In April 2025, the former rugby league star and recovering gambling addict, Luke Bateman , found himself living in a broken-down caravan in remote Queensland, about nine hours’ drive north-west of Brisbane. He had no mains power or water and only a sketchy connection to the internet. For Bateman, who was then 30, the isolation was the point: out here there were few temptations, no casinos, no booze and certainly no drugs. During the day, he would work in the scrub, in 40-degree heat, helping his stepfather, Donny, who had a contract to log the local cypress pine. At night, he would return to his camp and barbecue a steak before retiring to his caravan, where he would read. And read, and read, and read. Bateman, who I visited recently, reads virtually anything: in the absence of all else, he’d probably curl up with the instruction manual to his microwave. But his preferred genre was, and remains, fantasy. Dragons, fairies, shape-shifting werewolves: that’s his thing.…