Book One: The Lachlan Incident
In the hill country above Taralga, in the southern tablelands of New South Wales, a geologist conducting a routine ground-penetrating radar survey finds something that should not exist.
The object is the size of a kitchen table. Its hull is an alloy unknown to any materials database. Its power source — a stabilised micro black hole, contained within a resonant cavity that has been running for 419 million years — should have evaporated within weeks of activation. It did not. Inside, in a stasis field of extraordinary precision, are specimens from a Silurian reef that no longer exists.
Phil Coenraads assembles a small team on the Murdoch sheep property and begins the work of understanding what has been found. The geologist Dick Flood reads the volcanic sequence. The palaeontologist Soo-Lin Park characterises the specimens and begins to suspect the container is not merely a repository but a communication. The physicist Marcus Webb finds something in the data that has no natural explanation.
The Lachlan Incident is a novel about patience — the patience of something that has been waiting for 419 million years, and the patience of the people who slowly come to understand what it is waiting for. It is also a novel about what it means to find something that changes everything, and to understand that the finding is only the beginning. And it is a comedy — what happens when an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elder's ingenuity beats government perversity.