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veep23's review
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.5
incrediblemelk's review
4.0
I normally steer well clear of any self-consciously 'Australian' award-winners set in the colonial bush (this won Wilson the Vogel Prize), but when I flicked through the first few pages of this in the shop, the writing immediately intrigued me. It feels urgent and modern in a way that belies its 1829 setting: terse dialogue with an ear for colloquial rhythms, and descriptions that are viscerally poetic – sometimes, literally so.
But there's also a mystical quality to this that reminded me of Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps it's all the laconic men with their guns and merciless killing, but it's also the weird, unresolved tone of the ending and the role of stories and allusive imagery. One of the most McCarthyesque scenes occurs when the roving party meet a stranded toff with a mysterious fancy case, who pitifully begs to be escorted to safety. John Batman looks inside the case, but never tells the party what it contains… and we never find out either.
The clan chief Manalargena, an ambiguous antagonist who seems to have magical powers, tells Black Bill – an equally ambiguous protagonist – a story about two brothers eating crayfish by a river, pursued by a hunter who wants the crayfish for himself, until all three are transformed into wallabies (or, in the version Black Bill remembers, snakes) and graze together peacefully, forgetting who is friend and who is foe.
This story seems to be an allegory of the frontier war that was then being fought between black and white people in what's now Tasmania. Manalargena wants Black Bill to join him in fighting off the whitefellas, who only want what someone else already possesses. And he implies that, like the wallabies, Black Bill has spent so long around the colonists that he has forgotten whose side he's on.
But the story could equally be utopian: a vision of a Tasmania shared peacefully by black and white people. Wilson explores the arbitrary lines of belonging and not-belonging in Van Diemen's Land: the clashing allegiances one could find oneself wrongsided by. It's telling that Manalargena is described as a Plindermairhemener man, but Black Bill is a Vandemonian: he belongs to this place, but having been raised from childhood by a white settler, he's native in a 'white' way.
We see this cycle being repeated as John Batman – another ambiguous antagonist, who'd go on to claim what's now Melbourne for the white men – steals a Plindermairhemener boy to raise in his household, calling him Ben. And when Eliza Batman enlists the help of Black Bill's wife, Katherine, in finding out the name of a black girl Batman has kidnapped – and whom Eliza is now trying to 'civilise' by bathing her and dressing her in European clothing – Katherine's mouth goes hard and she says, "Whites got no need of our names."
Also unwillingly becoming Vandemonian are the four convicts who are loaned out on assignment to Batman (an officially condoned use of convicts as slave labour for free landowners). Three are English, one is Welsh, but as Batman informs them, they're all Vandemonian now. And joining Batman, his servant Gould, Black Bill and the convicts in the titular roving party are two Dharug men from Parramatta, Pigeon and Crook. By virtue of their skin colour and their bushcraft skills they're lumped in with the local blackfellas, but this isn't their language or their country.
So much of the book is the oppressive suffering of this oddball group as they set out to earn money, land or their freedom by murdering and enslaving the local clanspeople. The cold, rain and snow, the hunger and thirst, the leeches and rocks and branches, the brutality and lack of compassion, are all described vividly. Theirs isn't a journey with a clear trajectory – they do rove, searching and never quite finding their quarry, and erupting into vicious, deadly skirmishes here and there.
Black Bill's urgent desire to find and kill Manalargena is what really drives the book. Like so much here, the nature of their feud is unspoken – although Bill's collusion with Batman to exterminate his own people is viewed with justifiable disgust by the clansmen. In a way, it seems that Manalargena represents Bill's shame over what he's done, and his alienation from his language and traditions. He's an opaque, stoic character who nonetheless feels deeply. Bill seems dispassionate, even callous, in his work, yet he displays a compassion that seems innate. He repeatedly rescues Horsehead, one of the convicts, a disagreeable man who could easily have been left to die.
Later, he rescues a black girl from the clutches of two escaped convicts, and feeds and shelters her. Children seem to act here as both as emblems of what has been lost, and hope for the future. The white urchins the party encounter in the towns are crueller and more horrible than the adults. Manalargena constantly surrounds himself with children. And Bill's unborn son is his only source of solace.
I was reading about John Batman on Wikipedia just now and learned that his direct descendant Daniel Batman, an athlete who died in a 2012 car crash, was married to athlete-turned-politician Nova Peris and fathered two children with her. Jack Batman, whose ancestor murdered black people, is Aboriginal.
But there's also a mystical quality to this that reminded me of Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps it's all the laconic men with their guns and merciless killing, but it's also the weird, unresolved tone of the ending and the role of stories and allusive imagery. One of the most McCarthyesque scenes occurs when the roving party meet a stranded toff with a mysterious fancy case, who pitifully begs to be escorted to safety. John Batman looks inside the case, but never tells the party what it contains… and we never find out either.
The clan chief Manalargena, an ambiguous antagonist who seems to have magical powers, tells Black Bill – an equally ambiguous protagonist – a story about two brothers eating crayfish by a river, pursued by a hunter who wants the crayfish for himself, until all three are transformed into wallabies (or, in the version Black Bill remembers, snakes) and graze together peacefully, forgetting who is friend and who is foe.
This story seems to be an allegory of the frontier war that was then being fought between black and white people in what's now Tasmania. Manalargena wants Black Bill to join him in fighting off the whitefellas, who only want what someone else already possesses. And he implies that, like the wallabies, Black Bill has spent so long around the colonists that he has forgotten whose side he's on.
But the story could equally be utopian: a vision of a Tasmania shared peacefully by black and white people. Wilson explores the arbitrary lines of belonging and not-belonging in Van Diemen's Land: the clashing allegiances one could find oneself wrongsided by. It's telling that Manalargena is described as a Plindermairhemener man, but Black Bill is a Vandemonian: he belongs to this place, but having been raised from childhood by a white settler, he's native in a 'white' way.
We see this cycle being repeated as John Batman – another ambiguous antagonist, who'd go on to claim what's now Melbourne for the white men – steals a Plindermairhemener boy to raise in his household, calling him Ben. And when Eliza Batman enlists the help of Black Bill's wife, Katherine, in finding out the name of a black girl Batman has kidnapped – and whom Eliza is now trying to 'civilise' by bathing her and dressing her in European clothing – Katherine's mouth goes hard and she says, "Whites got no need of our names."
Also unwillingly becoming Vandemonian are the four convicts who are loaned out on assignment to Batman (an officially condoned use of convicts as slave labour for free landowners). Three are English, one is Welsh, but as Batman informs them, they're all Vandemonian now. And joining Batman, his servant Gould, Black Bill and the convicts in the titular roving party are two Dharug men from Parramatta, Pigeon and Crook. By virtue of their skin colour and their bushcraft skills they're lumped in with the local blackfellas, but this isn't their language or their country.
So much of the book is the oppressive suffering of this oddball group as they set out to earn money, land or their freedom by murdering and enslaving the local clanspeople. The cold, rain and snow, the hunger and thirst, the leeches and rocks and branches, the brutality and lack of compassion, are all described vividly. Theirs isn't a journey with a clear trajectory – they do rove, searching and never quite finding their quarry, and erupting into vicious, deadly skirmishes here and there.
Black Bill's urgent desire to find and kill Manalargena is what really drives the book. Like so much here, the nature of their feud is unspoken – although Bill's collusion with Batman to exterminate his own people is viewed with justifiable disgust by the clansmen. In a way, it seems that Manalargena represents Bill's shame over what he's done, and his alienation from his language and traditions. He's an opaque, stoic character who nonetheless feels deeply. Bill seems dispassionate, even callous, in his work, yet he displays a compassion that seems innate. He repeatedly rescues Horsehead, one of the convicts, a disagreeable man who could easily have been left to die.
Later, he rescues a black girl from the clutches of two escaped convicts, and feeds and shelters her. Children seem to act here as both as emblems of what has been lost, and hope for the future. The white urchins the party encounter in the towns are crueller and more horrible than the adults. Manalargena constantly surrounds himself with children. And Bill's unborn son is his only source of solace.
I was reading about John Batman on Wikipedia just now and learned that his direct descendant Daniel Batman, an athlete who died in a 2012 car crash, was married to athlete-turned-politician Nova Peris and fathered two children with her. Jack Batman, whose ancestor murdered black people, is Aboriginal.
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