The Unearthed: Lenny Bartulin in conversation with Brendan Colley

There are animals in the camouflage of undergrowth; they forage this final, fading night hour. They hear the grunting men and lift their heads, listen, then bound away: the scrub, the bushes shake and wave, signalling their invisible trajectories.

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.

The author of five previous novels, including Infamy and Fortune, Lenny Bartulin’s work has been twice longlisted in the Tasmanian Literary Awards and selected as a Most Anticipated Historical Novel by Oprah Daily in the US. He lives in Hobart with his wife and son.

Brendan Colley was born in South Africa. After graduating with a degree in education, he taught in the U.K. and Japan for eleven years before settling down in Australia in 2007. Winner of the University of Tasmania Prize for best new unpublished work in the 2019 Premier’s Literary Prizes, The Signal Line is his first novel. He lives in Hobart with his wife.

Join Lenny and Brendan at the Afterword Cafe.

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