Customer Reviews

Diamond Dove

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(4.5 stars) Part white and part aborigine, Emily Tempest has "a foot in both camps." As a child living with the aborigines at Moonlight Downs while her white father worked at the Moonlight cattle station, Emily was a happy member of the community until she was fourteen, when her natural curiosity and tempestuous nature led her to violate a strong community taboo. Immediately, she was sent off to boarding school in Adelaide, her best friend, and partner in the violation, an aborigine, facing a worse penalty within the community. After starting three degrees (including law) and finishing none, she traveled the world, eventually finding her way back "home" for the first time in twelve years, just as Lincoln Flinders, the father of her best friend and the leader of the community, is found murdered. There is no dearth of motives.

The aborigine community has recently had its ancestral lands restored by the Australian courts after whites had appropriated it for cattle grazing and development, and resentful whites have been trying to buy or lease it back. Racial tensions and cultural conflicts underlie intercommunity relationships, and some of the aborigines' most sacred sites have been deliberately destroyed by whites. Aborigine youth who have lived in Bluebush, the nearest community, no longer feel the ties to the land that their parents and ancestors have had, and the community's future is threatened. Emily Tempest is determined to find out who murdered Lincoln Flinders, and she is in a unique position to do so, but she also has her enemies, both inside and outside the aborigine community.

Australian author Adrian Hyland, who won the Ned Kelly Award for this atmospheric and dramatic first novel, creates a narrative that moves at warp speed, filled with action and excitement. At the same time, he also invites contemplation of the natural world and the lives of the aborigines who identify with nature on a visceral, even mystical, level. Their needs are basic, their lives are not pretty, and their land is infertile, making their ability to be happy because of their culture and beliefs significant by contrast.

Hyland's dialogue is earthy, filled with aborigine and white slang (for which there is a glossary in the front), and he is often profane, preferring to show his characters and their lives as they really are, instead of the way an "overcivilized" reader might wish them to be. His remarkable ability to recreate the seemingly bleak North Australian landscape and the people who consider it "home" puts the reader in touch with life's most basic needs and the aborigine culture which has developed there. Despite its movie script ending, this unusual and captivating mystery, the first in a projected series, is one of my favorites for the year.

This title is the UK edition of Moonlight Downs, the title used in the US. n Mary Whipple

Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigines, a white woman's life among the aborigines
Sorry by Gail Jones, set in W. Australian bush

Diamond Dove is a crime thriller set in the Australian outback. But its stars are the charismatic characters so true to life you can almost smell the beer and sweat. Adrian Hyland recreates an Australian outback community in a way that is both brutally honest, but also charming and endearing. Forget Crocodile Dundee, this is the real outback. Funny, easy to read and with a stunning heroine, I'm eagerly looking forward to the next installment.