Only Killers and Thieves(108)
He stands. Blows out the lantern, scrapes back the chair, carries the whiskey through the house and out the front door, where he finds Tess waiting for him beside the verandah bench.
“How did you know, eh?” he asks her, rubbing her head. “How did you know?”
He sits down on the bench, lights another cigarette. Tess hops up beside him and lays her head in his lap. He drinks, he smokes. The darkness of the gully around him, the shapes of the trees, the shadows of his land. Everywhere is shadow, shades of black and gray, the hillside and the house upon it, the pitch of its roof and the hollow of the verandah and within it the outline of a man sitting with his dog, and the single red dot of his cigarette end, glowing when he inhales.
Author’s Note
The characters, events, and most of the locations in this novel are fictitious, but all are rooted in historical fact. The Queensland Native Police operated from the colony’s formation in 1859 until the early years of the twentieth century, and for his comprehensive study of all aspects of the force, I am grateful to Jonathan Richards’s The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police (University of Queensland Press). Reading Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788, 3rd ed. (New Holland Publishers), by Bruce Elder, provided the first spark for this story, and the book was a helpful source throughout. The epigraph is taken from a digitized version of the original Queenslander edition, accessed via Trove (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page2531550), a valuable online resource offered by the National Library of Australia. All errors or inaccuracies in the novel are my own.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to: my agent Lucy Luck and all at C+W; Anna Stein at ICM Partners; my editors Terry Karten and Laura Macaulay, and all at HarperCollins and Pushkin Press; my tutors and course mates at UEA, particularly Andrew Cowan, Helen Cross, Malachi McIntosh, and Jean McNeil; my family for their support and encouragement; and above all Sarah, for everything.
About the Author
Paul Howarth was born and grew up in Great Britain before moving to Melbourne in his late twenties. He lived in Australia for more than six years, gained dual citizenship in 2012, and now lives in Norwich, United Kingdom, with his family. In 2015, he received a master’s degree from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing program, the most prestigious course of its kind in the UK, and was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship.
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