Island Home

  In the late seventies and early eighties, when I first sent stories to magazines in Melbourne and Sydney, I encountered a cultural headwind I naively assumed had puffed itself out a decade before, but despite the confidence evident in the new wave of Australian cinema, the bubbling ferment in local publishing, and a fresh swagger in the arts in general, the old colonial mindset lingered on in the form of an unspoken aversion to regional settings and colloquial expression. If you were a writer or painter and you showed more than a passing interest in place, you risked being labelled second-rate, provincial or reactionary. Having understandably had their fill of bushrangers, hardy pioneers and Hans Heysen gumtrees, the guardians of culture were leery of anything countrified. There was a palpable anxiety about presenting a clean face abroad. Idiomatic language and settings a little alien to the inner-city milieu of publishing and cultural power bore a shaming whiff of redneck armpit. Whether you’re from far north Queensland, the Territory or Western Australia, there are times when you feel as if you’re living on an island within an island. Tasmanian writers and artists live it quite literally, on an island beside an island and half the time their bit of Australia is absent from the map. And with every cultural and geographical current against you, it’s hard to resist the impulse to obey the tidal logic and set sail for somewhere downwind.

  As Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro have shown, it’s one thing to teach yourself to write and another to train your editors to read you. Both these regional writers – each stubbornly invested in particularity – educated their publishers and their readers with sheer persistence, by holding their nerve. Every Australian reader is forced to accommodate the strangeness of overseas – usually American or British – fictional settings. To keep up you need to adapt to new and weird idioms and soon these become normative. This provincial form of cosmopolitanism isn’t optional. Similarly, a reader from some no-account place like Perth is expected to adjust their senses eastward with no reciprocity. At nineteen and twenty it was a nasty surprise to realize just how resistant a Sydney or Melbourne editor could be to the appearance on the page of Australian places and species with which they were unfamiliar. It may be hard to believe at this distance, but in my early days it wasn’t just the foreign publishers suggesting I append a glossary to the end of a novel. As I recall, the pesky dugite (Pseudonaja affinis) caused the most editorial grief at home and abroad, and I was tempted to follow St Patrick’s lead and ban elapid snakes entirely. But I kept coming back to Flannery O’Connor. Not only was she misunderstood in New York, she was a problem for folks at home in Georgia, too. I loved her craft and the singularity of her world. But I also admired O’Connor’s cussedness, her refusal to come to heel. She was an important influence.

  I don’t know if, in the end, I held my nerve as a writer or just painted myself into a corner, but I persisted with place as a starting point for all my stories. For me a story proceeded from the logic of an ecosystem. When I began a piece I never knew where I was headed, but I followed the contours of the country my characters were in and found my way to the nub of things, and over time I grew more passionate and emboldened about using the vernacular language of the people I knew best. In a way I wanted to draw a reader into a fictional setting that was unmistakably distinct, just as I was swept into the foreign worlds of Hardy’s Wessex and Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Taranaki. I began to write about Albany and the people and places along the south coast. This was as much a matter of making do with what I knew as it was an ongoing act of homage to somewhere I loved. But in retrospect I see I was trying to find a language for the presence of the past. I was coming instinctively to an understanding of the way geography shapes us, but also tacitly giving credit to the weight of time. When they move in and across a landscape humans are wading through a shared past, surrounded at every turn by events and processes that will never be over. And I don’t just mean human events, but matters of geology and biology, too. The past is inescapable. Every extruded stone we brush by, every flattened vowel and awkwardly idiomatic expression we use as we stumble past it betrays the weight of time. For someone brought up with a modernist outlook, it’s hard to swallow the idea that we belong to nature, tougher still to be owned by time.

  For all Australia’s blustering cultural successes in the 1980s, the old colonial anxiety about looking like yokels in front of the wider world had not completely evaporated. When Cloudstreet appeared in 1991 that was still something to contend with. By this stage I’d been writing professionally for a decade and was for much of that time having novels published in New York and London as well as Sydney and Melbourne. Admittedly, with Cloudstreet I was pushing vernacular as far as I could take it, to the degree that a goodly portion of the demotic expressions in it are entirely made up. Which was a lot of fun. But when the book was being reviewed in Australia some of the fretful critical reactions were priceless. The metropolitan contempt for regional people and their language was undisguised. After hearing an early reading in Canberra one commentator dismissed it as a throwback to Dad and Dave. Another lamented that I’d wasted so much time and talent on bumpkins like the Lambs and the Pickleses. Despite – or likely because of – the unexpected popularity of the novel, what troubled many critics was a potential loss of face in front of our ‘betters’. Regardless of how archly some reservations were expressed, you could read two centuries of convict shame and colonial anxiety in them, as if the past were still leaning hard upon even these bright folks of the intelligentsia. I lost count of the times interviewers asked ‘what they were supposed to make of it in New York’. It’s painful enough to hear a question like that from your auntie on the farm, but to get it from some svelte sophisticate in seven shades of black was tragic.

  Colonial stigma doesn’t evaporate overnight, especially while we keep finding new ways to reproduce it, and perhaps it’s deeper in our communal psyche than I care to think. Notwithstanding the forward-looking stance we like to maintain in public discourse, the past clearly bothers us, even if we’re not conscious of it. Despite my conviction that non-indigenous Australians are more at home on this continent, and that progress has been made politically to address some shocking aspects of invasion and settlement, there is still a lingering unease about what lies behind, and this uneasiness is not only associated with social matters – it’s also about things.

  At our end of history we’ve come to believe we have power over nature. We like to think matter, creatures, weather and organic processes have no power over us. But if you walk deep into a wild Australian landscape, the glossy armour of your self-possession may begin to show a few cracks. Sometimes this is just a matter of scale. In several senses the sheer bulk of this country, the largeness of space, makes it unknowable. ‘One seems to ride forever and come to nothing,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in the nineteenth century, ‘and to relinquish at last the very idea of an object.’6 Although I celebrate the fact that our country is yet to be mastered, some creaturely part of me quails at the thought.

  Much has been made of the land’s so-called melancholy. Since colonial times it’s been a common observation, as if there were an irresistible link between a lightly peopled continent and sadness, as if the Great South Land didn’t just miss out on the Enlightenment, it wanted for company as well. But talk of a looming spirit of desolation persisted well into the twentieth century. By that time it was just as likely to be a response to the darker legacies of settlement as an expression of geographical isolation. In his wonderful history Hunters and Collectors, Tom Griffiths writes about the horror and shapeless depression experienced by inheritors of dispossessed lands, and he quotes ornithologist Alec Chisholm who, despite long experience in the bush, occasionally felt uneasy, ‘chiefly when dusk enveloped the ridges and gullies on dull days in winter. The ironbarks now had shed their friendliness. They were, perhaps, revengeful phantoms of the black men who had once frequented these forests. Especially was I uneasy when passing a spot on a ridge-top in which white pipeclay contrasted with the sombre colo
ur of the trees.’7 Liminal apprehensions such as these can be hard to dismiss. Their origins are likely more than merely optical. Consider the colloquial terms for two plants – ‘man fern’ for Dicksonia antarctica and ‘blackboy’ for Xanthorrhoea preissii. Both are compact and upright and commonly grow in groups. In a lightly populated – indeed, as it frequently would have been, a depopulated – landscape, the human eye can’t help but see likenesses and the mind draws on a well of communal memory. Sometimes, it seems, like the blind man of the Gospels, cured of his affliction but not yet used to his healed eyes, we still see ‘men as trees walking’. Often enough the melancholy felt by settlers and their descendants was entirely their own. But for far too long such sadness was also powered by radiant absences, by silence, by guilt and denial, and until quite recently by Commonwealth law.

  Still, it seems fair to admit that the land itself could be implacable. It did not readily admit interlopers.

  When I look at sepia images of my forebears they appear apprehensive. Some arrived in chains, others were settlers. On their camel-drawn sulkies or leaning against tree stumps and rough huts, they narrow their eyes defensively at the camera. For some the strangeness of this country was too much. At least one lost his mind and retreated to a cupboard to hang himself. Many others seem to have been brave, hardy people. They don’t have the ebullient faces of settlers in the American west, for dogged as they were they lacked the optimism and sense of manifest destiny of those on the American frontier. This isn’t only about the disgust and disenchantment of the newcomer: my ancestors looked fearful. And they were probably right to be. All the landscapes they settled in or were consigned to by the Crown were places of great and abiding power, and that potency has not diminished.

  For one thing, the evidence of death is everywhere in this country: shells, bleached bones, the emu woven through five strands of fence-wire. And it’s an ongoing process: trees turning to dust before your eyes as termites grind them into soil, skittled bullocks pumping themselves into bloated travesties at the roadside. A constantly poised potential: the telltale chicken-wire bubbles of a croc in a billabong, the wispy translucence of the box jellyfish glistening in the throw-net.

  Some places simply feel too tough for humans. Capstone moonscapes in which a feral goat might struggle to keep its feet. Gibber plains where the light is insufferable. Tea-tree thickets that sap your will to live. There are places that feel uncongenial for reasons you know are irrational. Sometimes it’s more about being alone in them that’s suddenly giving you the creeps. Camped at the samphire edge of a birrida – a sort of gypsum claypan – near Shark Bay many years ago, I was overcome by a fear of inundation. The sea was kilometres off in the distance and hadn’t been this way in centuries but when I lay on my swag the land felt too low to be trusted. It’s one thing to lie on a riverbank under a sheet at night listening to saltwater crocodiles ambushing barramundi a few metres below you, but to toss and turn at the prospect of an ancient sea returning when there’s nothing out there but crickets is ridiculous.

  All the same, plenty of natural threats are real enough. To stand in a tingle forest in even a moderate breeze is to experience a force no research can prepare you for. With their giant, fire-hollowed buttresses and restless crowns, these trees creak with enough pent-up energy to make your flesh crawl. How my ancestors must have hated trees: the wandoo that burps sparks at the blow of an axe, the relentless thickets of peppermint and stubborn jam, the groaning armies of karri massed upon ridges as far as the eye can see. Whether you’re at war with them or you come in peace, trees can be genuinely malevolent presences. In a high wind they’re dangerous and at dusk they’re untrustworthy. It’s not just when they’re spitting embers that they seem carnivorous. The fires of yesteryear have left them riven with gaping, grinding mouths that can snap shut and bring down the night sky in a moment.

  The animated landscape of Aboriginal Australians is not fanciful. Landforms, plants and bodies of water possess the sort of power that’s palpable to even an heir of industrialized scientism like me. In this country, outside the cities especially, it takes a certain determination to ignore the ardour and livid energy at work in nature. The studious disenchantment of a modern education is no protection against it. Some of it is just lingering force, a constant trail of evidence. Like the massive boab tree rent in half by lightning, or the barnacle-encrusted boulders you discover on the clifftop high above the sea after a cyclone. But a lot of Australia’s might is experienced in real time. In the desert you feel the country forsake its mild mood soon after dawn, and as it works itself up into its noonday rage the birds fall nearly silent, the reptiles retreat and the spinifex seethes and sweats its cloying musk. Everything around you is pushed to its absolute limits, tested to within an inch of its life.

  At times you perceive this force as something passive, at others as a kind of intransigence, but along with the grinding authority of inertia and attrition, places exert active, unpredictable power, a lively and sometimes fickle agency my Kentish and Irish antecedents – like the continent itself, largely untouched by the apparent Good News of the Enlightenment – would probably have affirmed without hesitation. On every continent, places both wild and built still brim with power. Things have their own secret histories and inner lives. Europeans know this – they sense it most keenly in buildings. You can’t help but feel an afterglow of the past in the stone flags of a castle keep from the Dark Ages or the ruins of a Roman house beneath the streets of Paris, but it’s palpable in nature, too. When you hike up through a rocky island pass in Greece as olive prunings are being burnt you can literally smell spent time – you taste it. Closer to home I’ve witnessed the queer violence an Indonesian sea cave can assert as it vomits bats at dusk. The awe of traditional people in places like these should not be surprising.

  For all our delusions of technological mastery and our beetle-browed fixation on the future, citizens of the developed world can still be cowed by the presence of the past. Sometimes your senses are distorted by ‘mere’ geology. In a desert gorge, say, where hot rocks blow frigid air from karst vents and every baking, parched stone bears the counterintuitive scars of water. Walking through old mine diggings where land has been laid waste forever, I feel a queasiness, a sense of reproach so direct it seems to come from the place itself. And I don’t believe my sorrow and agitation are only projection, for these feelings are not so different to the creeping shame and awe you’re subject to at the scene of any violent crime. You feel the dead, the afterglow of experience.

  But experience is not exclusive to humans. Country lives too, it strives and yearns and changes. And maybe it remembers, for the past is never over. Not even for stones and water. Particularly not for these. I’ve been to places in the Pilbara and the Kimberley where hidden soaks and sudden breakaways give off a watchfulness, a discomforting presence not easily accounted for. You ask yourself: Did something terrible happen here? Or is this resonance just a signal of the life force in the country? In spots like these it can be a relief to find evidence of ancient culture because it makes some sense of the uncanny sensation. The petroglyph, the rubbing stone or ochre painting lets you off the hook. You can reassure yourself that someone else has felt this before you. So perhaps you’re not imagining it. But then you wonder: Am I feeling the people of this place or the power they’ve always found in it? I suspect at times even a non-indigenous visitor might catch an echo of both. Looking on wryly, an Aboriginal Australian may not even credit the distinction. Either way it’s hard to imagine, even where custom and law have been fatally interrupted and there are no physical remnants of arts or industry, that a human history of sixty thousand years will never make its presence felt in country that appears to be otherwise bereft of people.

  There are, of course, many places in Australia where this primal energy has been known since time immemorial and where it continues to be refreshed by ritual visits and ceremonial relationship. My acquaintance with these kinds of places is largely rest
ricted to the far north Kimberley, home to the world’s oldest extant tradition of icon painting. In rock shelters throughout coastal archipelagos, behind mainland beaches and out into a rugged hinterland the size of California, the conjoined pasts of people and country endure and continue in sites of rare power. Here the Ngarinyin, Wunambal and Worora peoples have been painting and maintaining their mouthless Wandjina figures since the beginning of human history. Daubed in ochre, these images of fierce, life-giving, watchful energy stare out from ledges and adorn cave ceilings. Their companions, the smaller Gwion Gwion figures that dance along lintels and walls close by, are further evidence of how long and how intimately this remotest country has been known and revered. When a traditional lawman approaches a Wandjina site he is often a mixture of caution and suppressed excitement. He announces himself and his companions as if to a relative of great standing. Like all icons, the Wandjina craves company. It is revived and enlarged by attention. The elder’s visit replenishes its power. As of this writing there are still pre-contact lawmen in the region carrying on an ancient and sacred tradition of reciprocation that secures a place and its people. An outsider is tempted to look upon these paintings as mere artworks, but they’re much more than that. Similarly the non-indigenous visitor is likely to be overcome by the antiquity of these sites, when for those who maintain and are maintained by them they are living places where past, present and future are indistinguishable.