The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson, Allen & Unwin, $27.99.
The Vogel literary award has been recognising and rewarding young writers for 30 years now, and this year’s winner is an absolute stand-out.
Yes, it is dark and it tells a brutal story of a party of “rovers” (read thugs and killers) roaming the harsh back-country of Van Dieman’s Land in the late 1820s, seeking Aborigines to trade for bounty or free pardons — or if that’s too much effort, simply to massacre.
Their leader is the weirdly charismatic John Batman, who went on to barter the land on which Melbourne stands for beads a few years later.
These were times when, as the central character Black Bill observes, “You can’t murder a black, any more than you can murder a cat”.
Yet Wilson is neither judgmental nor obvious and there is a lyricism, even beauty, amidst the casual cruelty which reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s frontier novels, such as Blood Meridian.
I guess it’s that Wilson, too, has clearly worked so hard on the language, stripping it back to create something elemental, even mythic.
It’s an amazing feat for a first-time writer. Good on the Vogel and its judges for giving us this treat.
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