Ballantyne
As noted elsewhere, five mornings a week, you can find me pounding the pavements on a mostly dog-free circuit through downtown Bowen and around the Front Beach.
Mostly dog-free because I like to spend that time pondering various matters. Most relate to writing activities that can be tapped out or dictated at the end of the circuit.
Sudden eruptions of canine greetings or territorial guardianship tend to disrupt those thought processes, which explains why I try to avoid places they are likely to occur.
And when I'm not pondering historical material, one of my fiction projects, the cricket or some music-related matter, my thoughts often turn to political issues.
I could, of course, push the results of those thoughts out into the ether as a series of blog-style rants, but then I thought of a better option.
Why not have a (fictional) politician address those issues?
The Astute Reader will possibly detect some echoes of titles by John Mortimer that allegedly comprise the memoirs of an Old Bailey hack named Horace Rumpole in the titles below.
There's a dash of Frank Hardy's Yarns of Billy Borker in the delivery.
Ballantyne's Background provides a location for background information that would otherwise intrude on a developing narrative.
Ballantyne and The Factional Heavyweight leads into Ballantyne's preselection as #2 on the ALP's Senate ticket for the 2019 Federal election.
Ballantyne and the Family Tree forms a prequel to that, prompted by the 2017 Section 44 parliamentary eligibility kerfuffle.
Ballantyne and the Sanctity of the Confessional follows his preselection and covers matters raised by the Royal Commission into childhood sexual abuse.
