Bill Metcalf

Sins of the Father focuses on Philip Cooper, a forty-seven-year-old Australian who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian commune established by his father, Neville Cooper, in New Zealand. In 1989, Philip left the commune and came to Australia. Since then, he has been trying to extricate his wife and children and create a ‘normal’ life.

In 1858, a year before Queensland separated from the colony of New South Wales, Theophilus Pugh wrote in the first history of Queensland: ‘Difficult indeed will be the task of the historian who hereafter attempts to chronicle the events connected with the early days of this now important settlement.’ Authors of the subsequent nineteen histories of Queensland, including Ross Fitzgerald, Lyndon Megarrity and David Symons, would have been well advised to heed Pugh’s prescient warning.