When a group of desert children invite their school teacher, Mrs White, home for dinner to show her why their homework is always grubby, no one expects what is to come!
They are happily showing Mrs White their higgledy piggledy garden when suddenly a big red sand storm comes billowing over the hill. Sand and spinifex whips at their legs and flies at their heads. They can hardly see through the storm.
They hurry back home, only to discover that everything is now red. Their lovely clean house is covered in red dust. The beds are red. The washing on the line is red. The table is red. Their delicious dinner is red and ruined. And Mrs White’s clean white dress has turned into a dusty red dress. Now Mrs White finally knows why the children’s homework is always so grubby!
But that won’t stop Ishmael and his intrepid band of misfits from taking on bullies, bugs, babes, the Beatles, debating and the great white whale in the toughest, the weirdest, the most humiliatingly awful – and best – year of their lives!
The novel’s portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown
Josie Wowolla Boyle is a Wonghi woman who was born in the desert of Western Australia. She is an acclaimed storyteller, singer and artist who has been enchanting children of all ages since the 1980s. Josie performs in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. She has made a number of recordings, worked as an artist in […]
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Michael Gerard Bauer, is is the award-winning author of Don’t Call Me Ishmael. He has taught English and economics, and lives in the suburb of Ashgrove, Australia.
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Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in Tennant Creek, and the novels Plains of Promise, and Carpentaria, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Victorian and Queensland Premiers’ Awards and the ALS […]
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