The Expanding Fictional World of Bruce Pascoe

Before Bruce Pascoe was Aboriginal he was Jewish, but it didn’t take. In 1999, the year he was fifty-two, he came out as Leopold Glass. It was a pseudonym chosen for his self-published novel Ribcage—a book of crime, money and race. A mock bio of Leopold Glass described a man who had mislaid his family: “He is currently researching the life of his paternal grandmother who grew up in a New South Wales orphanage with no clear records.” Unlike Glass, the real author had two grandmothers with very clear records.

Ribcage is short, 144 pages, and the hero, David Bourke, is a mundane psychopath. He kills and maims to achieve a comfortable life, for himself: “all you need is $800,000 … quickly”. With that amount—and the directions are detailed—you buy rental properties and shares. It was a simple life plan in the late 1990s for an intelligent criminal who doesn’t want to get caught. The bodies along the way were of no importance.

The advice Bourke gives to other crims…