Peter Mathers (16 July 1931 in England[1] – 8 November 2004 in Melbourne) was an English-born Australian author and playwright.
He "farmed, clerked, woolled, gardened, landscaped, chemicalled", and did other things before settling into his writing career.
In 1966 Mathers completed his first novel, Trap, an inventive and often comic novel concerning the escapades and family history of Jack Trap, an urban mixed-blood Aboriginal person in what was then a society racially divided by the White Australia Policy.
[3] It won the Miles Franklin Literary Award,[4] His second novel, The Wort Papers (1972), ranged across the country in rural settings from the Kimberley to dairy country in northern New South Wales, and further established his reputation as a stylistic innovator and satirist.
[5] Mathers wrote radio plays, articles and published many stories in magazines, journals and newspapers before beginning a substantial playwriting career, which included Pelaco Hill, Bats, The Mountain King and The Real McCoy.