Jesustown: A place of reckoning with no redemption

Specifically, he says, those about Australian Indigenous peoples, and the types of people who once engaged with them, with varying degrees of curiosity, paternalism, contempt or downright racism.

Daley has long been preoccupied, as a journalist and writer, with Indigenous history, Australian culture and post-colonial identity, but this particular book-buying spree was focused on a period of mid-20th century exploration.

That period, and specifically the Australian-US collaborative expeditions to remote Australian regions in the 1930s and 40s, was characterised by "this mad race to collect material culture" - fertile ground for contemporary fiction.

The old books he collected were instructive, to say the least.

"Personality types came out and the ... disgusting ethnographic nature of a lot of it was really front and centre," he says.

"The really interesting thing was, some of [the anthropologists] seem quite progressive for their day. They were almost willing to think of Aboriginal people as equals. Almost, not quite.

"Others were really, really retrograde, but they were all collecting like mad."

It was an amalgamation of these characters - people like Charles Mountford and Donald Thomson - that led to the fictional creation of Nathaniel Renmark, one of the protagonists of Daley's new novel.

Jesustown, named for a fictional former mission town in the fictional area of Arcadia, somewhere north of Brisbane, is the story of Patrick Renmark, grandson of Nathaniel, the legendary renegade anthropologist celebrated for having personally brokered a peace deal between the traditional custodians of the land and the local white constabulary in the 1940s.

The story is set both in the present and the past, in today's London and Arcadia, and in the Jesustown of Patrick's childhood and an earlier time.

Patrick, a writer and popular historian who calls himself a "story-ist", is what the British would call a "wanker", and the Americans would call a "jerk". And in Australia, well, he's what we'd call an out-and-out "dickhead".

The reader knows this, and so, deep down, does Patrick, even though he's beset with an identity crisis. Over-confident but terminally insecure, he has tenure at a prestigious British university where imposter syndrome is kept at bay by a constant stream of popular books and articles of the kind of simplified, overblown recasting of heroic - and notably flawed - historical figures. Sir John Monash, Breaker Morant and so on.

He speaks with a British accent, but fashions himself as an Aussie truthteller, in cream moleskins and brown RM Williams boots (to which Daley admits a long-term and unexplained aversion).

But both his wife - independently wealthy enough to keep them comfortable - and his unhinged mistress see through him. They know he's a fraud and so does he. When his comfortable but tenuous life upends itself spectacularly, leading to the tragic death of his toddler son and the end of his marriage and affair, he exiles himself back to Australia.

Daley, a regular columnist and commentator for The Guardian, is accustomed to writing a new book every 18 months to two years.

Jesustown took much longer, written as it was "around the edges of life". It's been a hard book to let go of, not least because of the larger issues it delves into, in the guise of a contemporary character piece.

Patrick has long ago agreed - and accepted a sizeable advance - to write a book about his grandfather, the legendary "Renny" or "Pa" as he had always known him. And now the time has come.

Returning to the Jesustown he once regularly visited as a child and adolescent, he is surrounded by an Indigenous community - known as The People - who are so comfortable with their own identity, culture and traditions that Patrick's own shaky self-image is thrown into ludicrous and sharp relief.

Faced with his grandfather's sprawling and chaotic archive, he soon realises his expert "story-ist" expertise will be no match for the dense layers of history - both real and recorded - that he will have to negotiate, both academically and emotionally. He has to reconcile his own personal narrative with that of his swashbuckling Pa, as well as his own troubled father.

It's not, Daley says, a novel about redemption.

"Life's not redemptive, right? It doesn't work like that. And working through these characters, I wasn't sure they deserved redemption," he says.

He's much more sympathetic to the Indigenous characters who light the way, both in the past and the present. They provided some relief, some sense of humanity and reason, from the awfulness of Patrick and his eccentric, confounding grandfather.

Confounding because, like the real-life people on whom he's loosely based, he was fighting against injustice. But he was also building a narrative to transmit down to the oblivious, non-Indigenous Australia of the south, one that didn't always stick to the facts.

"For me, there were often good intentions of some of these people with bad consequences," he says.

"As part of this story, I took snippets of things that actually did happen ... which I reimagined and conflated with a whole lot of other stuff, real and imagined."

A lot of Renny's rage comes from the fact that many of the visiting American anthropologists collected vast amounts of Indigenous remains, to take back to the US.

"They all kind of operated on the assumption that they were observing the banishment of the race - fallaciously, of course - but as part of that, they collected everything," he says.

"As a result, the museum repositories are just stacked with that stuff. But the thing that really captivated and horrified me was the amassing of thousands of sets of human remains."

He was able to see some of these - the remains of 4600 Indigenous people currently stored at the South Australian Museum, and in the process of being repatriated. This gave him the resolve to write a book "about the frontier and its bitter colonial legacies", including the contemporary quest to bring these remains back home.

But Daley is at pains to reiterate that Jesustown, which delves into 20th-century reckoning between First Australians and prevailing white narratives, will contain no new information for Indigenous readers.

"I'm not telling indigenous people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people anything at all that they don't know, that they haven't thought about and written about and been active about in cultural life forever.

"If they read it, it'd be interesting to see what they think of it, but I think a lot of non-Indigenous people should read it. I hope they do."