The Hanging Tree (Jillian Watkinson, UQP, $22.95 pb, ISBN 0702234753, October) ***

~

This book gave me strange dreams. Clear, starry nights; orange, dusty nowheres; voices around campfires; the smell of chlorine on hot family days around a pool in the suburbs. And, always, the sound of grown men sobbing. In The Hanging Tree, Jillian Watkinson revisits the world of her award-winning novel The Architect and paints a vivid picture of a long-buried consciousness seeping into the present. Most of the novel is set in Queensland in the late 1970s, on a cattle station called Tallaringa Downs. This is the seat of the Masters family, the site where diverse pasts converged, where the family’s history was simultaneously nurtured and amputated. Twenty-five years later, Bill Masters is trying to write this story as a legacy for his newborn daughter but finds that, while there are various truths on offer, the real story is in the silences. And as the silences are broken, secrets spill forth to tell tales of the fragility of man in the face of inevitable change. Watkinson’s research into political and social history has given this novel a fascinating factual base. However, her research into family histories has created an emotional depth that is ultimately haunting.

Kabita Dhara is fiction buyer at Dymocks Melbourne

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker