Brogan … SYNOPSIS
(First in a series of Brogan’s life and adventures)

Some call Australia the lucky country, land of opportunity, continent of contrasts. All true. Some call Australia’s people brash, basic and brutally forthright. Also true.

Eighty-five percent of Australians inhabit the temperate southeast crescent, ten percent live in the tropical north and but five percent inhabit eighty percent of this fifth largest continent in the world.

Brogan, born in the drifting sands of corner-country on desert-edge, of drifting parents, his values founded on the rationale of drifting drovers, is of the latter few.

The turn of the nineteenth century in the far outback, fifty years after the first historic yet fatal excursion into the vast unknown centre, remained a time of dogged struggle to even survive the conditions; yet a hard core of men and women braved persistent droughts in their world of heat and sand and paradoxically, periodic floods so widespread that the vast plains became an impassable inland sea.

Of formal education, medical aid, contact with settled parts in those days, there was none. Neighbours lived a hundred miles distant and camels were beasts of burden for supplies as well as trusty ‘steeds’ of transport; no other creature could traverse the waterless terrain.

Brogan the boy, neglected and lonely, discovers life under the patronage of such unlikely mentors as the ‘black nuns’ of the aboriginal mission at Milparinka who ‘mother’ him, the old Afghani camel driver who ‘fathers’ him and a cocky farmer in Queensland’s channel-country who harbours him. Kelly, an aboriginal ‘yellahair’, befriends him. And let’s not ignore, of course, the poxed and grasping Elsie who uses him.

The Brogan story exemplifies the life, trials and tribulations of typical Australians in the unforgiving outback.