Peter Pierce, The Australian
BORN and educated in Hobart, Lenny Bartulin is the author of a series of three crime novels, A Deadly Business (2008), The Black Russian (2010) and De Luxe (2011).
In his new novel, Infamy, crime is still central to the plot but Bartulin ventures back in time to tap Tasmania’s richest fictional lode: the early colonial era of convicts, pastoral expansion at the expense of the Aborigines, bloodshed, buggery and bushrangers.
There’s the iron rule of the evangelical Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, the establishment of struggling small towns and rural properties that vainly sought to mimic those remembered by their settlers from Europe.
Arthur has a key role in the novel, as does the messianic bushranger Brown George Coyne, whose offer of 20 gallons of rum for Arthur’s arrest borrows from the vaunt of the “gentleman” bushranger Matthew Brady (hanged in Hobart in 1826).
Coyne lives with his desperadoes in a fastness in the mountains of southern Tasmania. There are notable similarities with Christopher Koch’s Lost Voices (2012), in which the cultivated outlaw Lucas Wilson holes up in Nowhere Valley.
Coyne’s luck has been to stumble on “an Eden as was hidden beyond the cave in the mountain”. There, also, he “found the nugget, as though it was fate, washing in the shallow river”. Because of its river of gold, Coyne names the place not Nowhere but Alluvium.
Both Bartulin and Koch trace the collapse from within of these criminal utopias. Before then, Bartulin sets in motion a hectic narrative, as fast-paced and given to cliff-hanging as a serial at long-ago Saturday matinees.
In the prologue to Infamy, William Burr is wounded while hunting mahogany pirates in British Honduras in Central America. Recuperating, he receives a letter from John McQuillan, his former employer and now chief magistrate of Hobart Town. This invites him to come and earn a reward “from our dear old friend Lieutenant Governor Arthur (Colonel Holier Than Thou)” for capturing Coyne.
By the summer of 1830, Coyne is in Van Diemen’s Land.
Bartulin briskly assembles his cast: the venal and philandering police magistrate Stephen Vaughan and his contemptuous wife, Ellen; the mysterious Charles Trentham, “a ship trader” and purported friend of the Chief Secretary in London; Arthur’s man Montagu and Trentham’s man Perkins, frequenters of the taverns of the town; the mainland Aborigine Robert Ringa (“they wanted him to track down men for hanging”), Coyne’s spy in Government House, Tilly Holt.
Burr is soon filled in on this netherpart of the world by McQuillan: “You’ve not seen hell, lad, until you’ve seen Macquarie Harbour.” This was the worst of the four places of incarceration and torment in Marcus Clarke’s great seminal novel of the convict system, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874).
Read the full article at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/books/on-a-manhunt-into-colonys-dark-heart/story-e6frg8nf-1226727742662#sthash.z8CBKpb7.dpuf
