No Australian native son blazed brighter than Hugh D. McIntosh (1876–1942). Here is a lively biography of a Sydney boy who left school aged seven and rose to be the Squire of Broome Park in Kent, the stately seat of Lord Kitchener. McIntosh – contender though he became for a seat in the House of Commons – remained always an Australian. At Broome Park, a cricket pitch was laid down with ten tons of Australian earth, imported so that the visiting Australian Test team might practice on their native soil. The McIntosh ‘coat of arms’ came not from the College of Heralds but from the studio of his old mate Norman Lindsay. The very doctor who delivered him at birth was Charles Mackellar, father of that Dorothea who celebrated our ‘sunburnt country’.
Huge Deal: the fortunes and follies of Hugh D. McIntosh by Frank Van Straten
Lothian, $34.95pb, 320pp, 0 7344 0680 0
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