“My what? My uncle? I have an uncle?” I asked, incredulous. “And he’s a famous bank robber?”

“Was. He’s dead,” Dad said, before adding, “He was my brother.”

That was the first time I heard of him. Terry Dean, cop killer, bank robber, hero to the nation, pride of the battler- he was my uncle, my father’s brother, and he was to cast an oblong shadow over both our lives, a shadow that for a long time prevented either of us from getting a decent tan.

If you’re Australian, you will at least have heard of Terry Dean. If you aren’t, you won’t have, because while Australia is an eventful place, what goes on there is about as topical in world newspapers as “Bee Dies in New Guinea After Stinging Tree by Mistake.” It’s not our fault. We’re too far away. That’s what a famous Australian historian once called the “tyranny of distance.” What he meant was, Australia is like a lonely old woman dead in her apartment; if every living soul in the land suddenly had a massive coronary at the exact same time and if the Simpson Desert died of thirst and the rainforests drowned and the barrier reef bled to death, days might pass and only the smell drifting across the ocean to our Pacific neighbors would compel someone to call the police. Otherwise we’d have to wait until the Northern Hemisphere commented on the uncollected mail.

Dad wouldn’t talk to me about his brother. Every time I asked him for details he’d sigh long and deep, as though this were another setback he didn’t need, so I embarked on my own research.

First I asked my classmates, but I received answers that differed from each other so wildly, I just had to discount them all. Then I examined the measly collection of family photographs that I had seen only fleetingly before, the ones that lay in the green shoebox stuffed into the hall closet. This time I noticed that three of the photographs had been butchered to remove someone’s head. The operation could hardly be described as seamless.