Hudderstone Wash-Up

Daniel Anstiss is a battler from a meatworks town on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia’s oldest city. After setbacks during his early school years, he eventually excels at his tertiary studies and joins Australia’s diplomatic service. Despite his commitment to his vocation, it gradually becomes clear to Daniel that he is an outsider with little hope of navigating Canberra’s pathways of privilege and networks of influence on the basis of merit alone.
'Hudderstone Wash-Up' is a coming of age story that begins during the 1950s in a fibro cottage on a flood-prone dirt road next to a railway line on which steam trains transport doomed livestock to nearby slaughter yards. An eyewitness tracks Daniel Anstiss’s formative years and depicts his resolute drive towards academic success at the Australian National University in the early 1970s. Then, through ad hoc recollections, a former colleague provides eccentric descriptions of the political upheavals and bureaucratic expediencies that threaten to derail Daniel’s career.
David Morisset is the pen name of an Australian writer who grew up at Riverstone in the Hawkesbury River District, northwest of Sydney. After roaming the world, first as a diplomat and later as an economist, he published several novels as well as collections of short stories and poems. His poem, 'Persian Princess', was commended in the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (2009 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards).