One Wet Season

Ion Idriess sets this book in the small Kimberley town of Derby, (in the remote northern Territory of Australia) during the annual wet season. Each year the men of the Kimberley, from ‘over the range' and ‘along the Fitzroy' gather in Derby to sit out the torrential rains. They drink, tell yearns, share their pioneering stories, share their losses and successes. Idriess spent the wet season there in 1934, with many of the characters he knew, but more that he met, and he shares these stories with the reader.

The chapters in this book are inter-related, and some follow each other sequentially, but not all. The stories jump around a lot - some are stories of the wet season and the antics the men get up to with Idriess present, but most are stories from the time outside of the wet season.

There are a few characters who are present throughout long tracts of this book - Womba Billy is the most memorable, and perhaps the most interesting. A white fella, but brought up by an Aboriginal family he speaks many Aboriginal languages, as well as pidgen English and English, and has the respect of the Aboriginal people and therefore an insight into their lives. Without doubt these stories and interactions were the highlight of the book for me.

As anyone who follow my reviews will know I am a big Idriess fan, and for the first time with one of his many books, that I haven't been enthralled for page one. It look me a long while to put my finger on what the issue was, and then it dawned on me - I wasn't able to build an interest in enough of the characters. Until we got onto a Womba Billy chapter we were quickly introduced to characters before chopping to another story after perhaps a half a page. Often the chapter might contain 6 or 8 small vignettes, not related. As often as not the vignette ends in the death of the protagonist - the Kimberley is a dangerous place, frontier lands if you like, these men were pioneering raising stock out here, and the munjon or wild Aboriginals are plentiful. Beyond the Kimberley are the King Leopold Ranges - land even more remote than the Kimberley!

Because of this patchiness, and because there was a fair few humorous drunken escapade stories (which were a bit lame in todays context) this book failed to engage me the way I expect from this author, and as such was a 3.5 star read. Because of his other excellent books I feel obliged to round this down to only 3 stars. This is still worth the time in reading, absolutely, but it just doesn't reach the highs of his other works by comparison.