With a nod of his head to Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, Richard King, winner of the 1995 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, writes with tongue-in-cheek to give us a boisterous novel of just one of the beginnings of white Australia.
'Yes, we are here to etch the faint name of England upon the dust. Now that six months have elapsed and we have humbled up a few small huts and crude buildings, erected this fine flag pole and scrambled up some docks, now that six months have elapsed and we have gloriously and honourably declared unequivocally Great England's slight and vague ill-defined interest in this land, let us strike ourselves a home.'
In the fine and funny tradition of absurdist writing, 'Carrion Colony' is set in a broken-down penal colony, Old & New Bridgeford, in Australia in the early 19th century. Richard King writes an extraordinarily compelling, somewhat autobiographical and tongue-in-cheek view on just one of the beginnings of white Australia.
There's mayhem, violence and generally very odd behaviour exhibited by the soldiers and the convicts dumped in what feels like the middle of nowhere. There's a doctor who's too preoccupied in razing the native flora to practise medicine, a madman stranded on a rocky outcrop engraving a tiny map of Great Britain in the stone, a cartographer whose pencils are blunt and the Spanish Girl, the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, with a mean knack for Red Ace.
Every man and woman in this colony is being stretched beyond belief just to survive, but there's humour too in the surviving.
'Carrion Colony' is a boisterous novel, full of verve, that interprets history with a wickedly satirical lens.
