The description of Holland's forthcoming novel Oblivion suggests that it expands on Holland's preoccupation with the impact of modernity on place. In spare prose where not a word or a scene is superfluous, The Mary Smokes Boys is set in a small town in the Brisbane Valley, not far from the city in terms of distance but at risk from either encroachment or a bypass. Encroachment would bring the banality of supermarkets, chain stores, fast food outlets and project home developments, while a bypass would consign the town to a slow death through the decline of passing trade. But Holland doesn't romanticise the town. The surrounding vista of bush, mountains and creek is evoked in exquisite prose but the town itself is a place of limited choices. For the young people whose story Holland tells, it is a place of irrelevant education, limited entertainment, and few employment opportunities. Most young people leave for the city and they don't come back. The ones that stay get into trouble in the fringe economy: horse theft, gambling, and prostitution.

And for children living in poverty or with feckless parents, welfare support is non-existent.

When 10-year-old Grey's mother dies giving birth to his sister Irene, his grandmother moves in to care for the infant, but the love the girl receives comes from Grey. His father Bill North is a useless drunk, and the grandmother is a sour and judgemental woman who disapproved of her daughter-in-law's religion and this second pregnancy. She also disapproves of the local lads and their propensity for ending up in juvenile detention. But though Grey is a quiet and sensitive boy, haunted by the loss of his mother and devoted to his scrawny little sister, he soon becomes one of the Mary Smokes' Boys. And when he leaves school, he drifts into the same kind of odd jobs on farms or a few hours doing the night shift at the service station.

It's hard to convey the sense of anguish that this story evokes. Trevor Shearston's Hare's Fur (2019, see my review) made my heart ache for the children hiding out in a cave after their feckless parent was sent to gaol for drug dealing. Like those children, all that Grey and Irene have is each other, and the existential threat that haunts the novel is their fear of being separated. Grey's half-hearted girlfriend Vanessa isn't interested in a loser stuck in a dead-end town, and he knows he could have a better life in the city. But he can't leave Irene behind, and he can't take her with him, even though in the town it is he who has effective custody of her after his grandmother dies and his father starts working far afield and comes home only intermittently. And nobody intervenes.

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When Grey North's mother dies giving birth to his sister, Grey vows to protect her as his father did not protect his mother. His alcoholic father accepts work away from home leaving Grey and Irene in the care of their grandmother. Irene develops an obsession for her big brother, waiting for him to come home of an evening and forming no friendships herself. When their Grandmother dies, they are left very poor and struggle to feed and clothe themselves. The occasional return home by their father, sees them both avoiding home as he drinks himself to oblivion. In this way the reader is familiarised with the landscape of Mary Smokes, a small town of less than 1000 inhabitants. A town that offers little hope of employment to the young people growing up there. However, the author expresses beautifully Grey's feelings for this place in a paragraph on page 69 -

'Grey was alone. He swam upstream and sank into the pool beneath the cradling spotted gum root and rested his arms and let the water crash over him. He laughed to himself at this inconsequential, late-night-creek-swimming small-town life. At such times all thoughts of leaving or anything else belonging to that still-distant place called the future left him alone. The world still moved slowly at Mary Smokes Creek. At the creek you took in the infinite and nameless changes in the hours, and moving at the same speed as the earth there was not that whiplash of time and the death feeling that came with hours lost unwittingly in degrees of waking sleep. At Mary Smokes Creek there was time for everything, and no desire to do anything at all.'
After his mothers death, Grey attaches himself to a group of disaffected boys, hence the title. They indulge in petty revenge and often anti-social behaviour and the reader is exposed to the criminal activities that can exist when times are hard. When Grey's father incurs a large gambling debt, Grey feels compelled to resort to theft to resolve the problem with unforeseen consequences.
This is a grim, yet poignant tale and the poetic writing which brings to life the landscape of Mary Smokes elevates this book and carries the reader along. ( )