In 1890, estranged brothers Tommy and Billy McBride are living far apart in Queensland, each dealing with the trauma that destroyed their family in different ways. Now 21, Billy bottles his guilt and justifies his past crimes while attempting to revive his father’s former cattle run and navigate his feelings for the young widow Katherine Sullivan. Katherine, meanwhile, cherishes her newfound independence but is struggling to establish herself as head of the vast Broken Ridge cattle empire her corrupt late husband mercilessly built.
But even in the outback, the past cannot stay buried forever. When a judicial inquest is ordered into the McBride family murders and the subsequent reprisal slaughter of the Kurrong people, both Billy and Police Inspector Edmund Noone – the man who led the massacre – are called to testify. The inquest forces Billy to relive events he has long refused to face. He desperately needs to find his brother, Tommy, who for years has been surviving in the wilderness, attempting to move on with his life. But Billy is not the only one looking for Tommy. Now the ruthless Noone is determined to find the young man as well, and silence both brothers for good.
Only Killers and Thieves, Paul Howarth
Right from the opening pages ONLY KILLERS AND THIEVES is brutal. Transporting readers to colonial Australia, this is a book that will should make you ponder how we got to be where we are. In the main this is a story about brutal people, doing unspeakable things - to Indigenous people, animals, and each other along the way. There's a ruthlessness portrayed here that's going to make you stop reading, to stare off into the distance. In fact the overwhelming feeling I came away from this book with was one of profound distress. At the brutality, at the carelessness, at the way that we seem to have taken to heart that cruelty and perpetuated it down the generations to where we are now. In a country that seemingly doesn't give a rats about the environment that has tried its hardest to sustain us; about our Indigenous population and the massive injustice done to them; that worships money, and ignores the corruption endemic in ensuring that some people have all the money, and others can simply go to hell.
Set in outback Australia in 1885, this is the story of opposites. The wealthy, influential squatter, successful farmer, even in times of drought, unsuccessful family man; and his neighbours, a small family struggling in the drought to remain viable, a close group of 2 boys, their young sister, mother and father, this family knows to keep away from their wealthy, nasty, (water stealing) neighbour John Sullivan. The boys, unfortunately, don't quite know the full story of why, but the discovery of their dead parents, and gravely injured sister, sees them turn to their neighbour for help, away from the Aboriginal stockman who has worked for them for years, as he's blamed for the massacre of their family. This triggers yet another murderous rampage by Sullivan and Inspector Edmund Noone of the Queensland Native Police.
Needless to say the boys are young, impressionable, and each of them reacts to the events of that deadly pursuit in their own way, each of them carries the outcomes of it in very different ways for the rest of their lives. It's a brutal, awful, horrific story, told in a beautiful manner. Confronting reading undoubtedly and some may find themselves physically affected by the tableau's drawn in vivid, clear, uncomfortable detail.
ONLY KILLERS AND THIEVES is an example of how crime fiction can be used to peel back the layers and analyse the darkness at the core of humanity, and it's hard to avoid the important point that white Australian's need to do some hard thinking about their attitudes to where we came from, how we colonised this country and exactly what we think we're achieving by ignoring lessons from the past.