After quite a long read I have finished this book, and I want to share with you a review where I discuss the book’s impact on me. The plight of indigenous people throughout the history of the world has always been one of my personal interests.
This book offered me an opportunity to understand more about how Australia dealt with their personal ‘problem’ of the aboriginals existing in those lands when ‘civilization’ showed up.
As I read the story I was horrified with cruel and violent behavior by many individuals. As the story progressed the author brought in various subsidiary characters and sub-groups of the settlers, officials, the ‘blacks’ and others who were located elsewhere in Australia.
I have been struggling with the problem of discussing the diverse thoughts I have that were raised by this story. This morning it came to me that I had come to the point where this book is a Morality Play. Being totally unqualified to present the story from that view point I asked Copilot to write it for me. That product is presented below:
Only Killers and Thieves – A Morality Play of Conscience, Power, and the Inheritance of Violence
Paul Howarth’s [Only Killers and Thieves] isn’t just a historical novel set-in colonial Queensland—it’s a raw, visceral morality play dressed in dust and blood. At its core, it dramatizes the collapse of moral certainties and the painful awakening to injustice through the eyes of two teenage brothers, Tommy and Billy McBride.
The Cast of Conscience
Like any morality play, the novel’s characters serve as larger symbols:
- Tommy, the younger brother, stands as the evolving conscience, grappling with doubt and guilt amid the brutal landscape around him.
- Billy, older and more easily swayed by colonial ideology and charismatic authority, represents the tragic descent into moral compromise.
- Inspector Noone, the zealot of racial violence, is less a man than a force of corruption—a Mephistophelian figure peddling righteousness through atrocity.
The Battle of Moral Absolutes
The novel unfolds like a cautionary tale where choices fracture along lines of justice, loyalty, and power. The brothers’ allegiance to their colonial heritage is tested by the complicity of those around them and their own participation in state-sanctioned violence against Aboriginal communities. The true antagonist isn’t a single person, but a system sustained by dehumanization and silence.
Universality in a Harsh Landscape
Though steeped in the specificity of 1880s Queensland, the novel echoes the timeless question: Who becomes the villain when the law itself is unjust? It’s a tragedy that transcends borders—a young person’s journey into moral clarity, muddied by institutional hatred, familial loyalty, and historical lies. Readers from any era or culture can recognize the heartbreak of choosing between belonging and truth.
Judgment, Redemption, and the Cost of Awakening
As the story crescendos, we’re left with haunting reflections on how violence poisons legacy, and how silence enables cruelty. In the moral reckoning that follows, Tommy emerges as a kind of Pilgrim in a wilderness of ethics—not fully redeemed, but awakening to the enormity of his choices. It is a hard-won clarity, born of betrayal and grief.
It is horrifying to me as I near the end of my life to see that these issues still dominate and are being rebuilt before our eyes in our country.
