Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland

Publisher's Synopsis

"I parked my little white ute on the outskirts of the camp and sat there, looking out at the scatter of corrugated iron hovels. Somewhere in the distance a cock crowed. Or a crow cocked. It was hard to tell the difference. Whatever it was it sounded crook."

Something has drawn Emily Tempest back to Central Australia - to Moonight Downs, the community she left half a lifetime ago.

Not much has changed; the barefoot kids are bush mechanics now, but Emily still doesn't know if she belongs in the Aboriginal world or the white.

And trouble seems to follow her. Within hours of her arrival an old friend lies brutally murdered and mutilated, an old enemy the only suspect. Until Emily starts asking questions.

My Review 

Emily Tempest returns to Moonlight Downs and her Warlpuju tribe, the aboriginal mob in outback Northern Territory in which she was born and raised for the first 14 years of her life. Her father is a white man, her mother aboriginal and after travelling the world where she has seen some of the most dangerous places imaginable, she has finally returned to the land where she feels truly at home.

I'd arrived home just in time to see my utopia torn apart.

But her return coincides with the brutal murder of one of the tribe's elders, a man who has been very close to her in her early years. The death tears the tiny community apart, with traditional mourning sending family members into the desert alone and the rest of the tribe into the nearest town to the pub. With the local police investigating the murder with the usual intensity given to a blackfella death, that is, very little, Emily takes it upon herself to take a stab at working out who the murderer might be.

The obvious suspect is Blakie Japanangka, a completely crazy aboriginal who roams in and out of Moonlight Downs screaming abuse at all and sundry. He's a man of incredible strength and very little grip on sanity. He happened to be camped in the hills just outside the tribe and was seen arguing heatedly with the murdered man. The question burning in Emily's mind is, could this have been a revenge killing for a perceived breaking of a sacred taboo?

Blue-bloody-bush! The town had a population of some fifty million: a thousand blacks, a thousand whites, the rest cockroaches

When an important person in an aboriginal community dies, the whole community tends to scatter to the four winds and this is exactly what happens to the mob from Moonlight Downs. Or at least, most of them head to the town of Bluebush. This happens to be where Emily has reluctantly found a place to stay, having picked up some casual work at one of the pubs. But it's from here that she begins her investigation and it's also here that we get a good indication of the racial prejudice that she's going to be up against when dealing with whitefellas.

The town of Bluebush is delightfully described in all of it's grim, unappealing, dirty disgusting glory. The spectre of the toxic slag-piles that overshadow the town seems to be an appropriate metaphor for many of the men who inhabit the place.

Emily is quick to find a second suspect in her unofficial murder case. A local landowner who has been pressuring the Moonlight Downs mob to sell him their land so he might drill for water could very well have run out of patience during negotiations and taken matters into his own hands. Unfortunately, he happens to be a particularly wealthy, well-connected (and white) landowner and proving murder is much easier said than done. It's going to take all of her ingenuity to get out to his property, find something incriminating and then get someone to believe her, but once the ball starts rolling it picks up momentum of a frightening scale.

A Wantiya mother, a knockabout miner father and a Warlpuju foster mob.

Hyland's decision to write from the perspective of a young half-caste aboriginal woman is an unusual one for a white male, yet it's one that is done with great aptitude. Emily is a strong character who is just as in touch with her aboriginal heritage as she is with her white background. Through her we are introduced to the beliefs and traditions of her tribe. The crux of the story lies in the land inhabited by the Warlpuju tribe and the Dreaming they believe lives in them. Their dreaming is actually the spirit of the land itself, in this case they are of the diamond dove dreaming. As traditional owners of the land it is their duty to protect it, but in this case it seems that every mangy bugger wants a piece of it.

With an amazingly diverse array of eclectic characters roaming in and out of the story there is never a dull moment, with highly amusing scenes scattered between others that a just as thought-provoking. It's all tied up in what turns out to be a diabolically devious plot that comes to a breathless conclusion out in the rugged land of the Warlpuju's dreaming. This is a very rewarding story and a great debut novel.