“Mick Barnes is a veteran journalist, who excelled as an investigative reporter for Australia’s greatest (real) newspapers, as a script writer for nightly national television news, and as a playwright whose dramas and comedies have been performed from Sydney to the Edinburgh Festival. He has been in training as a curmudgeon for many decades, and now writes from beneath the great looming water tower of innerwest Sydney, as a powerful, eloquent symbol of Mankind’s triumphantly heroic commentaries on our existential experiences from the heart, the soul and, well, from under the water tower.” Peter Shann Ford, literary colleague and innocent bystander