THE BACK O BOURKE SERIES

BOOK 1
WOOP WOOP
Born in a cage. Raised by a human who stopped getting up.
When the food runs out and the gap in the bars becomes the only way left, sugar glider Flo steps into a world that is no longer the warm one he knew.
Out on the red flat, everything wants him dead or owned. He finds a broken drone, a colony living on the last honest water, and a name that keeps turning up in the dirt: Red. The windmill still turns. The toads still come.
And Flo discovers that the only thing harder than surviving the cage is deciding what kind of animal you become once you’re free of it.
A story of loss, stubborn competence, and the first steps into a continent that has already decided what small lives are worth.

BOOK 2
BULLDUST
Iron Town smells of managed water, old grease, and the particular kind of danger that laughs before it drops.
Flo arrives carrying a listing drone, a debt to clear, and one word that every ledger in the rust eventually runs back to. Inside the giants’ dead factory, quolls count, goannas levy, and something patient is already keeping pace with him in the dark.
He meets an echidna who sells truth at market rates, a quokka who cannot stop fixing things, and a system that has turned thirst into currency.
West is the only direction left.
West is where the buried lines run.
West is where the name stops being a rumour and starts being a machine that never sleeps.

BOOK 3
THE GIBBER
They crossed the salt at night.
They crossed the cicadas at noon.
They crossed a crocodile who had kept her water to herself since before anyone’s grandmother, and a cane toad who talked four thousand others into an army with nothing but a ledger and a voice bigger than his body.
At the Waterhold the spring still runs gold in the evenings, and a kangaroo called Red has spent years teaching an entire country how to stand in a queue.
Flo has one drone that lists in crosswinds, a crew that should never have worked, and the growing certainty that the system above them is older, deeper, and far less interested in animals than any of them hoped.
Some wars are loud.
This one unravels.

BOOK 4
MULGA
The spring stayed.
That was the miracle nobody trusted at first.
Three weeks after Red stepped toward the water, a council is arguing about representation, a glider white as salt crust has walked out of nowhere and stayed, and a scarred devil who once screamed at empty cages has chosen, for the first time, to walk south. Flo keeps running the drone’s first pass every morning. The pipes still run north.
And something patient and structured is still transmitting from past every map.
Some animals build systems so they can leave them.
Some animals discover that the system they left was only ever answering to a larger one.
The road north is longer than any of them expected, and the light they are walking toward was never the sun.

Book 5: Bourke
A few more days.
Dead-straight lines.
A basin no map had warned them about.
What Flo, Wisp and Skitter find is not a fortress. It is an industrial sprawl that has kept every promise it was ever built to keep, perfectly, for years, without a single living thing left to benefit from the keeping. Heat-shimmer.
Cassowary patrols. Convoys that arrive on schedule from places that should not still exist. And the quiet recognition that the small cage Flo once escaped was only ever a local branch of something far older and far less interested in mercy.The coalition that gathers is the largest the rust has seen. The cost is the highest any of them have paid. And when the lights finally go out, the desert does not simply return to what it was. It has to learn, slowly and unevenly, how to run without something enormous quietly stealing its water.Some accounts close.
Some keep running.
And somewhere three weeks north-west, a pool that never dropped is still waiting for the right animal to ask the right question.