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Boyhoodlum

A hilarious memoir and a crash-investigator's report into how not to be a boy. Anson Cameron was born in the Victorian town of Shepparton in 1961, the son of a country lawyer and an English rose. Through the shoeless neighbourhoods and surrounding forests, sipping a Blue Heaven milkshake, shooting at anything that moves, and singing an Irish Rovers song, this boy wends his way smiling and lying and creating chaos in his wake. He joins a peeing club and becomes a tycoon of urine; assassinates the Cisco Kid; keeps a deaf man as an entertainment; starts a war between hags; electrocutes a friend's mother; and has a Bodgie clubbed by the police before he is seven. His war on schoolteachers means he is forced to cycle home from school dyed a different colour every day. At high school, with a maturing political outlook, he joins a gang of Anglos to fight a war on Wogs. There is hardly a trap of vanity into which he doesn't fall. With a wry narrator and a cast of rural originals,...
Views: 62

Nice Shootin' Cowboy

A finely crafted collection of award-winning stories.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.
Views: 51

The Last Pulse

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...
Views: 50

Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

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...
Views: 44

Stealing Picasso

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...
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Silences Long Gone

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...
Views: 6