Wake in Fright

Wake in Fright (1961) is the debut novel by Australian author Kenneth Cook. Plot summary John Grant is a young, bonded schoolteacher who has been assigned to work a gruelling two-year post as the schoolmaster of Tiboonda, an isolated, three-building township in the outback of western New South Wales. Upon finishing school in time for the six-week Christmas holiday season, Grant catches a train to the mining town of Bundanyabba – known by the locals as "The Yabba" – to await a flight home to Sydney, where he hopes to spend his vacation swimming at the nearby beach. While passing time in a pub, Grant encounters the local policeman, Jock Crawford, with whom he drinks several glasses of beer and visits the local two-up school to get dinner. Deciding to try his luck at the game, Grant makes two hundred pounds in a winning streak, but in a bid to win enough money to pay off his bond and impress Robyn – a wealthy and attractive woman he briefly encountered in Sydney – he loses all but two shillings of his cash in two rounds, leaving him without means of buying a plane ticket. The next morning, Grant visits another pub, where he is befriended by mining director Tim Hynes, who invites him to have dinner with his wife and their adult daughter, Janette, and drink with two of his colleagues, boxers-turned-miners Dick and Joe. During the night, Janette attempts to seduce the virgin Grant, who drunkenly vomits during the encounter. He awakens the following afternoon in the ramshackle cabin of "Doc" Tydon, a vagrant medical practitioner, war veteran and associate of the Hynes. Grant quickly takes a disliking to Doc when he expounds upon his open relationship with Janette. They are joined by Dick and Joe in a violent, drunken kangaroo hunt that rages into the night. Upon awakening the next morning, Grant faintly recalls being on the receiving end of a homosexual encounter initiated by Doc. Taking the rifle gifted to him by Dick and Joe and leaving Doc's cabin, he is encountered by Crawford in the street, who returns his belongings that were left behind during his rendezvous with the Hynes. Resolving to hitchhike to Sydney, Grant buys some provisions and begins walking eastward through the desert, and is eventually driven to the town of Yelonda. At a truck depot near a hotel, he notices a truck bearing the word "Sydney".