Indigenous Issues

THE BOUNDARY is the first novel from Australian author Nicole Watson.  Nicole is a member of the Birri-Gubba People and the Yugambeh language group and her novel is set in Brisbane, at the end of an unsuccessful land rights claim, soon after which high profile people start dying.

Reading this book it's impossible not to be aware of some fundamental elements.  There is a sense of anger in the book - anger at the treatment of an ancient people in their land and anger at the deprivation and desecration of those people.  There's also a sense of celebration - Aboriginal sensibility, thinking, belief systems, and society are clearly illustrated.  That's not to say that this is a saccharine view of life - there's good and bad and right and wrong on both sides.  There's so much damage to many of the people in this book, but there's also signs of self-reliance, repair and restoration.  THE BOUNDARY is told in a style which has a real feeling of difference, choppy, abrupt, scathing as many difficult subjects are tackled - politics, land rights, alcoholism, dysfunction, family tensions and the difficulties that change continues to bring.

THE BOUNDARY is most definitely not a light and easy read, nor is it a perfect, flawless debut.  The subject matter alone makes it confrontational, and the writing is often as abrupt as the content.  It provides a real sense of the "other" with a glaring distinction between the mystical and reality which starts off feeling a little choppy, but does ends up making some sense.  The use of the crime genre to tell this story rings true, the subject matter confrontational and whilst I did at one point think the writing a little patchy, the personal stories are strong, involving and very moving.  So many aspects of the story THE BOUNDARY illustrates are raw and brutal, it does makes sense that the reader should sometimes be uncomfortable.  It also makes sense that the flights into the mystical aren't explained, it makes sense that the resolution solves the immediate problem and raises a lot more questions.

What THE BOUNDARY really did for me is make me hope like hell that more and more indigenous Australian's set out to write their stories in their own language, and stylings, so that more and more of us can get an insight into the differences, understand the pain and get even just a glimpse of a reality which is quintessentially their own. 

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.