My filled days, he thinks ironically, my filled days. With walks along the front, a shambles to the pier and along it to the point where winds knot green swirl of sea and gull and fish and some crumbling other man casting his lines. Back to the figged park and the bottle-lollied picnic kiosk, and an hour or so beneath broad leaves pecking at book or paper. Barney Sweetman. The bastard, he says. And Buckmaster. Buckmaster and Sweetman. Knighted for milking God's earth. Knighted for handling the sugar strikes. Knighted for owning more acres of sweet grass in the north than any man had right to control. But not knighted for that noon at Mandarana--how the names come back now!--the virtue guards with rifles kicking their unwilling horses up the runty slopes while the natives scuttled like roos from bush to bush until the high plateau. Or after. The down-curve through hot air and the body whizzing.
Former schoolmaster Tom Dorahy is returning to The Taws, the town in Queensland, Australia he left twenty years ago. Dorahy left town because of an act of terrible violence: a vigilante group slaughtered six Aborigines they suspected of pilfering from their farms. A seventh, cornered by the men, threw herself from a cliffside, clutching her baby, who, unlike the mother, miraculously survived the fall. A sick old man was gunned down at the home of a white farmer trying to protect him; the farmer is tied to the dead body for a week, and loses a leg from a gangrenous infection. The men who committed acts never faced justice; in fact, they've prospered, becoming knights and elected officials. But Dorahy is intent on using the town's homecoming to expose them at last.
A Kindness Cup is a novel about colonial violence and willful ignorance. Everywhere Dorahy goes, irritated locals ask him, why not let it go? It was so long ago. But of course, this is how colonial violence works; if you escape justice in the aftermath--and of course you do--time springs up to indemnify you, and the murdered natives, those still suffering from expulsion and grief, are relegated behind the barriers of history. Dorahy has no strategy, as with the trial many years ago, whose scenes pepper the novel, he can't keep himself from exclaiming the truth. In this way he acts as a kind of guilty conscience, the heart battering from beneath the floorboards. Dorahy's forthrightness gathers allies, all mostly unwilling, like a local news editor. On the other hand, those who committed violence in the past prove all too willing to commit violence in order to keep the story from coming to light.
Astley is a strange writer. I don't know that I was prepared for The Acolyte, which I read last year. Her style is very elliptical, and her writing at times has that quality (which she shares with my Australian fave Patrick White) where you're not sure whether it's amazing prose or terrible prose. Maybe I just knew what I was getting into, but I thought that The Kindness Cup was a better use of that strangeness. The scenes of violence stand out vividly, though I felt at times that they overshadowed the "story proper" of Dorahy's return. And I wonder if it might have made better use of the victimized Aborigines, who are largely mute. (There's something unintentional about the way that Konawha, the suicide, is placed beyond the narrative by her death, while the white farmer Lunt remains to suffer for our sympathy.) Still, A Kindness Cup does with a cutting sharpness what it sets out to do: slice through the myths of Australian pioneerdom to show how, like all settler colonial myths, they are predicated on murder and enforced silence.
