The things people throw away

’In the early 70s, a teenage boy flees a disturbing religious community in Melbourne to cross the Nullarbor and find the old mining town of Ora Banda. A dream comes unstuck’ -- publisher. In this allegorical road novel Allan takes a familiar theme, the loss of innocence, and invests his 1970s with a rare mixture of candour, religion and violence. "I despise fatalistic novels. Fate denies us the opportunity to change history. If a character’s decisions are made for him, or have been made ineffectual, then all decisions become meaningless. Characters then become like aeroplanes forever trapped on auto-pilot, their course set for a steady and certain decline, rising or falling at the mercy of the wind, yet still set for an inevitable collision, a kind of personal ground-zero predictable by basic geometry. Plot is an arbitrary attack on the good sense of memory. I have great faith in memory. I have no faith in fate. I could turn off this highway as easily as you can turn the page."