Word: outbacker
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...tall tales you might hear while holidaying in Australia-a land whose residents famously love to regale visitors with made-up stories-perhaps the tallest of all will be the one you hear in Murchison Station House, a 200,000-hectare sheep farm in the Western Australian outback. There you will be told that everything you see once belonged to Mukarram Jah, the eighth Nizam of Hyderabad, and that it was all seized when he failed to pay his debts. You may be inclined to laugh when you hear this. How could Jah, the grandest of Indian kings, inheritor...
...last Caliph of Islam in Turkey; the Indian government hoped he would become a diplomat. But the impetuous young man, still sulking over the end of his kingdom, was more interested in tinkering with cars. Then, in 1972, he discovered Australia. After his first glance of the outback, he is said to have exclaimed: "I love this place, miles and miles of open country, and not a bloody Indian in sight." He bought Murchison House Station, noting that it was "the size of a country"-large enough to compensate for his lost kingdom. His pedigree would matter little there...
...debts, he sold his Perth mansion, but his troubles kept mounting. The crowning ignominy came in 1996 when, fearful that his creditors might get a warrant issued against him, Jah hurriedly caught a plane out of Australia. "The Shah" was exiled again, this time from his outback kingdom...
...whirlpool of historical change and legal tangles. Yet if Jah had used even a fraction of his money and status, he could have transformed the lives of millions of poor people in Hyderabad. At the least, he should have been able to make a farm in the outback turn a profit. Instead, after losing one of the greatest fortunes in history, the last Nizam retired to Turkey, where, we are told, he lives a modest and anonymous life, and spends his time-quite appropriately-studying Roman ruins...
...miraculous occurred. Walking slowly from the back of the hall toward the stage came a gentle giant of a man, his 1.9-m bulk wrapped around a hollowed tree trunk into which he breathed. Sculthorpe's music at once expanded, evoking the spaciousness and soaring skies of the Australian Outback; William Barton's didgeridoo was the heartbeat...