Firestick Farmer
​
James Farmer grows up in an environment of violence and deprivation, and his eventual academic career focusses on the corresponding history of his people.
As his life takes an increasingly bitter turn his personal and professional obsessions push him through radicalisation towards a terrible conflagation.
* * * *
Firestick Farmer is an exploration of the forces that shape radical sentiment both in Australia and abroad.
The narrative is sympathetic but also presents the blunt truth about the unpredictability of radical action, and a warning against the use of political violence no matter how just the cause.
​
​
EXTENDED SYNOPSIS
​
Firestick Farmer is a contemporary Australian novel exploring themes of love, resistance, political violence, and despair.
​
The book tells the story of James (Jim) Farmer, a radicalised Aboriginal academic. We witness his descent into political extremism, his decision to literally fight fire with fire, and how he ultimately turns that weapon against the colonising powers he despises.
​
The novel swings between manic declaration and deep acknowledgment of loss: the portrait of a man deeply in love with his land, culture, and history, yet hunted by grief, doubt, and an inability to love.
​
Plot
​
The novel opens with Jim’s letter to Nate, setting the stage in a tone of prolepsis — the preparations made, the outcome sealed, the reckoning near at hand.
Jim explains how his long public advocacy for Indigenous sovereignty and “resistance and return” brought him into contact with enigmatic figures offering both resources and direction.
​
Against a backdrop of lectures, small alliances, and bitter disillusionment with empty words, Jim accepts their proposal. What follows is a chilling travelogue: towns, mountains, forests, even suburbs are marked with red crosses on maps; each cross becomes a site of destruction.
​
By the end of the mission, his resolve wavers. He relents from pure hatred and admits to wishing he could undo what has been done. Still, he does not repudiate his actions entirely. Instead, he insists on both the justice of resistance and the fairness of warning. His letter to Nate becomes his frank confession, along with a plea that Nate tell his story plainly if he is ever put up as either “mastermind or dupe.”
​
The story then shifts to a long narrative from Nate, going back to the very beginning. He describes how he met James Farmer after moving to a farming community far from the city, how they became firm friends, and everything that followed.
​
Nate’s story fulfills his promise to Jim to tell things plainly and completely. Yet it also becomes a stark commentary on the different lives that people live depending on the health of their family relationships.
​
Nate and Jim come from entirely different families, and that gives them entirely different lives. Nate’s family story is one of love; Jim’s story is one of violence, deprivation, and neglect born out of generational abuse.
​
Themes and Significance
​
The Question of ResistanceTrue change, Jim argues, cannot come from words alone but from radical action. Fire is imagined as an amplifier of a single life’s agency.
Cultural Inheritance
The text arises from a thought experiment merging Indigenous dispossession with Irish Catholic responses to such dispossession — particularly the willingness of the Irish to take up arms against their oppressor.
Legacy of Abuse
The work deliberately casts two men from a similar genetic background into entirely different family situations. The outcomes for each man are radically different, as one would expect.
Extremism as Sickness
The narrator has been loved yet cannot feel love; extremism is shown as the distorted product of inner wounds and grief.
​
Style and Form
​
The book is cast as a traditional first-person narrative but is also dominated by found pieces — long letters, sections from Jim’s books, and political tracts. The prose collapses the distance between personal relationships — especially Jim’s relationship breakdowns — and national catastrophe. It moves between blunt post-industrial urban realism and Jim’s reverent, increasingly apocalyptic vision.
​
Context in the Author’s Work
​
Firestick Farmer belongs to the author’s early work and is not overtly positioned within the New Scripture Project. However, its elevated and confessional cadences resonate with later works such as The Majesty of Judas and From the Chronicles of Lupa. The book blends testimony, myth, and scripture-like rhythm, but it is ultimately an anti-heroic tragedy. Unlike the mythic outlaw or redeemer who is raised up by the love of a woman, James Farmer is a man broken by grief, caught between a mandate of resistance and a terrible urge toward self-destruction.
​
FAQs
​
Is Firestick Farmer historical fiction?
No. It is contemporary fiction without any clear real-world referent. However, it draws on historical injustice, Indigenous land practices and politics, and histories of violent resistance, such as in Ireland.
​
Is James Farmer a hero or villain?
The novel resists both conclusions. Jim acts from deep courage and conviction but also out of deep wounds, making him capable of extreme clarity but also profound blindness.
​
Is Firestick Farmer connected to New Scripture?
Firestick Farmer is one of P. Julian’s earlier works and is not specifically positioned within the genre of New Scripture. It does, however, show many features of that emerging style: fusing personal voice with scriptural cadence, turning one man’s confession into a text of mythic and ethical weight.
The long letter from James Farmer that forms the prolepsis to the work is rendered in a headlong, elevated narrative style containing many of the features of Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose.
​
Does Firestick Farmer promote violence?
Absolutely not. It explores the psychological dimensions of radicalism, grounding them in the particular context of Indigenous politics in Australia. It is intended as a cautionary tale against political violence, and as a call to action within Australia to address the conditions that — wherever you are in the world — promote and foment radical sentiment.
​
The protagonist James Farmer repents of his actions at the very end, though perhaps too late to avert catastrophe.
​
Firestick Farmer should be read as a warning about the unpredictability of radical action and the dangers of political violence, no matter how just the cause.
​
Closing Note
​
Firestick Farmer is both an analysis of radical political violence and a testament to survivors of childhood abuse. It confronts the reader with uncomfortable questions about dispossession, justice, retribution, and belonging.
​
In the character of James Farmer — especially through the long Jerilderie-style letter he leaves behind — P. Julian has given us an intense survivor who cannot be easily characterised: a man both defiant and broken, righteous and remorseful, a fighter who ends the fight at the very last moment so that his enemy might at least receive fair warning.