This is a cracker of a book. I literally could not put it down and read it at a sitting. From the very first page we are plunged into the mind of the main character—we can hardly call him a ‘hero’, though he has performed heroic deeds. A former army officer, badly wounded and literally scarred by his time in the second ‘Boer War’ (1899-1902), Gus Hawkins is by 1911 a policeman, a mounted trooper, stationed in the far west of NSW on the Darling River between Bourke and Wilcannia. His new life is ‘a bit like the army, days of crushing boredom and then fifteen minutes of terror, then it was back to writing up requisitions for soap’.
He discovers and must investigate the murder of three young people, children of one of the great local landowners. Who did it is fairly clear, but the reason why is not obvious—and indeed is almost unimaginable. As the story’s various threads are disentangled, Hawkins (and we) reach closure of a sort, but it is a long and demanding journey.
The area Pip Fioretti describes is one we know from A.B. Paterson, Henry Lawson and, most particularly, Arthur Upfield. But it is seen from a contemporary perspective on, for instance, colonial massacres: the murder of Aboriginal children, drowned for ‘stealing yabbies’ has gone unreported and a local preacher was told ‘they were blacks and not worth his prayers’. The title Bone Lands alludes to environmental destruction: the landscape is littered with the bones of dead animals and many people work at killing rabbits or wild dogs. The killing work never ends and neither does the pastoral work. All of this is done by men and here Fioretti uncovers the underlying rift between women and men; not just a rift, but a deep divide that shapes the entire story. A parallel rift is that between rich and poor. The homesteads where the wives of the station-owners dispense gracious hospitality is a world away from the huts of small selectors and their scurvy-ridden children.
The language is richly evocative: one man has ‘eyes as hard as goats’ knees’. A local village is ‘a furuncle in the groin of the Darling … a place where drinking was the main occupation and the citizens nursed a chronic case of brown bottle flu’. ‘Justice was an abstract noun, and therefore as rubbery as you wanted it to be, especially out here’.
The suspense about what happens to Hawkins himself is terrific, disclosed only in the last three pages of the book. It’s very clever, and a beautiful conclusion to an extraordinary work.
Author: Pip Fioretti
Publisher: Affirm Press
ISBN: 9781922992864
Buy through the ARR.News Store
This book review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Related story: Author interview – Pip Fioretti
