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'It begins with an anecdote, related at third hand. David Crouch opens his incisive and intermittently exhilarating account of the colonial author, radical and agitator William Lane with Vance Palmer describing how, during ‘a sweltering summer in Brisbane,’ writers Sydney Jephcott and Francis Adams were startled by a ‘ghastly apparition’ on the ‘dusty roadway’ before them. Jephcott takes the limping figure for Mephistopheles. Adams hisses ‘”shut up! It’s Billy Lane”.’ For many in late colonial Australia, Lane was the Messiah rather than the Tempter. Crouch does not venture a biography. Lane is lightly sketched—club-footed, adamantly teetotal, fiercely industrious, geographically restless and—especially through his own weekly magazine the Boomerang—‘able to pour his ideas into the moral marrow of colonial print culture.’' (Introduction)
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