After school, Temple served a year of national service in the army, stationed at Cape Town.

During his years with the newspaper, particularly while doing police rounds in the courts of Cape Town, he saw at first hand the degrading effect of apartheid on people of colour and felt the experience changed him.

[1] During his mid-twenties he married his wife, Anita, and moved to Grahamstown (now Makhanda) in the Eastern Cape province to study history and politics at Rhodes University with the intention of becoming an historian.

[4] Temple eventually came to consider himself as "complicit" in the apartheid regime,[5] and after the death of Steve Biko in 1977 he resolved that he had to leave South Africa.

[2] Temple managed to secure a job with an English-language news digest in Hamburg, falsely claiming that he could speak German.

[2] In 1982 Temple moved to Melbourne to become the founding editor of Australian Society, a magazine of social issues, where he stayed until 1985.

He then returned to teaching, playing a significant role in establishing the prestigious Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT, Melbourne.

[9] Temple also wrote three stand-alone novels: An Iron Rose, Shooting Star and In the Evil Day (Identity Theory in the US), as well as The Broken Shore and its semi-sequel, Truth.

[15] Irish must solve the various mysteries which occur along the way, including the circumstances which led the occasional barman to disappear.

[16] His ex-girlfriend becomes one of the main suspects as Irish attempts to solve the murder mystery, unveiling secrets and even more complications along the way.

[17] In 2019 a 20,000 word fragment of an unfinished Jack Irish novel, provisionally titled High Art, appeared in a posthumus collection of Temple’s writing, The Red Hand.