The stories contained in this volume have been written over the past year or two. The one exception is 'Over the Hill,' published in a Sydney evening newspaper-among others of my early writing-in late 1945. The two stories 'The Raymond Connection' and 'The Power Within' were included in a slim volume specially published to fit an Australian Broadcasting Corporation 'Encounter' session, broadcast in April and November 1985.

about this book...

Geoffrey Bingham's short stories, and this book in particular, have unique features which fill a niche almost wholly uncatered for in recently published Australian literature. The Raymond Connection is a collection of interrelated short stories of richly varying texture; they are unmistakably, unashamedly but unselfconsciously Australian in the best possible way. They are woven into life experiences inextricably bound up in that amalgam of historical, geographic and cultural circumstances with which the Australian reader uniquely identifies.

This is not another book of reminiscences, nor just the pungent evocations of a particular decade. Some chapters are slow and pastoral, some mystical and vaguely disturbing, others humorous and whimsical. There is immense and sensitive perception of the effect of day-by-day life in Australia and our responses to it.

The quality generally absent from most recent Australian writing and present in this work is a wholly credible 'up- beat.' Human failing and frailties are laid bare-but sensitively and uncondemningly; our foolish characteristics are deftly revealed but not 'knocked'; deep emotions are evoked but not sentimentalized. The writer is not simply impressing us with his virtuosity, but with sensitive integrity he imparts a 'point of view.' It is refreshing. The reader hopes again. Human dignity is in view.