- This is a magnificent and beautifully written novel. Jock Serong’s best.
- It is a fascinating, engrossing tale, full of fleshed out characters and relationships, and a highly credible story line based on an actual historical event in the early days of the colony of NSW.
- At its core is the contrast between the cruel, miserable, ignorant but entitled English plunderers and the Indigenous communities who reach out to them and try to make them welcome.
- The brown skinned Bengali ‘lascars’, or sailors, are also treated by the white masters like slaves.
- The Indigenous leaders such as Pemulwuy, and the young domestic servant Boorigul, are painted sympathetically, in contrast to the ugly, opportunistic and thuggish white colonials. ‘Pemulwuy, out there in the darkness somewhere, was the fire that threatened them from without. But ultimately he would flicker and die. The greater danger was the malignancies within: Macarthur and the Corps.’ A young Aboriginal girl, for example, is brutally raped by two out of the four white survivors of the shipwreck of the Sydney Cove.
- The common trope of a thin crust of civilisation in danger from the unknown dark forces underneath is reversed here.
- There is a brief but devastating portrait of the 'legendary' John Donald Macarthur: ‘The man was a tyrant in the making: a grasper made powerful by influential friends’.
- In the end the malignancy within is never defeated. It continues.
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