Fiction

This Excellent Machine

Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages him, but maybe it's just another dead end? To make sense of the world, Clem uses his telescope to spy on his neighbours. From his wall, John Lennon gives him advice; his sister (busy with her Feres Trabilsie hairdressing apprenticeship) tells him he's a pervert; his best friend, Curtis, gets hooked on sex and Dante and, as the year progresses and the essays go unwritten, he starts to understand the excellence of it all.

Longlisted International Dublin Literary Award 2021
Review from Queen's University (Dementia Fiction)
Here is a generous review from Lisa Hill at ANZ LitLovers
Marcel (Proust), Milan (Kundera) and Me (me), in the The Age/Sydney Morning Herald
'Chariot Culture' feature in The Australian
Read an extract here in InDaily
Another extract from The Adelaide Review.
Review from the excellent Helen Eddy at ReadPlus
A published work-in-progress (2018) from Westerly
Review in The Australian
Review in Westerly
ABC Perth (Barry Nicholls)

Incredible Floridas

As Hitler’s war looms, famous Australian artist Roland Griffin returns home from London with his family to live a simple life of shared plums and low-cut lawns in the suburbs. A daughter, and a son, Hal, growing up with a preoccupied father, always out in his shed stretching canvases and painting outback pubs. An isolated man obsessed with other people, and places. Everything is a picture, a symbol. Even Hal, the boy in the boat, drifting through a strange world of incredible Floridas. As the years pass, Roland learns that Hal is unable to control his own thoughts, impulses, behaviour. The boy becomes the destroyer of family. The neighbourhood is enlisted to help Hal find a way forward. Child actor, a clocker at Cheltenham Racecourse, an apprentice race caller.

Longlisted International Dublin Literary Award 2019
Whispering Gums review here.
Sydney Morning Herald/Age review here.
Indaily extract here.
Adelaide Review extract here.
John Neylon's launch speech here.

Datsunland

A long-deserted drive-in, waiting for a rerun of the one story that might give it life; a child who discovers his identity in a photograph hidden in his parents’ room . . . Stephen Orr’s stories are happy to let you in, but not out. In Datsunland, his characters are outsiders peering into worlds they don’t recognise, or understand: an Indian doctor arriving in the outback, discovering an uncomfortable truth about the Australian dream; a family trying to have their son’s name removed from a Great War cowards’ list; a confused teenager with a gun making an ad for an evangelical ministry. Each story is set in a place where, as Borges described, ‘heaven and hell seem out of proportion’. There is no easy escape from the world’s most desperate car yard, or the school with a secret that permeates all but one of the fourteen stories in Datsunland. Here is a glimpse of inner lives, love, the astonishment of being ourselves.

Read an extract ('The Photographer's Son') in Indaily here.
Sydney Morning Herald review (Kerryn Goldsworthy) here.
Newtown Review of Books review (Carmel Bird) here.
Read the novella 'Datsunland' in the Griffith Review here.
Nice fireside chat with the folks at Griffith Review about short fiction writing. Read it here.

The Hands

On a cattle station that stretches beyond the horizon, seven people are trapped by their history and the need to make a living. Trevor Wilkie, the good father, holds it all together, promising his sons a future he no longer believes in himself. The boys, free to roam the world's biggest backyard, have nowhere to go. Trevor's father, Murray, is the keeper of stories and the holder of the deed. Murray has no intention of giving up what his forefathers created. But the drought is winning. The cattle are ribs. The bills keep coming. And one day, on the way to town, an accident changes everything.

Longlisted 2016 Miles Franklin Literary award.
Listen to a podcast with Cath Kenneally here.
Another podcast with Storycast here.
Indaily review here.
Readplus review here.
The Weekly Times review here.
Extract here.

One Boy Missing

It was a butcher on smoko who reported the man stashing the kid in the car boot. He didn't really know whether he'd seen anything at all, though. Maybe an abduction? Maybe just a stressed-out father. Detective Bart Moy, newly returned to the country town where his ailing, cantankerous father still lives, finds nothing. As far as he can tell no one in Guilderton is missing a small boy. Still, he looks deeper into the butcher's story—after all, he had a son of his own once. But when the boy does turn up, silent, apparently traumatised, things are no clearer. Who is he? Where did he come from and what happened to him? For Moy, gaining the boy's trust becomes central not just to the case but to rebuilding his own life. From the wreckage of his grief, his dead marriage and his fractured relationship with his father may yet come a chance for something new.

Shortlisted, Ned Kelly Awards, Best Crime Fiction 2014

Dissonance

Dissonance begins with piano practice. Fifteen-year-old Erwin Hergert is forced to tackle scales and studies for six hours a day by his mother, Madge, who is determined to produce Australia’s first great pianist. To help Erwin focus, Madge has exiled her husband, Johann, to the back shed. Jo is diagnosed with cancer and Madge allows him back inside, but only for long enough to die. Madge takes Erwin to Hamburg to continue his studies. Erwin prospers in Germany with his new teacher until he meets a neighbour, sixteen-year-old Luise, and finds there’s more to life than music. Meanwhile, Germany is moving towards war. Late 1930s Hamburg forms the backdrop to an increasingly difficult love-triangle, as Erwin is torn between the piano, Luise and the demands of his love and devotion to his mother. Soon the bombs, real and imagined, start falling. Marriage and parenthood give way to death, and tragedy. Before long Erwin and Madge are drawn into the horrors of a war that leaves little time for music. Dissonance is a re-imagining of the ‘Frankfurt years’ of Rose and Percy Grainger. You can read an extract here.

Time's Long Ruin

Wakefield Press 2010

Nine-year-old Henry Page is a club-footed, deep-thinking loner, spending his summer holidays reading, roaming the melting streets of his suburb, playing with his best friend Janice, and her younger brother and sister. Until one day Janice asks Henry to spend the day at the beach with them. He declines, a decision that will stay with him forever. Time’s Long Ruin is a novel about friendship, love and loss; a story about those left behind, and how they carry on: the searching, the disappointments, the plans and dreams that are only ever put on hold.

Winner, SA Premier's Award for an Unpublished MS, Adelaide Festival, 2008
Highly Commended, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, 2010
Shortlisted, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, 2011
Longlisted, Miles Franklin Award, 2011
National Year of Reading 2012: SA selection for ‘Our Story’
French edition Le temps n'efface rien (Presses de la Cite)
Development as opera Innocence (State Opera SA)

Hill of Grace

Wakefield Press 2004

1951. Among the coppiced carob trees and arum lilies of the Barossa Valley, old-school Lutheran William Miller lives a quiet life with his wife, Bluma, and son, Nathan, making wine and baking bread. But William has a secret. He's been studying the Bible and he's found what a thousand others couldn't: the date of the Apocalypse. William sets out to convince his neighbours that they need to join him in preparation for the End. The locals become divided. Did William really hear God's voice on the Hill of Grace? Did God tell him to preach the End of Days? Or is William really deluded? The greatest test for William is whether Bluma and Nathan will support him. As the seasons pass in the Valley, as the vines flower and fruit and lose their leaves, William himself is forced to question his own beliefs and the price he's willing to pay for them.

ANZ LitLovers review here.
Runner-up, SA Premier's Award for Unpublished MS, 2004 Adelaide Festival

Attempts to Draw Jesus

Allen and Unwin 2002

In his gran's day jobs weren't a problem. But when Jack Alber gets laid off from the local servo there aren't many options. He's only seventeen and in his small town there's only need for one chemist and one butcher. And from his scribblings in his journal, it's evident that Clive 'Rolly' Rollins is more interested in observing life than living it. Jack and Rolly's fates are irrevocably changed when they both answer an ad to work as jackaroos on a remote outback station. The Great Sandy Desert will allow both to prove something to themselves and to their families and friends. A landscape of endless Mitchell grass and gibber plains will provide experiences they'd never find back home. But all it takes to change their destiny is one wrong turn.

Runner-up, 2000 Vogel/The Australian award

S H O R T S T O R I E S

'Dr Singh’s Despair' (Southerly 68/1, August 2008)
'The Shot-put' (Meanjin, December 2008)
'Guarding the Pageant' (Strange Tales of a Small City, Wakefield Press Anthology, February 2009)
'The Confirmation' (Writers’ Radio, May 2009; Quadrant, September 2009)
'Jesus Toast' (Geek Mook, Vignette Press, May 2012)
Riverland Stories ('The Photographer's Son', 'The Barmera Drive-In', 'The Pyap School', 'The Shack'). Click here to hear these stories read by the author on ABC radio.
Extract from An Australian Wake (novel-in-progress) (Southerly 73/1, 2013)
'The Photographer's Son' (Quadrant, November 2013)
'The Pyap School' (Transnational Literature, May 2016). You can read it here.
'The Shack' (Southerly 76/2 Writing Disability, January 2017). You can read it here.
'Box of Bones' (Island 151, November 2017)
'The Holotype' (Island 157, June 2019)
'From where the birch takes the sun' (Burning House Press, July 2019)
'First Thought' (Burning House Press, September 2019)
'Mrs Meiners has gone to get chalk' and 'The Sooty Copper' (Thrill Me, Glimmer Press, April 2020)
'Point Nemo' (Burning House Press, April 2020)