Tiger Men by Judy Nunn, Random House, $32.95.
Spanning 65 years of Tasmanian history from 1853 to 1918, actor and best-selling author Judy Nunn follows the fortunes of three disparate yet inexorably linked families in the sweeping saga Tiger Men.
Where the term used to describe the bounty hunters who hunted the Tasmanian tiger into extinction, in Judy’s writing it refers instead to the novel’s eponymous new barons of industry who pillage Van Diemen’s Land of its natural resources for their own gains.
At the opening of the book, the docks of Hobart Town are ruled by the roughest; jailors and convicts who arrived in chains.
The sealers and whalers have fished the seas dry and the indigenous population have been fatally transported to Bass Strait.
Progressively philanthropic colonists and do-good clergy will groom the city into sophistication and prosperity, triumphantly bathed in electric light and boasting running trams.
Nunn’s founding cast in book one, wealthy English wool merchant Silas Stanford, paddy-on-the-run Mick O’Callaghan and US political prisoner Jefferson Powell, set out on very different paths, but their labyrinthine families will collide and collude.
As books two and three unfold, their century-old politics are breached by new thinking generations.
“Don’t work for your money, marry it,” was the word on the Wapping slum streets and in the brothels in the days before penal reform, but when money still does not buy respect and acceptance, blackmail and bribery cannot keep love at bay.
The days of buying silence and aborting the fruits of infidelity must be replaced with burying hatchets, and acts of heroism and true love.
The advent of the telephone and the Turkey Trot dance heralds the newest brigade of young guns at war with the eye of the tiger clearly facing the enemy on a united front. An epic miniseries in the making?
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