Sweet Cherie Dutton, small and demure, the dainty little lass with the big buck-toothed smile, was dispossessed by a more skilful opponent towards the end of the next game. Her response was immediate—she dropped her mentor with a nifty elbow right behind the ear. And both teams were into it, all claws and screams, snarls and pulled hair. It took ten minutes to drag them apart.
    I stood with them on the court and they huddled around, all panting and fire-eyed and snarling about hated bitches. The match had to be abandoned. We were only about thirty points behind at the time.

From a passing drover the boy bought a horse for thirty shillings, a poor horse apparently worn out. But it was a young horse and the boy knew of a valley growing succulent feed. In two months that bag of bones was a fresh young horse, deep chested, fiery of eye. The boy tried unavailingly to sell him for five pounds. He swapped him eventually for two horses, dog poor. These two he fattened and sold to a tank contractor for four pounds each. The profit of six pounds ten shillings thrilled him.
  There are people who love to read biographies—sadly I’m not one of them. I say sadly because I’d like to be one of them, but I always find biographies boring, and they never tell me what I want to know. Take the one quoted above, the first big biography I ever read, that of Sir Sidney Kidman, The Cattle King by Ion Idriess. The tale of a penniless boy who ran away from home and ended up owning about half of the useable land in Australia. It should have been fascinating, but it wasn’t. He was just simply too good a person to be real; always dealing fairly with everyone; was kind to his family and neighbours. I didn't believe a word of it.

   There have been whole novels written with those few lines as a plot, and many fine  movies made from them. Except, of course, a story hero would not sell the horse for profit the way Kidman did—they would ride it to success in a famous race or have to get it back from a dangerous bunch of bandits. That was the trouble—real people always chose the boring success-making options and never did the foolhardly stuff that made the best stories.

   And in this case I knew the character well. He was one of the robber barons that Robin Hood Types waylaid; he was the tough cattle man who burned out the settlers in the American range wars and obliged Wild West heroes to oppose them; he was the squatter who came down upon the jolly swagman. 

  This was the book that taought me to distrust biographies. It is fiction, not facts, that point the way to the truth.