Colonies are built on dreams, but some dreams threaten ruin.
Set against the awe-inspiring immensity of the hinterland west of the Hawkesbury River, this epic of chance and endurance is an immersion into another time, a masterpiece of language and atmosphere.
Ex-convict Martin Sparrow is already a lazy, lovelorn and deep-in-debt failure when his farm is wrecked by the great flood of March 1806.
In the aftermath he is confronted with a choice. He can buckle down and set about his agricultural recovery, or he can heed the whispers of an earthly paradise on the far side of the mountains - a place where men are truly free - and strike out for a new life. But what chance does a ditherer such as Sparrow have of renewal, either in the brutal colony or in the forbidding wilderness?
The decision he makes triggers a harrowing chain of events and draws in a cast of extraordinary characters, including Alister Mackie, the chief constable on the river; his deputy, Thaddeus Cuff; the vicious hunter, Griffin Pinney; the Romany girl, Bea Faa; and the young Aboriginal men, Caleb and Moowut'tin, caught between war and peace.
Rich, raw, strangely beautiful and utterly convincing, The Making of Martin Sparrow reveals Peter Cochrane - already one of our leading historians - as one of our most compelling novelists.
