'Is there ever a good time to confess to adultery?
Lawrence Lalor, Gold Coast surfie and small town teacher has wandered through life, drifting and shifting with the wind. Sidestepping a blackmailing Southern Belle he rebels against life in a Philadelphia dead-end job and drags his beautiful wife back to the inner city hills of Brisbane.
Why save up for the dream Australian home when you can steal one?
Death and deceit are everywhere when Lawrence lands a job in the Department of Hatching, Matching and Despatching. Tasked with the mission of perusing death notices for administrative anomalies, Lawrence chases the Grim Reaper throughout the Australian countryside.
1999 was the time for Lawrence to take on backpackers, a UFO, drugs, the Republican Referendum, an ex-lover turned MS sufferer and everyone’s favourite neighbour — an axe-wielding, fig-killing, wannabe property developer.' (Publisher's blurb)
Dedication: For Ellen Margaret Perrett
Who always had words for me.
Epigraph:
The land is mine
All the way to the old fence line
Every break of day
I'm working hard just to make it pay
This land is me
Rock, water, animal, tree
They are my song
My being here where I belong
–This Land is Mine
P M Kelly and K D Carmody
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
–The Waste Land
T S Eliot
