The Following, page 25
Nick came wading through the chop to catch the bow of the dinghy before it struck rocks. They swapped roles without much to say. Tiger unbuckled, threw Nick his lifejacket and stepped out staggering. Tiger held the nose of the dinghy while Nick strapped on the lifejacket.
Do you really want to do this? was Tiger’s wordless look. Nick’s return-look seemed to say, Who are you talking to?
‘Ready,’ he said.
Tiger let the dinghy go and the small craft, after a moment of sulky sidling, took a liking to Nick and went bounding away through the chop – straight out into the white-capped channel to perform and caper.
When Tiger looked up next, Nick was stacking out as far as he could, Red Lemon straining at every lashing the wind could give her.
Author’s Note
Assembled with my schoolmates in the playground of Temora Public School on the 17th of October 1949, I heard the voice of the prime minister, Ben Chifley, on the radio, at the launch of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and assumed that he was the one who pushed the explosives plunger and made the loudspeakers on the classroom verandah ruffle so memorably. But history tells me otherwise: it was the Governor-General, William McKell, who pushed the plunger – and so Book One of The Following, derived from that echo, is owed to a ghost of Ben Chifley, with apologies to the real one. Likewise, throughout this book, it is a ghost of the party he belonged to, not the party itself providing a focus of spiritual attachment. Therefore it has no name.
Book Two is owed, with gratitude, and in a delight of fictional reworking, to my brother, Donal McDonald, and the jackaroos of Inverarity Station and points north-west of the black stump quite a few years past. Thanks, Don, for what I took without asking from stories that are so much yours. Thanks, too, to the invaluable writings of Patsy Adam-Smith on fettler life, Ruth Park’s on her youth, and George MacDonald Fraser’s recollections of Burma.
Book Three of The Following is owed in lasting friendship to Rob Fenwick, Jennie Fenwick, Greg Shand, the late Diana Shand, and above all, with love and thanks for more than words can say, to my wife, Susie Fisher.
Finally, my thanks to Trevor Shearston for a writer’s words when needed most.
Roger McDonald was born at Young, New South Wales, and educated at country schools and in Sydney. His writing has been awarded the Adelaide Festival Book of the Year, the New South Wales, South Australian and Victorian Premiers’ Prizes, and the Miles Franklin Award. The Following is his ninth novel.
Also by Roger McDonald
Fiction
1915
Slipstream
Rough Wallaby
Water Man
The Slap
Mr Darwin’s Shooter
The Ballad of Desmond Kale
When Colts Ran
Non-Fiction
Shearers’ Motel
The Tree In Changing Light
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Version 1.0
The Following
ePub 9781742759937
Copyright © Roger McDonald, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published by Vintage in 2013
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
McDonald, Roger, 1941 – author.
The following/Roger McDonald.
ISBN 9781742759937 (ebook)
Subjects: Political fiction, Australian.
A823.3
Lines on page 149 from ‘Parting’ by Boris Pasternak, as translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater, published in Fifty Poems by Allen & Unwin, 1963.
Song lyrics on page 185 from ‘South Coast’, written by Frank Miller, Sam Eskin, Lillian Bos Ross and Richard Dehr, published by J. Albert & Sons and performed by The Kingston Trio.
Cover image © Nikki Smith/arcangel-images.com
Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia
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Roger McDonald, The Following
