Children of Blindness

Causing a storm of controversy on first publication, Children of Blindness, a powerful drama set in the small, fictional, but archetypal outback country town of Woongarra, depicts with stunning force, the violent interaction of a small group of people; black and white, over a period of little more than a week, in which three of them die. Based on actual events at the time, this searing novel opens with Dougo Foster returning from six months in prison to find his children taken into care because of gross neglect by his drunken, pregnant wife, Flo. Dougo's furious, spontaneous attack leaves Flo hospitalised and the baby in danger. His efforts to regain his children from indigenous guardian George Davies' communal home are the central thread along which the story unfolds. Dougo's angry brother, Allan, runs the Aboriginal Legal Service, and is involved with Lesley, a white schoolteacher, who as an outsider, is horrified by conditions in the town. Allan's offsider Pete Mathews sees his boss as going soft on whitefellows as a result of his friendship with Lesley. But he has taken advantage of Dougo's prison term to fornicate with his wife, Flo. Harry Fletcher runs the segregated pub and doesn't care who buys the booze or the effect it has; even an alcohol-fuelled, violent gang-bang in the back yard. Then there's Fred Pepper, the sly grog merchant who sells illegal alcohol and deadly methylated spirits to the Aboriginal community. And Jim Dargan, a fourth-generation white landowner who savagely attacks Allan Foster, unaware that they share a common great-grandfather. Grappling with all this are a compassionate cop, Constable Ed Vickers who finds he can't stomach the daily mayhem and his colleague, red-neck Sergeant Ron Evans who, hardened by experience, regards all Aborigine as hopeless, bloody boongs. But there is little even they can do when a series of events combine to tip the teetering township over the edge, into a night of unremitting horror.
About the Author: Trish Clark has been a journalist all her working life; a period of more than forty years, in which she has worked as a newspaper columnist, a feature writer for major magazines and newspapers, a radio broadcaster and television reporter, as well as a producer of radio and television programs that have been broadcast nationally and internationally. She helped to found and establish the internationally successful science program for television, Beyond 2000, which was aired by the Discovery Channel for more than a decade. She was associate producer for the program over most of this period, shooting hundreds of stories, in scores of countries on six continents. She is the author of eight books, which include a biography, as well as fiction and non-fiction publications, including five with her husband, Iain Finlay, on Africa, South America, the South Pacific, Viet Nam and Central Asia. The two of them have recently embarked on the challenging task of wrenching back the ownership of all their titles, written solo or together and are having a deal of enjoyment in establishing an e-publishing company, through which they hope to make all their previously published and unpublished titles available to a wider public. The areas of life that interest Trish most urgently at present are the causes and cures of poverty and why power in the guise of sex, politics and money is seemingly so on-going, endemic and unavoidable. Why many people are happy not to inquire too much into history and the result of this ignorance is a subject of continuing concern and fascination for her.