Australian Graffiti

I love the Royal Family. I really do. They're fresh-smelling and inoffensive. They look fine tootling along in their gilded carriages.

But . . . they can piss off out of my country, and they can take the top left-hand corner of the flag with them.

A lonely traveller on outback roads. A soldier tortured to death. An angry young woman changes everything. An indigenous man takes on an empire. A storm kills a city. A Prime Minister decides to give up 'stray fucks and the grog'. The building of an architectural masterpiece. A supreme athlete fulfils her destiny on the grandest Australian stage. Billy Nomad finally reaches the coast and completion.

From January 1 1900, to the 2000 Black Summer Bushfires, Australian Graffiti: Tales of the Twentieth Century hums with the rhythms of a nation going through a hundred years of change. To the sounds of the jazz horn, the didg, and the rock guitar, these 25 stories brilliantly evoke the times and disparate characters of Twentieth Century Australia.