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.
Only Killers and Thieves
Two adolescent brothers are exposed to the brutal realities of life and the seductive cruelty of power after a tragedy shatters their family in this riveting debut novel—a story of savagery and race, injustice and honor set in the untamed frontier of 1880s Australia—reminiscent of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and the novels of Cormac McCarthy
An epic Western, a tough coming-of-age story, and a tension-laden tale of survival, Only Killers and Thieves is a gripping and utterly transporting debut that brings to vivid life a colonial Australian frontier that bears a striking resemblance to the American West in its formative years.
It is 1885 and the McBride family are trying to survive a crippling drought that is slowly eroding their lives and hopes: their cattle are starved, and the family can no longer purchase the supplies they need on their depleted credit. When the rain finally comes, it’s a miracle. For a moment, the scrubland flourishes and the remote swimming hole fills. Returning home from an afternoon swim, fourteen-year-old Tommy and sixteen-year-old Billy McBride discover a scene of heartbreaking carnage: their dogs dead in the yard, their hardworking father and mother shot to death, and their precocious younger sister unconscious and severely bleeding from a wound to her gut. The boys believe the killer is their former Aboriginal stockman, and, desperate to save Mary, they rush her to John Sullivan, the wealthiest landowner in the region and their father’s former employer, who promises to take care of them.
Eager for retribution, the distraught brothers fall sway to Sullivan, who persuades them to join his posse led by the Queensland Native Police, an infamous arm of British colonial power whose sole purpose is the “dispersal” of indigenous Australians to “protect” settler rights. The group is led by the intimidating inspector Edmund Noone, a dangerous and pragmatic officer whose intellect and ruthlessness both fascinates and unnerves the watchful Tommy. Riding for days across the barren outback, the group is determined to find the perpetrators they insist are guilty, for reasons neither of the brothers truly understands. It is a harsh and horrifying journey that will have a devastating impact on Tommy, tormenting him for the rest of his life—and hold enduring consequences for a young country struggling to come into its own.
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