Dean Biron

Much talk around the abuse of children centres on the desire (or demand) for justice. Unfortunately, justice is not easy to attain. To begin with, it tends to require a justice system. This introduces all manner of creaking bureaucracy and complicated, sometimes outmoded laws. Justice outcomes are also hugely influenced by race, gender, and inequality ...

From the ill-fated explorations of Leichhardt and Burke and Wills through to the Beaumont children, Azaria Chamberlain, and the backpacker murders in New South Wales, the history of Australia is peppered with tales and images of people going missing. And, as the First Peoples might well have been able to warn us, few of those stories turn out well ...

For the most part, the burgeoning 1980s nostalgia industry in Australia tends to overlook the fact that back then the states seemed to be engaged in a kind of Sheffield Shield ...

The work of Brisbane-based author Patrick Holland is reputedly influenced by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose Tabula Rasa cemented his standing ...

Beams Falling is a good example of its kind: a sweaty, grimy Sydney-based noir. I wish that were higher praise, but there is an endless procession of local crime fiction out there – much of which seems to emanate from Sydney – and the competition has not set the bar overly high.

In April 2012, barely a week after Queensland had elected a conservative government to office for the first time in twenty-six years, Campbell Newman announced the abolition of the state-funded premier’s literary awards. The decision, despite disingenuous claims to the contrary, was entirely symbolic, coming as it did before Newman’s Liberal National Party had been officially sworn in or had articulated anything approaching a comprehensive fiscal policy. It was an early portent of a regression to a time when philistinism was celebrated and executive power ran uncurtailed. Soon the premier was using his maiden parliamentary speech to pay tribute to his conservative predecessor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who narrowly avoided a criminal conviction on the back of one of the most infamously tainted juries in Australian legal history. More recently, amid a host of controversies over ministerial nepotism and shady deals, the government has undertaken a sustained attack upon the Crime and Misconduct Commission, the very organisation formed in response to the rampant treachery of the Bjelke-Petersen era. It may be the self-professed smart state, but former Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod put it best in his memoir: ‘Queenslanders are not like other Australians.’

Promise is set on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, although it might as well be Siberia so far as any claims to historical or social verisimilitude are concerned. Just about every stereotype ever devised in the name of crime fiction has been assembled here, resulting in a story so over the top as to stretch credulity beyond breaking point.

About a third of the way into Simon Cleary’s Closer to Stone, all of the preceding distinctively phrased metaphors and similes, all of the fragrant, lucid imagery – along with some that is rather less than lucid: how, exactly, does one pick up a drink and take a ‘deep sip’? – begin to meld into a compelling whole. Narrator Bas Adams, scouring the immense unknown of the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria for his brother Jack, who has been absent without notice from duty as a United Nations peacekeeping soldier, has come across the woman who last saw him alive. Sophia, a strong-willed, self-sufficient American schoolteacher, informs Bas that Jack had been undergoing a process of recuperation, though not from any physical ailment: ‘his need,’ she says, ‘was like a wound [...] he was dying inside, and he had the courage to choose another life.’