Redman's Relic

In 1884, STICKLER REDMAN leads an expedition into inland Australia, recording and cataloguing the rock art of the native people. It’s an inexperienced group, ill-suited to the job, and only survives with the help of three Aboriginal men. One of Redman’s men is wounded and shelters in a cave on the Nullarbor coast, a vast cavern where they discover painted walls and Aboriginal artefacts, including a bowl of twisted metal objects. When they’re rescued, the injured man unintentionally takes a piece of the metal with him. Redman eventually takes this artefact to America where it becomes known as Redman’s Relic. His family recognise it as model of a tiny section of the genome, mankind’s genetic blueprint, but its value is misunderstood and misrepresented.
When she is eleven years old, Redman’s granddaughter, Biddie-Lee, learns of the Relic. It’s 1956, and alien sightings are commonplace. She dismisses her family’s belief that Redman’s Relic is alien in origin, but is nonetheless fascinated by it and by genetics. She begins studying the ancient relic, unlocking its secrets little by little, and using the information to develop cosmetics and medicines which she markets to the world through a major pharmaceutical company. She is only 21 when her first product reaches the market. The royalties for that product and many others like it are flooding in. In only a few years, she is one of the richest people in the world. She’s reclusive, intelligent, but also very beautiful and sexy on her own terms.
JIM SANFORD has never been happier. He’s quit a job that was wearing him down, met Lyndal, the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with, formed a successful partnership with a down-on-his-luck miner called DING, and found a whole new opal field in Coober Pedy. The money is pouring in, millions at a time, and life is just beautiful ... all that in the first half of 2008.

But Jim has trouble coming in the form of KARL ROUSE, opal miner, bully, and would-be sales agent for Australian opal into Asia. Jim knows Rouse, but is unaware that he is a violent man with a very black past, and he’s about to reach breaking point.

There’s more trouble on the way, too, about which Jim knows nothing – he’s never heard of BIDDIE-LEE REDMAN, now recognised as a world leader in genetics, so he couldn’t possibly anticipate that the little twisted fossil he finds in his mine and takes to PROFESSOR DEAN ALLENBY, is something that Biddie-Lee wants. She’s recognised it as being the same as Redman’s Relic. She wants it, and every other piece like it, and Jim and Ding are finding a lot of it underground, where they’re digging out the prized red-fire opal. Jim thinks they’re finding sections of a fossil, but Biddie-Lee knows better. Unfortunately for Jim, for all of them, the professor does know Biddie-Lee – they had a very brief affair thirty years earlier, and he’s still besotted. He calls to tell her about Jim’s fossil. Biddie-Lee and two allies leave for Australia the next day – they’re coming for the fossils, and they’ll stop at nothing to get them. Trouble suddenly has a capital T, and it’s all focussed on Jim and his rich opal mine.

Meanwhile, Jim is working happily in his mine and thinking about LYNDAL. His only concern is about possible theft – they’re finding an enormous quantity of opal – so he arranges security through some old friends. An ex Special Forces pilot, and his Rottweiler are stationed at the mine, full time.

When Jim takes the twisted fossil to the professor hoping to learn something about it, he learns something of Biddie-Lee and her ancestor as well. And from that point on, the evil of Rouse and the greed of Biddie-Lee flow together in a calamitous series of events resulting in violence, death and destruction. Jim’s world is destroyed, and paradoxically, it falls to Biddie-Lee to help him to reconstruct his life.