It is the summer holidays in Safety Bay, and Barry Carter has a credibility problem. Lying on his verandah at eleven forty-two on a hot January night, he watches a green light blink twice, pause, and blink twice again from Penguin Island — which has been closed since the last ferry came home at four. Nobody believes him. Barry mistook a wheelie bin named Bruce for a shark. He has no credibility.But Rose believes him. And Rose recruits Annie, who already has a notebook. The notebook...

The annual Classics Dinner is in full swing. Professor Hadley MacNamara — formidable, silver-haired, sixty-five, the kind of man rooms arrange themselves around — is holding court on the veranda of the Scholar's Table above the Swan. His toast is is genuinely brilliant. It moves from Homer to the geography of joy, and the room gives him exactly the silence he deserves.Then, after the silence, something is different.He begins a sentence he does not finish. He reaches for a c...

Something is moaning on the headland at Point Peron — and whatever it is, it empties a school camp in under an hour.Barry Carter is fourteen, constitutionally unable to lie to his mother, and — as the framed commendation on the HQ wall attests — President of the Safety Bay Six. When Year Nine camp ends two days early after an unearthly sound drives twenty-six boys and two teachers from their bunks, Barry knows, with the reluctant certainty of a boy who has been right about this sor...

A man was trapped in impossible conditions. Another man went into the darkness to save him, again and again. A community kept vigil. Hope survived when logic said it shouldn't. And ordinary people rose to meet extraordinary circumstances with courage that still resonates more than a century later.

When the prestigious Italian Bellini Foundation arrives at the Swan River Festival of Voices with a previously unknown Vivaldi manuscript, Dr Alex Moreton notices three things before the opening reception is half over.The provenance chain leads from a Swiss estate sale, through a Zurich auction house, through eighteen months of preliminary authentication in Rome, and arrives in Perth wearing the imprimatur of the Bellini FoundationBy the following morning, the manuscript wa...

Sixty-one years, three brass plaques, and a locked biscuit tin nobody has ever seen opened — that's the Bay Fryer's whole reputation, gone from a cool room that was locked the entire time. No broken window. No forced door. Just a tin-shaped nothing on a shelf, and a landlord's lease letter sitting on the spike like a clock starting.The Safety Bay Six follow the only clues going: a salt-dried footprint two sizes too small for any grown suspect, a sleeve of stolen drone footage, and ...

Alex Moreton thought she understood grief. She thought she understood archives too: their order, their absences, the way a missing page could say more than a hundred that remained.Then she finds a hidden vault beneath the university, and inside it a record of everything her family and her institution have spent generations trying not to know. There is a dead girl, a dead engineer, a ledger that keeps the dark half of the story, and a woman who has spent forty years standing guard o...

The lighthouse at Lassiter Point has been decommissioned since 1986. The Heritage Council believes the shire owns it. The shire believes the Heritage Council does. No one has paid for maintenance since 2003, and the Fresnel lens has been sitting in the dark ever since.Until it wasn't.At two in the morning, the lamp comes on. Forty minutes exactly. Old Mossy, who has sat on the Rockingham seawall long enough to remember how the coast used to sound, has seen it before — three...

When a development application appears on the chandlery door at the south end of the Bent Street foreshore, the Safety Bay Six recognise the signs: a heritage-listed building, a compressed public comment period, and a sub-floor excavation scheduled in six weeks. What the application doesn't mention — and what Barry, Annie, Rose, Vic, Kath, and Pip are determined to protect — is the hollow floor that Pip documented two years ago, a stone chamber beneath it that pre-dates the Australian colo...

The car alone should have been a warning. Long, low, the colour of wet slate, parked across two bays like the lines were somebody else's problem — and out of it steps a man who looks at the Safety Bay foreshore the way you'd look at a fish you're about to fillet.When a developer's marquee goes up over the lagoon every kid in Safety Bay has known their whole lives, Barry, Rose, Annie, Kath and Vic know exactly what's coming. What they don't have is proof — so they get some, at dawn,...

When the body in the bag is the wrong body, the case becomes the case. The seventy-three papers at the novel's centre are not, as you first assume, a list. They are a ledger. Academics rarely admit in public: that scholarship has always been inseparable from patronage, and patronage from obligation. Academic institutions, where power is quiet, consequences accumulate slowly, where power protects itself in beautiful rooms and Dr Alex Moreton's dining table at the Scholar's Table on the Swan...

On a January morning in Perth, a woman is recovered from the Swan River. She was the university's chief archivist — precise, stubborn, entirely without sentiment about what an archive was for. She knew where every document was.There is a note at her house. A single page. Handwritten.It says: I cannot undo what was done.It doesn't say what was done or what gets buried, and what survives the burying, and what it costs the people who decide that something buri...