Mort has two sons, as abused by him as he by his father. The younger brother, Jack, has left for Sydney and a successful career as a property developer. Of her brothers, Mort works as a morose mechanic, in denial about his upbringing. Cathy was brought up on opera but now writes her own country material and longs to be on the road with her band. Their mother Frieda, who had turned a blind eye to Cacka's behaviour while he was alive, would rather have run a flower farm on their plot. Responsibility for running the business rests mainly with Frieda's daughter Cathy, an aspiring Country and Western singer, and her manager husband, Howie McPherson, a 'Rockabilly throwback' with pencil-line moustache and ducktail haircut.Īll of the Catchprice children were abused when young and are dysfunctional in their various ways. Since then Sydney has swollen in size and Franklin finds itself only two miles beyond the outermost suburbs it too has become built up and is largely inhabited by indigent immigrants. The business is in Franklin, New South Wales, which used to be a country town twenty miles from Sydney. Its barbed portrayal of a dysfunctional New South Wales family brought the author strong national criticism.Ĭatchprice Motors is a terminally run-down used car business founded by 'Cacka' Catchprice and his wife Frieda in the 1940s but now resembling nothing more than a 'badly tended family grave'. The Tax Inspector is a 1991 novel by Peter Carey, published in Australia by the University of Queensland Press, in the UK by Faber & Faber and, at the start of 1992, by A.

The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey