Killarney - Culture and History

In spite of this apparent unpretentiousness and ordinariness, Killarney's greatest claim to fame is that it was the subject of David Malouf's novel Harland's Half Acre. In the novel Malouf writes of the town: 'Named like so much else in Australia for a place on the far side of the globe that its founders meant to honour and were piously homesick for, Killarney bears no resemblance to its Irish original.

'It is lush country but of the green, subtropical kind, with sawmills in untidy paddocks, peak-roofed weatherboard farms, and on the skyline of low hills, bunyah pines, hoop pines and Scotch firs of a forbidding blackness. Tin roofs flare out of an acre of stumps. Iron windmills churn. On all sides in the wet months there is a flash of water. These are the so-called lakes.'

It was 'a flash of water', an exceptional cyclone, which raged through the town in 1968 almost wiping it out.