Diamond Dove [Paperback]

Emily Tempest has returned to the Northern Territory to visit the aboriginal community, Moonlight Downs, in which she grew up. Emily left in her teens; her father sent her to live with an aunt in order to keep her out of trouble and get a decent education. At 26 years of age, Emily is back. She's not sure why. Perhaps to visit her father or maybe it's a need to find out where she belongs in the world Right now she feels she has a foot in both the white and aboriginal worlds and doesn't quite fit into either.

One of the first people she encounters on her return is Lincoln Flinders, one of the community leaders and father of Emily's closest childhood friend, Hazel. Within hours, Lincoln is found brutally murdered and first appearances would indicate that it has been a ritual tribal murder. The obvious suspect is Blakie, an eccentric who lives on the fringes of the community and appears to be their self-appointed spiritual enforcer. However there's something about the death that doesn't sit right with Emily. The ritual aspects of the murder might have been done to cover the real cause. Blakie may be cunning but he isn't that well organised. Finding the police indifferent to her feelings about the murder, Emily embarks on her own investigation which take her on a journey on which she discovers who she really is and uncovers the identity of the killer along the way.

The author, Adrian Hyland, spent many years living and working with indigenous people in the Northern Territory; DIAMOND DOVE is a story told with a great deal of affection for the people. Their spiritual connection to the land and its native animals is particularly well described. He makes no attempt to gloss over the dysfunctional aspects of life in the remoter areas of the Northern Territory, both European and Aboriginal.Emily regards her community with a mixture of deep love and exasperation at the destructiveness of some of the behaviour she witnesses.

There are other issues raised in the book. The inevitable clash of cultures and lack of understanding that results. Conflicting interests of farming, mining and aboriginal land claims, the politicization of these interests and the odd mix of people who seem to be attracted to such remote areas. The real achievement that Hyland has managed to pull off is the fact that he vividly portrays all these aspects of life in the outback without making any judgements and without trying to push the reader down the path towards a particular opinion. He leaves that entirely up to the individual.

Hyland has also injected a wonderful dry humour into the book. Expressions such as "dry as emus knees", "he belonged to the von Ribbentrop school of negotiation" and "been taking deportment lessons from a Rottweiler" are genuinely funny. The author also has a gift for description; " Gladys herself was a battleship on stilts. She wasn't much older than me, but she'd exploded in every direction. She was immensely tall, immensely fat, wearing a green dress and a coiffure that looked like it had been fashioned with a splitting axe."

Like the precious stone, DIAMOND DOVE is a rich gem of a book and one not to be missed.

In one sense this is a fairly simple "whodunnit" with false leads, twists and turns and a very engaging lead character. The murder of an aboriginal elder is not as straight forward as it seems, the main suspect is more than he seems. Add in a misfit, sparky heroine, some aboriginal mysticism and a few rednecks and you get something beyond the ordinary. THe book's setting lifts it out of the ordinary, or rather, Hyland's description of the Australian outback raises it above the bar. The outback is one of the main characters in this book and influences each and every character in some way or another. The book is full or a wry, dry humour and the main character, Emily Tempest is one of the most vividly realised heroines Ive ever come across. Its a very visual book with beautifully described settings and characters. It amazes me that Hyland can paint such clear pictures with fairly sparse language. Its not an over wordy book. Every word serves a purpose.
This is a great read and a book I will read again and would recommend to others.

(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 white woman's life among the aborigines
Sorry by Gail Jones, set in W. Australian bush