My first response, when I started reading The Roving Party was to realise that I knew nothing about Tasmanian Aborigines except that no full-blood Aboriginal people from this part of Australia survived colonisation. I knew that their descendants survive, and have suffered the ignominy of being denied their Aboriginality by some people. These critics – while conveniently discriminating against these descendants for not being ‘White’ enough – are not willing to acknowledge that descendants of Aboriginal women – who were abducted or raped by Tasmania’s earliest settlers and the sealers who visited Tasmania and its offshore islands – are entitled to claim their heritage. But when my tongue rebelled against the pronunciation of Panninher and Plindermairhemener in Rohan Wilson’s Vogel Prize winning novel, I realised that I did not even know the names of the Tasmanian tribes that existed for millennia in my own country. I am not proud to admit that until fairly recently I knew more of the names of Native American Indians than I did of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples.
And yet I love the sussuration of Aboriginal languages. My state retains many Aboriginal place names, from Warrnambool to Narre Warren to Murrumbeena. The original owners of my side of Melbourne are the Wurundjeri and the Bunerong. The murmur of those soft syllables appeals to my sense of the Australian landscape. These are sounds that belong intimately to the land, the wind wandering across our vast plains; the rustle of our gum trees in the dawn; the sizzle of rain on rocks baked by a scorching sun; the muddle of insect life; the hesitant creek that knows its fate as drought strikes.
Rohan Wilson’s debut novel has revealed the Plindermairhemener as one of the peoples who inhabited Tasmania from time out of mind, and he gives voice to these people by using their language in this book. It gives the work authenticity and power. For while the sordid tale of human brutality in 1829 is fiction, it is based on extensive scholarship – and such is the power of Wilson’s prose that I believe in the novel’s truth. I know, at an emotional level, that if not these, then some other people now lost, engaged in these events. It is our history.
The Roving Party tells an horrific story. Nothing in the massacre histories of our nation can equal the emotional response I felt when reading about this group of men – at the behest of the Governor – tramping through the Tasmanian bush hunting the indigenous people as if they were vermin. And the hunters are not all white: the party consists of John Batman; four convicts hoping to earn a ticket-of-leave; a gormless farmhand; two blacktrackers from Parramatta and Black Bill, the Vandemonian brought up and educated as a white man.
When one man is killed in cold blood and another remarks that ‘You cant [sic] murder a black…any more than you can murder a cat’ (p99) the sense of outrage is visceral, for the speaker is Black Bill who despite his upbringing speaks the language of the Plindermairhemener and knows their culture intimately. This powerful man is an enigma: we are not privy to his thoughts, only his words and deeds. What, for example, should the reader make of this exchange:
Batman screwed up his eyes in the low winter sun. I’d say the blacks have given up on this pasture.
Bill drank again from the canteen and recorked it as he began walking off along the track. They can no more give it up than you can give up yer hands and feet, he said.
Is that a rebuke? Or a sardonic rejoinder? Or does a man denied his heritage interpret the love of land as merely the instinct of an animal attached to its territory?? What does a man who belongs in neither culture really think about this barbaric enterprise in which he plays a leading role? What really is his motivation?
It’s chilling to read dialogue in this novel because it is as it must have been among those frontier search parties out to massacre the Aborigines, and the brutality depicted on both sides is not for the faint-hearted. But Wilson’s economic prose lets the reader fill in the gaps, and as I showed in my previous Sensational Snippet, his descriptions of the land are very powerful indeed.
It’s really exciting to discover a strong new voice in Australian fiction writing powerful stories about important things. I heard Rohan Wilson speak on the panel for the Native Titles session at the Melbourne Writers Festival – and I was very impressed by his grasp of the complexities of writing about Australia’s Aboriginal history and his courage in tackling controversial aspects of it. This is a writer with a great future in Australian literature.
There are some great reviews of this book. Check out Geordie Williamson at The Australian, Hannah Kent at Kill Your Darlings and Patricia Maunder at the Radio National Book Show.
© Lisa Hill
Author: Rohan Wilson
Title: The Roving Party
Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2011
ISBN: 9781742376530
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readings $27.99
Availability:
Fishpond:The Roving Party
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
As someone born and schooled in Tasmania, it behoves me to comment. the only thing I was taught about my the history of Indigenous Tasmanians was the name Truganini: we primary school students were taught that she was ‘the last Tasmanian Aboriginal woman’.
Many years later I read and studied ‘Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World’, an historical novel by Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) and felt shamed and saddened on a number of levels.
My despair hit a low note when my readings unearthed a number of spellings and pronunciations for the name attached to the Tasmanian Education system’s symbolic Indigenous woman – the main three being Truganini, Trucaminni and Trugernanner (which is now generally accepted as the ‘correct’ spelling). It seems like a final (trivial by comparison) insult.
Thanks for the review.
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By: Karen lee Thompson on August 31, 2011
at 7:11 am
After hearing the author speak at MWF I definitely want to read this book now! I think I am going to have to buy it when I go on Saturday as there is no sign of it on my library catalogue yet.
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By: Marg on August 31, 2011
at 7:23 pm
I used to have this problem at my local library a while back, when they went through a phase of ignoring Australian literary fiction. I suggest two things: a friendly letter to the Chief Librarian enquiring about purchasing policies, and also making enquiries about inter-library loans. If you look up The Roving Party on World Cat http://www.worldcat.org/title/roving-party/oclc/726092770&referer=brief_results you can see where your nearest library is that has it and you can ask your local library to do an inter-library loan for you. Since it’s not a very expensive book to buy, – and you can mention that it’s an award winning book when you make your enquiry – they may feel that it’s less trouble to buy it than to mess about doing the inter-library loan.
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By: Lisa Hill on September 1, 2011
at 7:58 pm
Usually they aren’t too bad, but no sign of kim Scott’s book or this one! If I put an ILL request in (which I use all the time) they might buy it, but I think I might just splurge
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By: Marg on September 1, 2011
at 8:01 pm
[…] Toosey is a veteran of the Black War about which Wilson wrote so evocatively in The Roving Party. He is a hard man, brutalised by years of poverty and violence, his own childhood destroyed by […]
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By: To Name Those Lost, by Rohan Wilson | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on October 13, 2014
at 10:36 pm
[…] Mears and Brian Castro, and more recently Christine Piper (After Darkness) and Rohan Wilson (The Roving Party) amongst others. This year, however, the award takes me out of my comfort zone because it was […]
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By: When There’s Nowhere Else to Run, by Murray Middleton | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on July 15, 2015
at 10:16 am
[…] The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson, see my review […]
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By: 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize longlists | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on August 14, 2017
at 3:42 pm
[…] that has shaped my knowledge of the Black history of colonial Tasmania, as has Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party. We can learn about the Depression and the truths about egalitarianism by reading vivid novels […]
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By: The Honest History Book, edited by David Stephens and Alison Broinowski | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on September 30, 2017
at 12:03 pm
[…] in impact Bridget Crack is more like Rohan Wilson’s disconcertingly powerful duo The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost, also set in colonial Van Diemen’s Land when the new society being […]
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By: Bridget Crack, by Rachel Leary | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on October 30, 2017
at 11:47 pm
[…] Wilson has written prize-winning and unforgettable novels also set in this period, including The Roving Party (2011 and To Name Those Lost (2014). These novels bring to life the stories of Tasmania’s […]
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By: Authors from Tasmania (Australian Authors #2) | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on December 6, 2017
at 10:20 pm
[…] (featured here in Meet an Aussie Author) is one of my favourite authors. From his debut novel The Roving Party (which won the Vogel and a swag of other prizes) to his second, the award-winning To Name Those […]
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By: Daughter of Bad Times, by Rohan Wilson | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on May 26, 2019
at 1:26 pm
[…] Rohan Wilson, The roving party: historical fiction, winner of NSW Premier’s Literary prize, Lisa’s review […]
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By: Monday musings on Australian literature: ABC Bookshelf’s top Aussie reads 2019 | Whispering Gums on December 16, 2019
at 11:00 pm
Your thoughts on what you read are always extremely perceptive Lisa. I wish I was as articulate. This one has been a very good read for me. After posting my GR thoughts I read a few other reviews this morning and The Roving Party has been well received in general and deservedly so. I keep reading that it is written in the style of Cormac McCarthy. I have only read The Road by that author, very good that was, but too long ago to make comparison.
The Roving Party is a damn fine book IMO, not far from being perfect. I have just read the first chapter of To Name Those Lost such was Rohan’s debut. I am looking forward to reading your review once finished.
You nailed it by saying “powerful” Australian fiction writing.
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By: fourtriplezed on June 27, 2020
at 8:26 am
I just checked, it’s nine years since I read this book and it still resonates with me. What magic authors can weave when they set pens to paper!
I’m glad you liked it as much as I did, Rohan is one of my favourite authors.
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By: Lisa Hill on June 27, 2020
at 10:36 am
[…] this thorny issue… Rohan Wilson’s novel about Tasmania’s infamous Black Line in The Roving Party brought knowledge of a shameful episode in Australia’s Black History to national prominence […]
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By: Author event: Colum McCann in conversation with Mark Raphael Baker (Melbourne Jewish Book Week, online) | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on June 30, 2020
at 3:14 pm