Outback Australia

There's absolutely nothing like a quintessential Aussie bloke, a cop in purgatory, stuck in outback Western Australia, doing time on the Stock Squad for offending the powers that be.  Alan Carter's debut novel PRIME CUT starts out with considerable promise, despite the slightly unrealistic picture of a Stock Squad peering that closely at roadkill!

But the setup is beside the point as DSC Cato Kwong has to be out in the middle of nowhere for some reason, therefore becoming the only option on hand when a mangled torso is washed up on the beach of mining town Hopetoun.  Much to his old bosses displeasure.  But then it's just for a few days until some resources can be freed up in Perth. So Kwong has a mystery, an existing force of two cops, and a deadline if he wants to drag himself back from the brink of investigating rustling for the rest of his born days.  And things are even more complicated when he arrives in Hopetoun to find that one of the local cops is an ex of his, sidelined to the bush because she was badly injured in an incident after they split up, Tess Maguire has problems of her own.

Because Kwong and Maguire both have pasts (separate and their failed relationship) there's obviously going to be a hefty dose of self-evaluation and backward looking focus at points in the book, but that's handled with considerable aplomb - and helped immensely by some really deft touches of humour, and a laid back, Australian sensibility.  There's also a point at which you can see that this author has spent some time in this town, he has a keen eye for the effects of a mining boom on a quiet little seaside town and he's developed a good sense of place - albeit a place in the middle of nowhere, a 21st century outback Australian frontier of a sort.

The pressure of the deadline gives the story a good feeling of tension, without it being played overtly.  There's a nice balance of investigative ability and observation, assisted by some risky moves and some strong local knowledge.  There's also a lot of threads playing out in the book, so the reader is kept well on their toes keeping track of who is who and what is what, let alone why!  The characters are really well handled, from the ambitious but flawed Kwong, to the local policeman who can hold his own.  Tess Maguire was interesting, her life obviously considerably derailed by her encounter with a man who injured her badly when on duty one night, her story weaves its way into the narrative, just the same as Kwong's personal story is drawn out.  The only downside is that towards the end Maguire disappears a bit in the hurly burly.  The series stars DSC Cato Kwong, but Carter may just have a team on his hands here.  And let's hope that we see a lot more of one or both of them into the future.  PRIME CUT really is a terrific debut novel.

There are a lot of reasons why I move heaven and earth to get hold of a Philip McLaren book when I hear there's a new one in the offing.  Firstly, as you can probably pick from the synopsis above, there's a very dry, understated wit in McLaren's story-telling style.  He's also writing about his own people, in a way that's both affectionate and exasperated.  He's also frequently very very pointed about the difficulties Aboriginal people in Australia face on a daily basis.

What McLaren is doing in MURDER IN UTOPIA is really interesting.  He runs a parallel story of a young Aboriginal girl in Australia, against a disgraced New York doctor both of whom collide in Utopia.  McLaren hastens to add this is not a book about the real Utopia - rather it's a fictional setting for his book, stating "I found the irony irresistible: imagine naming a place Utopia, a place so impoverished, so desolate."

The narrative moves forward bringing Jack Nugent to outback Australia and a community in need of medical services, as well as a community struggling against so many issues - alcohol, violence, neglect, poor housing, tensions with authorities.  All of these are told from both points of view - from the American, doctor, outsider with alcohol problems of his own, and from people within the community.  A ritual killing becomes a catalyst for people to adjust their views and for the depth of the problems in the community to be dragged into the daylight.

The structure of this book really works well, and whilst it is obvious that there is a lot of opinions and observations of reality being voiced within the narrative, fair enough.  In fact it's a privilege to read a fictional story addressing real-life issues in an Aboriginal voice, and the occasional stridency or maybe sledge-hammer adjustment of plot to make a point seemed perfectly reasonable in the circumstances.

Not a book for readers looking just for "pure entertainment" MURDER IN UTOPIA is a book for readers that want to learn something about issues we should be more aware of, written by somebody who obviously knows.

This book is absolutely fascinating.  In a series of chapters based on each crime - starting with the escape of convicts in Tasmania in 1822, right through to the disappearance of Peter Falconio in the Northern Territory in 2001, the author has explored a series of notorious crimes - all of which took place in various locations throughout the bush and remote Australian outback.

Starting out with the escape and subsequent cannibalism of a group of convicts in Tasmania in 1822, we then learn how cattle rustling in 1870 is more successful when you are in an area so remote that it's almost totally unknown.  From there to Victoria and the late 1870's - to the time and activities of one of our most famous bushrangers, Ned Kelly.  In a more sobering tale, in the early 1900's racism and cruelty led to a violent spree when Jimmy Governor finally had enough and took revenge.  In 1940 a mining worker disappeared and it was pure hard work that meant that the police solved that crime and a little later in the 1940's Alice Springs was very much a frontier town when it was rocked by a series of bombs.  In 1968 Larry Boy proved that Aboriginal bush skills were extremely formidable as they still were when local Aboriginal people were called in to help in the search for Azaria Chamberlain in 1980.  From there it's 1989 and a series of backpacker disappearances that leads to a shocking discovery in the Australian bush, with the book finishing in 2001 with the disappearance of Peter Falconio from the roadside in the middle of the Australian outback.

The great thing about each of this individual chapters is that they are told in a very non-sensational, matter of fact way, that gives the reader a real understanding of the events without the ooh aaa factor that you often get from newspaper accounts (I'm thinking in particular of the story of the death of Azaria Chamberlain here!)  Anybody who is interested in some of the real crime stories of Australia over many years will find this book most instructive.