David Ireland Books

"The Southern Cross is a pub, an old, battered and experienced place, somewhere in the centre of Sydney. Meat Man is a regular, a very regular regular, who views the world - the world of the pub and its clientele - through his beer glass, his glass canoe which transports them all to other worlds, worlds of fighting and loving and, above all, drinking. The grand saga of the Southern Cross or the tragic futility of humanity at a watering hole? Perhaps it's all to be taken on a bent elbow with another swallow."

New release of modern classic from three times Miles Franklin winner. At the Puroil Refining Termitary and Grinding Works, on the swamplands of Botany Bay, men work in cramped spaces, in isolation, anonymity and alienation, cut off from the rest of humanity. Their only ways of escape and rebellion are their individual strangeness and their Sunday meetings with girls like Cinderella, Never on Sundays and Sandpiper.