The Tax Inspector

"You don't seem a very Tax Office kind of person."

"Well I am," Maria reddened. "I'm a very Tax Office sort of person. I hate all this criminal wealth. This state is full of it. It makes me sick. I see all these skunks with their car phones and champagne and I see all this homelessness and poverty. Do you know that one child in three in Australia grows up under the poverty line? You know much much tax is evaded every year? You don't need socialism to fix that, you just need a good Taxation Office and a Treasury with guts. And for a while we had both. For five years. I didn't join to piddle around rotten inefficient businesses like your family's. I never did anything so insignificant in my life. I won't do that sort of work. It fixes nothing. I'm crazy enough to think the world can change, but not like that."

- Carey, Peter. The Tax Inspector (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1991). p. 216.

In her parents' house there had been no money for female fashion. Her mother wore black as she had in Letkos and fashion was something you made over a noisy sewing machine in Surry Hills. Maria had grown up in a house without clothes just as someone would grow up in a house without books or music.

- Ibid, p. 196.

This was a woman with a clear and simple sense of right and wrong. You could see this in the nose. It was a damn fine nose. It was chiselled, almost elegant, but very certain...She was a moralist. She had guts. She was one of those people whom Jack had always loved, people with such a clear sense of the moral imperatives that they would never find themselves in that grey land where "almost right" fades into the rat-flseh-coloured zone of "nearly wrong", people with a clear sight, sharp white with edges like diamonds, people whom Jack would always be in awe of, would follow a little way, more of a way than his profession or what might appear to be his "character" would allow, people in whom he had always been disappointed and then relieved to discover small personal flaws, lacks, unhappinesses that proved to him that their moral rectitude had not been purchased without a certain human price -- this one is unhappy, that one impractical, this one poor, that one incapable of a happy sex life.

He could imagine none of these flaws in Maria, nor did he seek any.

- Ibid, p. 170.

"I'm always shocked to hear wealthy people complaining about tax. I should be used to it. I should be very thick-skinned. In fact, I thoguht I was thick-skinned, but I watch them eating with their Georg Jensen cutlery and I wanted to stand up and shout and make speeches about poverty and homelessness."

- Ibid, p. 249.