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Peter Docker knits us into a ‘pea-soup fog’ of Western Australian heat, blanketing us, until we feel it ‘seeping right into the bones’. In the familiar-sounding Baalboorlie, the sun beats down,scorching the airless metal cell of a prisoner transportation vehicle. It cooks the Old Man’s flesh as he is escorted across a vast stretch of his desert country. The floor of the mobile oven sears his bare stomach, the branding ‘raised up and angry red and orange, in the shape of the rising sun badge of the ADF’. His grandmother was right, ‘White men will steal you in the night, then cook and eat you’.
- Book 1 Title: Sweet One
- Book 1 Biblio: Fremantle Press $29.99 pb, 316 pp
From the other side of the country, Melbourne journalist Izzy Langford is called in to cover the story of the Aboriginal war veteran’s death. After making a name for herself as a police-sympathiser following a similar incident on ‘Psalm Island’, Langford is determined to have her own words printed this time. It seems she has barely struck up a light on the Baal tarmac when the two PTV drivers are found dead; locked in the sauna of the local gym. This is where the familiar tabloid narrative ends, and the action moves beyond the realm of the law, into war.
In this socio-political thriller, Docker revisits the questions asked often in the years following the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody: how did this happen, and what lengths must be taken to ensure this can never happen again? His solution: unleash a military-trained vigilante task force to seek vengeance upon the perpetrators. Docker asks big questions about justice and the Australian law, and explores how different rules apply in different places to different people. Sweet One is essential reading.
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