Ian Kennedy Williams: Regret. Penguin Books, Ringwood 2002.
	DARK COUNTRY Tourism promoters probably don’t fully appreciate portrayals of the Australian bush showing its sinister side. But perhaps they ought to embrace the darkness as well as the lighter side of our outback. It makes it all the more interesting. The idea of a kind of heart of darkness beneath the surface has already been explored in film and literature. Movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock or the more contemporary Dead Heart explore the darker side. Kenneth Cook’s excellent novel Wake in Fright, also a film (titled Wake in Fright or Outback) is one of the best examples of a work of art that captures the menace of the bush. (A menace the convicts and early colonists were only too familiar with.) The Cook novel concerns a young schoolteacher’s descent into hell on a country posting. The ugly side of bush life – drunkenness and wanton slaughter of wildlife on a shooting spree – was central to that story. There’s a familiar feel to a new Australian novel examining the underbelly of rural Australia in a muscular, fictional fashion. In Regret, Brisbane author Ian Kennedy Williams becomes the latest to chart this side of our country, the aspect the tourist promoters don’t push. His prose has been described in The Australian as exhibiting ‘a welcome sense of menace’, something that will attract many readers. We love our crime novels and often the darker the better when it comes to that genre. Actually, Ian’s story, which he describes as a ‘psychological drama’, could fit into the crime novel genre as well. It involves an investigation by local police into the death of a part-Aboriginal man during a weekend of pig shooting. The novel’s protagonist, Matthew Wesker, and idealistic young schoolteacher from Sydney doing his time in the country (there has to be an outsider for stories like this to work) becomes involved with a young woman who has a penchant for pig shooting. Despite a reluctance to participate in blood sports, the young teacher is led by his loins and joins the girl, Nadine, and some other rather unsavoury locals from the moribund town of Cedar, on a weekend pig hunt at the appropriately named Regret Falls. The publicity of the book promises that all this takes place against ‘a background of simmering discontent, and an atmosphere of sexual jealousy and racial tension’. Perfect fodder for fiction. There is a killing and the subsequent investigation rakes over the weekend hunting party’s activities. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, illuminating a story that could ultimately be read as a metaphor for rural decay and modern Australian malaise. This exists, despite what some politicians try to tell us. Right-wingers will see it as black-armband stuff, but that’s the stuff of our history really. In fact, the author, who is unsure of the origins of his yarn, feels that ingesting Australian local by osmosis may have led to the inspiration for the yarn. ‘I had read about the practice of white settlers hunting blacks for sport once,’ he says. For a lad from seaside Somerset in England, this must have seemed amazingly barbaric, though we have become used to dark and shameful tales from our past. Since leaving the UK in 1970, he has worked at various jobs while he has pursued a writing career that is now his fulltime occupation. Until 18 months ago he and his wife lived on an acreage at Grafton in Northern New South Wales. While that existence may not exactly have been an outback one, it gave him the entrée to rural life that helped him formulate his new novel. (He has also published collections of short stories and has written film scripts and poetry.) ‘Some friends of mine have recognised aspects of Grafton in the book, but of course Cedar is not Grafton,’ he says. Even so, the rugged upper reaches of the Clarence River near the town inspired the setting for the tragic circumstances of his tale. The Regret Falls of the novel are based on an area known as The Gorge. ‘I’ve only been there once and there was such heavy rain that we had to leave or get flooded,’ he says. Once was obviously enough to capture the drama of the place. It was then transmogrified into Regret Falls. Australia is pitted with places with such tragic names, many of them named after disastrous early explorations that led to madness or death (or both) for the explorers or pioneers who discovered them. The disaster in this case is the murder of Matthew Wesker’s girlfriend’s part-Aboriginal friend, Gonzo. Or was he just killed by mistake by a ricocheting bullet fired in sport at a large goanna? Well that’s what the local cops are trying to work out in this story, a menacing tale from the darker side of Australian life. And this one will certainly turn you off the idea of a weekend of pig shooting, which you may or may not have been contemplating.
Reviewed by Phil Brown, 17 July 2002 Reprinted with permission from the Brisbane News.