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The Genteel Poverty Bus Company single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 1992... 1992 The Genteel Poverty Bus Company
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

For Macintosh Hope, marriage, the 'fustiness of the Romantic poets' in academia, and society no longer hold any attraction. However, solitude and isolation on an uninhabited island in north Queensland do. All seems perfect there for Mac, until the treachery of a greedy developer becomes apparent.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Vanishing Points Thea Astley , Port Melbourne : Heinemann , 1992 Z505356 1992 selected work short story

    'Australia's acclaimed national treasure delivers two slyly linked novellas - The Genteel Poverty Bus Company and Inventing the Weather - in which "progress" vies unsuccessfully with more feral aspects of an untamed land. When would-be hermit Macintosh Hope, formerly of the Genteel Poverty Bus Company, settles down on a tiny Pacific isle off Australia's coast, he thinks he's found the perfect retreat from the workaday world. And he has - until neighboring Hummock Island is claimed by developer Clifford Truscott as a tourists' paradise. Thus sparks a confrontation pitting the thuggery of progress against the skills and wit of a lone man who proves uncannily adept at remaining the proverbial thorn in the magnate's side. Inventing the Weather finds the same developer's wife fed up and leaving her fatcat husband and their smug, precocious children. Julie Truscott's journey to independence takes her as far as a small mission run by nuns at Bukki Bay. But old ties aren't severed easily, and Clifford soon sets off tremors in the mission community, once he casts a profit-making eye on its enviable spot on the coast. With an unerring sense for language and a shrewd eye for human character and detail, Thea Astley sounds the territory and spirit of her native Gold Coast with the authority of a seasoned denizen of the terrain. ' (Publication summary)

    Port Melbourne : Heinemann , 1992
    pg. 1-122
Last amended 1 Sep 2009 12:58:55
Settings:
  • Far North Queensland, Queensland,
  • North Queensland, Queensland,
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