Lyn Yeowart’s crime fiction debut The Silent Listener was a “an engaging but pain-filled excursion into regional Australia in the second half of the Twentieth Century”. That book explored issues of domestic abuse and trauma. Yeowart’s second novel, The Hollow Girl is, if anything, even darker. Yeowart takes as its starting point “homes” for unmarried pregnant women (often teenagers) established in remote areas of Australia where teenagers were sent between the 1950s and 1970s, where they were essentially enslaved and then had their babies taken from them at birth. Similar institutions existed in Ireland and that troubled history was recently dealt with in Claire Keegan’s book Small Things Like These.
The Hollow Girl has three narrative points of view over a couple of different time frames. In 1973 female police detective Eleanor Smith is finally given a murder to investigate – the death of a nurse at Harrowford Hall, an institution for unwed mothers that was on the cusp of closing down. The other two narrative threads take readers back to 1961 to Jane, a fourteen year old who finds herself pregnant after being taken advantage of by her friend’s father at a family wedding, and Marilyn, a pregnant inmate at Harrowford Hall who has to quickly learn to survive in the institution’s laundry and dreams of escape.
The Hollow Girl deals with a lot of really tough subjects. In particular the appalling government-sanctioned treatment of teenage girls (in her Author’s Note Yeowart says that between 1951 and 1975 an estimated 150,000 mothers were subject to forced adoption), and the social attitudes that allowed this to happen. This is not the first Australian crime book to deal with the issue of forced adoptions. Vikki Petriatis has it as a thread of her new novel The Stolen and Aoife Clifford also dealt with this issue in her coastal crime novel When We Fall. Yeowart also uses her narrative to reflect on the treatment of Eleanor, a hard working and intuitive detective, who is gaslit, undermined and underestimated by her misogynistic and possibly corrupt boss.
The Hollow Girl opens with a murder (called “The Last Murder” in the chapter heading) and then rewinds to three more murders. Eleanor herself is steeped in investigative technique and has a young offsider to whom she can explain things (and start to shift his ingrained misogyny). So that while Yeowart deals with difficult subject matter she does so in service of a page-turning historical crime thriller full of fascinating twists and clear-eyed reflections on the flawed justice and medical system as they may well have been in the 1960s and 70s.
The Hollow Girl by Lyn Yeowart
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