Author's Note

This is a novel built on a documentary spine.

The judgments are real. The Hansard is real. The ASIC releases, the reporting of the ABC and the BBC and the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, the Indonesian enforcement actions, the competing corporate statements filed in Hong Kong and Lombok and Bali in the first months of 2026 — all real, all listed at the back.

Everything interior is invention. The private conversations. The weather in the rooms. The thoughts of the men inside them. And the minor characters who carry the human cost — Marion Dalgety, Trevor Aylwood, Dave Prentice, Amanda Walsh, Made Wijana, Ron Hallam, Kate Ellery, Tisha — these are made up, because the record contains a hundred and fifty-two families and thirteen creditors and thirty investors and dozens of students, and does not contain their kitchens.

A novel exists to supply the kitchens.

Where a named real person appears, they appear doing only what the record says they did. Where two parties dispute a fact, both accounts are given.