Robert Drewe

'Listen to me,' my mother says. 'They've let off an atom bomb today. Right here in W.A. Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, and I want you at home.' In the sleepy and conservative 1950s, the British began a series of nuclear tests in the Montebello archipelago off the west coast of Australia. Even today, few people know...

Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach—and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family—The Bodysurfers is an Australian classic. A short-story collection which has become a bestseller and been adapted for film, television, radio, and the theatre, The Bodysurfers on its first publication marked a major change in Australian literature.

Our Sunshine is the tale of a man whose story outgrew his life. Robert Drewe's strikingly imaginative re-creation of the inner life of Ned Kelly is written with a brilliant clarity and impressionistic economy. It carries the reader into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation, an entrancing and frightening landscape of murder, sexuality, persecution, robbery, vanity, politics, and corruption....

Aged six, Robert Drewe moved with his family from Melbourne to Perth, the world's most isolated city—and proud of it. This sun-baked coast was innocently proud, too, of its tranquillity and friendliness. Then a man he knew murdered a boy he also knew. The murderer randomly killed eight strangers—variously shooting, strangling, stabbing, bludgeoning, and hacking his victims and running them...

The untold story of Johnny Day, Australia's first international sports hero - a tale of mishap, adventure, chase, chance and luck - from one of Australia's finest writers. At the age of ten, a small boy from Ballarat named Johnny Day became Australia's first international sporting hero. Against adult competition, he wooed crowds across continents as the World Champion in...

Internationally acclaimed as a novelist and memoirist, Robert Drewe returns to the short-story territory he has made his own. Set against a backdrop—the Australian coast—as randomly and imminently violent as it is beautiful, The Rip reveals the fragility of relationships between husbands and wives, children and parents, friends and lovers. You will find yourself set down in a modern Garden...

No holds are barred as the Cleary family attempts to put long-held tensions behind them to celebrate a milestone. What could possibly go wrong? Kungadgee, Victoria, Australia. A weekend in late November, 2014. At Hugh and Christine Cleary's new vineyard, Whipbird, six generations of the Cleary family are coming together from far and wide to celebrate the 160th anniversary of...