Update

In Durban Poison Jack Muir lands in the South African police state at the high point of apartheid and soon finds himself linked to drug dealers and anti-apartheid activists. He is a young man now and much more self-assured but still racked with self-doubt and desperate to find a purpose, a reason, some meaning for his life.

Durban Poison is a continuation of a rites to passage quartet, but also a political thriller, a chase and an exploration of a young man's developing spirituality.

Racism

"Australia is a particularly racist country." said Trenton Oldfield, the Australian who disrupted the Oxford and Cambridge boat race in 2012. 

We often delude ourselves that we played honourable roles as a colonial power and in the march to freedom of South Africa. Some of our hero leaders - Bob Hawke for one - continue the myth that we played a great part. We did not. 

Australians need to know about the nation's innate racist past, how many in the early 1970s travelled to Southern Africa and enjoyed the privileges of being white masters in an apartheid state and the Unilaterally Declared Independent Rhodesia. 

1973 South Africa was also a staging post for Australians on their way to somewhere else.

The great American-Romanian-Jewish writer Elie Wiesel once wrote: “No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgements are wrong. Only racists make them”.

Two themes - religion and race - have permeated my first two adult novels: Boy on a Wire and To the Highlands and this third in the series will bring it all to a head set in one of the most violent times in Southern Africa.

The end of apartheid ushered in a brief respite, but, sadly, violence is again on the rise.