Set deep in the heart of rural Australia during the era of Gough Whitlam, pub brawls and flared jeans, Gunnawah is a compulsive crime thriller of corruption, guns and drugs from a new voice in Australian Noir.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Riverina 1974:
When nineteen-year-old farmgirl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. Its owner, Valdene Bullark, sees something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide.
Val puts Adelaide straight to work. What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it’s as if she’s poked a stick in a bull ant’s nest. Violence follows. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs.
Shady deals. Vested interests. A labyrinth of lies. It seems everyone in Gunnawah has a secret to keep. But how many want to stop Adelaide dead?
EXTRACT
Somewhere where the Murray River streamed down from the Great Dividing Range, flowing sinewed and calm before hitting the swampy flat lands, somewhere down in the water’s depths, a human skull sat settled and still, eye sockets filled with mud, facing straight up. The skull was wedged under the largest rock in the lagoon, weighed down with the mud only an ancient river system could deposit. Underneath the skull, a chain pulled back and forth in the water’s ebb, caught on what could have been a human spine, there were too many body parts jammed in to tell. All the clay had turned to sludge, stirred up by the yabbies way down there where the Murray cod shit. A hand on the skeleton was trapped beneath something large and solid, something weighing the skeleton down. There were two hands in all. Two hands. Two feet. One spine. One skull.
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1
Adelaide Hoffman tried to remember a time when running by the river brought her joy, but as hard as she tried, nothing came to mind. She ran in a straight line, the whites of her eyes flashing, left, right, left again, so hard to see in the murky dawn light. The main bridge over the river into town only took her a minute to cross. She glanced quickly over her shoulder in the semi-darkness, dirty blonde strands stuck to her face, her feet thudding in time with her frantic breath.
Two signs sat stacked at the end of the bridge as it dribbled into town. Welcome To New South Wales, the first one shouted to anybody crossing the Murray River who didn’t understand the border between Victoria and New South Wales or where the hell the bridge they were on was taking them.
The second sign sat slightly back, smaller, almost apologetic; Gunnawah. Pop: 989. The shire mayor had confidently announced he planned to get it over the 1000 mark before the end of 1974. But that had been last week at the lawn bowls club on New Year’s Eve, and nobody ever trusted what happened at the bowlo on New Year’s Eve.
Once over the bridge, Adelaide slowed her stride. Saddleback Lagoon sat only a short distance away, a misshapen billabong beside the river with still water so deep they said nobody had ever seen the bottom, not that anybody would want to with the bottom filled with possum carcasses and Murray cod shit.
‘There’s cod down there so fricken big they could swallow you whole, Adelaide,’ her older brother had told her once and she’d laughed and pushed him off his dirt-bike.
The sky rim glowed lemon with the promise of the rising sun and the crackling heat of a Riverina day. At the water’s edge, the ground vibrated with the thud of approaching feet. Tadpoles mouthed at the water’s glossed lid where her moving shadow cast a shade across the surface. Huff-thud, huff-thud. Bloated air filled with the sharp tannin scent of soaking eucalyptus leaves. Clumps of white cockatoos watched from distant gum boughs, spread like dandruff through the limbs.
From far off in the distance, a semi-trailer ground down through its gears.
Skidding to a stop beside the lagoon, Adelaide leaned down at the water’s edge, cupping her hands, splashing at her face.
She lifted her head. Shit, was she late? Pivoting back toward the road, breathing in, breathing out, she ran. White shoes crackling on the crushed granite path, jumping puddles with well-worn precision, she ran along the gravel trimming the road flowing from the bridge, headed straight north into town. She ran.
On the road ahead, a white Holden ute with a black bull bar sat parked outside the Big H Farm Machinery & Supplies depot, the depot’s fence patchworked with signs. Adelaide ran toward it, slowing herself, wondering whether she’d left the keys on the seat or under the floor mat. It didn’t matter either way. Nobody locked their car in Gunnawah. Nobody locked anything. Not before that year anyway.
‘Mornin’, Adelaide,’ a wiry male said, walking toward her, ‘Glad to see ya found ya way back.’ His tanned face split with a streak of white from his grin. ‘Never know what’s down in them river bends after a good rain.’ He laughed, wiping his face, coming to a halt as if something important had just struck him. ‘Ya dad’s pump parts just rolled up. You shoulda hung around.’
Adelaide Hoffman wrenched down the back flap of the ute, pulling a red cap from the tray, shoving it on her head, winding the sweaty plait in underneath.
‘Probably Jimmy, but river-runs sure beat the hell out of hanging around here for an hour in the dark waiting for a delivery truck,’ she said.
She wanted to tell Jimmy why she ran, how nothing bothered her, how she left everything behind, how some days she thought she might keep running as far as she could, away from the town, the farm, just away. But when her mother had suggested therapy might help her recovery, a session with Jimmy Doohan at the local farm machinery depot wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind.
She grabbed the weight of the box on the opposite side to Jimmy, hoisting the Davey pump parts onto the ute tray. A slight walnut of a man, Jimmy had been a country jockey once, but a bad jumps fall and a deep affection for painkillers had finished that phase of his life. Now he owned the auto repair and tyre yard diagonally across the road from Big H. Jimmy Doohan’s Auto Repairs – We keep doohan! Jimmy had thought of that all by himself.
Adelaide leaned over the box. She towered over Jimmy, but then again, most people towered over Jimmy. Biceps flexed, mouth fixed, she dragged the box into the ute tray, before jumping behind the wheel, turning the engine.
‘Jesus, Adelaide, whatever your dad’s payin’ ya, it isn’t enough.’
She gunned the ute toward Federation Street, a hundred yards south back down the road. She knew the way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ronni Salt (a pseudonym) is a citizen journalist and social media commentator with a rural and legal background and a strong interest in environmental issues. She hails from the Riverina and much prefers dogs to people. Gunnawah is her debut novel.
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