THE FOLDED PHOTOGRAPH

Every story has, at its centre, a small folded thing. A photograph in a kitchen fire. A pathology report in a Manila consulting room. A letter not sent. A name removed from a folder before the folder was delivered. A Sherpa boy's letter from his father, folded into an exam-board envelope at the moment the boy understood why his mother had been silent for a month.

These stories are reconstructed from publicly reported AAT decisions, Federal Court judgments, OMARA disciplinary orders, and the published findings of the Department of Home Affairs. They are not the author's cases. The fraud architecture, however — the kickback ring, the ghost college, the substituted PTE Speaking section, the partner-visa cohabitation theatre, the s. 351 lobbying — is real, and so, in his experience, are the quiet officers who see it first.

For readers of Jeffrey Archer's A Quiver Full of Arrows, Tim Winton's quiet rural Australian moral fiction, and the procedural-with-twist tradition that runs from Roald Dahl through to Anthony Horowitz. The companion volume, The Brown Envelope, covers thirteen Canadian stories. A third volume, set in the United Kingdom, is in preparation.