PRESS RELEASE: Is Outback Odyssey Australia’s To Kill a Mockingbird?
New historical novel draws bold comparisons by quietly challenging who gets remembered — and who doesn’t.
SYDNEY, NSW, AUSTRALIA, July 23, 2025— When a reader recently described Outback Odyssey as “Australia’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” author Paul Rushworth-Brown was caught off guard. However, as conversations have continued to spark around the book’s themes of silence, memory, and cultural erasure, that comparison is resonating with an increasing number of readers — including me.
At first glance, the two novels couldn’t be more different. Harper Lee’s Mockingbird is set in the Deep South, revolves around a courtroom drama, and has become an American literary touchstone. Outback Odyssey, meanwhile, follows a young Yorkshire lad named Jimmy who arrives in 1950s Australia and ends up working alongside Aboriginal stockmen on a remote sheep station.
But at their core, both novels explore what happens when truth is inconvenient — and what it costs to tell it anyway.
While To Kill a Mockingbird takes aim at racial injustice and the cost of conscience in the American legal system, Outback Odyssey does something uniquely Australian: it lifts the veil on who gets left out of the story when national myths are told. Through Jimmy’s eyes, readers encounter the quiet strength of First Nations men, the buried pain of colonial legacy, and the strange, uneasy silence that still lingers in the bush — and in the country.
“Paul doesn’t preach,” says Amanda Smith, who teaches literature and writes about cultural narratives. “He listens. And he brings that listening into the novel in a way that’s rare. You feel the dust, the isolation, the weight of things unsaid — and yet there’s a real beauty to it. Like Mockingbird, it’s a coming-of-age story wrapped around a moral reckoning.”
Outback Odyssey is more than a bush yarn. It’s fiction grounded in lived experience, shaped by oral histories, and inspired by the author’s time working outback — and by the silences he’s encountered ever since. While not claiming to speak for First Nations people, Rushworth-Brown’s work honours their presence by refusing to write them out.
“It’s not the same book, of course,” says Smith. “But the spirit? The courage to use fiction as resistance — that’s what makes the comparison stick.”
About the Author:
Paul Rushworth-Brown is an Australian author and former national football coach. Paul brings a deep respect for history, land, and storytelling into his work. Outback Odyssey is his latest novel and is published by Historium Press.
For media enquiries, interviews or review copies, please contact:
Hayley Brown
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 0431724652
