balance, never denying the difficulties of her handicap, never inviting pity for her plight, as she recounts adventures she might never have had with two legs.

This project addressed a need for a sensitive, accurate and reliable testing method to aid assessment of the toxicity of algal blooms and assist water management. Increasingly, diagnostic dilemmas are resolved through the use of DNA-based technologies which often provide high sensitivity and specificity and are efficient both in terms of costs and time. However to date, no such test was available to the Victorian water industries. This project sought to bridge this gap by developing an automated DNA-based diagnostic assay for cyanobacterial bloom assessment blooms in Victorian waters. The assay exceeds expectation in its ability to accurately quantify levels of toxigenic cyanobacteria in bloom samples, retains exceptionally high specificity and sensitivity and each assay out-performs common conventional PCR approaches established in the literature. Four toxigen assays (microcystin, nodularin, cylindrospermopsin and saxitoxin) were designed, tested and optimised. This book is co-published with Water Research Australia Authors: Aaron Jex, Louise Baker and Raechel Littman, University of Melbourne

At the age of eight, Louise Baker lost her right leg in a bicycle-meets-car accident. Out on a Limb is her story of her subsequent life as a uniped. Throughout the book she maintains a fine balance, never denying the difficulties of her handicap, never inviting pity for her plight, as she recounts adventures she might never have had with two legs.

The author relates her humorous experiences as the sole female teacher at a private boy's school in Arizona.