To the Highlands, by local author Jon Doust, is an engaging and honest tale of a young Perth man’s coming of age in the strange and foreign setting of PNG. Five years after Doust’s Boy on a Wire, Highlands again features Jack Muir, a young and listless boy from the WA country. Now at the end of the swinging sixties, when the world is full of change and revolution, Jack is sent to the islands as a bank Johnny. This new novel follows Jack’s journey of self-discovery from rising bank star, to trouble maker and finally to the highlands, where Jack questions who he is as a person and the invisible laws that come between love and people of different colour. Doust is a master of imagery and is particularly adept and displaying Jack’s disorientation.There is a strong theme of sexuality running though the narrative, which is never overdone or vulgar, but instead highlights the struggle between a young man’s desires and the consequences of such desires in a time where birth control had not yet become widely available. Doust also weaves a wonderful tapestry of sights and sounds of the landscape of rural Australia, Perth and the islands – both the timeless quality of the outback and the strangeness of a time which many readers might not be able to recall. For older readers To the Highlands may take them back to a time when WA’s drinking age was 21 and small country towns flourished and for younger readers it will unveil a snapshot of time which was caught between the conservative past and the progressive future.
To the Highlands is a book that rewards a second reading, as the story is fast and chaotic and, just like life and memory itself, reveals more and more imagery in a story that will highlight the still present issues of racism and sexuality.
By Rhiannon Emery.