The novel is a coming-of-age story about Daniel Anstiss, who is is a battler from a meatworks town on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia’s oldest city. After setbacks during his early school years, he eventually excels at his tertiary studies and joins Australia’s diplomatic service. Despite his commitment to his vocation, it gradually becomes clear to Daniel that he is an outsider with little hope of navigating Canberra’s pathways of privilege and networks of influence on the basis of merit alone.
“Hudderstone Wash-Up” begins during the 1950s in a fibro cottage on a flood-prone dirt road next to a railway line on which steam trains transport doomed livestock to nearby slaughter yards. An eyewitness tracks Daniel Anstiss’s formative years and depicts his resolute drive towards academic success at the Australian National University in the early 1970s. Then, through ad hoc recollections, a colleague provides eccentric descriptions of the political upheavals and bureaucratic expediencies that threaten to derail Daniel’s foreign service career.
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