AustLit

'With a nod of his head to Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, Richard King, winner of the 1995 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, writes with tongue-in-cheek to give us a boisterous novel of just one of the beginnings of white Australia.

'In the fine and funny tradition of absurdist writing, Carrion Colony is the exciting new novel from the winner of the 1995 Australian/Vogel Literary Award.

'Set in a broken-down penal colony, Old + New Bridgeford, in Australia in the early 19th century, Richard King writes an extraordinarily compelling, somewhat autobiographical and tongue-in-cheek view on just one of the beginnings of white Australia.

'There's mayhem, violence and generally very odd behaviour exhibited by the soldiers and the convicts dumped in what feels like the middle of nowhere.

'There's a doctor who's too preoccupied in razing the native flora to practise medicine, a madman stranded on a rocky outcrop engraving a tiny map of Great Britain in the stone, a cartographer whose pencils are blunt and the Spanish Girl, the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, with a mean knack for Red Ace.

'Every man and woman in this colony is being stretched beyond belief just to survive, but there's humour too in the surviving.

'Carrion Colony is a boisterous novel, full of verve, that interprets history with a wickedly satirical lens.' [publisher's summary]