The Summer Exercises

A civilian chaplain records whispered confessions and low urgings, writing in a notebook during his summer tenure at Sydney's Central Street Police Station. His 'Summer Exercises' are habitual - five times a day. His terseness can generate feelings so sharp that sometimes a great notion gets pared clean with a meager swatch of syllables. In constructing this notebook of a sharp observer, author Ross Gibson builds a world - Sydney, Australia in 1946 - sordid and bruised after decades of depredations. --- This work of fiction was inspired by 175 carefully selected black and white photographs from the collection at Sydney's Justice & Police Museum, taken during the years immediately after World War II. These photographs (many included in the book), were generated by the New South Wales Police in the course of their investigations between 1945 and 1960. They form a visual reference for this richly imagined and experimental storytelling to take place. Anchored in the realities of the 1940s, along with Sydney police investigative procedure, The Summer Exercises is an artistic re-invention of history as it happened.