Tasmanian-born Lenny Bartulin is the author of five books and his latest, The Unearthed (Allen & Unwin), is the first of his I’ve read. I was drawn to the setting of the story in my own locality, as well as the fact that I enjoy a good mystery.

Set mainly on the West Coast of Tasmania, in and around the townships of Strahan and Queenstown, there were some very familiar places mentioned throughout this book, like Hamer's Hotel in Strahan and the gravel football oval in Queenstown, giving the story a strong grounding and sense of atmosphere.

Initially, on finishing the book, I had the strange feeling of not being sure what I thought, but the more I mulled it over, the more I feel it was actually cleverly done. It included several mysteries to be solved and, unlike crime novels I have read in the past, they aren’t solved in the traditional sense, almost allowing the reader to form their own conclusions. This book will make you stop and reflect on what you have just read.

Told from multiple points of view and jumping between various timelines in the present day and 1950s, each part of the story reveals pieces of the mystery.

When bones are found in the Tasmania wilderness, one of the main characters, Antonia Kovács, discovers through her work at FSST (Forensic Science Services Tasmania) that they are decades old.

She has questions for her father, a now retired Police Inspector who had been stationed at Queenstown around the time, so she heads home to where he is now enjoying a quiet retirement in the harbourside township of Strahan.

Meanwhile, Tom Pilar the other main character in the book, receives an inheritance. It’s from a man belonging to his past, a friend of his father's, though Tom can barely remember him. He travels from the mainland to Queenstown to get a better understanding of why he was receiving it. I felt the author's description of the drive from Hobart to Queenstown was spot on!

There are flashbacks where we meet some post-war migrants and locals working in the mines. It’s through these flashbacks that the mysteries begin to unfold.

I found it interesting how the mysteries were revealed, laughing to myself when I realised the clues I had clearly missed. I certainly won’t be a detective anytime soon!

I enjoyed the local references; I could tell that the author had spent time in and around the areas described in the book. There has also been some extensive research undertaken into the lives of the migrant workers of the area in the early/mid 1900s.

When bones, decades old are unearthed in the Tasmanian wilderness, the search for answers starts, Antonia Kovacs returns to home, this is where her father lives retired police inspector in Queenstown, will he have answers that she needs to uncover the truth?

At the same time that the bones are found Tom Pilar receives a letter from a solicitor telling him he has been left an inheritance, from a man who was friends with his father, a man he had met only twice there is a stipulation as well that he is to return his ashes to Queenstown and have them buried with the body of his daughter, is there a coincidence with the bones being discovered?

This story takes in the a lot from the past, the hit and run mystery death of a little girl, the mining and the logging that went on back it the 1950’s the many migrants that arrived to work and the locals who lived there, there are many twists in this one and it is a good story but for me it jumped around a bit I found it a bit hard to follow sometimes, there are many characters in the story, the end had me thinking, I am not sure how I felt about it.

This is a story that will appeal to many readers who love a good mystery from the past and I did enjoy it.

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my copy to read and review.

The Unearthed by Larry Bartulin is an atmospheric story set on the North-West Coast of Tasmania. Moving between the past and present the story unfolds about miners and piners, with hardship and grief a dominating factor.

The publisher’s blurb gives an intriguing introduction to the story.

After decades-old human bones are discovered in the Tasmanian wilderness, Antonia Kovács returns home with questions for her father, a retired police inspector in Queenstown.

Meanwhile, Tom Pilar receives news of an inheritance, from a man he barely remembers, one of his father's friends from the early days, newly arrived in the island and looking for work.

Set amidst the harsh terrain of the timber and ore industries of the west coast, The Unearthed is a haunting novel about the past and its quiet but tenacious grip on the present. It reveals the tragic connections between the disparate lives of post-war migrants and local workers, and the fallibility of memory, the illusion of truths and the repercussions on real lives.

Two story lines, one of a body discovered and the other of Tom Pilar returning to Queenstown to claim the inheritance, merge and cross paths in the present and the past.

A complex story with many threads and characters - the reader is drawn in and taken on a slow and deep journey where more suggestive events emerge.

An interesting read with significant historical aspects.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from Allen & Unwin via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

#TheUnearthed #NetGalley

Australian author, Lenny Bartulin’s The Unearthed (2023) is an intriguing ode to life in the western Tasmania timber wilderness and its links to post-war migrant workers. It begins with the discovery of remains in the bush and a detective visiting her elderly father. It then morphs into a historic tale of several immigrant characters and their lives as piners or Huon pine timber cutters. A gentle historic tale with nobly humanistic people and an atmospheric feel, which is a joy to read. Its finale returns to the mystery of the discovered remains and is delightful literary fiction with a four and a half stars read rating. With thanks to Allen & Unwin and the author, for an uncorrected advanced review copy for review purposes. As always, the opinions herein are totally my own, freely given and without inducement.

Smaller in scope and far less flashy than Fortune, which I read last year (and loved), but with an incredible depth of emotion, Lenny Bartulin's latest novel is still recognisable as having been written by the same author, with the same clever style of storytelling. If I had to ascribe a genre, I suppose I would say it's a mystery, but it's so much more (and less) than that. More, because it's a beautifully told tale of migration and grief and hardship and new beginnings, and less because there's no real detective in the traditional sense and no authority to formalise the findings at the end.

It all begins with the discovery of human remains in the wilderness of Tasmania's remote west coast. Not recent, so not urgent, but still needing to be dealt with. Antonia Kovács, a forensic scientist with Forensic Science Service Tasmania, volunteers to travel to Strahan to collect the bones for testing. While she's there she can drop in on her father, retired police officer Dicky Nolan. He's 89 and still living at home alone, so she worries about him.

Meanwhile, Tom Pilar has received a letter from a firm of Tasmanian solicitors. It seems he's inherited a house and some money from Slavko Cicak, a man whose name Tom does not immediately recognise. Interrogating his memory, Tom begins to remember his father having an acquaintance - or maybe even a friend - named Slavko back in his Queenstown days, before Tom was born. Having died without family, Cicak has bequeathed these assets to Tom on the condition that he arranges to bury his ashes with his daughter, who died in a hit and run accident in Queenstown in the late 1950s. Tom makes his way to Tasmania to claim his inheritance.

So in fact there are a number of mysteries to solve. As Bartulin gradually reveals the story behind each one, he weaves a complex tale of the miners and piners* of the west coast in the first half of the twentieth century. He clearly knows his subject and the location very well; coupled with the book's dedication, I wonder if there's a family history or connection at the foundation. Regardless, it's a rich and satisfying journey of discovery as all the threads begin to draw together. And then, once all the facts are laid bare, like a master, he leaves space for us to draw our own conclusions as to what really happened.

Highly recommended.

Australian author Lenny Bartulin has an eclectic but fascinating output – he began his career with three noir-ish accidental detective books set in Sydney, moved on to Infamy, a historical Western set in Tasmania and followed that up with Fortune, a picaresque historical romp which centred (sort of) around Napoleon. In his latest book, Unearthed, he brings some of these threads together – using what at first appears to be a crime procedural set in Strachan, a small port on the west coast of Tasmania, as the framing for an exploration of post-war Eastern European migration to the island.
Antonia Kovács returns to her home town of Strachan and her ageing ex-policeman father when some human remains are discovered by a hiker. The narrative will check back in with Antonia from time to time but Bartulin has other stories to tell. The first is that of Tom Pilar who has received an inheritance from an old friend of his father, Slavko Cicak -a sum of money, a house in Queenstown and instructions to bury his ashes in the grave of his daughter. Following Tom’s memories of both his father and Cicak from when he was a boy. Further back still, Bartulin tells the story of how Cicak came to Australia as part of a wave of Eastern European refugees and of the tragedy that would come to define his life.
While The Unearthed as some of the trappings of a crime novel, it is really the story of a diverse and complex Tasmanian community. This is a world of hard working in the mines, hard drinking and violence, but also one of love, loyalty and strong community bonds. Bartulin bring readers into this world with luminous prose such as this:
"A couple of hours later, he reached the high country, part the central lakes, Unfurled, rolling landscapes. Endless carpets of button grass, wide plains stretching to distant mountains. Streaked greys and blues, Antarctic whites, yellows, oranges and greens, tremulous, dense… That he was here now, so many years later, it was like jet-lag, a stickiness, a simultaneous presence and absence, like being caught on the tracks of a strange alignment, a borderline."
But this is also about the stories we tell. Those we tell ourselves and those we tell others. Not only stories that make sense of the world but stories that serve to make the unpalatable palatable. How stories:
"… were simply either boiling or simmering. They were always on the stove and everybody was always in the soup. To write them, to tell them, was an arbitrary bracketing, a contrived moment… Erin believed that the controlling force of the universe was not ourselves, wasn’t the stories we apparently forged and authored, but rather a universe of infinite narratives shooting around, looking for somewhere to land."
In the end Bartulin circles back, making the various threads of each of the disparate but connected stories relevant to the initial mystery. And in doing so he has used his crime narrative to effectively shine a light on a particular time and place and the community that defined it.

Primarily set in the North West Coast of Tasmania, The Unearthed is a part 'slow burn mystery' part dive into the history of the lives of those who lived and worked on the North-West coast from 1950's onwards.

When I reflect on this book, the words that come to mind are eerie, beautiful, haunting and calming, all mixed together. I went on an adventure reading this book, first thinking it was going to be a mystery, who-done-it, then I got lost in the stories of all the characters and all of a sudden realised the book was almost finished.

At one point I did wonder what was going on, as nothing had 'happened'. But then as I read on, I began to realise it was about how all the characters lives intersected and the various connections between the past and present.

I really enjoyed this book, and even more so because it was set in my home state meaning I knew the exact places being described, which always makes it more special.