[4] During the 1970s he turned from journalism to writing fiction,[2] beginning with The Savage Crows in 1976, followed by A Cry in the Jungle Bar, The Bodysurfers, Fortune, The Bay of Contented Men, Our Sunshine, The Drowner, Grace and The Rip, as well as a prize-winning memoir, The Shark Net, and the non-fiction Walking Ella.
[1] Fortune won the fiction category of the National Book Council Award, The Bay of Contented Men won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the best book in Australasia and South-East Asia, and The Drowner made Australian literary history by becoming the first novel to win the Premier's Literary Prize in every state.
Our Sunshine was made into a 2003 film, retitled Ned Kelly, directed by Gregor Jordan and starring Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom and Naomi Watts.
Birth of a novelist, death of a journalist by David Conley[10] Drewe is Australia's most prominent journalist-novelist in that he has won awards for reportage and fiction.
Ever since his first novel, The Savage Crows (1976), Drewe's fiction has interrogated conceptions of a unitary national identity such as that projected by the Australian legend, with its emphasis on the bush, mateship and Anglo-Celtic origins.
Its very obviousness, together with the variety of subjects chosen, has deflected attention away from the evolving, subtly changing nature of his response to the historical record.
This has, of course, ranged from the adversarial to the nostalgic and elegiac, and a similar diversity characterises the historical sources drawn on for his major fiction, beginning with genocide in Tasmania and Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific region, through the making of national fold-heroes, to an autobiography and stories based on his early life in Perth.
"The Diviner" by Murray Waldren[13] He has always specialised in precise texts of straightforward but expressive prose, tinged with traces of black humour.
In literature, his world is one in which characters barely comprehend what is happening around them, where life and nature verge on the malevolent, where shards of sudden insight illuminate the confusion.
One of his strengths is an ability to pin down the fine detail of how people interact, socially and emotionally, to capture the nuance and undercurrents that exist beneath conversations.