A moving and epic novel about the last days of legendary bushranger Ben Hall The thought was coming more often. That wherever he was, he was at the centre of a cage. He couldn't have said when the notion first entered his head. Some time in the last months. It was more now than a notion, he could see the damn bars. They were grey steel, the height of a man on horseback. In a dream he'd ridden out of a clump of boulders and caught them just before they retreated, how he knew what they looked like. It is 1865. For three years Ben Hall and the men riding with him have been lords of every road in mid-western New South Wales. But with the Harbourers' Act made law, coach escorts armed now with the new Colt revolving rifle, and mailbags more often containing checks than banknotes, being game is no longer enough. The road of negotiated surrender is closed. Jack Gilbert has shot dead a police sergeant. Constable Nelson, father of eight, lies buried at Collector, killed by John Dunn. Neither time did Ben pull the fatal trigger, but he too will hang if ever the three are taken. Harry Hall is seven. Ben has not seen the boy since his wife Biddy left to live with another man, taking Harry with her. The need to see his son, to be in some way a father again, has grown urgent. But how much time is left before the need to give the game away and disappear becomes the greater urgency?
A jewel-like novel about an old man living in the mountains who comes across three runaway kids. Russell Bass is a potter living on the edge of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. His wife has been dead less than a year and, although he has a few close friends, he is living a mostly solitary life. Each month he hikes into the valley below his house to collect rock for glazes from a remote creek bed. One autumn morning, he finds a chocolate wrapper on the path. His curiosity leads him to a cave where three siblings--two young children and a teenage girl--are camped out, hiding from child services and the police. Although they bolt at first, Russell slowly gains their trust, and, little by little, this unlikely group of outsiders begin to form a fragile bond. In shimmering prose that captures the feel of hands on clay and the smell of cold rainforest as vividly as it does the minute twists and turns of human relationships, Hare's Fur tells an exquisite story of grief, kindness, art, and the transformation that can grow from the seeds of trust.
‘Please. I’m in hell!’ The truth of that was in his face. The rims of his eyes were red-raw, his hair was matted, he hadn’t shaved since knocking at her door, when he’d been clean-shaven — one of the few details she remembered of that blurred encounter. ‘I know why you’re avoiding me. Whoever told the cops told you, too.’ It’s 1970, and young Annette Cooley is part of a small team working on an archaeological dig on the New South Wales south coast — a site that appears to prove that Aboriginal societies in the late Holocene were becoming less nomadic, even sedentary. The discovery is thrilling in its significance, and the atmosphere in the group is one of charged excitement. The team is led by a husband-and-wife pair, stars in their field, Aled Wray and Marilyn Herr, and working on their sites promises to be the making of Annette as an archaeologist. On a new site, linked to the first, Annette starts to fall for a fellow student, Brian Harpur. But there are strange tensions and a hidden darkness within the group. Then one of their party mysteriously disappears. When police arrive, Annette makes a decision that will irrevocably mark her life, and Brian Harpur’s. Written in clear, beautiful prose, and with great depth and moral complexity, The Beach Caves is a powerful story about jealousy, guilt, the choices we make, and the different paths our lives could have taken — shadow paths, which nevertheless leave a trace.
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