The narrator relates his childhood with his oldest sister, Dawn, who has Down syndrome. He describes how after Dawn - at their mother's insistence - underwent a surgery to remove her uterus, they went on a beach holiday. Dawn and the narrator, out from under their mother's thumb for once, learn to fish with the help of Captain Hodge, who Dawn falls in love with. When the holiday is over, Captain Hodge asks the narrator for help; the narrator gives Dawn the message that Captain Hodge is married and so cannot marry her. Now a middle-aged man with his own family, the narrator remembers that what he told Dawn was a lie.
New art teacher Karen arrives at Prospect Secondary College, a school gaining attention for its miraculous turnaround of drug and suicide rates. She teaches the Integration art class, finding pleasure in working with the students with disabilities. However, she eventually discovers that said disabilities are self-inflicted, with a special school fund paying for the operations. Prospect's principal, Dr Best, argues these amputations and alterations are better than the suicides the students threaten to commit otherwise.
'Peter Craven’s third annual anthology of “best” Australian stories contains a mixture of twenty-four stand-alone stories and extracts from longer works-in-progress. It is clear that the purpose-built short fiction better exemplifies the skills of crafty concision. The book signals a welcome revival of aspects of the Lawson-Furphy tradition of masculine folk narrative adapted for the postmodern metropolis. Jack Hibberd’s “Christ Stopped at Echuca” takes the tall tale on extravagant parodic flights but is rather too long. Brian Matthews jousts with versions of traditional Australian masculinity in the setting of a university tutorial. The grafting of literary sophistication onto masculine oral culture takes a witty turn also in Gerald Murnane’s mannered tale of a creative-writing teacher’s recognition that his assessment methods are derived from those used in horse racing.' (Introduction)
'Peter Craven’s third annual anthology of “best” Australian stories contains a mixture of twenty-four stand-alone stories and extracts from longer works-in-progress. It is clear that the purpose-built short fiction better exemplifies the skills of crafty concision. The book signals a welcome revival of aspects of the Lawson-Furphy tradition of masculine folk narrative adapted for the postmodern metropolis. Jack Hibberd’s “Christ Stopped at Echuca” takes the tall tale on extravagant parodic flights but is rather too long. Brian Matthews jousts with versions of traditional Australian masculinity in the setting of a university tutorial. The grafting of literary sophistication onto masculine oral culture takes a witty turn also in Gerald Murnane’s mannered tale of a creative-writing teacher’s recognition that his assessment methods are derived from those used in horse racing.' (Introduction)
