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Paul Daley’s novel testifies to the ongoing necessity for truth-telling in Indigenous histories.Credit:Mike Bowers

In 1959,Herbert wrote a satirical novella,Seven Emus,in which a rogue anthropologist tries to steal the Emu Totem from the Tjingali tribe. The most damning observation inSeven Emus,and the one most pertinent for Paul Daley’s novel Jesustown,is that the study of Indigenous customs and history by many colonial anthropologists,especially from Australia,Britain,and America “might not be made so much with the simple impersonal motive of acquiring knowledge as with the very personal one of collecting”.

Ancestral remains,artworks,and totems were often stolen (collected) as trophies to be taken to universities and museums to advance professional careers.

In the author’s note that closes his novel,Daley,a journalist who has written about post-colonial Australia,echoes a similar condemnation:“When the settler state wrongly assumed it was witnessing its own self-serving ‘extinction’ of the oldest enduring civilisation on earth,the scientists and other experts — driven by their fierce competition and a shared salvage mentality — descended to horde[sic] as much material culture as possible to chronicle the ‘vanishing race’ and fill their museums.”

At the heart of Daley’sJesustown is a rogue anthropologist,part Levi-Strauss,part Kurtz,called Nathaniel Renmark,who lived in the eponymic mission among the Indigenous custodians “The People” on the coast of the fictional Acadia. His life’s work was researching “the people he’d ‘saved‴⁣⁣ from colonial interference,resulting in a global reputation as a leading non-academic expert on the Indigenous ways of life.

Nathaniel’s story is told from the first-person perspective of his grandson,Patrick,a hack historian and self-proclaimed “story-ist” who writes “history rehashed as irreverent antipodean yarn-spinning dressed as a kinda sorta truth”.

With a list of bestselling publications mirroring Peter FitzSimons’ back catalogue,Patrick made his name and wealth by pumping out “tales of heroism and survival against the odds. Of plucky,fearless,anti-authoritarian men — always men — on the seas,in the skies and on the battlefield”.

After being banished by his wife for the accidental death of his son,Patrick returns to Jesustown to investigate the legacy of his grandfather and write his next book.

There,he discovers that Nathaniel shared his ethos of truth’s malleability. While trawling through his grandfather’s disordered and self-congratulating archive,Patrick finds a box of cassettes recorded right before Nathaniel killed himself in his ’90s. These recordings contain a confession,in which he attempts to absolve himself of being implicated in an expedition of American anthropologists who stole ancestral remains from The People.

The more Patrick digs,the less feasible writing a potboiler seems as he struggles to reconcile the comfort of absolutes between good/evil and white/black with the moral complexities of reality. The heroes he usually venerates were clearly the villains in Jesustown.

The mystery of Patrick’s pariah status gradually reveals itself through a series of remembrances that disclose the ambiguous culpability of Patrick in the death of his son,addressing the novel’s opening line:“How does it feel to lose the three people you love the most?” (One of those people is not Nathaniel Renmark.) Meanwhile,in Jesustown,he reconnects with a lost love,Tamar,and her twin brother Jericho,who attempts to reclaim the stolen bones of his ancestors and return them to Country.

Much like his protagonist,Daley eschews moral absolutes in Jesustown. There are no clear-cut heroes,no untarnished virtues. The “grey area” of frontier violence and the white saviour figure is conveyed through Nathaniel Renmark,a man who loved the Indigenous people,who in turn embraced him,but ultimately caused them harm through his urge for recognition.

The novel testifies to the ongoing necessity for truth-telling in Indigenous histories,not in an overtly didactic way,but by dramatising the presence of buried histories that arose from the colonial-settler tendency to overwrite and distort the Indigenous stories they set out to discover.

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