Brett Evans

There was a player for Balmain in Australia called Bobby Lullum.

His mother-in-law tried to poison him with thallium.

Oh, the famous thallium murders.

Yeah, and it came out in the case that he was actually having intimacies, as it was called, in the court case with his mother-in-law.

She wasn't found guilty, but he did get divorced.

And you can see that Drew, as an old journalist, he obviously knew this story and he's adapted it in his own way because it's not really a Robert Drew story unless there's water or swimming or the beach.

And so instead of a football player, the main character, Brian Tasker, in this story is a swimmer and he's on the edge of being in the Olympics and then it unfolds.

And why his mother-in-law is shaving him, I won't tell you.

You'll have to buy the book.

I would say he's the literary patriarch of Tim Winton.

You know, they're both Western Australians.

They both write about the ocean and people are always in the ocean and he...

Robert Drew himself once wrote an essay called The Beach and the Bush, I think.

And it was basically this argument that I'm bored with the bush.

I lived on the coast, like most Australians, and that's the place I remember.

That's the natural environment where I fell in love or I went to after my father died, those sorts of things.

And he made this really strong argument.

And you can see that he's carried it all through his work.

He's edited books about the beach.

He's written about the beach in nonfiction.