The bloodword and desert oak
Holden wrecks and boiling diesels
Steam in forty-five degrees
Beds Are Burning (1986), Midnight Oil
In the 1980s the nation of Australia attained a certain quirky cachet in the United States as the country of Crocodile Dundee, Men at Work and vegemite sandwiches and Outback Steakhouse, with its Bloomin' Onion and its Shrimp on the Barbie. Outback was a real big thing for a while here. We still have an Outback about three minutes away from where I live.
However, in 1986 there popped up in the US Australian rock band, Midnight Oil, that, while it may have been, to US eyes, quirky, was emphatically not silly, cheesy or, um, vegemitey. To the contrary, Midnight Oil was very serious indeed--and very angry, with songs, like "Beds Are Burning" and "The Dead Heart," about the abuses committed by British colonials against the smallest continents' indigenous, or aboriginal, people, those who carried in "our hearts the true country," as the lyrics of "The Dead Heart" ran.
Midnight Oil had actually been around in Australia for seven years before American radio picked them up in 1986. "The Dead Heart," the first single from their album Diesel and Dust, charted at only #53 in the US, but the second single, "Beds Are Burning," made it up to #17 and remains their most iconic song, with nearly 300 million views on youtube. I loved these two songs and I bought the Diesel and Dust CD (I had just gotten a CD player), but I have to admit I only remember one other song on the album, "Put Down That Weapon." I'm listening to it now on youtube (and yes they just aired an Outback Steakhouse ad between songs) to see if I recall others. (Okay "Dreamworld," which I'm listening to now, sounds familiar.)
Immediately memorable about Midnight Oil are the raspy, sometimes menacing vocals of frontman Peter Garrett, the horn parts and the driving percussion of Rob Hirst, who died three weeks ago. BOOM, BOOM, CRASH, BOOM! On my stereo system these percussive bits sounded literally earth shattering, especially on "Beds Are Burning."
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| Australian salt lake |
Rob Hirst's death got me thinking again about Australia and that naturally got me thinking about Anglo-Australian crime writer Arthur Upfield (1890-1964), who had a similar interest in indigenous culture and a famed "half-caste" series detective, Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte. Upfield maintains a following today but lies somewhat in the shadow, in the land of vintage mystery, of American hard-boiled and British classic mystery writers. He portrayed a world all his own, with a great many (most?) of his Bony tales taking place in the great Australian outback, which comprises most of Australia's' physical space but little of its population. Although it abounds in isolated locations, Bony's world is not that posh country houses, gentry and quaint villagers nor of mean urban streets, nightclubs and gangsters.
With my long-standing preference, now somewhat discarded, for classic country house and village mysteries I had a somewhat equivocal relationship with Upfield's crime novels. Their strongest feature, I think it's generally agreed, is their strong settings, but those settings often throw classic detection into the background. Moreover, for hard-boiled fans, the books may be a bit slow-moving and lacking in such rapid-fire action trappings as beatings and beddings. Although he was of the generation of Chandler and Hammett, Upfield was not really a hard-boiled writer. Still one can see affinity to both American and British mystery in his writing.
Although Upfield commenced the Bony detective series in 1936 the series was not actually published in the United States until 1943; but then he was received there with great fanfare. Here's Anthony Boucher welcoming Murder Down Under (aka Mr. Jelly's Business), the first Bony book published in the US: "Unusual and timely setting, good puzzle, and unique setting. Long and slow but richly rewarding." Three years later, he wrote in a notice of The Devil's Steps that Bony was "one of the greatest figures of modern detection."
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| death of a lake |
A significant faction of American mystery addicts agreed with Boucher. In an article published about Upfield in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1954, the year he published his 18th Bony mystery, Death of a Lake, the features writer claimed that while "the average American mystery novel sells 3500 copies, Napoleon Bonaparte sells between 30,000 and 40,000." This was easily enough to make Upfield one of the most popular crime writers in America.
What was the great appeal of Bony mysteries for the American mystery reading public? Again, setting. As for the author himself, "setting, not the puzzle, was his first concern." Of Death of a Lake specifically, Upfield declared: "My primary objective was to describe the death of a lake. I've purposefully soft-pedalled the mystery to emphasize the background."
Upfield divulged that he spent five months writing, then rewriting, a book, after which he would "have a loaf for a couple of months before I get down down to the next one." Unlike many mystery writers Upfield made enough from his worldwide book sales to make a good living from crime fiction.
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| New south Wales map showing the towns of Menindee and Broken Hill, also mentioned in Death of a Lake, in the northwest |
Lake Otway fills with water only once in a generation and then it stays filled for about only three years. The novel takes place in January and February at the peak of an Australian summer heatwave, when the temp hits over 100 in the shade; and the lake is sure the evaporate in a mere matter of weeks. And there's something in the lake which seems particularly to interest seven whites--five men and two women--at the outstation. (There are two full blooded indigenous Australians as well on the scene for a time, but they do not figure in any real sense in the tale.)
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| abandoned Holden vehicle rusting in an unforgiving Australian climate |
After laying out the setting (a map would have been nice), Upfield in chapter two lays out a procedural chronology of a possible cold case:
Ray Gillen, a debonair, devil-may-care stockman and Korean War veteran, had a half-share in a winning lottery ticket, netting him L12,500 dollars, or over half a million today (about $400,000 USD). He left the city of Toowoomba in Queensland on a motorbike, declaring his intent to see Australia (he "never cared a hoot for money"), and arrived on September 3 (1952?) at Lake Otway, where he decided to stay and work for a time. Nine weeks later on November 7, Gillen, a strong swimmer, went for a late-night swim in Lake Otway and was never seen again; presumably he cramped and drowned in the lake.
So what happened to the lottery money? Could Gillen have been murdered for it? In late January (1954?), fifteen months after Gillen's original arrival at Lake Otway, D. I. Napoleon Bonaparte, having come across the official records of the Gillen affair in the police Case File, comes to the Lake Otway outstation in the guise of a humble horsebreaker to investigate matters. (Many of Bony's cases fall into this pattern of having him appear in disguise to investigate criminous events at remote locales)
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| the real life Albemarle sheep station where the author himself once worked |
The majority of Death of a Lake is devoted to Bony sounding out the handful of inhabitants of this remote outstation about past events there. The local men, headed by Overseer Richard Martyr, are sufficiently but not especially memorably characterized, while the women, a mother and daughter by the surname of Fowler, are more memorable. "These two quarreling women gave [the outstation] life."
Like two true daughters of Eve, however, the mother and daughter, while they have come to this homosocial environment and domesticated it with feminine cookery and cleaning, have also infested it with the vipers of sexual provocation and designing womanly wiles.
Bony knows, we are informed, "that to be a wanton a woman needed no training." Warns a trucker of Lake Otway: "Women! You go careful with the women at Lake Otway!...Ruddy termites, both of 'em. They eats into a man's dough from the inside out."
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| workmen at a station |
Another hand tells Bony bitterly of the distaff side of humanity:
All they thinks about is what they can get out of a bloke. Only the blacks get their women in a corner and keeps 'em there....They gives their women a beltin' every Sunday morning regular, and there's never no arguing or ruddy funny business during the week.
Who says Australian whites didn't respect aboriginal culture? I can see modern readers now proclaiming this novel grievously dated, on account of such sentiments, when it's really nothing of the sort, as we should have learned by now in the Age of MAGA and the manosphere. So-called "woke" culture didn't extinguish such "dated" beliefs; it merely suppressed them until the advent of social media and its conservative influencers.
Personally, I've never believed overmuch in the myth of the dated mystery novel. Usually we just like to imagine they are dated in their sentiments. Certainly this one I suspect is an accurate enough depiction of many men in rough working environments. At least the bossman, Martyr, is more sophisticated, even writing poetry, but he is drawn to the women too--what straight man wouldn't be in such a place?
Indeed, though Lake Outway may be dying, the outstation perched above it is positively awash in sexual cross currents. The men pursue and buy gifts from Sydney and Adelaide for mother or daughter or both as the case may be, while the woman--the girl, Joan, but 21, and her mother, barely past forty--compete with each other for favors from the men. Ray Gillen himself stayed on at the outstation, it seems, merely to dally with bewitchingly lovely young Joan. Bony's task for much of the novel is navigate these dangerous crosscurrents and discover just who was plotting what with whom.
Meanwhile the lake is dying and Upfields descriptions of the fight for survival among the local feathered and furred creatures--the various birds, the rabbits (millions evidently), the roos, the foxes, etc.--is gripping. Eventually the water in the lake will completely evaporate and Gillen's drowned body presumably will thereby be revealed, along with the gold locket which he wore around his neck--and then what?
Well, I won't spoil that for you of course. But there is, also near the end of the novel, a deadly house fire and another death. Finally Bony gets down to brass tacks and conducts a brief though genuine investigation of these events, discovering in the process the sordid truths surrounding Gillen's demise and other later events.
It's a slow-moving tale yet somehow a compelling one. Upfield excels at nature writing and the idea of people having to await the "death" of a lake to uncover the body that lies beneath the diminishing water and its secret is an intriguing one.
It feels rather like some sort of Somerset Maugham or Ernest Hemingway humans in the wilds story, like "Rain" or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." For a while the situation with the unforgiving natural elements turns so dire that it starts to resemble what I call a "survival mystery"--that tiny detective fiction subgenre where the characters fight for their very survival as they grapple as well with the nominal murder problem.
Upfield's scenic writing is superb and while the characters are stock they move the tale along. At times I was reminded rather of an American hard-boiled novel with its femmes fatales, potentially more deadly than the male. People may deem to novel anti-woman, but on the other hand it seems of a time and place where women had to use what weapons nature endowed them with, as the purported "weaker sex," in order successfully to manipulate men. Sisters couldn't quite do it for themselves then, especially in the Australian outback; rather, they often had to work behind a man to accomplish their ends. Blame not the women, but the male-dominated society which cast the sexes into these performative roles, what MAGA lovingly terms "trad."
All in all, I think Death of a Lake is a fascinating mystery novel of an unusual time and place and it remains, in my view, one of Upfield's finest efforts in the crime vein. Had Agatha Christie written this book I can see her having riddled the tiny outstation with an ingenious if unlikely welter of obscure motivations and false identities; but Upfield was not Christie and we can live with that surely. Different knife strokes for different crime folks, say I. Pick your own poison.
See also my review of Upfield's earlier detective novel Venom House (1952), an account of a Bony case which is mentioned in Death of a Lake. I think that's the author's closest take on a classic English country house mystery.
