Download or read book Tasker Tusker Tasker written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Tasker is a divided, but enjoined, man. Physically he is running from the law while hunting down his own father, just as his father used to track down the wild tuskers in Sri Lanka. At the same time, mentally, he is tracking down his murderous brother’s enemies, imaginably or not, with a deadly efficiency. Adding to his confusion is how his indolent lawyer’s job in the Attorney-General’s Department has itself suddenly become fraught with danger for his own personal safety. The resultant clash that erupts between his fervently-adopted Australia and his fervently-rejected Sri Lanka isn’t helping the mental chaos he is thrown into on an otherwise perfectly-acceptable day. One trouble is his state of being so enjoined. Through his own mind’s-eye he sees how his own milieu has been drawing him inevitably towards the cliff’s edge. Also through his-and-his-brother’s mind’s-eye he sees too much of the terrorizing worldwide Tamil organizations, and from a close-up much too gory. And through his-and-his-father’s mind’s-eye he sees no good nurture purpose to his existence, except the sighing and dying and the leavings from him. He can see how it’s all so willfully like his father’s wild snared tuskers endeavouring to escape, trying to drag the lines dragging the antler’d sambhur’s skulls through the hopelessly impossible bush. On top of all this, he has the living scaffold of the Sri Lankan Inspector Ekanayake now-and-ever looming over him. The Inspector doesn’t care a hoot about any mind’s-eye or mind’s-eyes, ‘bloody ****ing hell sorry’. He only cares for the hunt’s conclusion, and how John Tasker should know it. What is the Inspector doing in Canberra and asking so many pointed questions? What might he know about the shadowy and murderous Tasker twin brother with, apparently, the justified alias of Tusker? All John Tasker can now see is how his world and the manic world of his fearsome brother are being forced to converge so suddenly and so bizarrely. This is the first title in the ongoing Inspector Ekanayake series.

Download or read book You Want It Don t You Billy written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2016-07-02 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill and Billy are having marital problems but these pall when compared to the problems they have to face from their next door neighbour. If that wasn’t enough, there is the general alarm put out to be on the alert for a serial murderer thought to be in the district. In the heavy night of the Mornington countryside, their weekender cottage offers scant protection from what is determined to befall them from the outside and what is determined to torment them from the inside. It is not as if they find themselves living in some scripted fiction where the fear comes driving at them intermittently but can be pulled back from with a flick of a light switch. No, this night they find themselves within the clutches of an evil that is constant, unharboured and unanchored. This night the pretend-fear becomes the real fear… the production gallops towards reality. It is difficult to tell who is who, or what is what. The only thing Bill and Billy – and anyone else – know is that all becomes very real dead mad.

Download or read book Little She written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He hadn’t told his son he was adopted, nor that his son had a twin sister who hadn’t been handed over with him when they travelled from Melbourne to India all that time ago to pick up both infants. Part of his silence was the guilt of being on the end of what was then undoubtedly a child-racketeering scam. Charged by his estranged wife to go back to India to find out more about the recent brutal murder of their son – and, consequentially, what had happened to the infant girl child, Smith found himself having to fight his way through the bland face of locals’ attitudes to death, religious extreme rituals and behaviour, and especially towards female infanticide. In order to get relatable explanations, he has to confront the fiercest of Tantric rites through the most grotesque, whack-job so-called wise man, Nandi Baba, through police dismissal, through the ignominy of caste prejudice, and through the motiveless violence of local crime. Smith was never going to succeed in learning much. But, for all the little grace he has left in him, he does find his Little She. And to explain it all to his wife, he could only illuminate it all through himself as third-party – and only a sort of son et lumiere projection could illuminate what is going in even his own mind. But whether he succeeds or not, nothing can stop their damnable karmic wheel from a’turning, a’turning.

Download or read book Truganinni Inside Out written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2016-06-27 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven years after King Billy’s death, Truganinni stood alone, arguably the most important living relic of her Tasmanian race. She would walk the streets of Hobart Town, resembling Queen Victoria in her voluminous skirts and headdress. She quite enjoyed the curiosity and finger pointing wherever she went. And she could go anywhere. Towards the end, she appeared to bear no malice towards her race’s persecutors. Growing stoutish, she smoked a pipe and enjoyed a daily jug of beer. But she began to grow ill and as her death loomed, so did the memories of what happened to King Billy’s body. On 8 May 1876, at the approximate age of 73, Truganinni died. She is said to have cried out, ‘Don’t let them cut me up. Bury me behind the mountains.’ Only hours after the news, body-snatchers in the Royal Society of Tasmania started to bark for her body, as they had successfully done regarding King Billy. The government fought toe and nail politically to fight them off. Did it matter to the old girl? No, she was off regally floating across the Dreamtime skies of Australia, raising hell with her beloved Nanna, on their Shag Magnet anyway. By then the mission on Flinders Island of Act 1, and McKay’s house in Hobart Town in Act 3, were the least she wanted to put a bomb under... ------------------------- Bill Reed is a novelist, playwright and short-story writer. He has worked as editor and journalist both in Australia and overseas, and has won national competitions for drama and for long and short fiction.

Download or read book Bullsh written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous narrative writtenn for nthe stage around Ron Edwards' best-selling book 'Australian Yarns'

Download or read book Living on Mars written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2016-01-16 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A harvesting of 6 full-length plays by Bill Reed which have not been published in book or ebook form before, yet were performed by professional companies.

Download or read book The Wolfman of Oz written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Y ou could say man into wolf and wolf into man got blasted into existence. You could also say the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Tasmanian Wolf got blasted out of existence. It’s called extinction and it lasts forever and, when Ihe the wolfman did the sums of early Tasmania, it all added up. This was except for one thing… the existence of the truly last Thylacine Wolf hiding out somewhere life-giving and life-preserving from the ever-hunters and the always-killers. This made it all the more urgent for Ihe to find the great beast first, in order to brace up its unique animal-kind courage before they tracked it down. They are always tracking it down. But Ihe was Man and also Wolf, as one, and he was on the scent too… that for every eye done to extinction was a human hunter’s eye and for every done-in eye tooth was a human hunter’s tooth. And for flesh, what better than human flesh? But first, there was his famous arch-enemy to hunt down and run from, both. It was bad enough when he planted his foot in the wrong place and the Army’s report about it concluding: ‘In any hairy situations, this will undoubtedly change how he gets a lot of looks’. But what would the Army know about the trauma that transmogrifies? It’s always been nits or nothing with him, anyhow. It’s just that Ihe the wolfman didn’t want to end up like the presumed last Tasmanian Wolf hanging from a rafter. That great shame.

Download or read book Living on Mars the play written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry had one good eye until the surgeon lost even that one’s lens down some drain. He had a wife he could call his own until she started to shack up very noisily with some young turk Australian postgraduate in his (Henry’s) own home. He had a housekeeper until she left in built-up disgust claiming Henry continuously confessed to some vague past unspeakable crime. Henry also had this itch which his new housekeeper – his wife’s cousin – could keep in check with her very personal fingernails. Then there was his house-full of irreplaceable objects until his new housekeeper’s husband came along and proceeded to methodically clean him out. Try as he might, though, Henry couldn’t get rid of was his famous father’s specimen jars of Australian Aboriginal parts... an internationally acclaimed collection which no one, not even the housekeeper’s husband, wanted to rid him off. All this was obviously conspiring to rob him of his morning banana. The thing is he didn’t even have his Australia anymore since fate’s blindness had him stranded there in Port Moresby, where even people he didn’t know were outside gathering into an angry mob just because (he thinks) he is he. Unfair is unfair no matter how incapable you are of looking at it. Still, Henry always had the driven-self of living on Mars, if only he could have gotten around to it.

Download or read book Mirror Mirror written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stranded in his Sydney flat, the journalist John Rinner tries to explain his Dad-dud existence to his daughter by telephone. This is not easy since he hasn’t seen her in 18 years and she is on the other side of the world working in an Amsterdam hotel with little time to listen to an excuse for a Dad. Just as his working life in the field with the UN Childrens Fund now seems only smoke-and-mirrors, so does Rinner’s own life seem as it flashes past him in delusion and illusion, and with more bottoms than tops. This seems especially relevant to his real-or-imagined North Queensland aboriginal roots... almost as much as the witnessing the world’s abuse of its children has scarred him. But, more and more, the cross connections of telephone torment continue, escalating in him into looking down into a sump rather than getting any sort of expiation from reconnecting with his beloved daughter. At least it is a mirror on the wall there, and not the sad sack that is himself. At least, too, the mirror gives back to him a more intelligent conversation than he can get from other human beings these end of days. He is still, though barely, intuitive enough to be able to appreciate being able to tell it: ‘You heard the one about the guy going up to a mirror on the wall and spouting, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the....?”’ --------------

Download or read book The Rhyming Cutlets of Pirip written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2021-03-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We cannot blame Charles Dickens for not meeting our national Arts treasure Philip P. Pirip, but: go blame yr rottern Fate; whos flushs beat yr faces straights It could be said, though, Dickens did lend his major characters to Philip P. Pirip, although ‘lend’ might not be the best word; rather freedom opened the door to its wide-open spaces to allow them to escape and give vent to their grievances with their famous author, seeing as to how he never once mentioned the fabulous Surnevv diamonds that they once had their hands on and now wanted back at whatever cost to literature. Fabulous royalties might have been Charles Dickens’s lot but the diamonds were the only avenue for riches beyond creative writing for Miss Haversham, Estella, Mister Jaggers, Compeyson, Orlick, Biddy and a whole cast of actors and naked ‘actrusses’ who now demanded their jewel dues and were willing to kill for them. That escape fell to them after ‘Great Expectations’ found its way onto one of the heaps in the rubbish tip that was beloved of Pirip and in fact the location of his Tiphome, a dump in itself. From that fact, it was only a short fictional distance for the Dickens’s characters to land on Pirip’s lap with a vengeance. They came to lap but I stukk out tongue, ‘take thapt’! How our hero struggles with them might not be in any universal history books but, in artistic circles, it set the standard for the license to cull.

Download or read book Just Out of Your Ground written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a rollicking play about one of the founding and/or foundling fathers of Western Australia… Thomas Peel, first cousin of the then British Prime Minister. He was the leader of the first organized group of settlers, but from the moment he arrived on western shores, he became, as it were, rooted to the spot, utterly unable to marshal himself to provide the leadership and employment to his hundreds of artisans, labourers and families. Indeed, for one whole paralyzing year, he couldn’t even move himself from the beach he landed on, even while the others were suffering from starvation, scurvy, dysentery and exposure. Finally, his people had to desert him as quite mad, and this included his own wife and daughter who saddled him with his dreaded mother-in-law and his wife’s love child. Still, even these two weren’t terrifying enough to push him off his beach and towards the dark heart of the then Australian interior… that physical opponent in which lineage allows for no special treatment and all better take the zinc cream with them. In that desolation, there weren’t even cricket practise pitches awaiting you. For thirty-six years, old Peel stood a lonely, haughty and solitary figure blinded to his failings. If that wasn’t enough, in old age, he was hauled before the magistrate for some decrepit and unspecified sexual misconduct against his haggard housekeeper. But, even regarding her, the rumour mill had as against his mother-in-law. Even today, his commemorative headstone has him buried on top of her in the same grave. Hopefully jokingly, or else this play should be a tragedy.

Download or read book Crooks written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You would have to wonder why a Rhodes Scholar, a VC winner and a Commissioner of Police named his son Frank E. R. Stein by way of a ha-ha ‘monstrous joke’… or why he cackled derision every time his eyes lit upon the boy; or why he showered more affection on his adopted son, Costas, the otherwise offspring of a Mr Bigs of organized crime. And as the well is so poisoned such is the quest Frank Stein must make to seek revenge for the gangland killing of his crusading crime-fighting half-brother. At least it is a way to presuppose the kingpins presumably coming for him too; after all, even as a joke, it’s not how you bow out, but how you get stuck in. Rape, assassination, shocking intrusions of a vicious crime world… it’s all there for a tragic and hilarious story to unfold before Frank Stein, assisted(?) by his own side comprising of a woman in search of an international bestseller and an indigenous brother who survives writing sports reports without going to any games when all he needs is a deaf, dumb and blind rich white sort to tide him over. And, yes, haunting over all is a shadowy guardian Chinese toughie, as well as his ubiquitous father from his wheelchair. One has to ask: what have the famous father’s shocking WW1 experiences to do with the resulting mayhem? What has be done to his sons? What did the Nip bullet the old boy finally coughed up after forty years look like, even as a metaphor? Underlying the rich gallery of these and other grotesques, there are the wit and the pace and the bawdry of Crooks. In the real-life crime parlance of ‘a pushover to put down’, this book won’t disappoint crime buffs. -------------------- about the author Originally a well-known playwright, Bill Reed began writing longform fiction in his late thirties. To date he has written thirteen novels, including the so-called noteworthy ‘1001 Lankan Nights, books 1 and 2’. He has had eight plays professionally staged. He has worked as an editor and journalist in Australia and overseas before finally putting his feet up in Sri Lanka.

Download or read book Dogod written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ed: following is the Thomas-Nelson-Australia’s 1977 blurb for the original edition, but here annotated, in italics, by the author for this reprint. ‘Bill Reed’s first novel is a celebration of the Australian language. ‘Dogod’ employs a language that uses our sounds, our national images, our landscapes and our slang to examine our rhythms and forms of speech. Leading back through the images-as-words of Joyce, Carroll, Thackeray and Shakespeare…’ (I thought I was the one making with the jokes here?) ‘… here is a lament for the human condition as it is affected in modern times.’ (I lamented a bit over the manuscript too. All I know was it was a neat pile of typescript pages but next morning it had paws marks all over it.) ‘As a bone to a dog, so are we as toys to the gods. Hence Dog-god – a chaotic deity tossing and pouncing with bestial delight on His/Its favourite human plaything, Jelf. A walking disaster area, Jelf hardly needs Dogod’s assistance to attract the natural and unnatural contempt of his associates as he lurches on his apocalyptic journey…’ ( ‘apocalyptic’ is first-class; with his allotted dog pass, Jelf travels Economy) ‘… through Australia’s visible and invisible landscapes.’ ‘’Dogod’ is both funny and profound. It is an examination of the comic-tragedy that is within each of us, and within our society. Its wit, its humour and its deeper purposes are brilliantly sustained. Its challenge is for you the reader.’ (At least putting reader, singular, was spot on.) (NB: Also, there’s nothing about the plot here. I remember distinctly that there was one – as in Jelf chasing Alyce chasing Quilty chasing Henry chasing a whole host of others or vice versa, while the Australian dream – really doggedly -- chases them all and keeps spoiling the plot like the real hound it is.) --------- About the author Bill Reed is a playwright, novelist and short-story wroughtist. He dangles, shaken, hanging from the pelt.

Download or read book Throw Her Back written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smith, and then his son Terry, found they were just as snagged on Hindu’s damning wheel as their forebears had been for over 170 years, until the family finally managed to carry on to Australia. The two of them thought they could ride belatedly to the rescue of Terry’s once little-she twin who was simply never handed over at the adoption ceremony those years before… especially since they discovered she had escaped being returned to sender at birth as some sort of yoni-assembled piece of mis(s)-manufacture. But they found themselves caught in the spokes of child rackets, caste delusions, and probes into the country’s female-gender issues that are only attached by wires to ultrasound machines. Nandi Baba, the Kapalika priest, with his best-brandy Tantra practices, gave them hope of saying enough’s-enough, until his conjured Hag goddess, a-quiver sexually, came down upon them. The book is set in Australia, India and Sri Lanka and is fictionally based on real events – and, most devastatingly, on even Indian Government statistics showing in many places mathematically-impossible discrepancies between official birth rates of boys over girls. ----------------

Download or read book Water Workout written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2017-10-04 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE POOL IS A GREAT GYM… FOR ALL AGES! You don’t have to be a swimmer or sprightly to experience the joys of water and the benefits of water exercising. In your own or the local pool, you have the best fitness medium imaginable. The pool is not just for kids to play around in, or for competitive swimmers only. Even if you can’t swim, it’s for you -- a fitness center that comes without embarrassment because you are doing something sensible that looks sensible! Use the pool as a gym for: ü general day-by-day fitness ü body building -- using even only old socks on your hands or feet! ü sports training and injury recovery ü pregnancy – gentle yet great-flexibility help ü aches and pains relief -- no matter what your age Or, simply to feel good. Or, going one step further: to get back to feeling good! Water exercising is also great fun: Do it to music. Do it in pairs or groups, or just indulge yourself. Get strong or try slimming with it. If you push against water, you will meet a smooth resistance that gives back what you put in. You feel that special ‘soft’ resistance that only water gives so soothingly and relaxingly. So, use it to benefit yourself or your loved ones or friends. Water is the only fitness ‘apparatus’ you need have. Be your own coach in your own pool.

Download or read book Wi written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2020-01-03 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surely you remember Wi, a name especially chosen to fit our attention spans? The world-record kidnappee, nabbee, swipee, snatchee, hoisted so many times even he’s lost count? (How about those three times in five minutes effort? That takes rare raw talent, that does.) I mean, if it wasn’t for our Wi how many of these yabbers, yarns, shaggy dogs and yank-your-chain whoppers could I trot out for you? Even getting across one’s not easy when it’s always against the wind from people laughing in your face. No, really, without our Wi, where would all the odd-balls be, drowning their sorrows by ingesting the food in Dominic’s Eatery, swallowing whole mouthfuls without a thought for their own safety? Would any plate get the Wi wipe and come out miraculously unscathed from what had been just laid upon it? Without Wi, how many screwballs could have hired him to do all they’ve always wanted to do? God knows, and the Talls say ‘God knows’ because, if you take it that God made him in His own image, then maybe you’ve stumbled across the one time God spoke too soon. Okay, setting that aside, coming to you is a cast of Lankan characters – and you’d cast too -- and barf, and burp – if you had some of Dominic’s food inside you, let’s not kid ourselves. Not all of us have cast-iron guts and can absorb what could canonize you if you kept it down. And our Wi can’t help being White, either. Did he ever ask for the hoists he’s had to suffer, or complained about the lack of duty-of-care his kidnappers have shown him -- their kidnappee, after all? No. All he asked was a hideaway high above the stars so bright. At least he got that. And, though having to watchfully wait, at least he received the epiphs, too. With the epiphs, he could epiphicatedly dream, so I guess he had something going for him. And let’s not forget he’s Talls recorded as having said, ‘Just let me know if I’m breathing too much and I’ll stop’. Hey, what kidnappee or country like Australia gets a kidnappee so considerate? Is he a peach of a pooch, or what? ---------------------- Bill Reed is an Australian novelist, playwright and short-story writer with national awards for all three. He now lives in both Australia and Sri Lanka.

Download or read book Mr Siggie Morrison with his Comb and Paper written by Bill Reed and published by Reed Independent. This book was released on 2015-06-07 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blurb (Act I) PARSONS: I’m beginning to feel what his friends must have gone through when they were really seeing him off. The longer they wait, the more improbably it is that the bloody plane will ever leave. They mouth platitudes to each other about every man having the unimpeachable right to die at home. They don’t look into each other’s eyes knowing that not one of them has even bothered to tell the old boy about pipe dreams, tobacco smoke delusions. What they mean, really, is that they can’t wait any longer to get him off their hands. Blurb (Act 2) SURROUND MONOLOGUE: I didn’t care. I had my ticket in my hand in the plane. I would have had my ticket in my hand if they hadn’t taken it off me before I got on. That’s not the point. It’s as good as having your ticket in your hand when you’re sitting in the plane and they haven’t turfed you off because if they haven’t turfed you off then that means you must have had a ticket in your hand to be able to be there on the plane. And what I’ve got a right to expect is a bit of help from someone coming up and saying Siggie. Someone to come up and say my name. It’s a tremendous bit of help when someone remembers your name when they come up and say, Siggie. It’s terrible when someone comes up and opens his mouth to speak but says nothing. Blurb (Act 3) As a director, I was immediately impressed by the inherent theatricality of the play… of what constitutes a theatrical event. In this work that gives us not just a play but an experience of the struggle for creation. (Peter Batey, Artistic Director,