Paul Daley is a Walkley Award winning journalist, author and essayist. He writes the feature Postcolonial for the Guardian, which explores Australia’s national identity.
Jesustown is clearly an extension of this conversation. The novel offers up a compelling narrative that forces a lens up to colonial and contemporary attitudes towards First Nations Peoples.
Spanning generation, the novel hones in on Patrick Renmark. Patrick has landed in the remote former mission of Jesustown, a broken man. Now pushing fifty, Patrick has not returned to Jesustown since his humiliating withdrawal as a teenager. Then he was fleeing the aggressive whip of his grandfather Nathaniel “Rennie” Renmark.
Renny is famous, or notorious for saving The People. In the novel The People are the custodians of the land around Jesustown, and stand in for Indigenous peoples across the land. Renny’s shadow is everywhere in Jesustown and hovers most distinctly wherever Patrick stands. As he seeks to discovering who Rennie truly was underneath all the myths, Patrick finds that Rennie’s hubris is perhaps his most enduring legacy.
Jesustown began for Paul Daley in a museum storage room in Adelaide. On viewing a cache of human remains belonging to First Nations Peoples he was moved to pen a narrative that centered the struggle to have remains and relics returned to their rightful owners.
The novel displays no great love for the so called explorers and pioneers that moved into what we now call Australia and plundered everything that could be carried away. Nor does it look favorably on those who came after to chronicle what they believed to be the dying days of people who had been systematically targeted for extinction by the invading colony.
In this light we can view Renny’s tale as a sort of pleading with history. Fiercely protective of his legacy Renny denied anyone the opportunity to tell his story. Now as his archive stands empty his successor Patrick arrives in Jesustown the victim of his own hubris.
Patrick has allowed his own mythologising tendencies to blind him and in doing so he has destroyed his own life. Jesustown is both the last place he wants to be and the only place that will have him.
Jesustown is a striking novel for its singularly ugly figures of Renny and Patrick. Traveling alongside them we are left to assume that if the telling of Australia's national myth is left to them, then we are not much chop.
Patrick is a so-called story-ist, a philosophy or style peculiar to the book but which might best be summed up as ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. Patrick has storified everything he touches but finds he cannot do the same to Renny’s legacy because it seems it has always had a touch of the fantastical.
Traveling with these professionally unreliable narrators invites the reader to think about their own attitudes and approach to history. Here we see the subjective nature of records and the flagrant self-interest of the parties who want to come out on top.
We are asked to consider this story of discovery and adventure that leaves out the murder and subjagation of those inconveniently in the way.
Jesustown is a fascinating examination of colonial legacy and contemporary responsibility. It holds a light up to the crimes of the past and leaves the reader in no doubt that there is much to recompense.
Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
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