AustLit

'Cairns and its region are still tourist drawcards, although it’s now ‘‘a mature destination’’, in the anxious phrase of operators seeking to rebrand the sights. Artists have called more often than novelists, among them Ian Fairweather, Donald Friend and Ray Crooke. Now far north Queensland has found an ambivalent literary laureate in Candice Fox, whose novel Crimson Lakeis set among ‘‘the croc-infested Cairns marshlands’’, ‘‘stretches of yellow sugar cane … running for kilometres, the walls of a hidden city’’.' (Introduction)