Girl in an Empty Cage Read online

  Authors Note

  This book is set in the Northern Territory of Australia, a place which covers a sixth of the Australian Continent, the top centre part of a map of Australia. It lies in the tropics. Its capital, Darwin, is closer to Indonesia and other Asian centres than the rest of Australia.

  Deserts lie to the south, centred around the town of Alice Springs. Large rivers run to the north, with a wealth of wildlife. Most famed is the fearsome Salt Water Crocodile, the world’s largest reptile. Crocodiles can grow longer and heavier than a car, able to drag other large animals, like a bull buffalo, into the water to kill. They stalk below the water and capture in a silent, deadly ambush. The crocodile is of great totemic importance to the coastal aboriginal tribes. In dreamtime stories it is one of the earliest ancestral beings. The crocodile’s totemic spirit plays a central role in this story. Crocodiles have killed many people across Australia’s north. As a young man, I survived my own attack by a large crocodile, which is recounted in the memoir ‘Children of Arnhem’s Kaleidoscope’.

  This book is a work of fiction but many places and some events have a factual basis, from my experiences in the large part of my life lived here.

  A central location in this book is the Fitzmaurice River which flows into the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf, where the Northern Territory coastline meets the Kimberley region of Western Australia. This is a very remote and rugged place. Here tides rise and fall by up to ten metres. In a running tide this river becomes a white water gorge as the river thunders through its constricted passage. Very few people come to this place, one of the earth’s places most empty of human occupation.

  Even emptier is that place inside a person who is devoid of hope.

  Part 1 : Lost in an Empty Place