Non-Indigenous Australians of my generation might have fleetingly pondered the curious names that flashed past the car windows on long ago family road trips – Massacre Bay, Skull Hole, Butchers Creek. Too few, however, might contemplate today how it feels to be dispossessed in a continent replete with topography, public buildings and institutions named in honour of your people’s murderers – names celebrating the very acts of massacring Indigenous people without commemorating those murdered. Just on that, at least 10 places in Queensland alone are named Skeleton Creek. Discuss.
Much contemporary Australian crime fiction is set in farms, small towns, the hostile bush and the red dusty expanses of various deserts; rural landscapes from which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would probably have been violently dispossessed and massacred after European invasion.
These crime novels are captivating, understandably popular and skilfully written. Most, with notable exceptions, focus on crimes committed within fictional contemporary settler communities.
The names of some Australian places and the violence they connote seem perfect for the crime genre. Stranger than fiction indeed. But perhaps they are too real.
In late winter 2023 I was well advanced on the draft of a novel I’d been steadily progressing since my last was published a year earlier. The characters were circling one another – conversing, doing to each other and being done to. Ghostly lines of plot were finding definition to steadily form a blueprint. I could envisage the final pages.
This coincided with Australia’s purported national conversation about the looming October 2023 Indigenous voice to parliament referendum. The mainstream political atmospherics were ugly and the so-called robust debate gave licence to resentful torrents of racism that manifested in absurd propositions that Indigenous people would somehow be unfairly advantaged by a yes result. Added to that was a burgeoning (and, as the referendum result would have it, emphatic) national repudiation of long-overdue imperatives of historical truth telling of how Australia has violently oppressed the world’s oldest continuous civilisation. The debate and the referendum result reflected Australia’s past as much as its present.
This urgently changed my plans. I dropped what I was writing.
New thoughts impelled me.
What if I wrote a place that encapsulated this racism, historical denial and hatred? How would that history reverberate today? What is the town called? How did it get its name?
These questions quickly gave shape to a place inspired by my travels throughout Australia and from my non-fiction writing and journalism. There were so many places where terrible acts of violence against Indigenous people were committed both in colonial and post-federation times. A number of these violent acts involved troopers, police and “hunting” parties chasing or “herding” Aboriginal people over cliffs to their deaths as infamously happened at Appin under the orders of Governor Macquarie in 1816.
The fictional Leap could be in any Australian state or territory. It is ubiquitous for its violent connotation – the history of terror and colonial massacre seared into the landscape.
Its imagined surrounds embody murderous frontier conflict, where the Indigenous custodians survived and endured but remain dispossessed, discriminated against and marginalised. Where a racially motivated cop can still shoot dead with impunity an Indigenous person in response to a wildly disproportionate physical threat. Where Aboriginal people die in police lock-ups after needless arrest. Where violent deaths of other Indigenous men and women have always been swept under the carpet by cops, journalists, politicians, the broader community … too many historians and writers. Where the very name of the town is a celebration of mass colonial murder.
Fanciful? Read the news.
It’s a place where direct descendants of Black people’s killers and the descendants of those they massacred walk the same streets. Where the Indigenous people will talk of that violence as recent because, given hundreds of generations of civilisation, it is only yesterday and today’s oppression is part of its continuum. It’s where the settler families mostly choose not to dwell on it at all.
Welcome to The Leap!
The stranger in a hostile, strange, remote place is an enduring narrative in Australian fiction whose modern exemplar is, to my mind, Kenneth Cook’s brilliant, unsettling 1961 novel Wake in Fright. This book was formative to the teenage reader – and the adult writer – in me and The Leap is partly intended as paean to it.
My stranger is Ben, an Englishman who is vaguely conversant with his empire’s colonial crimes (more so than many Australians he meets). The story begins, like many crime novels, with a dead white person. But Ben’s quest is not to solve this killing. Instead he finds himself peeling back the layers of the victim’s home town, its racially divided community and reverberating history.
There is no misanthropic cop or prodigal son or daughter returned home to unearth clues about a mystery killing.
For there is no single crime to solve in The Leap. No killer to track down. Just a vast colonial and contemporary crime scene involving countless offences against race, gender and social function. The scene – the whole district, the town and its stranger-than-fiction name – is the crime. Everyone knows who the offenders are – now and back when.
There is no deeply buried big secret here, just deliberately forgotten truths. And that seems like an apt description of a far bigger place. Perhaps an entire continent.
The Leap by Paul Daley is out now through Simon and Schuster.
