Grassdogs’ literary antecedents jostle like faces crowding around a porthole on a departing emigrant ship. One can tick them off like books on a required reading list for a twentieth-century Australian literature course. The doppelganger Jekyll-and-Hyde protagonists (blithe young city lawyer Tony Tindale and his bestial, increasingly wretched uncle Edgar) might have been written with actor Dan Wyllie in mind. Edgar even loses teeth in a car accident, just like Wyllie.

Part murder mystery (as reminiscent of the taking of the Beaumont children as it is of Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net [2000]) and part social-realist tragedy à la the film Tom White (2004), Grassdogs evades easy categorisation. The novel, though set in the present, begins and ends in a part of the country that time has neglected but not entirely passed over. Edgar, too, suffers from benign neglect. He gets more loyalty and companionship – more understanding, even – from the family pet terrier and various stray dogs than he does from his parents and the wary townsfolk.