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  • Published: 1 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9781740511421
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.99

The Electrical Experience




T. George McDowell believes in getting the job done.

T. George McDowell believes in getting the job done.

'I do not care for words in top hats. I believe in shirt-sleeve words. I believe in getting the job done. We're like that on the coast.'

T. George McDowell, a manufacturer of soft drinks on the south coast of New South Wales, prides himself on extolling the virtues of progress. He is a Rotarian and exponent of wireless, refrigeration and electricity. He is a Realist and a Rationalist - a 'fair man but hard as nails' according to his staff - but trouble in the shape of his youngest daughter, Terri, tests his values and beliefs, and he finds that his own sexual longings begin to intrude in his dreams.

First published in 1974, The Electrical Experience is an at times humorous examination of the Australian soul, and won the National Book Council Award for Fiction.

  • Published: 1 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9781740511421
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.99

About the author

Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in 1970s became a full-time writer. He won national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He was best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s as she struggled to become a diplomat. His last book The Drover’s Wifea reading adventure published in October 2017, brings together works inspired by Henry Lawson’s story and examines the attachment Australia has to the story and to Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name. Frank was awarded a number of fellowships including writer in residence at King’s College Cambridge, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. His work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was made a Doctor of the University by Griffith University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, 2015. Frank Moorhouse died, in Sydney, on 26 June 2022.

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Praise for The Electrical Experience

'His effect is unexpected, exhilarating, disorienting, sometimes hilarious... He makes you laugh, and think.' - Angela Carter, New York Times

'Moorhouse stands alone...' - Le Monde, Paris

‘ ... the loosely related episodes are drawn together into a narrative of novelistic dimensions. In all his writings, there is a care for the exact weight of a word, speech and scene which make him one of the most potent forces have been applied to the Australian short story …’ Harry Heseltine, The Literature of Australia.

‘The ironic detachment with which a past ethos is established, partly by the fragments of 1930s folklore and history, is balanced by Moorhouse’s sympathy towards and understanding of the central character.’ Oxford Companion to Australian Literature.