What Comrade Oldie Knew - Willis, H. A.
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The summer of 2010-11 was Perth's driest for a century. The city's reservoirs were down to the mud and the ground water aquifers were being pumped for all they could give. Toiling away in the State archives, Comrade Oldie discovers some rather disturbing facts about those aquifers - information some powerful people would rather not be disclosed. When a former colleague dies in mysterious circumstances, and a manuscript goes missing, Oldie realizes that he had better be careful about what he says to whom - then he meets Blondie, a gorgeous photographer he wants to impress. Before he knows it,…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
The summer of 2010-11 was Perth's driest for a century. The city's reservoirs were down to the mud and the ground water aquifers were being pumped for all they could give. Toiling away in the State archives, Comrade Oldie discovers some rather disturbing facts about those aquifers - information some powerful people would rather not be disclosed. When a former colleague dies in mysterious circumstances, and a manuscript goes missing, Oldie realizes that he had better be careful about what he says to whom - then he meets Blondie, a gorgeous photographer he wants to impress. Before he knows it, trouble is coming straight at Oldie with the momentum of a heavily loaded, speeding truck. He discovers you don't need an earthquake to find out you can't trust the ground under your feet. Although seriously ill with hepatitis C, Oldie is a man who will be late to -- or even miss -- his own funeral. He decides that in his circumstances even an honest man has little choice other than to just take the money and run. Central to the novel is an affectionate depiction of Perth and life on Australia's west coast. With a cast of characters including a building that talks, Professor Mayakovsky and Judex's dove, Willis gives himself space to combine droll humor with social critiques.
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Autorenporträt
Willis was born at Colac and grew up in Apollo Bay, Kyneton and Ballarat. He subsequently lived in Darwin, Auckland (1970-80) and rural Tasmania before settling with his wife and two young sons in Perth in late 1981. As a student at La Trobe University in the late 1960s, Willis was part of a group that wrote and produced the first issue of Cinema Papers (Oct 1967). While studying at the University of Auckland, he was a founding member of Alternative Cinema, an Auckland film-makers' cooperative established in 1972. He contributed articles to and edited several early issues of that group's journal, Alternative Cinema. Willis later (1976) wrote an in-depth account of the New Zealand film industry for Cinema Papers. In 1974-5 Willis produced a half-hour television documentary, Stanley. This concerned the twelve-day manhunt (in October 1941) for mass killer Stanley Graham. Based on his interviews with participants in the manhunt, and his access to the previously closed Police files, Willis went on to write Manhunt, the most detailed and definitive account of the event. The feature film Bad Blood, based on his book, starred Jack Thompson and Carol Burns. After settling in Western Australia, Willis worked as an archival researcher, film script assessor (WA Film Council, 1991-93), book editor and reviewer. Between 1989 and 2006, he wrote about 250 reviews for The West Australian, The Age and The Canberra Times. He also wrote a number of longer articles on subjects that included the closure of the old Metters stove factory in Perth, chronic pain, east European cultural and political history, cultural stereotyping, and environmental issues. In an essay on Colonial frontier violence he identified and reproduced the first known photograph (1865) taken in the Kimberley region. His essay on pain was selected as the Western Australian finalist for the MBF Health and Well Being awards for 1994. In 1994 he interviewed Tim Winton for Eureka Street; Winton later dedicated his novel Breath (2008) to Willis. Willis has been involved in two aspects of the Australian "History Wars". When Keith Windschuttle published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One (2002), Willis undertook a detailed analysis of the author's cited sources in order to dispute his figure for Tasmanian Aborigines killed during hostilities in Van Diemen's Land. In relation to that debate, Robert Manne described Willis as "a conservative scholar ... known for his scrupulousness". In 2010, he joined the debate over the introduction and history of smallpox in Australia, arguing that the origin of the 1789 outbreak near Sydney was most likely from a Macassan introduction through Northern Australia. As a non-fiction editor, Willis prepared for publication (including the title) The Last of the Last (2009), the autobiography of Claude Choules, the last combat veteran of World War I. At the time of publication Choules was 108, making him the world's oldest first time author. Other titles edited by Willis include From Kastellorizo (2006), Michael (Stratos) Jack Kailis's memoir of his extended family, and Nurses with Altitude (2008), a collection of stories by Western Australian nurses of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Between 1982 and 1991 Willis published eleven short stories in various literary journals, including Overland, Australian Short Stories, Brave New Word, Going Down Swinging, The Weekend Australian, and Island Magazine. In 2010, he indexed and was one of the editorial annotators of The Australind Journals of Marshall Waller Clifton 1840-1861. In 2011 he wrote the introductory essay to a reprinted edition of Thermo-Electrical Cooking Made Easy, by Nora Curle-Smith, first published in Kalgoorlie in 1907, and claimed to be the world's first cookbook for an electric stove.