A Crying in the Wind

Book excerpt: This epic and sweeping 200-year saga of an ancient island and its violent transformation from Eden-like paradise to the tourist-destination Tasmania of today, is told through the lives of four families. Aboriginal child Tom, stolen in 1812 and forced into early adulthood with no family, no identity, and no love; the hard working Scottish Fairfield family who leave all that is familiar to establish themselves in an alien place; the convict George Turner whose gentleness and conscience are finally destroyed by hard fate; and later the Dijkstras - displaced from Java and then from the Netherlands by WWII - come seeking a new home in the fabled isle that their own Abel Tasman had discovered in 1642. In the wake of invasion and genocide, the remnant Aborigines struggle for bare subsistence and recognition on the remote Bass Strait Islands while the pastoral settlers build their empires on someone else's land; the convict's sons try to create a new identity, and the Dutch search for peace but bring memories of other wars. All of them are in an alien environment full of ghosts and strange presences. As their descendants - ordinary people whom you might meet on the streets of Hobart today - interact around the troubled boy Ty, a threatening environmental mystery, and a fiery climax on the slopes of the grand Western Tiers, this is raw history as well as the heart-warming story of ordinary people, loving, hating and battling along in a difficult setting, indelibly marked by their past, yet striving to rise above it and seek redemption. "This rich and absorbing story's other ending is still out there, waiting in the wind to be heard..." Dr Alison Bleaney