You know those childhood memoirs that tell of the innocence of youth, of a gentle past when boys and girls were adorable and agreeable, respectful of their elders, and spoke only when spoken to? This isn't one of those. Boyhoodlum is the hilarious confession of an ingeniously devious and destructive boy. In the late 1960s and early '70s, Anson Cameron waged guerrilla war on his hometown in country Victoria. When he wasn't blowing his family TV to smithereens, he was electrocuting a friend's mother; when he wasn't raining expletives on a genial deaf neighbour, he was raining missiles on classical music fans. And in his leisure hours, he found time to join a Wee Club, stockpiling an ocean of urine for future use. Knowing he was destined for greatness, young Anson saw no reason to keep his self-importance to Napoleonic levels. At high school, a posse of hirsute male teachers attempted to put the errant lad in his place. But would the 'wonderbeards' be able to quell a born entertainer and agitator? Brilliantly evoking an era in which the Cisco Kid, Valiant Chargers and the lethal powers of a home-made shanghai reigned supreme, Anson Cameron's riotous memoir is a crash-investigator's report on how not to be a boy.
Black faith. White faith. Whose claim of spiritual allegiance to the land really matters? They're flying me across the country to fight a hag. They think to reason with. But I know to fight. An iron town is dying. Inside a fibro bungalow in a horizon-wide mirage Belle Furphy is watching from her kitchen window while her town is dismantled around her and trucked south. Ignoring the Dreamtime and spurning the Multinational and vowing to die here where she long ago dug the ashes of her family into the rock of the land, she's becoming the island they say no man is. Flying in from the east coast is her estranged son Jack with his Sunset Village brochures: snapshots of happy deaths on ergonomic beds with palliative carers hovering angelically overhead. Out the front of her house in airconditioned site-vans housewreckers play poker and read letters from her happily relocated neighbours at her through a megaphone. And they wait -for her resolve to give; or for her heart to give. Or for word finally to come through that, at last, nobody is watching . . .
A blackly funny novel about an unlikely hero, and his misadventures on the flood he has created. In the drought-stricken Riverland town of Denmark in South Australia, after the suicide of his wife, Merv Rossiter steals a boat. He trucks north with his eight-year-old-daughter Em into Queensland. There he blows up the dam at Croesus Station, releasing a flood through outback New South Wales into South Australia. As the authorities search for them, Merv and Em ride the flood south in their stolen boat, rescuing a Queensland Minister from the water, and then a young blackfella who fancies he sang the river to life all by himself. Meanwhile, in Canberra, the political flotsam carried by Merv's renegade ocean brings the Federal Government to its knees. The Last Pulse is the story of the last flood that will ever flow down the inland artery that was the Darling River. The stream is broken now and the agriculture and lives of South Australians have been appropriated with the water by a people a thousand kilometres to the north. Throughout their misadventures on his flood, Merv promises his daughter they will be heroes in South Australia, and that they are sailing towards victory parades and happiness. The other crewmembers, however, know he is heading towards a violent reckoning with Australia itself. Blackly humorous, poignant, timely, The Last Pulse is Anson Cameron's finest work to date.
In these blackly humorous and twisting tales, Anson Cameron takes you to the darker fringes of the nation's heartland, where babies are traded illegally out of Ford Falcons, red cordial makes men weep, and the great Australian dream has all but dried up. Love them, like them or hate them, Anson Cameron's heroes are ordinary people, all trying to make a quid and beat the system. This is life as immortalised by Tim Winton and Andrew McGahan - where getting by is an art form and getting ahead is for other people. In Nice Shootin', Cowboy, this ragged realism meets sparse and graceful prose in a rare fusion. Gritty with irony and spiked with wit, Nice Shootin' Cowboy is a finely crafted collection of award-winning stories.
He's just and only a boy. It's 1975. Blue Black is a clever young so and so, who's won a scholarship to an exclusive boarding school. His family is from the bush town of Pentimento, and his father earns his living logging the local trees while his mother looks after the home. Blue is their great hope. They've sacrificed a lot to send him to this school - and they expect big things from him. One day, the school is abuzz with the new arrival. No ordinary arrival, this - it's the young prince come all the way from England, sent out to the colonies to toughen up. He's just and only a boy, according to old Papa Rowell, the headmaster, and is to be treated as such. But when YR (as he's affectionately nicknamed) falls for one of the few female students, things become messy. Especially as she's the girl Blue's been in love with ever since he came to the school, and her father's the leader of the Liberal Party...
With his inimitable wry humour, Anson Cameron exposes the nature of man. In the dawning days of Science v, God, a zoologist vivisects a gorilla to disprove evolution and has his own brain placed in an ape's head. One of many wicked and wise tales from the collection Pepsi Bears and Other Stories.
From Australia's foremost comic novelist comes a hilarious satire of the art world, based on a true story. Harry Broome dreams of being a famous painter. And when a sophisticated French beauty buys all the paintings at his first exhibition, he knows he's on his way. But in the art world nothing is as it seems. Before long, to pay his debts and save his reputation, he is trapped in a plot to steal Picasso's Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. She is the gallery's greatest acquisition, and when she goes missing the city's many treasure hunters come out to find her: a corrupt tycoon who knew Picasso, a gay escort obsessed with Michael Jackson, a bent barrister, a gang of bikies, a hit man, the gallery director, the Minister for Police. The Weeping Woman is priceless and life is cheap. Stretching from pre-war France to contemporary Australia, with a captivating cast of eccentric characters and a superbly engaging plot based on a true story, Stealing Picasso tells of an art theft and a forgery and their extraordinary repercussions. 'Anson Cameron is one of the most interesting writers of his generation' -- Weekend Australian
Daring and provocative short stories from one of Australia’s best comic writers. A collection of fables in which the intuition of animals is set against the hubris of man, Anson Cameron is part court jester, part acclaimed writer of short stories and novels, and part national conscience. A cola company uses the last wild polar bears as billboards. A boy is forced to compose poems for ats. A dog starts a race-riot. A zebra shames two armies. A zoologist vivisects a gorilla to disprove evolution and has his own brain placed in the ape’s head. In New Guinea Zookeepers eat their exhibits. In Gippsland the face of The Lord appears on dairy cows. In the Western Desert mummified egg-bandits hang from trees... By these incidents the Nature of Man is compellingly exposed. And the many and varied species of Mother Earth are wry spectators as Man pilots the planet he thinks he owns into the wall of oblivion. What the critics say about Anson Cameron: ‘...one of the most interesting writers of his generation... has an imaginative largesse and sentence-by-sentence articulation that soars above the pack’ -- Peter Craven, The Australian ‘...prose that fizzes with energy and humour, leaping from the scatalogical to the lyrical, from the earthy to the sublime’ -- The Adelaide Advertiser ‘Cameron writes a tough, gutsy story that is so well crafted you know there’s someone behind the wheel from the word go’ -- The Age
‘You’ve got to have that madness in your mind to win, win, win. You’ve got to have that somewhere, but it can’t consume you.’ The singular story of football's hardest man and sharpest mind. This story begins in infamy. Everyone’s first glimpse of the man is of ferocious blows struck in grand finals, his name splashed in headlines across the back pages of the tabloids. It’s the 1970s, it’s Richmond: kill or be killed. There was a time when almost every football watcher who heard Neil Balme’s name would react with disapproval. My God, what a bruiser . . . A dangerous fellow . . . And those who knew him would quickly deny these accusations. He’s not a brute, you know, he’s a thinker . . . A mild-mannered bloke, easygoing. The great paradox of Balme is the violence and the pacifism, the mayhem and the calm, the rough justice and the gentleness. He’s a cold-blooded thug; he’s a soft-hearted healer; he’s a villain and a hero. Balme is unique in having spent longer than anyone else in clubland. Richmond, Norwood, Melbourne, Collingwood, Geelong and Richmond again – over fifty years. He’s seen and created limitless change in those decades. So how did Neil Balme go from being the infamous on-field enforcer of the 1970s to the avuncular guru the football world knows and loves today? After eleven premierships, an aura surrounds the man. Get Balme to your club and success will follow. What has he to tell us of football, of the high times and the low, of the champs and the egos? Of Royce and GR, of Diamond Joe, of Eddie and Mick, of Bomber, of Dimma? And of life and the human heart? Balme’s tale is, unsurprisingly, a mix of hard truth and unerring compassion.
Novel telling the story of Mark, a tyrefitter by trade but a rock star in his head. He has the grudge of a lifetime against broadcaster Henry - the man who sold him on the dream in the first place. When Henry announces his love for soon-to-be famous Amarita on-air, Mark sees his opportunity for revenge. Author has previously written 'Nice Shootin' Cowboy' and 'Tin Toys'.
Drawing on a wide variety of empirical methodologies, including large-scale survey analysis, survey experiments, and content analyses, Following the Ticker explores the complex relationship between stock market performance and political judgments through distinctive patterns of coverage in American news media. Building an eclectic theory that explores the interplay between media agenda-setting and partisan motivated reasoning, author Ian G. Anson helps to explain why the stock market increasingly occupies the minds of Americans when they evaluate the performance of incumbent presidents. In doing so, Following the Ticker contributes to a growing literature exploring the links between public opinion and economic inequality in American society. Because "the stock market is not the economy," the increasing salience of the stock market as a source of political judgments reflects a worrying development for classic models of democratic accountability.
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