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 In
the small rural Queensland town of Lawson,
where the people are still reeling from
the arrival of the 1990s and modernity, surfie teacher Lawrence
Lalor is condemned to servitude by the Catholic Education League.
From his veranda and the pub, he quickly learns the secrets
of life in the bush.
While Lawson
is just another ‘dead- kangaroo-on-the-side- of-the-road’
country town with its streets named after saints, Lawrence is
quick to learn that beneath its simple surface, it is a town
of depth and deception.
Drunken
mistakes, accidental friendships, adultery, love, murder and
the arcane practice of fish counting lead Lawrence to the discovery
that courage and dignity are more rare than precious. Lawrence
Lalor’s journey through Lawson – the jewel of the
west – gouges a scar on his emotional landscape that will
stay with him forever.
The author
 Born
in St George, Queensland in 1966, Graham Perrett was the seventh
of ten children. He’s been counting the numbers ever since.
In 1985,
he received a diploma for teaching with which he taught for
three years in Darling Downs and far north Queensland and for
a further eight years in Brisbane.
In 1993,
Graham was awarded with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours through
the University of Queensland and completed his thesis on The
Autobiography of Malcolm X. He began his law degree
in 1995 and completed it in 1999 through the Queensland University
of Technology. During the same year he became a solicitor of
the Supreme Court of Queensland.
After working
with the Queensland Independent Education Union as an organiser
Graham was admitted as a Senior Policy Advisor with the Queensland
Government. He was the ALP candidate for Moreton in the 2004
Federal Election and was elected
to the Commonwealth House of Representatives in November 2007.
Having played
in a band – Once I Killed a Gopher with a Stick –
throughout his teaching days, Graham remains a keen fan of music
and literature and also enjoys writing and bushwalking. He now
lives in Southern Brisbane with his wife Lea and son Stanley.
Graham
Perrett responds to questions about The Twelfth Fish
Graham's
maiden speech in Parliament
Prose
from the Pollie's Pen: Review in Australian
Comment
by Rosemary Sorenson in the Australian 11 October 2008
GRAHAM Perrett,
who happens to be my mum's sitting member in federal parliament
(Moreton in Brisbane), has written a novel in his spare time.
The Twelfth Fish, published by the politically astute Ian
Syson at Vulgar Press, is about "the darkest side of
human nature and life revealed in the outback Queensland town
of Lawson". Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie once
wrote a novel and he, like Perrett, also had legal training,
so maybe that's the link. Then there's judge Ian Callinan,
also a Queenslander, who has published six novels, most of
which, disturbingly, are crime thrillers. "When a politician
picks up a pen and delivers a novel," Syson suggests,
trying to pique our interest, "readers can't be blamed
for seeking out the backstory." (Paul
Maley reviews The Twelfth Fish on Page 11.)
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