Noel Beddoe

After hearing the author give a very interesting talk at the Thirroul Readers and Writers Festival, when he told the story of how he came to write this book, I determined to read it.
This is a wonderfull, well written work of historical fiction which tells the true story of the massacre of the Wiradjuri people in the Murrumbidgee area of NSW. in 1842. The story is told from the viewpoint of the son of a fictional pioneering family in the district and his father who felt himself to be justified in exterminating these people. The family took up land which had been occupied by the W.people for centuries, They did him no harm, but they were in his way. The episode has a very marked effect on the boy and troubles him for the rest of his largely successful life after leaving his family. I must say that after reading this book, it also troubles me.… (plus d'informations)

The author of ON CRINGILA HILL has worked as a high school principal for twenty years, and been involved in Aboriginal eduation for most of his adult life, becoming the inaugural chairperson of the Aboriginal Education Reference Group. Which did seem to make this, his first crime novel, an intriguing prospect. Set in the past, in a community made up immigrants from a range of different backgrounds and religions, in a real location, part of Wollongong in NSW.

Not an area I know a lot about, so I can't say whether it's accurately portrayed but it certainly felt realistic. Shadowed by the major Steelworks, many of the main players in this story have families that have been drawn to the prospect of jobs, of a lifestyle more affluent and prosperous than that left behind. There's some lovely little displays of the differences in the past and the present - in particular the Macedonian grandfather who is still fascinated by a kettle that can turn itself off when the water has boiled. The same Macedonian grandfather who is ruthless in protecting his own, a powerhouse in the community, respected and feared. A man with plenty of secrets of his own.

Echoing the secrets that his grandson Jimmy and friend Piggy are hiding about the night that they witnessed the shooting of a teenage boy. A teenager involved in an appalling attack on a young girl - schoolgirl sweetheart of Jimmy, immigrant daughter of an Islander family. Another outsider in an area struggling with the tensions between the longer term Macedonian and Turkish residents, the newer immigrants of Italian and Greek background, and the Islander groups. Overlaying any ethnic tensions are the well known influences of drugs, gangs, violence and racketeering. It's a story that's well known in many working class suburbs of Australia and it's drawn out in ON CRINGILA HILL in a realistic, yet non-judgemental manner.

Add to that mix a policeman physically inhibited by a severe back injury, his wife who is struggling with her own role in life and the damage this case will do to his long-term relationship with a much admired colleague and you're looking at a rather bleak environment.

Surprisingly, bleak in a good way. ON CRINGILA HILL isn't a comfortable, entertaining book because it's obviously not meant to be. In it's own particularly low key style, it's engrossing. It's laying bare a world that is flawed and tricky, with the occasional brief glimpse of hope. Same with the characters who inhabit that world. All of which culminated in an ending that was full of loss and hope, with some things resolved and some things left raw and broken.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-cringila-hill-noel-beddoe… (plus d'informations)

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/noel-beddoes-yalda-crossing/

As Noel Beddoe says in an Author's Note, this book is fiction, but adheres closely to the history of white settlement near what is now the township of Narrandera, including the Second Wiradjuri War and the massacre on Murdering Island.

It's a formidable achievement. Told from the point of view of Young James Beckett, as a teenager in the 1830s and as an old man in Sydney decades later, it is deeply embedded in its historical moments, and has a powerful sense of place. We care about the characters and come to appreciate their secrets and mysteries, not all of which are revealed, and some not until the last pages. The unfolding narrative gives us neither the 'dun-dreary naturalism' that Patrick White hated in Australian fiction, nor the black armband breastbeating that John w Howard claimed to discern and despise among Australian literati, nor again a ripping yarn of the frontier. The tensions of the colonial society are there – English vs Irish, convicts vs free, authority vs opportunism, women as a tiny, vulnerable minority – but they are embodied in recognisable individuals, facing particular dilemmas. The social, economic and moral world of the settlers is thoroughly fleshed out in its own right well before the prospect of a massacre appears on the horizon.

Unlike other fictional treatments of atrocities against Aboriginal people, The Yalda Crossing lays the ground so that we understand how good people can deliberately commit abominable acts, not without reluctance, revulsion and remorse, but with a terrible sense of necessity. The good people who set the tone of the community aren't drawn into the vortex of violence created by people less grammatically correct than they: when push comes to shove, they are the ones who orchestrate the terrible acts. Launching the book at the Sydney Institute last July, Linda Burney said that as a Wiradjuri woman, descendant of the victims, she had to skip the chapter where the massacre happens and come back to it later. Noel Beddoe, descendant of the perpetrators, doesn't blink, and invites us, his semblables, to face our heritage with similarly unflinching gaze.… (plus d'informations)