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The Great Mint Swindle was one of the most outrageous frauds in the history of Australian crime. On 22 June 1982, the closely guarded Perth Mint handed over, without a murmur, $650,000 worth of gold bars, which were never to be seen again. Not a shot was fired, not a person threatened. It was all done with three fake building society cheques, which the Mint accepted without question. The mastermind behind the ingenious swindle never showed his face.

Keith Willey died on 6 September 1984. He had just submitted the manuscript of what was to be his last book. A study of Australian humour in adversity titled You Might As Well Laugh Mate, it summed up the man, not least in his last days. Sardonic, self-effacing, unashamedly Australian.

Before I came across this attractive and instructive book, I knew very little of the art of Sam Byrne, thinking of him merely as one of a group of outback ‘primitives’ based on Broken Hill, the Silver City, of whom the best known is Pro Hart.

It was my good fortune to be born into a family for whom books and paintings had a central place. My parents subscribed to an excellent lending library and were adventurous readers of novels. During the Depression they could not often afford to buy a painting, but they went to art shows and Sunday visits to the Art Gallery of New South Wales were frequent in my childhood.

Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him.

The name of this collection, with its pastoral associations, is ironic. Here we have no neat opposition between the country and the city; instead the lyrical evocation of the countryside serves merely to emphasise the brutality that women suffer there as men exercise their economic power through sexual cruelty. This is particularly obvious in the first six stories, set in the previous generation, which lead up to the experience of the central character, Anne. Bella, for instance, of the story ‘Isabella’, has degenerated under the tyranny of her father from the proud Edwardian beauty in the parlour photographs to a ‘lazy fat slag’ (his words). Her ‘lair’ is a rural slum, her brain a swamp into which every scandal scarcely percolates: ‘… the pinpoint gleams of interest receding into the sluggish brain where she will mumble at the information for the rest of the day.’ Her death from gangrene parallels her mental decay. Mrs Scarr of ‘That Woman’, let down by her ‘gutless’ lover Lennie – ‘Usually he climbed through the rough orchard just after lunch and came to her back door red in the face and breathing hard. Today he came late …’ – must now find a new home for herself and her children. The child Danuta of ‘A Bad Influence’, pregnant at ten, having been exploited by all her male relatives – uncles, fathers, brothers – mimes her nocturnal experience to her school friend: