Brendan James Murray

A chance encounter in a fish-'n'-chip shop set Brendan Murray on the trail of a mystery. Had a gay man been secretly murdered on HMAS Australia during the Second World War? The veteran he spoke to was certain. 'I knew about it,' he said. 'We all did.' But was the story true? If so, who was the dead man? And...

Brendan Murray redefines memoir in this haunting excavation of his own experiences as a child, teacher, and parent to discover why imagination is so important throughout our lives. Brendan James Murray's childhood was one of stark contrasts: vivid imaginative adventures but also disadvantage, fear, and the shadow of a school he spent months refusing to attend. When a silhouette on...

In the early years of the twentieth century, an awareness was growing among European Australians of an unexpected threat, one that seemed the very embodiment of the dark, ominous power of the Australian bush. To the Indigenous people of the Guugu Yimithirr nation, it was nguman; to the whites, it was the taipan, an eight-foot, lightning-fast venomous snake whose bite...