AustLit

Jack Barclay, great man of the Australian Labor Party, is dead. And with him has died the last remaining connection to the social reforms of 1970s Labor governments. New Labor is thriving in its place, proudly parading economic reform as the defining agenda for the new century.

At his funeral, family, friends and party faithful will gather to celebrate his life. Or will they? In the grand tradition of Australian public life, each stake an individual claim to Jack's greatness and put a personal spin on his life and contribution to the nation. The Great Man is a wickedly comic tilt at politics, greed and the craving for personal identity. (Publisher's blurb, back cover)

Sanctuary is the story of Australia's most successful expatriate journalist cum foreign affairs commentator, Mr Robert 'Bob' King, who has made a career for himself as a distinguished journalist with Time magazine and then moved to anchorman on CBS. He comes home to Australia to live in relative isolation at the age of 48 in Sanctuary Cove. Nobody can quite understand this move. A young Ph.D. student comes up to check facts about the biography he is writing about Mr Bob King's life. Mr King is canny enough to realise that the biography is probably not going to be totally favourable but he gets a shock when he realises just how unfavourable the biography is.

It is a look at the way our so-called free press is actually a fairly tightly controlled and un-free press; it's also a look at the way we lie about the nature of our achievements in our life. The conflict between the two protagonists on these issues gets quite acute. David Williamson.(ii).