Commandant - Softcover

Jessica Anderson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140059105 ISBN 13: 9780140059106

Publisher: Penguin Books Australia, 1988

Synopsis

In the 1830s, the penal settlement of Moreton Bay on the Brisbane River is under the command of Patrick Logan. His administration has been denounced by the liberal press in Sydney, but he scorns such criticism. How can it harm him when he had governed according to the rules?

Flogged and brutalised, some convicts escape to the bush and take refuge with the Aborigines.

Logan cannot continue to ignore the reaction to his harsh discipline after the arrival of his wife's younger sister, Frances. She cannot accept the brutality of chained and toiling men, punishment parades and the lash, and it is she who precipitates the crisis from which the final drama springs.

About this title

About the Author

Jessica Anderson was born in Gayndah, Queensland in 1916. She left school at the age of sixteen before briefly studying art at Brisbane Technical College. For most of her life she lived in Sydney.

Anderson wrote stories and adapted novels for radio before she published her first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy, in 1963. In 1978, she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Tirra Lirra by the River, and again in 1980 for The Impersonators, which also won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. In 1987 her story collection, Stories from the Warm Zone, won the Age Book of the Year award.

Jessica Anderson died in July 2010, at the age of ninety-three.

Carmen Callil founded Virago Press in 1972 and later became managing director of Chatto & Windus and the Hogarth Press. Since 1995 she has worked as a writer and critic. She is the author of Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, and co-author, with Colm Tóibín, of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Australia
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140059105
• ISBN 13: 9780140059106
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 303