Has another contemporary Australian journalist made the leap to fiction with as much imagination and success as Dalton? (I can think of Geraldine Brooks, who did so from her American base.) A feature writer with The Weekend Australian Magazine, Dalton has sold more than 500,000 copies of his award-winning first novel, Boy Swallows Universe (2018), a semi-autobiographical fantasy about a Brisbane boy growing up in a family of criminals. All Our Shimmering Skies will be recognisable and pleasurable to fans of that novel. This time Dalton adopts a female perspective in his twelve-year-old protagonist, Molly Hook, and sees as much beauty as darkness. The setting is World War II Darwin and the landscapes of the Northern Territory.

Molly lives in a cemetery with her family of gravediggers, but her mother, Violet, says that she is going away, up to the sky, to join Molly’s grandfather, Tom Berry. Molly ‘the gravedigger girl’ is left to work with her shovel (‘Bert’) for her father, Horace, and uncle Aubrey, both violent drunks. Aubrey is the real villain, and his menacing shadow looms over the story. In a gruesome scene, he forces Molly to dig up her mother’s bones as proof that she’s dead. But Molly talks to the sky and believes her mother sends down ‘sky gifts’ to help her. Molly is a brave, determined, funny girl who loves reading: books, poems, Shakespeare, even epitaphs. Her grandfather’s gravestone says he ‘died accursed by a sorcerer’ for stealing gold from Aboriginal land.

When Japanese bombs pound Darwin in 1942, Horace Hook is killed. Orphaned Molly sets off to find Longcoat Bob, the Aboriginal sorcerer who dresses like a French admiral, and to ask him to lift the curse she believes has caused her family’s sorrows. She is joined by Greta Maze, a small-time actress with her own reasons for escape. Greta gives Dalton the chance to break into a Hollywood dream sequence in which Molly imagines herself as the glamorous Marlene Sky and her Aboriginal friend Sam Greenway as a matinee hero like Tyrone Power or Gary Cooper.

The novel is divided into five parts for each ‘sky gift’. The first is Tom’s gold pan, engraved with poetic riddles that give directions to the gold stash. On their way, Molly and Greta save the life of a Japanese pilot, Yukio Miki. The three make a mythical journey through forests, over rivers, into caves. They have nightmarish end-of-world encounters and action-movie challenges as well as revelations from the natural world and its Aboriginal owners.

Trent Dalton (Russell Shakespeare/HarperCollins)

All this may sound crazy in summary, but that would overlook Dalton’s flamboyant talent for storytelling and for spinning fine sentences. He never loses control. You think you know what’s going to happen, then you don’t. His characters, though classic stereotypes, breathe and grieve like real people thanks to the author’s clear eye and generous spirit. Molly, in her stolen blue dress, is a memorable figure, carrying her mother’s stone heart, skipping with delight after a buffalo attack. Perhaps Yukio, the knife-maker’s son, learns to speak English too fast, but his sweet exchanges with Molly make the leap worthwhile.

Dalton describes the wartime city and the ever-changing deep country with precise detail and metaphorical magic: ‘Darwin dreams in drink and sweat’; ‘banksias with furry yellow flowers that stick out from their branches like hot corncobs spitting butter’, ‘the relentless ear scratch of cicadas’, ‘the vast ancient wetlands and wilderness of Molly Hook’s dreams, the prehistoric stone and vine country’.

The narrative has non-stop momentum, driven by physical action, gymnastic sentences, and shifting viewpoints: Molly looks up at the sky; Yukio looks down from his cockpit on the ant-sized people of Darwin. The reader’s eyes take in panoramas and zoom in on a real bull ant or a watchful dingo.

Dalton is not only the novel’s author but also its cinematographer, choreographer, and director, drone in one hand and conductor’s baton in the other. All Our Shimmering Skies would make a brilliant Baz Luhrmann movie, except that Luhrmann has already made Australia (2008).

Despite the scenes of death and violence, I wondered if this was a novel intended for young readers, given the heroine’s innocent voice and clear moral code. Dalton says he wrote it for his daughters. I think All Our Shimmering Skies is for all ages from teenagers upwards in the same way that Markus Zusak’s bestselling Holocaust novel The Book Thief  (2005) softened a tough subject by showing events through a child’s eyes, with charm, hope, and humour. This adult was enchanted by Molly Hook’s adventures.