Only Killers and Thieves

Paul Howarth

One, £16.99

Review by Nick Major

A sub-genre of the Western is the revenge story, where a wronged man - it’s usually a man - sets out across the American plains on his trusty steed to obtain justice, usually meted out with a pistol or two. We are almost guaranteed to encounter cattle rustling, brigands, an unforgiving wildness, and perhaps the odd ‘hi-ho silver!’ In his debut novel, Paul Howarth takes all this drama and relocates it to the Australian outback in the late nineteenth century.

For a long time, the Western was a blatantly racist genre. Howarth cleverly subverts this aspect of the tradition. He has written a story about the Queensland Native Police (QNP), a mercenary force established by the colonial powers to kill Aboriginal tribes, clearing the way for white settlers to lay claim to indigenous lands.

Tommy and Billy MacBride are brothers who live on a family ranch in Queensland. They come home one day to find their mother and father have been shot dead and their sister mortally injured. The attacker or attackers have left behind a broken gun. It belongs to one of the ol farmhands, a native who has recently found a couple of his tribesman – the Kurrong - hung from a tree in the outback.

Billy, the older but more naïve brother, decides they should take their sister to a doctor on the nearby farm of John Sullivan. Sullivan is a corrupt and racist former business partner of the brothers’ dead father. He persuades Billy that the Kurrong are guilty of the attack, and enlists a man called Noone of the QNP to help them hunt down the tribe. What follows is a shocking episode that sunders Billy and Tommy apart and depicts the true horror of colonialism on th Australian frontier.

Modern Westerns exist in the red shadow of Cormac McCarthy’s BloodMeridian, wherein violence is the only way of life. The influence here is clear, but the writing is nowhere near McCarthy’s standard. After the teenagers arrive at Sullivan’s house, the perspective moves solely to Tommy; the dialogue becomes wooden and the characters predictable, especially Billy. Characters do not always need psychological depth. In a novel like this one, however, they do. There are also too many pages dedicated to unravelling the truth about the MacBride murders. Some scenes read as though they have been forced in to provide narrative resolution. Even amateur readers are likely to feel bored and patronised.

With all that said, this is Howarth’s first novel. He creates somebeautiful writing about place, where nature and man live in unrelenting conflict. From the opening pages we are transported to a harsh landscape pitted with “spinifex” and “buckbush,” “red soil fine as gunpowder underfoot” and dust sliding in “great sheets over open ground.” He weaves his story through a complex period of Australian history, and that is no easy thing to do. In the end, he doesn’t quite ride off into the sunset but he does manage to avoid shooting himself in the foot.