BIGFELLA KIDMAN: EVERYONE DESERVES A FAIR GO

When Sid Kidman brings his family to England for a year's holiday in 1908, he is fifty-one and already the biggest private landowner the world has ever seen. BIGFELLA KIDMAN is the first book in a much longer story called THE SONG OF THE BUTCHER BIRD, and they both begin when Sid had been in London for six months. By that time the real Australian Cattle King had become something of a celebrity, partly because of his height and his distinctive wide-brimmed hat, partly because of his outspoken newspaper interviews, and partly because his preferred way of getting around the city was to climb aboard a two-horse bus and tip the driver to let him take the reins. Sid also believed in the principle that everyone deserves a fair go. At home, he was one of a small minority of white colonialists who extended this principle to the Aborigines, and their disgraceful treatment is one of the themes of this story. In London, Sid admired the horsemanship of the horse-bus drivers as much as he respected the bushcraft of the blackfellas, and in BIGFELLA KIDMAN he makes an open, front page offer of jobs in Australia for the hundreds of horse-bus drivers who were losing their livelihoods to the London General's new-fangled red motorbuses. He also attracts the attention of one of Britain's most powerful financiers, who invites the Kidmans to his country house and offers Sid a deal that could double the Cattle King's outback empire almost overnight. There are long strings attached to Lord Saltwood's investment proposal, and Bel Kidman advises her impetuous husband not to touch it with a bargepole. But Sid cannot resist the deal or the challenge that comes with it, and his agreement, like his job offer to the horse-bus drivers, will turn the lives of all the main characters in BIGFELLA KIDMAN upside down, whitefellas and blackfellas, on both sides of the world. BIGFELLA KIDMAN is available in paperback in UK bookshops, and in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon worldwide.

BOOMERANG
OCTOBER 1917
PROLOGUE
Not that it made much difference in the Queensland bush, but it was a Thursday morning early in the dry season when the big white man came out of his bark hut, shotgun first. He was badly hungover and ready to belt the living daylights out of the lazy slut who should have been brewing him a billy of tea. As he half expected, there was no fire burning in the silent, empty clearing. No black girl cowering. No billy brewing. None of the muted noise and movement of morning among the cluster of shabby wurleys that normally housed his Aborigines. Even the busybody mobs of galahs and parakeets that usually filled the gidgee trees with raucous squabbling had fled. The big man shifted the shotgun into the crook of his right arm and walked across the clearing to the nearest deserted wurley. There was nothing to show it had ever been occupied. He swore and aimed a vicious kick at the side of the ramshackle structure, and he was opening his flies to piss into the hole he had made when he saw the skeleton emerging from the long morning shadows of the trees, just thirty yards or so from where he was standing...

THE SAGA STARTS HERE IN SEPTEMBER 1908…

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The larger of the two newcomers was a full-blooded Aborigine woman, her face creased by a deep frown...
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His dad used to tell him you could smell London ten miles before you saw the first houses...
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Even the combination of his father's wealth and his mother's ancestry would not be enough...
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