I'm not sure whether Richard Flanagan's gig as co-writer of Baz Luhrmann's Australia brought him to downtown Bowen, but a quick scan of the Flanagan entry on the Wikipedia reveals some interesting details.
Maybe not enough interesting details to have me out chasing down hard copies of the various titles for the LHoC bookshelves, but a Rhodes Scholar descended from Irish convicts who's been critical of the Tasmanian Labor government's links to big business whose 2007 essay, Gunns. Out of Control in The Monthly inspired Sydney businessman Geoffrey Cousins' campaign to stop the building of Gunns' Bell Bay Pulp Mill would definitely appear to have his heart in the right place.
Non-fiction:
A terrible beauty: history of the Gordon River country (1985)
The Rest of the world is watching - Tasmania and the Greens (1990)
Codename Iago: the story of John Friedrich (1991)
Parish-Fed Bastards. A History of the Politics of the Unemployed in Britain, 1884-1939 (1991)
And What Do You Do, Mr Gable? (2011)
Fiction:
Death of a River Guide (1994)
The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997)
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001)
The Unknown Terrorist (2006)
Wanting (2008)