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About the author

Wakefield Press

Stephen Orr was born in Adelaide in 1967 and grew up in Hillcrest. He studied teaching and spent his early career in a range of country and metropolitan schools. One of his early plays, Attempts to Draw Jesus, became his first Australian/Vogel shortlisted novel, published in 2002. Since then he has published seven novels, a volume of short stories (Datsunland) and two books of non-fiction (The Cruel City and The Fierce Country). He has been nominated for awards such as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the International Dublin Literary Award. This Excellent Machine is the first volume in an anticipated trilogy of childhood novels.

Stephen Orr is married and lives in Adelaide.

Title page

Epigraphs

One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the tree of knowledge. Sometimes you swung back into the wood, as the unthinking may take a familiar road that no longer leads to home; or you perched ostentatiously on its boughs to please me, pretending that you still belonged; soon you knew it only as the vanished wood, for it vanishes if one needs to look for it.

J.M. Barrie

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

James Agee

Prologue

LOOKING BACK, I can’t say what made 1984 so special. A succession of failed driving tests? The man in the picture in Mrs Donnellan’s house? Mr Champness telling me the difference between regent and king parrots? Datsuns (always Datsuns)? Or maybe it was our journey north, and the search for Lasseter’s Reef. Looking out my bedroom window to see a couple of dogs going their hardest under a rosemary bush. Dave Donnellan (put out for sun) singing his mum’s songs. Or Curtis, forever telling me I was a dickhead.

No. A place, person—time—can only be known by knowing the things that went with them. Mixed with them. Coloured and flavoured them. That’s how I see it, now. We all lived and breathed and shared fruit because of those small moments of grace.

‘I know you.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Clem … Clem Whelan.’

‘No, he’s in Grade Seven.’

The old girl looked over the gal fence. ‘That went straight through my flyscreen.’

I didn’t reply. It didn’t look good. We’d been throwing lemons on the oval and I’d chucked one over her fence. It’d hit something and the others had run away, but I’d done the right thing and climbed the Moreton Bay to see what had happened. And then she’d peered over, hair rollers and all. ‘Clem Whelan. Your pop fixed my car one time.’