Gunner Fitch, a near-legendary water diviner, has been dead for over fifty years., but people in the town of Logan's Reef are still trying to escape his strange legacy.
His son Mal, a famous Sydney theatre director, returns every year to the drought-stricken town for reasons he is only beginning to understand. An old story of rivalry and passion rules his blood, involving an unkept promise and "a chain of hurt reaching down from a cruel, courageous action taken by a barely remembered woman in the name of love".
When Ida, Mal's actress lover, writes a play based on the life there, matters left unfinished in one generation begin to clamour for attention in the next.
It takes three men in Gunner's old truck, one of them an uncanny fit-throwing outcast with a nose for hidden water, to finish what Gunner had set in motion all those years before. To allow the past to break through and the circle to close. And, in so doing, to reveal to those lost in their lives a simple truth: "The thing about change is it shows you who you were all along. It brings you to yourself."
Bitters End ; Water Man ; The Lonely Hunter
Chippendale
:
Picador
,
1993
Z1306083
1993
anthology
extract
