‘Jesustown’ by Paul Daley

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 364 pages; 2022. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

How history is recorded and written, what is left out and what is exaggerated for effect, and how it is passed down, forms the central theme of this debut novel by Australian journalist Paul Daley.

Jesustown, which is set on a former mission town in remote Australia, is an attempt at post-colonial truth-telling even though it’s fiction and includes contemporary elements that feel a bit cheesy.

The author, in his afterword, says it’s “informed by some actual events that occurred across this continent, but it is not history and shouldn’t be read as such”. Even so, in its depiction of frontier wars, the ways in which First Nations’ were decimated by disease, had human remains and art stolen by collectors, and then endured the theft of their children, there’s a bright ring of truth about it.

Bending the truth

The story is narrated by Patrick Renmark, an Australian-born, London-based historian who calls himself a “story-ist” — he has made a name for himself publishing bestselling low-brow books about explorers and sportsmen and other “heroes”  — and thinks nothing of bending the truth if it serves the narrative.

When his marriage breaks down and his young son dies — a tragedy for which he is blamed and shamed — he flees to (fictional) Arcadia, in remote northern Australia, to work on a new project: writing a biography about his grandfather, who famously brokered “peace” between the Traditional Owners of the area and the local police and wore many different hats:

My grandfather — or Pa, as I called him — the feisty journalist. The great white anthropologist. The fearless explorer. The saviour of the last of the wild aborigines, as he liked to call himself. My grandfather, Nathaniel ‘Renny’ Renmark, the hero. My pa — the genius madman.

Renny has left behind an entire house rammed with disordered archival material, cassette tapes full of his spoken thoughts, Aboriginal artifacts and a published memoir, Black Men & White Lies: The Australian aborigine and me, which Patrick describes as “a self-serving and (typically) ungracious tome”.

Patrick reckons he can spin his grandfather’s story into another bestselling book but when he begins to sift through the archival material he realises it’s not quite that easy.

Jesustown includes Renny’s diary entries and transcripts of his tapes to build a picture of a complex man, who was eccentric and full of contradictions. He lived amongst the Indigenous population and grew to understand their ways and culture, defending them against those who would do them harm, but he also introduced sickness into the population and brought in some American anthropologists who were unscrupulous collectors of art and human remains.

As Patrick finds out more about the grandfather he hasn’t seen since he was a teenage boy, he tells his own story of shame and slowly reveals what happened to his marriage and his son. These two intertwined narrative threads build an interesting picture of inter-generational guilt, shame and legacy.

High ambitions

There’s no doubt that Jesustown has high ambitions to explore Australia’s complex and often violent and exploitative Black and white colonial past, but I’m not sure it succeeds.

The tone, for instance, feels off. Patrick’s voice is often satirical, ridiculing his own stupidity (mainly in relation to the sordid extramarital affair he conducts in London), but that tone jars against the heavier aspects of the story.

The earlier sections of the novel, in particular, where he lauds his career successes and sends up his own Australianness, are light-hearted and funny, but that mocking tone runs like an undercurrent throughout the entire narrative. It just feels counterproductive to the seriousness of Jesustown‘s bigger aims.

However, if you are looking for an “easy” way in to subjects as weighty as massacres, cultural theft and the entire subjugation of Australia’s First Nations people, then maybe this is a good place to start.

The novel’s exploration of history and storytelling and the ways in which the lines between fact and fiction are often blurred are also insightful.