Extracts from past Reviews

ROUGH WALLABY

McDonald's evocation of broken-down Australian landscape and broken-up Australian people has all the vigour, panache and cunning which...others have long sought in vain. - Canberra Times


Rarely has Sydney's fast lane been portrayed so raucously as in Rough Wallaby, a gorgeous romp with some extraordinarily complex, dynamic and thoroughly Australian characters...The pace, humour and backchat in this novel leave you quite breathless. - Sydney Morning Herald

A quirky, almost surreal satire of Australian society [which] involves a racehorse ring-in of the Fine Cotton kind...Rough Wallaby, in some ways a dark look at materialism and faded dreams of contemporary Australia, also celebrates the potential generosity of 'ordinary' people... - The Herald



THE BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE



In colonial New South Wales – where the convicts outnumber the jailers, the natives outnumber the convicts, and the sheep outnumber the lot – a whispered ballad, a “banded tale”, thrives to the status of legend. The Ballad of Desmond Kale is thus: “A famous convict escapes, an officer of rangers is outlawed, a woman decides on love, a boy is given trust by the one with wool around his wrist, a black boy is treated like shite by the same old devil, and the days roll into each other under the throbbing ball of the sun.”
As channelled by Roger McDonald, with his superior skill in extracting the best juice out of Australian history, the ballad charges through the raggedy settlement, into the “dangerous paradise past Toongabbie”, and eventually crosses oceans. As for Desmond Kale, the escaped Irish convict with a gift for sheep and infamy, he disappears into the interior – “the vast impoverishedterra incognita” – with his convict lass and ram of choice. Of Kale we know little more, and perhaps less than we started with, and for an Irish ballad that’s as it should be.
The Ballad of Desmond Kale is really about his assorted progeny, liberators, supporters and enemies, most notably Pastor Matthew Stanton – “a dusty frog of a man ... with a vital energy so extreme it almost squeaked with gristle every time he twitched”. McDonald evokes those early days in the “colony of forced improvers” with a visceral and poetic sense of language, land and character. Botany Bay, with its shady surrounds and occupants, is at last rewarded with a storyteller born to the task. - The Monthly


WHEN COLTS RAN

Triumph...A virtuoso prose performance. It is both precise in image and expansive in the subject to which it gestures. It is McDonald's finest work and clearly one of the novels of the decade. - Australian Book Review

The novel's richness of characters and incidents is extraordinary, as is McDonald's control over a narrative that seems to have little shape they reveals remarkable coherence. McDonald pulled off that feat by means of the novel's supple, allusive, often ironic but never sarcastic tone. His diction - they storyteller's voice - is unlike anything else in contemporary Australian writing. - The Sydney Morning Herald


MR DARWIN'S SHOOTER

Engaging...fully imagined and imbued with intellectual curiosity...McDonald's prose is uniformly well turned, and even his minor characters are observed with accuracy and humour. - New York Times

A lavish, rich novel. - The Independent

A work of distinction. - The Boston Globe

An unerring touch. - The Australian

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