Devils Eye

by Ian Townsend

It is 1899, and one of the fiercest storms in history is brewing - a hurricane named Mahina.

To a remote part of the Queensland coast come the hundreds of sails of the northern pearling fleets, and a native policeman trying to solve a murder. Nearly two thousand men, women and children are gathering around Cape Melville, right in the path of the storm that is about to cause Australia's deadliest natural disaster.

Based on real events, this is the story of an unstoppable force of nature and the birth and death of an Australian dream.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, Australia

369 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Ian Townsend is a journalist and radio documentary maker who worked for many years with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio national network. He has won numerous awards for journalism, including four national Eureka Prizes for science and medical journalism and an Australian Human Rights Award. His first novel, Affection, based on the 1900 outbreak of plague in Townsville, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the Colin Roderick Award, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the National Year of Reading, and was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC award. His second novel, The Devil’s Eye, based on the 1899 Bathurst Bay cyclone, was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award. His latest book, Line of Fire, is non-fiction, combining family history with military history and geology to tell the story of the civilian and military disaster that befell Rabaul at the start of the Pacific War.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Devil's Eye has been lurking on my TBR since 2008, but I was prompted to read it now because, like Vance Palmer's Cyclone ,  it's listed as a novel featuring a cyclone in a book of LitCrit that I'm reading: Chrystopher Spicer's Cyclone Country, the Language of Place and Disaster in Australian Literature.  Longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2009, The Devil's Eye is based on a real event: the 1899 catastrophic cyclone Mahina, which with a death toll of over 300 is still the deadliest tropical cyclone in Australian history.

This is the blurb:

It is 1899, and one of the fiercest storms in history is brewing - a hurricane named Mahina.

To a remote part of the Queensland coast come the hundreds of sails of the northern pearling fleets, and a native policeman trying to solve a murder. Nearly two thousand men, women and children are gathering around Cape Melville, right in the path of the storm that is about to cause Australia's deadliest natural disaster.

Based on real events, this is the story of an unstoppable force of nature and the birth and death of an Australian dream.

The structure mirrors the way that 19th century weather forecasting across the vast distances of North Queensland was fragmentary and hampered by poor communications.  So it takes a little while to bring together the fractured threads of the narrative...

Centred on the pearling industry when pearls were an unpredictable by-product of collecting mother-of-pearl shell, a.k.a. nacre which was widely used at the time to inlay cutlery, jewellery boxes, buttons and jewellery — the novel brings together these issues:

The illegal pearl industry.  Shells and whatever's inside them belong to the boss, but pearls get found and sold illegally to offshore buyers, obviously for less than they are worth, but the pearler gets a healthy 'bonus' instead just his pay for the day.  Two characters are employed in the risky business of spying out these illegal transactions.   One of these is dead, or might be, but whether he is or not, he's triggered an 'investigation' by the Native Police because he is said to have been speared.
Frontier conflict: the characters of Dr Walter Roth, Chief Protector of Aborigines, and Constable Jack Kenny, a Native Policeman, are alert to the irony that Roth's job is to protect the Aborigines, and Kenny's is to 'pacify' them.
Romance, and its complications: Maggie marries a pearler, dislikes his long absences at sea and decides to live on board with him and their baby Alice.  This leaves her father, the Chief Resident alone and frail on Thursday Island, so the unmarried older sister Hope is (as was common in those days) the obvious choice to be his carer.  But Hope has accepted an impulsive declaration of love from Kenny, from a difference social class and not in a position to support her. There are more complications than this spoiler-free summary, but the racial dilemmas introduce another interesting thread.  (The novel is rich in issues for book groups to discuss.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/11/19/t...

[aerwyna larae · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is like titanic but in a different situation and i love thissss.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written Australian novel of the huge cyclone which hit the north of Australia near Thursday Island early this century. It wrecked the pearling fleet and killed over 300 people. The book lists the dead at the end - interesting to see the number of pearlers from so many different parts of the world.

[Linden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Atmospheric, growing sense of doom well executed. I really enjoyed it.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I mustn't have been in the right mood for this one. I ended up skipping through to section detailing the cyclone.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved the history in this one