Parable of the Two Sons

Ken Wainwright was Master of Classics at Sydney Grammar School. His ambition was to teach classics at university. It was never fulfilled because his wife, Nell, was killed in a car accident with the wife of his best friend, Brent Fiske, leaving Ken to raise their sons, Fabe (10) and Augie (8).

Twenty five years later Ken dies from emphysema. Brent, living with Ken to care for him with his emphysema for his last four years, makes a claim on Ken’s estate. He alleges he and Ken had been clandestine lovers ever since an annual two week trout fishing trip they began taking two years after their wives died.

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A Kinchela Boy

Mick Mahoney is a young aboriginal stockman standing trial for the murder of his darling missus, Mary, in front of a jury that doesn’t seem to like the look of him. He casts his mind back to the week before his eighth birthday when he and his little sisters were stolen by ‘the Catcher Lady’ for their only sin, their original sin: part-white ancestry. But that all happened way back when his mother’s Irish great, great grandfather married a gin, a full-blood aboriginal woman, and fathered a family of half-castes. They were neither blacks nor whites yet it was reason enough to give the government fellas an excuse to kidnap Mick and his sisters and make them spend the rest of their childhood in the children’s homes where their aboriginality was to be driven out of them like the devil.

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Forthcoming publications by the author

The principal theme of Bevan's forthcoming novel, Ash Wednesday, due for publication in 2014, is global warming and its role in the devastating bush fires of February 2010 in central Victoria, dubbed "Black Saturday" because they took several hundred lives and razed dozens of small towns, obliterating some of them from the map. The novel traces the history of the role of Danish immigrants in the development of modern Australia society and culture, especially that of Joern Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House.

The principal theme of Bevan's second forthcoming novel, The Blue Note, due for publication in 2015, which is based loosely on the life of his younger brother, Mark, a composer and performer of modern jazz, is the tension created by music in the lives of those who devote themselves to its composition and performance: its creative and destructive forces, especially when it consumes its creators.