From Peter Carey to Cormac McCarthy, these are some of the most compelling depictions of a territory where both danger and discovery lie
From wild tales of exploration to the pioneers of the old west, from post-apocalyptic wastelands to the far reaches of space, the idea of the frontier has enthralled authors and readers for more than a century. The word alone evokes a boundary, a crossing, a limit of known experience beyond which discovery and danger lurk. In the emptiness of the frontier, we find characters reduced to their most basic selves, the comforts and trappings of the modern world stripped away to leave them with startlingly elemental choices: death or survival; morality or corruption; love or hate. We also find them pitted, more often than not, against their environment. Whether hostile or benign, the landscape becomes a character in itself.
In my case, the frontier was the Australian outback. Only Killers and Thieves is set in a dark period of colonial history, on the late 19th-century Queensland frontier, where two young brothers are drawn into a quest for retribution that will define both their relationship and their lives. In writing the book, I travelled with them through a beautiful yet brutal terrain. Perhaps that is also part of the frontier novel’s appeal: in our ultra-connected world there is nowhere that can’t be visited, either in person or online – but these stories can still transport us to distant times and places and make them urgently real.
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