This book is a testament to the persistence of the legend of King O’Malley. Larry Noye tells the story of the self-proclaimed founder of the Commonwealth Bank and builder of Canberra very much as O’Malley himself never tired of telling it, heavily embellished with the exaggerated ‘spreadeagle’ rhetoric and baloney of the hot gospellers, land-boomers, social reform cranks, and snake-oil salesmen of the American West among whom O’Malley took his first steps in the adult world. The book’s strength is that its author is so intoxicated with the O’Malley legend that it faithfully gives us a picture, as it were, straight from the horse’s mouth, full of colour and incident; its weakness is that it fails adequately to step back and separate fact from fiction.
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