Robin Maugham

“The whole district of Australia where I lived was just a small plot in the immensity of the huge continent whose fringes only had been explored. Berrima, in fact, was merely a little paddock which had been carved out of the wilderness. Yet even here in the stillness of the early evening I had a feeling that as a human being I was an intruder in the forest. For these dense forests belonged to the pale ghostly trees and to the strange creatures that were hidden in them. Then, suddenly, I would jump as if a gun had been fired close to me, as the silence was rent by the piercing din of the kookaburra, screeching and screeching from the branches of a tree above, until the menacing sound changed to a mocking laugh. The low, hoarse laugh would seem unending. Abruptly it would finish in an obscene, deep-throated chuckle, which had an odd quality of knowingness and familiarity, suggesting an intimate awareness of the stark fear of the man walking through the undergrowth below, and a malicious pleasure at the prospect of some inevitable and terrible doom.”
― Robin Maugham, The link: a Victorian mystery

“But if I could have met Tim Deakin when he was thirteen or fourteen,’ Ewing said, accentuating each word with his finger, ‘I am convinced that he would still be with me, and I’m convinced that we’d both be happy.”
― Robin Maugham, The Wrong People