There’s an old saying about tank water. While some city dwellers might panic about drinking it, country people know that if you’ve been raised on tank water, you’re set for life to drink it again without ill effects. Maybe that adage also applies to living in the country. If you’ve been brought up there, you know how it works.

Burge’s interesting novel switches between 1985 and 2005 and concerns the return of James, a city journalist, to his family’s country property in northern NSW after the death of a cousin, who leaves him the aggregated family properties.

There is an expectation that he will return to live in his grandparents’ old home on the properties, with an uncle assuring him that with a new tank, and a good spring rainfall, there will be enough water to move in.

What his father, a retired policeman, and other members of the family do not know is that James has had a male partner in the city for the past 10 years. So he is finely attuned to the gay beat that exists around a public toilet under the town’s main bridge, where his cousin’s body was discovered. Young men in the area throw themselves, or are thrown, from that bridge at least once in a generation, but James struggles to get his father to admit that the police failed to examine them as possible gay bashings.

In Tank Water Burge portrays well the rhythms of a country town, where James often encounters former acquaintances; where family members prefer not to know about his cousin’s sexual preferences; and where secrets and family tragedies span the generations.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Burge is a journalist, author and artist who lives at Deepwater on Ngarabal Country in the New England region of NSW.

His debut novel Tank Water is a coming-of-age crime thriller set in the bush.

His non-fiction debut Questionable Deeds: Making a stand for equal love lifted the lid on familial, institutional and government homophobia in Australia.

Michael co-manages The Makers Shed, a creative hub in Glen Innes. Browse his his artwork at his online art gallery.

In a series of hard-hitting articles for Guardian Australia, Margo Kingston’s NoFibs and Gay Star News, Michael’s journalism has always covered issues of equality, LGBTIQA+ history, popular culture, politics and pathways for independent artists and writers.

His article ‘Backwards to Bourke: Bulldust about Gays in the Bush’was published internationally in the Journal of Australian Studies.