Muck - A Memoir

The dynasty has started with my father as the founding father and me his only son, the founding son. He looks forward to the day when he can watch his grand children out there in the clover-covered paddocks frolicking among the cowpats. Playing with a pony, getting stung by bees. The most wholesome activities in the world ...

His parents have bought a big dairy farm, to be their estate and his legacy. On it they plan to build a grand manor house, where they can live out their fantasy of being self-appointed aristocrats while keeping him - their pride and heir - away from the local gold-digger girls. With staff to milk the cows and break in the race-horses, he is free to prepare himself for his illustrious future - principally by poncing about like Lord Muck.

Muck is about what happens when things go wrong, hilariously, tragically, on the path to adulthood. Set in Sydney and New Zealand, it features a cow called Miss Beautiful, an encounter with the Prime Minister, and a church-going atheist who sings like Dean Martin. It is about overbearing parents, farm life, mental illness and the extremes of human vanity. Most of all it is about a young man and the world he constructs in order to survive his family and somehow discover a self of his own.