Review by Crisetta MacLeod

Kirsty Murray has convincingly described an Australian dystopia in which Avian flu mutated and wiped out almost all females. Bo was protected in an outback hideaway by her grandfather. She rescues Callum, abducted from his two fathers by outback ferals. The two are on the run together. Murray writes engagingly about Callum’s response to seeing Bo naked, the first female he has ever encountered. They head to Vulture’s Gate (Sydney) to rediscover Callum’s fathers, who he believes will nurture them. When they reach the city, it is in ruins, and the society Callum remembers has degenerated.

There is the familiar trope of a corrupt ruling class, exploiting drone boys, born in vitro, who are the workforce. Two communities are attempting to bring down the upper class; the Festers, a group of rescued boys, discarded from the workforce, and Gaia, suicidal religious zealots planning to rid the world of destructive mankind. Callum is horrified to find his surviving father is a member. Meanwhile, Bo is imprisoned with the few remaining girls, kept to harvest their eggs. Predictably, Callum and Bo prevail, and escape by sea with the girls to make a fresh start. One male only? Watch this space!

For Callum, a colony boy, Vulture's Gate represents hope. After being stolen from his home in the outback by savage Outstationers and sold on as an attraction in a freak show, forced to perform in a circus for cruel masters, Callum escapes and returns to his outback home only to find his fathers gone, and his home destroyed. The only message left for him, his fathers are waiting for him in Vulture's Gate.

Bo is a girl living alone in the outback. She has been alone for the last six months, hunting, foraging and surviving. When one day she rescues a boy on the outskirts of her lands, she finds her once isolated home now set upon by dangerous Outstationers. With her home destroyed and all her family gone she feels lost, but with this boy she finds a friendship and something worth holding on to.

As Callum and Bo travel together across a harsh and desolate land, they are learning that the world they grew up in, and everything they were taught to believe, is not the world that exists before them. Callum always believed girls were extinct; he had been brought up sheltered from the ugliness that exists in the world. Bo, although taught to read, hunt and put together technology, is naive to the world beyond her lands; ignorant to what it is to be a girl.

But it is at Vulture's Gate that Callum and Bo discover the harsh truth of what has happened to the world. There, their dreams are crushed and their futures are left uncurtain, as each comes face to face with the horrors of what it means to live and survive in Vulture's Gate. But once inside are they able to escape?

Vulture's Gate is a provocative and well written story that raises questions of gender and society. In Callum and Bo the male and female perspectives are given, and in the story each sex blames the existence of the other all the ills that have befallen them and the world around them. Society is ruled by dictators with their drones and test-tube babies. Beyond that are the anarchists, religious extremists and Festers with their gambolling, bombs and human trafficking. But underlying all that is the theme of hope presented in the fairytales told by Bo. ( )