The Sequel

The manuscript opens in 1983, long before the red dirt of Western Australia entered the frame. A skinny, eight-year-old Luke Pomery was living in the remote, coastal Gulf country of Numbulwar in the Northern Territory, where his father, Neil, operated as the local shop manager. It was within the walls of this isolated homestead that the systematic physical degradation was born.
Neil established a regime of complete psychological and physical dominance over his young children. It was here that he weaponised a military-grade conditioning drill he sadistically nicknamed "flying to Fiji." The parameters were absolute: the eight-year-old boy was forced to stand or kneel completely rigid with his arms locked straight out horizontally for hours on end. If his small, developing shoulder blades sagged a single millimetre from exhaustion, the punishment was met with the immediate threat of a machete or a cut-down semi-automatic .22 rifle.
In December 1984, following his biological mother's divorce from Neil in 1982/1983, the family was uprooted from South Australia and dragged into the deep isolation of Western Australia, taking over the sprawling, 450,000-acre Moolapool Station outside Meekatharra. By 1989, the property ballooned into a massive 1.2-million-acre pastoral empire. Luke's biological mother was completely absent from this landscape, leaving the seven children completely isolated with Neil and a rotating line of station hands, 100 kilometers away from any external welfare intervention.
From the ages of nine to twenty-one, Luke was treated not as a son, but as an unpaid asset to be worked into the ground. At ten years old, while hauling himself up an old chimney flue, Luke suffered a catastrophic three-meter fall, landing millimeters from a concrete spoon drain, leaving him temporarily paralyzed and winded. His immediate panic was not his life, but the broken station property-knowing that an accidental breakage meant an unrelenting, terrifying beating from his father. He was forced to override the physical shock to his thoracic spine, stand immediately back up, and continue working without a single drop of medical care.
The systemic terror of Numbulwar escalated across the red dirt. Neil routinely used the young boy for target practice, firing his cut-down .22 rifle from 200 meters away directly at quartz crystals right next to Luke's head, sending white-hot sprays of sharp rock shrapnel across his face. The "flying to Fiji" torture was dragged out into the elements; Luke was forced to kneel for hours on blistering hot, sharp granite breakaway boulders under the roaring outback sun with his arms locked horizontally.
Amidst this industrial warfare, the family endured its heaviest tragedy. In 1985, Luke's youngest sister, Ambumbalillie (Lilli)-who carried a traditional name honoring her stepmother's Numbulwar saltwater lineage-passed away on the station as a baby. She was the first to escape the regime, remaining completely pure, sane, and untouched by the violence that systematically dismantled the surviving siblings as the years rolled on.
The manuscript documents a dual-front war. When Luke was removed from the physical boundaries of the station for schooling, he was thrown directly into a network of fragmented institutional abuse. Surrounded by predators, the young, four-foot-tall boy was subjected to severe grooming and abuse by the Christian Brothers, who groped the children, supplied them with hard alcohol spirits, and fed them pornography to control and silence them. Trapped between the violent tyranny of Moolapool and the predatory nature of the institution, Luke's fight-or-flight response was pushed past the breaking point every single day for twelve continuous years until he finally broke clean from the station in April 1996.