Paul Howarth - Only Killers and Thieves

In Queensland 1885, two boys Tommy and Billy McBride return home to find their family slaughtered. Their farm life had been precarious. Drought had practically wiped out their father's heard, and their mother could no longer get credit in the nearby town shops. Their local neighbour, John Sullivan, a ruthless, greedy man, hates Tommy and Billy's father - but it is to him they must turn when it looks like an aboriginal group has killed their family. 

The boys are pulled into a hunt by the Queensland Native Police, led by the violent Noone. As they, with Noone and Sullivan trek into the desert to find the aboriginal's responsible, the reader follows them deep into Australia, and a dark, racist past were all native people are "killers and thieves" and their only punishment in murder.

This is a difficult read. In places it's description of the treatment of aboriginal people at the hands of the militia is sickening - there is murder and rape. The boys are pulled into culpability for these crimes of revenge, even as Noone (and wider white society) gives them a gloss of legality.

Despite the difficult subject matter, this is a powerful novel about the racist genocide of the aboriginal people. The strength of the book is to put the tragic story of Tommy and Billy into this wider context. I came away from it feeling like I'd received physical blows, and at times had to rest from reading it. But this is a story that tells us a great deal about how colonial Australia developed and I was thinking about it many days after finally putting it down.

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