The Ballad of Desmond Kale

In good condition - ex library - has markings from use - due to differing weights on books, postage maybe adjusted at checkout.

'They start out confident enough. They lose their puff, fall into ravines, double back, drop their compasses, go bush mad, and that has been the way since the colony was framed, when a line was drawn, and everyone stayed inside it. In the main, they still do. It is such a vast ocean of land they cannot imagine it, and when they do try, do not get far.'

In the early 1800s, out of the prison society of governors, redcoats, gaolers, convicts and the few free settlers of Botany Bay, none ventured much farther inland than a few dozen miles from Sydney. Those who tried came back saying it could not be done, or did not come back at all.

Or so it was believed until the brazen escape of Desmond Kale after the final vengeance of his rival, the wildly eccentric 'flogging parson' magistrate Matthew Stanton: 'Kale marched a vicious mile, changed shape over a ridgeline and was gone. His face a shadow. His bootprints evaporations in the dirt.

The Ballad of Desmond Kale is Roger McDonald's stirring novel of the first days of British settlement in Australia. At the centre is Stanton's pursuit of Kale - an Irish political prisoner and a rebelliously brilliant breeder of sheep in a place where 'even the land itself is a punishment'. When it is discovered that fine wool thrives in the country of pitiless desolation, the fledgling prison colony is galvanised by dreams and greed: 'Something was going on there you might say like new stars being born into the darkest corner of the sky.' Wool is 'a hoard of promise on yellow hooves'; currency in a colony 'where every hand is on the throat of another'.

From the back country comes rumour in the form of a ballad, disturbing proof that somewhere beyond the colony line, Desmond Kale is thriving - 'a boast to the downhearted, a bother to the secure' - and the finest wool in the colony along with him.

On both sides of the world, the alchemy of wool fascinates, threatens and transforms. This epic story of greed, conceit and redemption is also an exultant love story and a lively recreation of our past. From Botany Bay to Brazil, from the halls of Westminster and mills of Yorkshire to the Spanish sierras and shipwreck in the Southern Ocean, The Ballad of Desmond Kale intrigues and intoxicates with vigour of language, vivid characterisations and dazzling originality. Once the ballad is sung, the world can never be the same again.