On Writers

Captivity Captive

By Rodney Hall,
McPhee Gribble 1988.

‘Don’t you see how it always is? Once we reach the very boundary of our known world and it’s morals, when we look, as our Lord did, over a vast plain filled with possibilities of life and riches, then the Devil tempts us.’

The known world is Paradise, in this case New South Wales farmland. The vast plain is liberty from a brutal and unrelenting Irish family, the right to choose the forbidden, this time it is incestuous love and beguiling death, and the warning is from the son Patrick, also speaking on behalf of his saint.

Here is a murder story, in fictional concert with history, the slaughter of two sisters and a brother unsolved since 1898, and in inquisitive concert with history into the origins of a national character.

For the Good Reading Guide
McPhee Gribble 1989.