Cirrus@Austlit

'When Bob Ellis died on 3 April Australia lost its most engaging provocateur. The Labor Party lost the truest of its true believers, the description Ellis coined in 1988 to entitle a miniseries he wrote about the party's history. A decade later he was attracting attention over the pulping of his book Goodbye Jerusalem. Tony Abbott, Peter Costello and their spouses claimed to have been defamed, and then there was the fathering of a baby to scriptwriter Amanda Long, the sum of it sufficient to inspire the cover story in a national magazine. Sadly that magazine folded in the very week of May 2000 when the Ellis story was to appear and it was never published. Its author Jan McGuinness reprises that lost tale here, a time capsule for perhaps the last Australian scallywag, profiled at the height of hes powers.' (Introduction)