Cassie McCullough

He is now a terrible alcoholic.

In fact, he's been blinded from drinking, you know, probably some sort of rot gut that was being cooked up in the colony in the 1830s.

And his career has ended in disgrace.

He's been pensioned off.

But...

He was the officer who was assigned to investigate the wreck, the shipwreck of the Sydney Cove.

Now, people who are familiar with Jock Sorong's work will know that his previous novel, Preservation, was all about the story of the Sydney Cove and the wreck and the island, Preservation Island, which is in the Bass Strait, where it ended up.

and also about how some of the survivors of the wreck managed to get to the mainland and begin a very long walk towards Sydney.

And I think you've got two options about that.

Well, three.

You can read Preservation or you can listen to Mark McKenna, the fantastic historian, doing an earshot on Radio National about that journey that the survivors of the wreck made.

You can find that just on the website.

That's fantastic.

quite helpful.

Or you can just push through.

You're going to have to push through a bit of the first of the chapters in this book and just let it wash over you because there is a sense that there's a story that you don't quite have your finger on right at the beginning, but that goes away.

So just to be perfectly clear, this novel, The Burning Island, is entirely fictional.

Well, not entirely.

There are some elements of events that did happen that Jock Sorong has taken and used for his purposes.

Right.