GURREWA SYNOPSIS…
(Gurrewa, finalist in the quest for the world's best historical eBook of 2002)

GURREWA is the first novel on the Founding of White Australia told through convict eyes, since Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life published in 1870.

It is the story of Australia’s white settlement and the Aboriginal demise told both through the eyes of a convict lad learning about life, people and values, and the eyes of the Sydney Cove Aborigines. It empties the vacuum cleaner with which modern Australians are at last cleaning under the carpet where, for generations, the dust of truth has been swept.

Adam is a London gutter waif, his only skill the art of street survival. In happy ignorance he accepts his world, evaluates humanity not according to precepts of social expectation but of experience. He seeks tenderness and succour in an environment that provides neither, as in adolescence he is savaged by the horrors of the hulks and transportation. His emotions find outlets in dreaming, in torment, in love, in adventure. From his first days at Sydney Cove, he lives the shame that is a nation’s founding.

The Aborigine too, finds his securities shattered, faced with the dilemma of the painful, terrible realisation that his heritage is crumbling.

The story begins with capture, chains, fearful realisations of man’s animosity and indifference. Flashbacks depict the environment typical of the convict brought to Australia’s shores, the characteristics of the narrow ignorant world of the street urchins who provide his measure of life’s standards.

In Newgate prison, his every security is threatened and on the Hulks his mind and body suffer disparagement beyond belief. The butt of intimidation and victimisation, he questions past standards and wrestles with new. Threatened securities become shattered and he can but dream of a world where there is compassion and dignity. The voyage introduces him to new standards, becomes a time of hope, self-pity and soul searching. Yet at Sydney Cove, optimism and zeal turn to anguish. Falling in love with Meg is all that saves his soul in the helpless degradation of convict life. Disparaged that in the convict heart is only shame for his world, he discovers in the black man’s culture, solace and dignity.

Yet the shame will not die.

Alongside the Aborigine he takes up the fight against the white advance—a fearful, emotional war that cannot be won.