Moonlight Downs: An Emily Tempest Investigation

When I finished this book, I was speechless. I was smiling. I was in awe. And I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to do what I'd just read justice in a review. I'm going to give it a shot anyway. After years of traveling the world, Emily Tempest, half-Aborigine, half-white, has returned to Moonlight, the community in the desert of Northern Australia where she grew up. Within hours of her arrival, respected community leader Lincoln Flinders' body is found, and all signs point to an Aboriginal sorcerer as his murderer. With the help of the police, Emily is determined to find Lincoln's killer, for the dead man held a very special place in her heart: "And how had Lincoln drawn me into this world? By stories. Stories and songs. With Lincoln a journey of any description was a rolling dialogue with the country. A track by a waterhole or an unusual rock, a tree shaped like a woman or a circle of stones, the subtlest change in the landscape, any of these things was enough to get him going: he'd tell you the tale of the ancestral beings that had made it, the songs they'd sung, the paths they'd carved in the Dreaming. For a wide-eyed five-year-old he'd made the country come alive." Although the mystery is intriguing, and the bad guy slips deliciously into the picture at the end, the strength of this book lies in its characters and its depiction of the landscape and its people. Hyland's language is earthy, sometimes profane, and often very funny. Fortunately for many of us there are glossaries in the front of the book which decipher the slang. (I made regular use of them at the beginning.) Hyland portrays the life of these people as it really is. He doesn't use politically correct euphemisms; he doesn't try to sugarcoat anything, and the book is all the more powerful for it. Emily is such an in-your-face creature. Her ambivalence about the aboriginal and white worlds that she's a part of is a strong theme in this novel. She makes me laugh. She certainly doesn't mince her words. She doesn't know the meaning of the word "quit". She's just the type of character I want to read more about. After reading Moonlight Downs, not only did I feel supremely entertained, but I felt as though I knew a bit more about a totally different culture thousands of miles away from my comfortable home in metropolitan Phoenix. Without doubt, Adrian Hyland's book will be one of my top reads this year.

(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. 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

"Moonlight Downs" is surely one of the more unusual mystery novels out there right now in that it is set in the wasteland of northern Australia, features a female sleuth who is half Aboriginal and half European and uses a lexicon of Australian English and Aboriginal expressions that will be completely unfamiliar to most non-Australian readers. Author Adrian Hyland has fashioned a complex mystery story that does not sort itself until the final pages of the book. Meanwhile, protagonist Emily Tempest, travels many miles through the outback trying to find the murderer of an old family friend who was the revered leader of a small Aboriginal band trying to reestablish its traditional way of life in a wasteland oasis. The problems that Aboriginal people have living between European settlements and traditional encampments are well and sympathetically laid out as the story line uncoils. The author thankfully provides a glossary of Aboriginal and Australian words and idioms at the outset of the book and be forewarned--you will have to access those references frequently until well into the book. This is an intelligent and interesting novel with a good mystery core that any reader of the genre will appreciate greatly. Finally, kudos to SOHO Crime for continuing to delivery excellent international mysteries to the American market.

"Given a Wantiya mother, a knockabout miner father and a Warlpuju foster mob, it wasn't exactly surprising that I often thought of geological formations as having lives of their own. I imagined them as enormous creatures, crawling through time..." That's Emily Tempest thinking to herself. She's a small, clever, confident and often headstrong young woman who is about to find herself hunted down by murderers in the bleak, dry Australian outback. To her sometimes confusion, she and those who know her usually think of her as a black woman misplaced in a white world or as a white woman misplaced in a black world. She's as much at home in both as she's not at home in either. When she decides to visit the extended family group she grew up with, who now have been given official title to their ancestral land, the Moonlight Downs, she finds herself at cross purposes with just about everyone she knows or meets. There are the people -- the Moonlight mob -- she ran with as a child while her father worked. They include probably the two most important people in her life...Lincoln Flinders, the aging leader of the Moonlight mob, and his daughter, Hazel. Then there are the whitefellers, especially those who center around Bluebush, the nearest town to Moonlight. Bluebush is one of the worst Australian outback towns you'll hope never to be stuck in...drunks, cast-offs, opportunists, manipulative government officials and up-from-the-bootstraps bullies. Some are pleasant enough, some aren't. Some are wealthy landowners, most are not. When Lincoln Flinders is found dead, killed in a gruesome manner that might make some think the murderer is a blackfeller, Emily decides it couldn't have been that way. Her decision to investigate is complicated by the plans some of the whites in Bluebush have to develop Moonlight Downs whether the aboriginal owners like it or not. Emily eventually figures things out, but not before the author, Adrian Hyland, has given us a straightforward and engrossing look at life in the outback, both among the aboriginal groups and the whites. He manages this with clear and even evocative language that doesn't fall back on poetic descriptions of aboriginal life or rugged outback beauty. Dreams and Diamond Doves play a part, but with a casual and unromantic acceptance of how people believe in things. Adrian Hyland is a first-rate writer. He brings us into Emily Tempest's life and times with a minimum of fuss. His descriptions are vivid but restrained. This works because he knows what he's talking about and because he knows how to create characters we can imagine for ourselves. Emily Tempest, somewhere in her late twenties, has been drifting around for several years. She drinks, she rolls her own and her mouth sparks out with casual obscenities. She knows how to live in the bush, identify rocks and how to keep drunks in line while she serves booze at her temporary job in town. She can take care of herself. She's also thoughtful, sometimes impetuous

The author, Adrian Hyland, spent many years living and working with indigenous people in the Northern Territory; MOONLIGHT DOWNS 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 "rough 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."