AustLit

From frontmatter: 'Nobody would be surprised to see a new book about Scotland Yard, or America's "G" men, or Canada's "Mounties", but the West Australian Police - surely there can't be much to say about them?

True, the West Australian public are generally law-abiding, but at least once in recent history they have indulged in a minor civil war, with rifles and bombs, which the police had to settle. Also, the young policeman tramping the hot and dusty streets of Perth may have as dull a time as his opposite number tramping the most respectable suburbs of London, but he may, next week, be far from civilization in a trackless desert.

From the moment when Mr. Graves joins the Force and arrests a dead man, to that other moment nearly ten years later when, promoted over the heads of his elders out of his turn, he gave himself the sack, he really has something entertaining or vivid or vital to say.

The rough, tough life of the goldfield towns in their heyday and the ghostly abandonment of decay; the uncanny powers of aboriginal 'black trackers'; a policeman's rescue-race fourteen days across a desert - strange stories of common people told with insight and sympathy and humour.'