Word: australian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lorin Hawes started out as a U.S. nuclear physicist, but in 1956 he emigrated to Australia because, he says, "I was fed up with warmongering, hillbilly officers, the CIA, the Pentagon, the whole damn lot." He lectured in Australian universities, but by 1965 found Australian society also becoming too militaristic for his liking. He then turned for his living to what had become his hobby: making and throwing boomerangs. Says the 39-year-old Hawes, a sardonic, 280-lb. mountain of a man: "I decided to join the select group of people who work less and earn more by being...
...that his boomerang comes reliably back to the thrower, whereas the aboriginal product often does not. Be that as it may, Hawes has become Australia's boomerang king. He employs seven workers, who turn out 60,000 boomerangs a year. Most are sold in gift shops in major Australian cities, but a quarter of the output is shipped to North America and Europe for sporting clubs and wives whose husbands have everything else. In addition, about 150,000 paying tourists a year turn up at Hawes' bushland farm, which he calls a "boomerangery." Those who buy boomerangs...
...Aboriginal and Island Affairs, which every year sells 40,000 boomerangs made by aborigines living on missions. Department spokesmen insist that only aboriginal boomerangs can make two complete circles in the air before dropping at the feet of the thrower. Senator Neville Bonner, an aborigine, has introduced in the Australian Parliament legislation that would in effect restrict boomerang making to his race. It has got nowhere-partly because Bonner had no success trying to demonstrate the superiority of the aboriginal product. At a press showing in Canberra, he scaled a boomerang that got stuck in a tree; the embarrassed Senator...
Exploring these questions Australian Novelist Keneally seems to write from within the marrow of his protagonist. Without blinking the horror, which is based on a real incident, he makes it what it rarely seems to be in real life: plausible and thus human...
...with spin-offs from historic incidents. It is a measure of his craft that he does not try to plug these themes into today's headlines for a cheap jolt of relevance. Jimmie's tale is played out against a background of incidental chatter and speculation about Australian federation, which in 1900 united the continent's six major colonies into a commonwealth. In the end the reader sees that this is not the background, but the whole point. The tragic contradictions in Jimmie's life are in fact the unresolved agonies out of which a nation...