A FASCINATING history of Australia unfolds in a prolific author’s grand narrative.
In the largest massacre of Europeans on the Australian frontier, in October 1861, rampaging Aborigines killed 19 European men, women and children who were encroaching on their tribal lands. This occurred on Cullin-La-Ringo, near the present town of Springsure, inland from Rockhampton. Predictably, the Aboriginal people paid many times over for these murders.
As the prolific Thomas Keneally makes clear, the leading slain settler, Horatio Wills, was the father of Rugby-educated cricket star Tom Wills who, fortuitously, was 80 kilometres …

BURDENSOME icon … Bond’s irrepressible alter ego, Aunty Jack. Photo: Marco Del Grande
Grahame Bond pulls no punches about his best-known creation.
An only child born in 1943, Grahame Bond is best known for two of his comic creations: the incredible Aunty Jack and butcher extraordinaire Kev Kavanagh.
Bond was born and bred in Marrickville in Sydney. His first hero was a neighbour from across the road, the legendary boxing trainer Ernie McQuillan.
As Bond recounts in this quirky memoir, two decades later, ABC TV chose McQuillan’s Boxing Gymnasium in nearby Newtown as a …

THESE five novels (several of them illustrated), among the latest offerings from Arcadia’s Press On series, are all by long-established authors whose careers have taken very different paths, yet who now find themselves in each other’s company in these attractively packaged and priced books. In order of seniority, the writers are Morris Lurie, Peter Corris, Michael Wilding, Ross Fitzgerald (whose book is co- authored with Trevor Jordan) and Garry Disher.
All of them work in a vein that has yielded some of their most popular fiction, although Corris gives us a …

FROM 1978-83, Mark Dodd worked as a pearl diver on old pearling luggers that still plied the Kimberley coast. In this riveting yarn, Dodd canvasses the intimate details of work on board fabled wooden luggers, especially the ”DMcD” (or ”Dan McDaniel”), and life and play onshore among the exotic alleyways and pubs of Broome, most notably the infamous Roebuck Bay Hotel.
To cater for cashed-up returning lugger crews peopled by an assortment of mavericks and desperadoes, the ”Roey’s” amply proportioned manager, Terry (”Top Cat”) Cullen, would ”roster on additional barmaids just …

Academic satire cuts to the bone
TOM Waits, the greatest composer-performer of our era, is said to have recoiled from the film This is Spinal Tap because it came too close to the reality of musical touring. My initial negative reaction to reading Fools’ Paradise, which tells the story of a middle-aged humanities scholar in a thinly disguised Queensland – sorry, “Mangoland” – university, is based on a similar feeling. And although that feeling remained, it took on more positive hues before I had finished reading this novel.
For a work of …

FOLLOWING her excellent 2008 biography of Enid Lyons, Anne Henderson has produced an eminently readable life of Joseph Aloysius (Joe) Lyons, United Australia Party prime minister from January 6, 1932, until his death on Good Friday (April 7) 1939.
This thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated biography explains how Lyons was the first PM to win and survive three consecutive elections and is one of only two politicians to be a leader of both sides of federal politics.
Labor premier of his native Tasmania from 1923 to 1928, Lyons entered federal parliament in …