Although the blood of Indigenous Tasmanians still flows in the veins of many people, the principal narrative of the violent fracture and disappearance of the tribes is one of doom and destruction, and like many tales of conflict between outsiders and Indigenous people, the stories are often inhabited by strange heroes and villains. The geography of the island ensures that the atmosphere is bleak, with a sense of terminal horror (an atmosphere notably captured in the 2009 film Van Diemen’s Land). The non-fiction works of such writers as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan have vividly documented this period, giving rise to what have been called the ‘history wars’ between historians who believe the first Tasmanians suffered genocide at the hands of the British, and those who deny this interpretation of events. Fiction, of course, has licence to cross into the realm of the imagination, taking inspiration from the apparent facts of history, and moving into the minds and hearts of characters, some of whom have been plucked from history, some invented by writers.

The Roving Party is set in 1829, when Governor Arthur was introducing his draconian reforms to the colony. These ensured that Van Diemen’s Land was one of the fiercest dictatorships in the world – an abyss, a hell on earth. In the course of the narrative, Arthur cancels the bounty he had put on the heads of members of Indigenous tribes, so that the enterprise driving the group described as the ‘roving party’ that is hunting down the tribesmen, after days and nights of brutal and grotesque activity, is void. One historical figure who looms large in the story is John Batman, widely regarded as a villain who tricked the tribes of Port Phillip in Victoria into handing over the land on which Melbourne now stands. In The Roving Party, Batman, still living in Van Diemen’s Land, leads a motley group in search of native people, resulting in massacres. Batman’s group consists of a boy, four convicts, two black trackers, a farmhand, and ‘Black Bill’.

The latter is the conflicted protagonist. He sets up a literary echo of Joe Christmas in William Faulkner’s Light in August, being a black man brought up as white. The abiding motif of the book is smoke, and Black Bill lodges in the reader’s consciousness veiled in a wreath or cloud or smudge of smoke, as if his very being is ghostly. There are the campfires of the roving party, the pipes the men smoke. Frequently Black Bill scans the heavens for the smoke of tribal fires. At the heart of the narrative are his dreams, in which he talks to his unborn child, who will never in fact draw breath.

Although the whole book follows the party as they roam about the harsh forbidding landscape shooting people and dogs in scenes of graphic gore, there is a deep mythic level located within Black Bill. The novel opens with reference to his unspoken tribal name, one that he has ‘no good use for’, and ends as he whispers the ‘secret name’ of his baby son. He longs, at the end, for future dreams in which this dead son will visit him. There is a terrible beauty in this redemptive act of naming.

The name Black Bill is a nasty British nickname; the character is more often designated by the narrative as ‘the Vandemonian’, the only character so named. It raises him to a grand status, yet marks him out for doom. His dead child works as a symbol of the obliteration of the tribes, for it (the mother says it was female, Black Bill says it was male) was in fact ill-formed and hopeless, like a vestigial gesture of nature. Yet for Black Bill and Katherine, the mother, it remains the spiritual link to themselves, and hence to the blood of the tribe. The baby’s body is incinerated, and Katherine wears the polished skull ‘mooncoloured, pale and jawless’ on a cord around her neck. Bill cups the skull in his hands and whispers to it, ‘desolate of heart’.

If there is one adjective that would cover the story of The Roving Party, it is that one – desolate. There is a catalogue of rapes and murders: ‘As he surveyed the great unbroken blackness circling the camp he was caught from behind by the hair and a broad winking blade cleaved his throat to the vertebra.’ Around this relentless savagery swirls the sad lyricism of passages such as this: ‘Bereft of their women and children the clansmen crossed their clanhold at a pace and progressed along the frontier as if they were as insubstantial as the stays of mistfilled light between the silver wattles.’

It comes as no surprise that this grim and astonishing novel won this year’s Vogel award.