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Author's note: The story so far: It’s 1984, and seventeen-year-old Clem Whelan has agreed to go with his grandfather, seventy-eight-year-old Doug, in search of Lasseter’s Reef. Doug was given a map as a young man, and held onto it, always trying to decide whether the journey west was worthwhile. Now, in the first throes of dementia, he’s decided to risk it. His journey is not so much about gold, as unfinished business. The suburb of Gleneagles is a close community, neighbours as interchangeable parts in each other’s lives, so failed lawyer Peter (number 33) and retiree Ernie (number 35) are coming along. The novel is a month-by-month description of Clem’s matriculation year, the neighbours who are part of the machine, the births, deaths and marriages that are, I suppose, a thinly-disguised take on my own oddlyshaped Hillcrest adolescence.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
This Excellent Machine
Kent Town
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Wakefield Press
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2019
16790616
2019
single work
novel
'Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages him, but maybe it's just another dead end? To make sense of the world, Clem uses his telescope to spy on his neighbours. From his wall, John Lennon gives him advice; his sister (busy with her Feres Trabilsie hairdressing apprenticeship) tells him he's a pervert; his best friend, Curtis, gets hooked on sex and Dante and, as the year progresses and the essays go unwritten, he starts to understand the excellence of it all.
'His Pop, facing the first dawn of dementia, determined to follow an old map into the desert in search of Lasseter's Reef. His old neighbour, Vicky, returning to Lanark Avenue - and a smile is all it takes. Followed by a series of failed driving tests; and the man at his door, claiming to be his father.
'It's going to be a long year, but in the end Clem emerges from the machine a different person, ready to face what he now understands about life, love, and the importance of family and neighbours.' (Publication summary)
