The title of A Kindness Cup is ironic. It alludes to the New year's Eve tradition of raising a glass (i.e. a cup o' kindness') while singing Auld Lang Syne. The words 'We'll take a cup of kindness yet' express 'good will, friendship and kind regard' to absent friends, and they evoke a sense of belonging and fellowship among the company. But the occasion in the novel in which it is sung is evidence only of malice, self-delusion, and a wilful forgetting. Written contemporaneously with Xavier Herbert's monumental Poor Fellow My Country that tackled Indigenous dispossession (1975, see my review) , Astley acknowledged in a note at the beginning of A Kindness Cup that the impetus for the novel was an actual incident at The Leap, Queensland, in the second half of the last [19th] century and she has used elements of the report of the Select Committee on the Native Police Force Queensland, 1861. Her novel exposing this massacre won the Age Book of the Year in 1975, predating The Other Side of the Frontier by historian Henry Reynolds in 1981. And wilful forgetting of Australia's Black history is still going on.

Alternating back and forth in time, from events surrounding the massacre to twenty years afterwards, A Kindness Cup exposes small town memorialisation as a lie. The occasion is a reunion to celebrate the founding of a town with a weeklong extravaganza of speeches, drinking and a performance by the town songbird who made good elsewhere. Now aged 60, Latin teacher Tom Dorahy has returned as an avenging angel to expose the involvement of his pupil Buckmaster in the death of Kowaha and her baby girl. Buckmaster now is an honoured citizen, knighted along with Sweetman for handling (i.e. breaking) the sugar strike and for owning more acres of sweet grass in the north than any man had the right to own. Dorahy's musings establish that (like most of the class) Buckmaster was stupid and lazy; he also had a father whose patronage kept him at the school. Defeated by his attempts to educate these lumpish boys, as a man of 37 Dorahy was capable of only minor acts of malice:

Nort, Mr Dorahy inscribed meticulously on Buckmaster's ill-spelled prose. Nort, he gently offered, as Trooper Lieutenant Fred Buckmaster gave his evidence before the select committee. (p.6)

Here Dorahy allows himself a self-indulgent joke: he wants Buckmaster to know that he has scored 'nought' on his ill-spelled Latin translation. Thea Astley is making the same comment about the enquiry into Kowaha's death — Buckmaster's testimony before a magistrate follows, and the enquiry achieves 'nort'.

Characters of all moral stripes flesh out the panorama of treachery.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/08/19/a-kindness-cup-by-thea-astley/ ( )