HUDDERSTONE WASH-UP

The paperback edition of David Morisset's newest novel can be purchased at Amazon and eBook versions are available at Kindle, Amazon, Apple Books, Smashwords, and other online retailers.

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.

OUTER SPACE

Their city should surely be almost nought

Except for harbour shores stolen and bought

For the great and good and their acolytes —

Ornaments to vocations of cutpurse.

They dub it a star of the universe —

Its inner suburbs lucky satellites

Destined to orbits of adoration,

Blessed by blistered tarmac burned by parades

And asphalt alleys and squalid arcades,

Where wealth sneers at the rest of the nation.

Out on the fringes, where livestock trains steamed,

There’s light so fiery it seems it was dreamed

To be doused by summer’s stormy raindrops

Amidst croaking frogs’ joyful jamborees.

Here it is that winter brings frost and freeze

And pallid suns blush foggy blue hilltops.

There are trundling fields and forever yards,

Space for madcap games and children’s follies.

Gardens bloom and shops stock chips and lollies

On streets of strive lined with homes of diehards.