McKinnon has firsthand experience of how ‘messed up’ the land is by ‘too much white fella stuff’, and is aware of the damage done to Aboriginal people by white settlement. She is motivated by a need to address those injustices and to expose the imbalance of power in black–white relations. In order to dramatise the conflict, she has chosen to set Cicada on a remote cattle station soon after World War I, a time when communication was difficult, prejudices were reinforced by white religious and secular authority, and the euphemistically named Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, had absolute jurisdiction over Aboriginal welfare in Western Australia.

In bald outline, Cicada is a melodramatic flight-evasion-capture story, distinguished from others of that genre by its extreme location, and by the sex and race of its two fugitives, one an Aboriginal servant, the other an aristocratic English lady. The catalyst for the women’s epic trek from Halls Creek to Broome is the shameful birth of a black baby to Lady Emily Lidscombe. When her estranged (and lowly born) husband cuts the baby’s throat and shoots her Aboriginal lover, the distraught mother flees Cicada Station with her maid Wirritjil. They are pursued by white stockmen and troopers, who presume, with no evidence other than self-serving rumour, that Wirritjil kidnapped Emily after murdering her own child and lover.

McKinnon’s extensive research into Aboriginal traditions, languages, and kinship systems lends a tone of veracity to the narrative, but this becomes laboured with repetition. Ethnographic details emphasise the superiority of Aboriginal survival skills at every step of the women’s flight across inhospitable terrain, but add little to the elaboration of Wirritjil’s character. At first, Emily disdains the ‘dirty’ food and shelter offered by her guide, but hunger, sunburn, and delirium force a reconciliation. She accepts Wirritjil’s help while reminding herself that Wirritjil is a servant, not a companion, hardly even a person, at best a childlike savage:

Wirritjil worked steadily, she reshaped her short spear, her hong, heating it, pounding it as it cooled. She worked hard on the tip, nursing it in the fire, removing it before it darkened and polishing it to a sharp point with bark.

     Emily watched her movements, unhurried and almost languid, it was as if she was in a continuous dance, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, flowing through the day. Even her string belt – full of new things, like the collection of a curious child, useful-shaped twigs, rocks, a clean lizard skin, her flint and pieces of tough grass – seemed part of the dance.

Emily’s conversion to an Aboriginal understanding of the land and its sources of abundance, and the forging of a genuine regard for Wirritjil, unfold as the two women elude the white men intent on killing them, and the black trackers who assist in their escape. Emily follows Wirritjil’s example and fashions a workable slingshot from a forked branch and twine made from resin, hair, and the tendons of a goanna. With pride she contributes to their store of food in a remarkable, if somewhat unbelievable, adaptation to life in the wilderness.

‘McKinnon has mined the richness of Aboriginal mythology and language, but seldom manages to break free from the white point of view.’

The diverse geography, climate, flora, and fauna of the Kimberley are revealed in lyrical descriptions as the characters move ‘through country that was like an ancient sea where long shallow waves had suddenly stopped and turned to sand, with small stones like bubbles of surf at the crest’. Aboriginal identification with the changing landscape and their anthropomorphism of nature endows every phenomenon with meaning: that the wind covers the women’s tracks, but leaves a wallaby’s prints untouched, might be seen as a sign of the wind’s collusion. How to act upon signs may not be clear, but displacement of the natural order is always a cause for concern: ‘It was a butcherbird sitting in the sand where it shouldn’t be and nestling like a pigeon that made [the tracker] worry.’

Sturt's Desert Pea (photograph by Jim Bendon)

Except for stories of country and the permanent present of Ngarrangkarni (dreamtime), McKinnon’s Aboriginal characters seldom express a direct opinion. They remain indecipherable, the opacity of their inner reality perhaps a failure of the author’s imagination, perhaps a silence emblematic of how little whites were (and are) willing to listen. When Aboriginal characters do speak, the cultural divide between blacks and whites is highlighted: when the pregnant Wirritjil wonders, for example, how it is possible for the same white man, who ‘sent’ her a child, to chase her with a gun; or when an Aboriginal boy looks his white companion in the eye and asserts that all kardiya (white people) deserve the death handed out by Jandamarra, the warrior who led an insurrection against white settlers in the 1890s.

McKinnon has mined the richness of Aboriginal mythology and language, but seldom manages to break free from the white point of view. Despite her sympathy for the plight of her Aboriginal characters, they remain ciphers, subject to a collective will, their conduct predicated on tribal law and skin names. The plot of Cicada is swollen with the multiple treacheries, deceits, and disgraces of its white characters, but at least the novel’s epitaph is supplied by the Aboriginal elder known as Charcoal: ‘The before and the after they come together and there just is.’