Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2025
Cover design by Hazel Lam
Cover images Magdalena Russocko/Trevillion Images; Shutterstock; iStock
Contemporary society seems obsessed with labelling and boxing things and publishing is no exception. I am told that The Campers has been deemed to be neighbourhood noir. I prefer to characterise this scintillating writing as literary fiction – without any connotation of elitism or opacity.
Maryrose Cuskelly has created a work with a remarkably vivid collection of characters who face the personal and social dilemma of how to behave when their comfortable values and easy lifestyle are disrupted by the marginal.
It’s full of psychological darkness and reminds me forcefully of Lord of the Flies – how quickly we retreat into violence and mob behaviour when ‘the other’ threatens our equanimity, our privilege and comfort. The line is so thin!
The residents of The Drove have enjoyed a peaceful and contented life in this cosy housing enclave and have a sociable existence in which produce from gardens is exchanged, news and views are swapped on the Whatsapp group and people are comfortable in one another’s company – they assume they are all on the same page in their espousal of social conscience. There’s an unnerving familiarity to this.
The arrival of a group of homeless people who camp by the river behind the opposite green space known as Gideon’s Paddock changes all of this. Incidents of anti-social behaviour and vandalism challenge the goodwill of even the most tolerant and fore-bearing members of the group.
The dominating presence of the campers’ self-appointed leader Sholto is another disrupter as our female lead Leah finds herself irresistibly sexually attracted to him. The ripples of discontent in her marriage and a hankering after a wilder youth are enough to tip her over the edge of ‘good judgment’.
I will leave it to the reader’s curiosity to pursue the path of the plot but it is not a surprise when respectability and wokeness crumble in the face of the challenge. Government services fail the residents in their desire to have the strangers moved on and so they justify their actions by asking what other choices they have when determined to protect the status quo?
The darkness of this book is troubling. We all see ourselves mirrored in this.
It is not that we are unsympathetic to the Drovers. Indeed we are, uncomfortably so really. The author’s portrayal of a diversity of situations and personalities in the Drovers reinforces this message – we are all capable of savagery, of indiscretion, of responding with impulse rather than considered thought. And what in fact are their choices? Is the situation tolerable? IS the plight of the homeless something they can fix?
In the centre of this swirling emotional maelstrom, two symbols strike the reader. The first is the former slaughter yard, now Gideon’s Paddock. Beneath the green sward is the blood of hundreds of slaughtered animals and the stones where the slaughter took place are still visible. The memory of death and suffering is still in the ground and not far from the surface.
Then there is the mighty fig tree which has stood for generations and is now in the yard of one home, its fruit and magnificence enjoyed by all the Drovers. It too has its origins in the history of slaughter, a place of shade for the cattle waiting for the kill. Its pleasant fecundity and shade for The Drovers is a contemporary illusion, a denial of its macabre past. Again, that thinnest of lines.
This book is a wonderfully dark portrayal of community and what happens when the established order is disrupted.
Maryrose Cuskelly is an accomplished storyteller with a dazzling command of atmosphere. From the beginning we feel the undercurrent of menace in the appearance on page one of a ‘fairytale-princess-turned-feral’.
With a plot that builds as surely and inexorably as the familiar pre-monsoon in the Northern Territory, The Campers steadily intensifies unease in the reader, as relationships fray and ‘civilisation’ takes a beating. This is utterly seductive writing.
Thank you to Allen & Unwin for my review copy and to Maryrose for such a fulsome discussion of the issues in this rich and absorbing work.