Books

Holden Sheppard
King of Dirt

Once you leave Australia’s cities and head inland, masculinity as an idea and a reality can grow weird and phantasmagoric. The bush, of course, is the place where a certain kind of man became legendary: the bushman of the frontier was a survivalist whittled to pure competence by circumstance and environment. This kind of Australian man – quiet and laconic, willing to die for his mates though reluctant to inflict violence – became our preferred national archetype following the conflicts of the last century.

There is a more disturbing version, though – a through-the-looking-glass blokiness. The worst crime a convict could be transported for was not murder but buggery. It was regarded as the one truly unpardonable offence against the social order, and many of those not executed for the crime were sent to the outer hell of Van Diemen’s Land, the most lavish punishment the law allowed. Meanwhile, women were so scarce on the colonial frontier that their absence became a shaping force. The same forces that gave birth to the Anzac legend also bred the cast of Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright – those possessed of a heterosexuality so rigorously enforced that it buckled and warped.

Perhaps this is why the opening section of King of Dirt hits so damn hard. We’re in Eucla, a township at the far south-eastern edge of Western Australia, where you can see the Great Australian Bight from the streets, inside the head of a digger operator and roadworker in his mid 30s. He was named Giacomo by his Italian parents, though is known to his workmates simply as Jack.

Jack, a queer man, has pantomimed straightness so successfully and for so long that it has become habitual. He drinks to excess, smokes, gambles, loves the Pies and footy culture – and self-harms each time the momentary licence of drunkenness leads him to download Grindr on his phone.

Jack’s penitential behaviour may be expressed in sad yet ordinary acts of self-sabotage, but it is also violence framed by the Catholicism drummed into him by his devout and culturally conservative family. He is a flagellant because he is a sinner. There is, indeed, something darkly ritualistic in the expression of Jack’s hurt.

Then a younger man from Perth joins Jack’s roadwork crew – the openly gay Spencer. Spencer’s blithe and innocent openness about his sexuality is cause for disdain among the other men. It makes Jack inwardly seethe, not just with hatred but desire.

That the two will hook up seems foreordained by the narrative’s logic – Jack is as desperate to express his true nature as to conceal it – yet the brief affair’s real purpose is to crack open Jack’s character just enough that he’s willing, after years of estrangement from his family, to accept an invitation to a cousin’s wedding and return to his home town of Geraldton.

His return to “Gero”’ is a revelation in many respects. The town he’d been obliged to leave, years before, due to rumours of a relationship with a young friend on his basketball team, has become a place where queer men congregate unashamedly. His preferences outed by the affair with Spencer, at least to himself, Jack takes genuine delight in the possibilities the place has to offer.

In doing so, however, the same split between selves only grows starker – especially when Jack’s first love, Xavier, returns to the scene.

Where many queer narratives are drawn from urban experience and middle-class perspectives, Holden Sheppard excels at the description of a small-town version. His characters work in the mines or on the roads, love muscle cars and gym culture, or hail from migrant or Indigenous backgrounds. The author sits in easy, democratic relation to those who wear high-vis as a uniform of caste. He writes sex with blunt eloquence and relish. A man’s coming-out story might seem tired in other contexts, but King of Dirt has the welcome earnestness of a novel view.

It can be hard to write in first person without bumping up against the limits of that perspective. Sheppard has a more sophisticated mind than his creation. He’s sometimes obliged to smuggle in language and concepts through workarounds that can seem overt or jarring – Jack’s a vessel that Holden can’t help but overflow.

That said, like the swamp rock that Jack prefers listening to, King of Dust is one of those novels where a certain rawness serves to heighten the authenticity of the art. Readers are privileged in seeing how wounded Jack has been by his circumstances before the character does himself. We forgive him his actions, long before he forgives himself, and barrack for his survival.

There’s something heroic in Jack’s halting progress toward understanding and self-acceptance. He’s one of those characters who makes us wonder, like the old Joe Jackson song, who the real men are.

Pantera Press, 400pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "King of Dirt".

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