Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

'His beauty and aloofness disturbed the equilibrium of the Rankin family...The stockman for a long time offered a resistance to the efforts of the members of the family to involve him in their lives. He moved about in their familiar world, observing it with unfamiliar eyes; and quietly, industriously he slowly rearranged it.' Ward Rankin had not wanted to be tied to the station; he'd imagined a life of travel and experience but there was no-one else. When his mother died, it came to him - owner and manager, now in his fifties, a frustrated man. Ida, his young wife, sees a solution to her own discontent in her growing feelings for the young English stockman Robert Crofts, whose arrival on the station changes their lives forever. Set in the remote Central Highlands of Queensland against a backdrop of heat, torrential rain and the strange and lonely landscape, this is a novel of passion, suspense, reinvention and revenge, watched over by the solitary presence of Mt Mooloolong.

Alex Miller has twice won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's premier literary prize; the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993. British by birth, he now lives in Victoria.