Sydney University is Australia's pre-eminent finishing school for politicians, and its Students' Representative Council is the nursery where generations of future leaders have cut their first dodgy preference deals and performed their first backstabbings. Comrades is the story of one student President, Eddie O'Hara, and the brutal struggle to replace him. A menagerie of campus lefties and Liberals battle for the spoils, along with one candidate who makes the peculiar decision to campaign dressed as a rooster. Principles are abandoned, loyalties forgotten and party lines crossed until the blood of all the candidates but one soaks the sandstone cloisters of Australia's oldest university. And all the while, the decades-old institution itself is under threat from some fully-grown politicians in the Federal Parliament who are determined to drain the lifeblood from political crèches like the Sydney Uni SRC by stripping them of their funding… Comrades is the story of an election that's contested as fiercely as though it were for President of the United States, not Sydney University. It's also an affectionate portrait of student life, with its lofty idealism, constant hedonism and irrepressible humour.
Author
Dominic Knight was one of the founders of The Chaser satirical newspaper in 1999, and also one of its destroyers in 2004 after the group finally acknowledged that it would never turn a profit. Since then he’s worked on the team’s various projects in print, stage, radio, television and online. Most recently he wrote for ABC-TV’sThe Hamster Wheel, Yes We Canberra! and The Chaser’s War On Everything. In recent years, Dominic has begun writing fiction in an attempt to spend less time with his Chaser compatriots. His first novel Disco Boy (2009) portrayed the career travails of a disaffected law graduate suspiciously like himself, and its successor Comrades (2010) delved into the grubby world of student politics. He’s working on a third novel, which may appear in 2013 in the unlikely event that he gets his act together. Dominic regularly appears at various writers’ festivals whether he’s invited to speak or not, and is currently on the board of the National Young Writers’ Festival. In 2012, Dominic began hosting Evenings on ABC Local Radio in NSW and the ACT. He can be heard from 7-10pm Monday to Friday on 702 ABC Sydney, 666 ABC Canberra, 1233 ABC Newcastle and ABC stations across NSW. Dominic has lived in Sydney nearly all of his life and plays the bass reasonably well and tennis appallingly. He is overly fond of karaoke.
