AustLit

'Bill and Billy are having marital problems but these pals when compared to the problems they have to face from their next door neighbour. If that wasn't enough, there is the general alarm put out to be on the alert for a serial murderer thought to be in the district. In the heavy night of the Mornington countryside, their weekender cottage offers scant protection from what is determined to befall them from the outside and what is determined to torment them from the inside.It is not as if they are living in some fiction where the fear comes driving at them intermittently as per the scripted climaxes of a script; this night they have to live with a fear that is constant, unharboured. And so does the audience.It is difficult to tell who is who, or what is what. The only thing Bill and Billy - and anyone else - know is that it is very real dead mad. ...' (Source: TROVE)

'Seven years after King Billy's death, Truganinni stood alone, a living relic of her race. She would walk the streets of Hobart Town, resembling Queen Victoria in her voluminous skirts and headdress. She quite enjoyed the curiosity and finger pointing of the townspeople.Towards the end, she appeared to bear no malice towards her race's persecutors. Growing stoutish, she smoked a pipe and enjoyed a daily jug of beer. But she began to grow ill and as her death loomed, so did the memories of what happened to King Billy's body.On May 8th 1876, at the approximate age of 73, Truganinni died.She is said to have cried out, 'Don't let them cut me up. Bury me behind the mountains.'Given her fierce spirit and perception of herself and her people, it would have been said with as much defiance as she could muster as much as being fearful.Only hours after the news, body-snatchers in the Royal Society of Tasmania started to bark for her body. The government tried to fight them off. She was off floating across Australia, raising hell with her beloved Nanna, on their Shag Magnet anyway. By then the mission on Flinders Island of Act 1, and McKay's house in Hobart Town, were the least she wanted to put a bomb under... ...' (Source: TROVE)

'Stranded in his Sydney flat, the journalist John Rinner tries to explain his Dad-dud existence to his daughter by telephone. This is not easy since he hasn’t seen her in 18 years and she is on the other side of the world working in an Amsterdam hotel with little time to listen to an excuse for a Dad. Just as his working life in the field with the UN Childrens Fund now seems only smoke-and-mirrors, so does Rinner’s own life seem as it flashes past him in delusion and illusion, and with more bottoms than tops. This seems especially relevant to his real-or-imagined North Queensland aboriginal roots... almost as much as the witnessing the world’s abuse of its children has scarred him. But, more and more, the cross connections of telephone torment continue, escalating in him into looking down into a sump rather than getting any sort of expiation from reconnecting with his beloved daughter. At least it is a mirror on the wall there, and not the sad sack that is himself. At least, too, the mirror gives back to him a more intelligent conversation than he can get from other human beings these end of days. He is still, though barely, intuitive enough to be able to appreciate being able to tell it: ‘You heard the one about the guy going up to a mirror on the wall and spouting, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the....? ...' (Source: Amazon website)

'Henry had one good eye until the surgeon lost even that one’s lens down some drain. He had a wife he could call his own until she started to shack up very noisily with some young turk Australian postgraduate in his (Henry’s) own home. He had a housekeeper until she left in built-up disgust claiming Henry continuously confessed to some vague past unspeakable crime. Henry also had this itch which his new housekeeper – his wife’s cousin – could keep in check with her very personal fingernails. Then there was his house-full of irreplaceable objects until his new housekeeper’s husband came along and proceeded to methodically clean him out. ...' (Source: Smashwords website)

'He hadn’t told his son he was adopted, nor that his son had a twin sister who hadn’t been handed over with him when they traveled from Melbourne to India all that time ago to pick up both infants. Part of his silence was the guilt of being on the end of what was then undoubtedly a child-racketeering scam. Charged by his estranged wife to go back to India to find out more about the recent brutal murder of their son – and, consequentially, what had happened to the infant girl child, Smith found himself having to fight his way through the bland face of locals’ attitudes to death, religious extreme rituals and behavior, and especially towards female infanticide. In order to get relatable explanations, he has to confront the fiercest of Tantric rites through the most grotesque, whack-job so-called wise man, Nandi Baba, through police dismissal, through the ignominy of caste prejudice, and through the motiveless violence of local crime. Smith was never going to succeed in learning much. But, for all the little grace he has left in him, he does find his Little She. And to explain it all to his wife, he could only illuminate it all through himself as third-party – and only a sort of son et lumiere projection could illuminate what is going in even his own mind. But whether he succeeds or not, nothing can stop their damnable karmic wheel from a’turning, a’turning.' (Source: Amazon website)

'Living in Black Holes is a first-time collection of five of Bill Reed's most popular and/or performed plays. The works collected here are: Mr Siggie Morrison with his Comb and Paper Burke's Company Truganinni Bullsh (including More Bullsh) Cass Butcher Bunting Each play has been 'modernised', in that the playwright has changed the plots as necessary to bring them up-to-date and brought the colloquialisms to be more familiar to the modern ear. Here and there, staging, too, has been altered to reflect modern-theatre's economies of scale. Settings and characterisations, though, have not been changed.' (Publication summary)

'An ensemble of actors who are about to start rehearsing a play about the Moree race riots visit Endeavour Lane in Moree to get a feel of the lie of the land. This is where the young Aboriginal 'Cheeky' McIntosh was shot and killed during the infamous 1982 rumble between local whites and blacks. The leader/director/writer of the ensemble has a more intimate knowledge of the site. Back in 1982 he remembers playing cricket with his school chums using, as a lark, a wicket made up of a piece of the makeshift ‘stockade’ Cheeky and his mates tried to hole up behind. Now, while the actors mill around Endeavour Lane, an old man appears in their midst, sits down and declares he is waiting for a bus (Endeavour Lane is a dead end) to take him to the murder trial of the three Whites charged with Cheeky's death. The old man is Daddy, a local Moree elder. Is he out of his time? Is he trying to interfere with the ensemble's thinking about putting on a play about that night back in 1982? Is he really waiting for a bus to take him to some trial about the riot? They might be the wiser if they could concentrate on what Daddy is saying rather than arguing amongst themselves. They do understand, though, that dabbling with the theatre is dabbling with an illusion that can be more real than reality, and just as killing. Still, they cannot understand why that full-scale riot at Myall Creek Massacre – even further back in 1838 – should keep cropping up in what should have otherwise been their lazy’n’hazy Sunday morning, especially since not a line of script has been written yet. It begs the question about which Daddy down the millennia are they dealing with here?' (Source: Amazon website)

'A harvesting of six full-length plays by Bill Reed. Unlike most of his other plays, none of these works here have been published in print by leading Australian book publishers or subsequently re-issued in print or ebook formats by Reed Independent. The plays have been extensively rewritten and so comprise revised versions to the versions seen on stage. Each has been involved in various seasons of the Melbourne Theatre Company, the old Nimrod Theatre and the Malthouse Theatre when it was the Playbox.' (Publication summary)

'O King, his name mightn’t be Scheherazade, but if he was a she, it might well have been. You never know. And, anyway, to sing for his supper or else be despatched, the Talls-reteller must spin his cut-it-out ways to your royal self. If you had ever been listening, you might be able to admit wiling your Lankan nights away on his pull-this-one shaggy-dog yarns, especially about the misadventures of the Australian whitie called Wi – don’t ask Wi, Sire! – after being bogged down in your Lankan realm, the Talls-reteller and the Aussie whitie, both, and not including you, of course. After all, there were some of your own people who had hired this Wi to perform their hearts’ good’n’mischievous desires, so nobody’s blameless around here. Except you, Your Majesty. Also, you should maybe cherish this White Wi as the world-champeen kidnappee of all time that he is. (Nothing could surpass his being nabbed three times in three minutes, not without having a real talent for it – and that wasn’t the end of it by any means.) Even the ordinary people have come to love the godful way the Wi wipes those dirty dishes in Dominic’s Eatery… but, no, it is probably better you don’t leave the harem to go and watch him in action, Sire. You might eat something there, and where would that leave us?' (Publication summary)

'Sire?

'Sire! Over here, in the boiling oils, Sire!

'Your Majesty, I know you think I speak drivel, but what can I do but affect mock humility and say I’m flattered you think so?

Sure, this mightn’t be the classic 1001 Arabian Nights, and these mightn’t be its perfumed nights but your Lankan nights have their skies just as full of the starry-eyed, no?

'And so I mightn’t be the beautiful Princess Scheherezade, but my oh-yeah-pull-this-ones still have to make you too tired in the day to have this bloody man of an axeman in your ear about my neck. That’s not easy for a strolling reteller like me, Sire. I get my word sounds mixed up a lot, and spelling’s never been one of my best motleys. I say that flattered I think so.

And my hey-gag-on-this shaggy dogs mightn’t be about Sinbad or Ali Baba, but they’re just as yank-this-it-plays-Dixie about the wuzz Wi and his other merry no-hopers from Wattala.

'Who, you say? Surely you remember Wi, a name especially chosen in length to fit your span of attention? The world-record kidnappee, nabbee, swipee, snatchee? (How about that three times in three minutes effort that time, Sire?) After all, who knows how many of your own people have also hired him out as White goods for their nefarious ends? Not that he wouldn’t prefer that to wiping plates in Dominic’s Eatery... the place to get wiped off!... and better than eating Dominic’s food.

Me, I’d eat anything in my cell down there banked out by the sewer, Sire. Even with my feet up – like, six feet above my head.' (Publication summary)

'It wasn’t much of a pooch, but the Irish colley’s eyes shone green when they came across the Jelform. Didn’t have to sniff before it uplifted its cock hatch and squatted for a pleasing time upon him. Just demonstrating that the Jelfessence was the very pillar of dogged benevolleyance. Now in ohmage to Dogod at this day’s end.'

'You would have to wonder why a Rhodes Scholar, a VC winner and a Commissioner of Police named his son Frank E. R. Stein by way of a ha-ha ‘monstrous joke’… or why he cackled derision every time his eyes lit upon the boy; or why he showered more affection on his adopted son, Costas, the otherwise offspring of a Mr Bigs of organized crime. And as the well is so poisoned such is the quest Frank Stein must make to seek revenge for the gangland killing of his crusading crime-fighting half-brother. At least it is a way to presuppose the kingpins presumably coming for him too; after all, even as a joke, it’s not how you bow out, but how you get stuck in. Rape, assassination, shocking intrusions of a vicious crime world… it’s all there for a tragic and hilarious story to unfold before Frank Stein, assisted(?) by his own side comprising of a woman in search of an international bestseller and an indigenous brother who survives writing sports reports without going to any games when all he needs is a deaf, dumb and blind rich white sort to tide him over. And, yes, haunting over all is a shadowy guardian Chinese toughie, as well as his ubiquitous father from his wheelchair. One has to ask: what have the famous father’s shocking WW1 experiences to do with the resulting mayhem? What has be done to his sons? What did the Nip bullet the old boy finally coughed up after forty years look like, even as a metaphor? Underlying the rich gallery of these and other grotesques, there are the wit and the pace and the bawdry of Crooks. In the real-life crime parlance of ‘a pushover to put down’, this book won’t disappoint crime buffs. ' (Publication summary)

'John Tasker is a divided, but enjoined, man. Physically he is running from the law while hunting down his own father, just as his father used to track down the wild tuskers in Sri Lanka. At the same time, mentally, he is tracking down his murderous brother’s enemies, imaginably or not, with a deadly efficiency.' (Publication summary)

'A collection of mainly award-winning or hightly-commended short stories from national competitions. Extinction is forever, give or take a day. And there's always Redemption trying to take that one precious minute of your time.' (Publication summary)