Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In the early 1920s, a young Australian named Rex Rivington abandons his education and leaves his comfortable family home in Melbourne to lead a colourful, but directionless life in the outback. He eventually recognizes his ambition to be a medical doctor, and he rejects his itinerant life to resume his education.
Rex wins it big in a poker game with a four of diamonds, enabling him to bankroll his education. He finishes medical school, but his plan to further his education and study surgery in Scotland is thwarted by the Second World War. Adventure and tragedy dominate his wartime postings in remote outback towns in Queensland and the Northern Territory, and he eventually settles into a country practice in Victoria, becoming a much loved country doctor.
Four of Diamonds: An Australian's Journey is a moving story of triumph and tragedy in a time of transition in Australia, as well as a saga of one man's dedication to his dream.
Synopsis
Rex spent a quiet Christmas Day. He opened the parcel from his family; it contained a leather fishing fly wallet from his father, a knitted woolen sweater from his mother and a book titled The Spell of the Yukon, by Robert Service, from Margorie. He re-read his father's letters and rested, and after a big dinner in the cookhouse at midday with those station men who had not left to join their families, he fished in the Upper Murray River until evening. The cook had left, after cleaning the kitchen following Christmas dinner, and Rex had the big kitchen to himself. He fried two small trout in butter for tea, and ate alone, enjoying his solitude in the evening without loneliness. He sat quietly on the verandah of the bunkhouse, listening to the water from the windmill sprinkling the orchard, and to the birds roosting in the box trees that lined the homestead's driveway. Rex was thinking about his family and his life, and he wondered when he would see them again, when his odyssey would be over.