I ventured to the other side of the world for April’s Location, Location, Location TBR Challenge prompt, and a story set in late nineteenth century Australia. By the Currawong’s Call is a superbly written story set in 1891 in a small town in the outback, featuring two engaging, well-rounded protagonists, a beatifully developed romance and a wonderful setting with a real small-town atmosphere and strong sense of time and place. Because of this, please be aware that the novel includes some period-typical language, prejudices and attitudes.

Reverend Matthew Ottenshaw has travelled from Melbourne to take up his first posting in the tiny outback town of Dinbratten. He arrives to the sounds of loud music and off-key singing drifting from the main street; the coachman explains that there’d been an important football match that afternoon, adding that the townsfolk are football mad and that the local team – the Rats – is pretty good and looks set to win the local championship. Matthew follows the man to his new home, pleased to see that while small, it’s clean and comfortable, and then turns his attention to his new church, similarly pleased to discover its striking simplicity. He’s sure he can be happy here and is looking forward to serving his new community.

Matthew gets to work settling into his new home, although he doesn’t have a great deal of time to get out and meet his new parishioners to start with. It’s not until he receives a visit from local police sergeant Jonah Parks, who offers to show him the sights and have a bit of a chat, that Matthew finally gets a chance to start exploring the town and to meet some of its footy-obsessed residents. Jonah is excellent company and clearly knows Dinbratten – and the people in it – like the back of his hand, and Matthew enjoys the time they spend strolling the dusty streets, conversing with each other and chatting with the townsfolk. A visit to the small, two-man ‘cop shop’ is the final stop, where Jonah introduces Matthew to his constable, and, as Matthew says goodbye, invites him to stop in at the Victoria Hotel – one of Dinbratten’s two pubs – for a drink on Friday evening.

The friendship between the two men flourishes over the following weeks and months; once footy season is over, Matthew is roped into playing for the cricket team and life settles into a comfortable rhythm of services and visits and Friday nights at the Victoria with Jonah. But everything changes when the oppressive heat of Summer brings with it the threat of bushfires, and Matthew, a city dweller who has never experienced such a thing, can only watch, stricken and woefully unprepared for the devastation to come. But with only hours to go before the fire reaches the church, Jonah arrives with rakes and sacks of soil and immediately gets them working to build a fire-break. They’re a good team, working efficiently to extinguish the small, burgeoning blazes started by flying debris – until Matthew’s prayers are answered when the wind turns and begins blowing the flames towards the river. In a moment fuelled by adrenaline, relief, and gratitude, Matthew finally gives in to the impulse he’s been fighting for months when he pulls Jonah into the sacristy and kisses him passionately. Jonah responds enthusiastically, but when Matthew comes up for air, reason re-asserts itself and he asks Jonah to leave.

Jonah and Matthew are both decent, hard-working, conscientious men who want to do the best for those they’ve been appointed to serve. Matthew is lovely – compassionate, courageous and honest and Jonah is very down-to-earth, straightforward about who he is and what he wants, firmly believing that who he loves is nobody’s business but his. Matthew admires Jonah’s view and his ability to be so comfortable with his beliefs, but he can’t reconcile his feelings for another man with the tenets of his faith so easily, even as he doesn’t feel ‘wrong’ for loving Jonah or for what they do together behind closed doors. The author does an incredible job of taking the reader on Matthew’s spiritual journey, which culminates in a wonderful scene where he experiences a real come to Jesus moment and arrives at a place where he’s able to reconcile his sexuality with his faith without denying or losing either of them. And with this knowledge comes a new certainty:

He had merely experienced change. He was a good man, and the God he knew and loved would recognise that. He hadn’t lost anything but his fear.

Once he and Jonah decide that they want to be together however they can be, the middle of the story narrows its focus somewhat and becomes (almost) a series of love scenes that highlight the growing intimacy – both physical and emotional – between the two men while also showing how impossible it is for them to be fully themselves anywhere other than behind a closed door. But that’s their reality – the law and bigotry will ostracise them (if not worse) from the community around them unless they keep their true relationship hidden. And in such a small place, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, they know the clock is ticking and it’s only a matter of time before they’re found out.

The solution they arrive at means taking fairly drastic action, and I was pleased with the author for taking the story in that direction rather than arriving at some of the happy-clappy (and completely ridiculous) endings I’ve seen in some m/m historicals. It’s painfully honest and believable, and achieves the right balance between making the romance and the HEA work while also not just hand-waving away any of the very real problems Matthew and Jonah face.

The one thing about the book that didn’t really work for me was the final chapter however, which is the transcript of a Who Do You Think You Are kind of TV show in which some celebrity or other finds out they’re descended from someone Matthew and Jonah helped, and then learns a bit more about their history. I realise it’s a neat way of wrapping up an almost-400-page book without adding another hundred pages or so, but it feels a bit trite and out of place.

That’s my only real complaint, though. Otherwise I loved By the Currawong’s Call and would certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a deeply felt, superbly written queer historical romance set somewhere other than Regency or Victorian England.

Note: At time of writing the ebook edition of this title appears to be unavailable; hopefully it’s a temporary issue.

ETA: The author has said the ebook will be available again later in the year.