Corroboree

First published in 1984, this is the story of how when Englishman Eyre Walker, newly arrived in Australia, meets the beautiful Charlotte Lindsay, romance quickly blossoms. But theirs is a relationship with fatal consequences. When a late-night tryst is interrupted by Charlotte's irate father, Walker's young Aborigine servant is brutally killed by guard dogs. A man with a conscience, Walker is anxious to atone for the boy's death by giving him a proper Aboriginal burial. And so he begins a marathon journey into the outback to search for Corroboree, the gathering of nomadic tribes for the age-old ritual. The expedition that he mounts is sponsored by Captain Sturt, a celebrated explorer who believes a huge ocean lies in the middle of Australia. But Walker finds something else in the middle of that vast continent, and the price he must pay for surviving it will scar him for life...

Anthony Masters is the author of eleven works of adult fiction - notably, Conquering Heroes (1969), Red Ice (1986, with Nicholas Barker), The Men (1997), The Good and Faithful Servant (1999) and Lifers (2001) - and, prior to his death, was in the process of completing another, Dark Bridges, which he thought would be his best. Many of these works carry deep insights into social problems that he gained, over four decades, by helping the socially excluded, be it by running soup kitchens for drug addicts or by campaigning for the civic rights of gypsies and other ethnic minorities. Masters is also known for his eclectic range of non-fiction titles. It ranged from the biographies of such diverse personalities as Hannah Senesh (The Summer that Bled, 1972), Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin: the Father of Anarchism, 1974), Nancy Astor (Nancy Astor: A Life, 1981) and the British secret service chief immortalized by Ian Fleming in his James Bond books (The Man Who Was M: the Life of Maxwell Knight, 1984), to a history of the notorious asylum Bedlam (Bedlam, 1977).