The Roving Party arrived in the middle of the night. It was September 2007. Kobe, Japan. The last place you should be pondering a man like John Batman, the son of a Parramatta convict, a pioneer settler, a bounty hunter, a killer of men. But there I was, rolling off my futon and onto the tatami floor, reaching for my laptop to type. Somehow, the framework of a novel had fallen half-formed from my subconscious and I had to get it down.
For years the stories of men like Wooreddy, Manalargena, Brady, and Batman had been brewing inside me, fed on a grist of great historians and cowboy movies. I’d written short stories. I’d written bits and pieces of novels. Things you wouldn’t even show your wife. Twaddle. But I had never published anything, never even finished anything. I was exactly what my teachers had always warned me I would become: an underachiever. Or what my boss in Japan somewhat less tactfully called a “useless bloody turd”. Now that wort of frontier violence and heroic myth had fermented into a clear, workable outline in the middle of the night. It was a revelatory moment.
What I had needed was a push. A few days earlier the president of the company where I was teaching English had sent a fax out to all 1,000 schools, explaining that God had decided to test the company and that we must prove our faith in him by working without salary for a week. It seemed the company was toiletbowling and sucking us along with it. But we held out hope. There were rumours of an obscure Japanese law, a system of compensation for workers dudded out of their entitlements: work until the company collapses, and the government will repay a percentage of the lost wages. It wasn’t much, but it kept most of us working until the creditors came to carry off the furniture. Or in my case, working, and then writing like a condemned man in breaks between classes.
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