The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

In the first of his three Miles Franklin Award-winning novels, originally published in 1971, David Ireland offers a fiercely brilliant comic portrait of Australia in the grip of a dehumanising labour system.

Piece by piece, David Ireland portrays a kind of life which is lived at an oil refinery in Sydney – from its highest tower from which one of the workers plunges to death, to the secret hide-out in the mangroves where the men refresh themselves with such ladies as the Sandpiper and Never on Sundays. He takes apart this vast industrial complex and its multitudinous characters, then reassembles it into a mosaic fiery and macabre, whose crazy patterns are lit with grim humour.