The Multiple Effects Of Rainshadow

(Paperback)

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Description

There are distant shouts, rifle shots, the pounding of feet across the bridge, the sound of running. A womans scream carves the night then bubbles away.

In 1930 the superintendent of a mission on a Queensland island, driven mad by his wifes death, goes on a murderous rampage. Fearing for their lives, the other whites arm a young Indigenous man and order him to shoot Uncle Boss dead. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow traces the lead-up to this bloody showdown and the repercussions in the years afterfor Aboriginal people and the colonial overseers.

Reviews

`Passion, brilliance and originality. * Sydney Morning Herald *
`FormidableUniquely provocative, acerbic and glittering. * Australian *

Author Bio

Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and Its Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004.