Lost Voices

This novel tells the story of members of the Dixon family through three narratives about a century apart.
 
In an effort to help his father who has fallen into debt, young Hugh Dixon bravely approaches his Uncle Walter, a wealthy lawyer, from whom the family has been estranged. Rather than being rejected, Walter is able to assist and Hugh begins to form a bond with Walter who recognises the boy’s artistic talent and also tells him something of a sensational tale from the 1850s involving his own father, Martin.
 
It is 1854. When the notorious bushranger Lucas Wilson and his partner Liam Dalton (a recent escapee from Port Arthur) raid the Dixon farm, Martin, a budding journalist, asks to go with them in order to write Wilson’s story for the newspapers. Wilson agrees, but blindfolds Martin on the route to their secret hideaway. Roy Griffin is another recent recruit and escapee who has ulterior motives. Martin discovers that Nowhere Valley is more than just a refuge for criminals and that Wilson plans a self-sufficient Utopia. Martin has more than a scoop, and finds himself increasingly drawn into Wilson’s schemes and dreams, until Griffin causes an upheaval that results in tragedy.
 
The third narrative returns to the early 1950s as Hugh is on his way to recognition as an artist and meets Bob Wall, an old friend from childhood who is also an artist. He helps him find a job with an illustrator and cartoonist, Max Fell, who has a secret sinister side. When Bob is arrested for murder, Hugh asks his Uncle Walter to defend him.
 
I was thoroughly captivated by this book and wish I’d known about it previously (published 2012). If you have visited Tasmania and know its history, you will have the benefit of a deeper understanding of this story in which a family and community struggle to shrug off the darkness of the past.
 
Although extraordinarily beautiful in places, the island still can’t avoid echoes from history in its inky black waters of Macquarie Harbour with its rocky portal of Hell’s Gates, the ruinous outposts of misery that were Sarah Island and Port Arthur with its Isle of the Dead, the solitary confinement remnants at the Cascade Women’s Factory, the roar of ocean breakers that roll across the world from South America and incessantly pound the West Coast – an infernal and eternal booming sound that could send you mad – contrasted with that unique silence of the mountains and the primeval forests that have witnessed the unspeakable. All of this might be felt if you have sensitivity to such things and this last novel by Christopher Koch captures this superbly through its characterisations and prose.
 
This passage from the third narrative:
 
“The past is a dimension that can’t be escaped, however hard we try. Old Van Diemen’s Land had claimed Bob Wall: that past which most people here preferred not to think about, just as they preferred to forget their convict ancestors. Only the present was thought to be clean and harmless: modern was good. But when Bob entered the Hobart Gaol, the bland and transient present was dissolved. He was locked not just in prison, but in the nineteenth century. It had never gone away, that sombre old century; instead it was hidden and preserved behind the high sandstone walls in Campbell Street, waiting for recruits from outside.”
 
Five stars

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