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Lachlan Strahan is a historian and the Australian High Commissioner to Solomon Islands. His first book, Australia's China, has become one of the standard works on Australia-China relations. His second, Day of Reckoning, traced a series of crimes in Papua New Guinea after World War II and was shortlisted for the 2006 NSW Premier's Australian History Prize.
A brilliant and original window into the Kelly outbreak – of the hunter rather than just the hunted. -- Janet McCalman This compelling and intimate history offers a new perspective on a national legend – the infamous Kelly Gang – and a vivid picture of the life of a policeman on the colonial Victorian frontier. Strahan’s career takes us constantly into the dark side of the colonial world, into the rough, vain and violent underside of a frontier society. Through the unfolding stories of individual cases and court dramas, we examine Constable Strahan’s character in action – and it is character that goes to the heart of the book’s defining scene, the conversation near Greta during the Kelly Outbreak. The story moves towards and away from that pivotal moment, showing how it framed a life and, perhaps, precipitated a tragedy. The book is also a beautiful meditation on history and memory and the power of family storytelling. This is a fascinating and original history, taut and suspenseful, written with subtlety and flair. -- Tom Griffiths In this story of his ancestor, Senior Constable Anthony Strahan, Lachlan Strahan brings to life a lost world of rural Victoria in the era of gold-seeking, free selection and bushranging. The book climaxes in the pursuit of the Kelly Gang, the moment when Anthony steps briefly into national history, but this is above all the story of an Irish migrant who makes his way in colonial Victoria by pursuing the hard life of a country policeman. It is also a family history: in tracing the life and times of Anthony, Lachlan is also learning something more about his own father, Frank, an archivist, historian and radical who admired the rebel and folk hero – Ned Kelly – and despised a man of the law, his own relative, who had helped bring a killer to justice. -- Frank Bongiorno This is a fascinating and original history, taut and suspenseful, written with subtlety and flair. -- Tom Griffiths Lachlan Strahan brings to life a lost world of rural Victoria in the era of gold-seeking, free selection and bushranging. -- Frank Bongiorno
