Thomas Wort, an executive with the communications organization.
Mediums Limited, performs a notable act of heroism and shortly afterwards receives an anonymous telegram.
Persecutory letters, telephone calls and more telegrams follow. Their sender reveals himselfas one X. Matters, who has had a slight acquaintance with Thomas years before. Matters sends Thomas a butterbox containing a strange collection of papers, which he claims to have uncarthed some years earlier near the village of Uppersass.
The Wort Papers' provide a
fascinating picture of life in rural and metropolitan Australia over two generations. There is the immigrant father, determined to succeed but hellbent on itinerancy. There are incredible accounts of journeys to the north-west and to the centre, of determined station owners and Afghan traders, of religionists and patriots, of experiments in communalism, of intrepid inland flights and daring sea voyages, of the dubious attractions of city life, of the ill-feeling between the lowlanders and the hill farmers of Uppersass.
The Wort Papers is the bizarre and comic creation of an extraordinarily inventive mind. It is an epic account of the Australian experience: gazetteer, family history, roll of honour (and of ignominy, bestiary and documentary; a ribald, ironic tour de force.