We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 111
SUMMER 2007
REVIEWS
FICTION
Alexis Wright – Carpentaria - Giramonda, 2007
In the mid-1970s when Poor Fellow My Country was published, calls for land rights were rising to a crescendo. Carpentaria, a new novel of compassion, strength and creative genius arrives in quite a different context. In 2007 the sense of threat to Indigenous people and their land is mainly submerged, yet rises to the surface almost daily. This book stirs memories of Poor Fellow My Country; it speaks to me in a similar voice – a voice of hope. But its style is radically fresh.
One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find hope .... The people of parable and prophecy ... finally declared they no longer knew what hope was .... Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old people were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories. (Carpentaria, p 12)
So begins Wright’s tragic story; a story that ends with hope despite terrible calamity.
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria is an epic on several planes that knits together the meanings underlying the lives of the Waanyi people of the Gulf country of far north Queensland with local stories of responses to new invasions. The voices of the sea and rivers of the Gulf country speak through their owners. The town is known as Desperance in the novel. It is a place not far east of the Northern Territory where, in real time, Army personnel are now taking up positions in Aboriginal communities. The life of Uptown, the white township of Desperance, is both insular and vulgar: a vast plastic likeness of a Santa Gertrudis announces the white people’s outback town. Alongside it is the Pricklebush where the Aboriginal clans are sheltered by scrap foraged and knit together from the Desperance tip. In an uncommon mix of focus the white town remains in shadow. The ‘fringe dwellers’ are at the centre of a different life that is poetic, lyrical, abrasive, volatile, tragic – and above all, through its main characters, hopeful in the face of endless disappointments and climate disaster. Here live Angel Day and Normal Phantom, a saltwater man whose fish-room shines with brilliant fish sculptures. And the fearless, outspoken Angel, keeping five children dry through her resourcefulness, her imaginative creation of shelter through bricolage of objects from the dump. A woman made of dreams too – into her own mist-enveloped world she brings her find from the dump: a statue of the Virgin Mary, embodying her own inner hopes.
Why does this book move me deeply? Because it stirs up feeling on how one might live in tune with the ecology of place, the cycles of the cosmos? A parable about how, if we don’t live in this way, nature and her beings – ‘the elements’ – make retribution? James Lovelock and other world scientists see this in their own way: as The Revenge of Gaia. But for them too an elemental sense of being stirs at this late moment of history.
Upon this larger canvas Carpentaria, a work of magic realism in Westerners’ language, becomes a powerful allegory for our times: the Earth’s retaliation in Gaia-like fashion, responding to the deep tramping marks of our footprints on the climate, on the places of both land and water. And so it happens for me that Desperance is destroyed by wild storms at the very moment when real floods in Gippsland are altering the landscape of place, of Licola, a memory place of my family amid the shade trees. Our generation now beginning to haunt the 2050 generation.
A cyclone is spreading destruction among the greedy ones like Bruiser, the unrelentingly brutal Mayor of Desperance, cattle king and powerfully singular figure. Like the free-ranging torturers of Abu Ghraib, he throws young ‘suspected’ Aboriginal boys against the cell walls like rubbish. A lean story of murder in custody. The cyclone is destroying too the place of the clans at the Pricklebush on the edge of the town.
Here serendipitously begins the powerful ‘other side’ that gives the novel its depth, its Žlan, its reason for hope. For Carpentaria is even more a novel about hope than about destruction or conflict – or pain; or even the vulnerability of children, half-sozzled, living in car bodies. Despair is not a word one would choose even in the darkest moments of its epic journey.
Carpentaria is a story largely about saltwater people – people with Dreaming sites in the sea and along the beaches. Its people are Normal Phantom, his son Will, their soul-mate companion, Elias Smith, a saltwater man ‘with ironic Slavic eyes’ who arrives at Desperance from the sea. Elias is a man who has lost his memory to the sea which also formed him. In this way he’s like Norm: ‘We are the flesh and blood of the sea and we are what the sea brings the land.’ Only a saltwater person could say that.
Norm Phantom is a towering figure, granite-like. His knowledge of the stars, the sea is deep and enduring. Yet Elias Smith is the figure who gives Carpentaria its healing quality; the man with the pale looks of a spirit-figure, who arrives silently from the sea. A prophet-figure (whose very name bespeaks the Old Testament prophet Elijah) in the language of religion; a mediator in the language of structuralism. Elias is the only other person in the Gulf waters whose sea skills match Norm’s. It is his memory the sea now has, a man who acquires other men’s memory. Elias is like a sacred partner and his special power is to heal enmities. And this he does between Norm Phantom and his estranged son Will Phantom, also a saltwater man (and fearless land rights activist) who comes to know the sea like his father – but through Elias. Did Elias also strengthen Will’s heart to take on and turn to dust the biggest mine of its kind on Phantom land? Will’s wife is Joseph Midnight’s granddaughter – Midnight is a man whom Norm despises and denigrates. Her name is Hope. (The author has a sense of humour, often mischievous. So Flinders, who mapped her Waanyi people’s coastline, becomes Mathew Desperance Flinders.)
Norm Phantom’s knowledge of sky and sea form one whole – poetic and signalling danger to the profane. He and his saltwater partner, Elias, fish in silence; that’s the lore of respecting the sea, especially the deeps. It’s the price saltwater people pay for living somewhere near ‘the edge of the sacred’ in the language of modern religious studies. They are part of a sea culture where certain fish in Waanyi and other mythical meaning systems are spirit ancestors whose names one does not say. Silence or special chant language are called for to propitiate the spirit ancestors.
Along the coasts of northern Cape York Peninsula to the Gulf country and beyond is the realm of the Rainbow Serpent, spelling danger to the profane. Capable of inflicting particular forms of sickness on humans, it is seen as responsible for cyclones and waterspouts. Through the northern coasts, including the Torres Strait Islands, cyclones are treated with utmost respect. So you do not speak the cyclone, for that will bring it.
Unfortunately, the newcomers to Desperance – the white folk, along with the trespassers of the mine – do not know any of this. They fear Elias and, accused of burning the Queen’s portrait, he is banished from Desperance. The mine men who murder him leave him sitting dead in his little boat on the waters mysteriously inland. Elias is rescued dead respectfully by Will Phantom with the mine vigilantes in pursuit, seeking to conceal their crime. Ultimately he is taken back to his sea home by Norm Phantom. Even towards the very end of Elias’s sea burial, the singular forces of earth and sky are at work. For theirs is a place where no man ‘sets to sea while the morning star shines above the fishing boats waiting for them’. Norm knows ‘that once his friend followed the [morning] star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth’. Waanyi cosmology lies deep in Norm’s mind, his heart, his whole being, and he tries not to escape the realisation of his friend’s Departure. Elias’s sea burial is beautiful: placed by Norm ‘into strangely calm emerald green waters ... the arms of water waiting at each depth to receive him’. Like the watery arms of Earth.
Wright’s narrative poetry in the heroic tradition is quite remarkable even for me after many years with sea people. The memories that carry feeling stir within the characters. And in myself. What Samuel Coleridge named beautifully ‘reliques of sensation’. Like waves of memory bringing life and hope.
In a most beautiful passage, Norm Phantom finds hope. In extremis, he comes to see ‘the other side’, the people of the land clans differently, his adversaries who live on the eastern side of Desperance. He is big enough man for that. Sitting in his little boat in the face of an oncoming tide with his daughter-in-law from the ‘other side’ clans and his little grandson Bala. (Bala means ‘fella’ in local Kriol, ‘brother’ in the Torres Strait.) Three people alone not breaking the ‘stoical silence of the salt-hardened face’ of this great, singular saltwater man. In the face of this young woman’s bravery, blinded momentarily by the sun, ‘the intensity of its white light hitting the water’ – the unreduced brightness signalling danger to ordinary mortals, something one does not look at; except from the corner of your eye – he is changed. As his silent daughter-in-law moves back to the sea, refusing to let go her search for Will, her man, Norm undergoes a transformation.
As he stumbles away from the sea, the little boy held tightly on his shoulders, he suddenly ‘knew he could not interfere with other people’s dreams’. Her dreams. At that moment Norm Phantom comes ‘to believe in her and even how a woebegotten people like the other side could rise above themselves ... to discover hope in their big empty souls. He smiled.’ Was he thinking of Joseph Midnight, Hope’s grandfather, the oldest man in the camp on the eastern side of Desperance, his adversary; son of his arch-enemy Cyclone; a rain man and the first man ‘to turn imagination into reality’ in contemporary times? For ‘he brought lies to life’. He it was, or his family, who stole Norm’s living-image son, Will. He can see Will walking off to live even in old Cyclone’s house. Now Will’s own son is on Norm’s shoulders and he will grow him up. He’d already taught the child important star and sea knowledge that would guide him through his life. There is poignancy in this quiet moment of tenderness
– and a lesson for this moment: little children are given to hope.
Had the hundred giant gropers swimming under their little boat guided them to safety? The boy screams with excitement when he sees these huge fish within the flowing sea grasses. The writing is lyrical. More than this, here the poetry of life meets the moment of transcendence of enmity. Within the child Norm has decided to teach there flows in part ‘the gammon blood’ of the other side. He will share with him his knowledge – ecological knowledge that encompasses the mysteries of life and death and its overcoming – the way of the Waanyi, his people and the author’s. The culminating moment is pregnant with a hope that comes from knowing how life can become ongoing. The right way to live can be taken for granted by Norm Phantom. It is written in the sky and the sea – at his place. It has a very different feel to the end of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road where life slips in without the meanings that guide this man and boy. Their future is not presaged by tearing apart the seamless cover of a present marked by nothingness. This duo’s silence is drowned by ‘the mass choir of frogs’ gathered around the two seafarers. They are both listening to the frogs’ song. Like the paintings on rocks by their forebears, the nonhuman species are there inside the story of the man and boy. In Western terms this is where the ecology of place takes in, Gaia-like, the living of all kinds and hues: ‘green, grey, speckled, striped, big and small, dozens of species all assembled around the two seafarers, as they walked’. The epic ends with the song of a watery land:
It was a mystery, but there was so much song wafting off the watery land, singing the country afresh as they walked hand in hand out of town, down the road, Westside to home.
He had resolved to rebuild on the same piece of land where his old house had been, above the nest of a snake spirit.
Carpentaria can be read as allegory about the consequences of the destruction of the earth and us all by the high-energy, market-dominated world. When Desperance is ‘destructed’ the cyclone takes the good, the bad and the ugly in an act of retribution. Yet the story may be read too as allegory about the story of Australia – the destruction of Aboriginal society. But not quite; for the survivors begin again with knowledge and hope.
Xavier Herbert’s epigraph, ‘To my poor destructed country’, gathers new and sadder meaning in our era. The ‘emergency measures’ in the Northern Territory are very much part of a surrounding context of foreshadowed legislation waiting in the wings. We’ve already had the Northern Territory government’s refusal to heed the pleas of the Yanyuwa to stop the mine at McArthur River near Borroloola. Why does the proposed amendment to the Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Rights Act, a legal milestone passed in 1976, give as its principal objective ‘to improve access to Aboriginal land for development, especially mining’? Are outstations to be starved of funds? Are Indigenous persons being encouraged to refashion themselves in the image of individualism?
The biggest danger in the present onslaught is, dare I speak it, the crushing of hope, the road to despair. Can despair be thrust upon good people? Creating a loss of self-respect?
In the twenty-eight years I spent working with Indigenous sea people in far north Queensland, I found that even the most despondent communities were by no means given over to despair. Always within them there were people active around an ongoing morality. People spoke of ‘the dark days’ they’d experienced; they also perceived the silver within the darkness of the clouds. Labelling people as incapable, as incapacitated, is a cruel act, a misreading. It’s also demoralising, even dangerously self-fulfilling, sapping the overtaxed energies of the good people; disarming the decent people.
Again and again in different places people spoke softly to me of ‘that sinking feeling’ of frustration and hopelessness they experienced when their sense of self, their confidence, was being squeezed out of them. Despair may be forced on good people.
Are we revisiting those times in new circumstances when access to Aboriginal land for mining, nuclear dumps, real estate business, has become part of an inexorable global force?
The stakes are high and rising like urgent sea levels; something the remarkable author of Carpentaria understands. The mine that land rights activist, Will Phantom, disrupts so effectively is a global affair. So the helicopter chase by the mine men after Will Phantom is not just a relentless chase through the spinifex: it’s a worldwide tracking from the other side of the world like the war in Iraq. Where Aboriginal people and their land get in the way, the new war already in train in the Northern Territory has, as its underlying force, those who must buoy up a way of life that keeps ravishing the earth to feed a lifestyle soon to be denied all our children through climate change.
NONIE SHARP is the author of Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory, Allen and Unwin/University of Toronto Press; Stars of Tagai: The Torres Strait Islanders and No Ordinary Judgment: Mabo, The Murray Islanders’ Land Case, both Aboriginal Studies Press. She is an Arena Publications Editor and Honorary Research Associate at La Trobe University.
FICTION
Manfred Jurgensen - The American Brother - Hybrid Publishers, 2007
Ask me what I think about Manfred Jurgensen’s new book, The American Brother, and I will say: ‘It depends which chapter you are asking me about.’ On the one hand, I love the reflective nature of this novel, the circling reflections of the main character Harry Greene, a Professor of Literary History, his quotations from writers, and his predicament. On the other hand, I almost stopped reading in chapter 1. I know it was a dream, but the gratuitousness of the sexual relations between what were to become two major characters annoyed me and I wondered whether someone advised that he should start the book with a raunchy passage. Harry seems convinced by this oneiric battleground, but I wasn’t and the novel would have been richer without that scene, allowing the more complex relationships to develop during the book.
On to Harry’s predicament: he is made redundant because literature no longer sells in the brave new world of corporate universities. Because Harry has always been a bit secretive, he lands up in the lap of Executive Exit, a rather dodgy front for a host of nefarious activities ostensibly meant to help CEOs and other professionals to come to grips with their early retirement. Jurgensen’s attack – fictionally speaking – on the knowledge economy, globalisation and terrorism is finely wrought.
The ageing Harry is trying to come to grips with his life, with the people with whom he’s had important relationships, and with his obsession with the theme of death in literature. Harry decides to take off for New York to give a series of lectures, his autumnal thoughts on life and literature.
But like the rolling of the Devil’s Marbles, Harry’s life is not entirely of his own making. Nevertheless, he makes his plans while the actions and sometimes subterfuges of others are creating their own forking paths.
The reader is allowed into Harry’s formative moments, the critical events of his childhood, meditations on friendship with the now famous conductor Andre Hollander and on his brief encounter with travel writer Angus McIntyre in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Harry is also haunted by the memory of an American ‘brother’, Gideon Butters, with whom he’d spent the happiest year of his life as an American Field Service student. As luck and fiction would have it, all three men happen to be in New York when Harry arrives there.
There’s another strand to this story – a dual one – of his relationships with women. There’s his wife, Janice, a school teacher committed to the welfare and education of her students. Their relationship has lost its fire, but the underlying friendship is a key to its success. His relationship to Sarah, a former PhD student and something of a wild card, is full of what might be called erotic warfare.
Harry is not entirely in possession of his life and is plagued by his own uncertainties. He reflects:
Age was coming to him like an undercover spy hounding him with unclear, camouflaged demands, seeking confessions he could not make because he still didn’t know what it was he needed to admit. (p 271)
His admissions are simultaneously to himself and to others. There is a kind of horror in the way in which Harry is caught up in a web of intrigue. Did he really bring it upon himself? Is he right to think he is being followed, or is it simply an old man’s paranoia? Even Harry does not fully comprehend what’s going on around him, while those close to him do seem to have some insight into not only his character (which they help him explore) but also his actions.
There is a good narrative pull to this novel and some wonderfully ironic jokes about power, globalisation and intimacy, sometimes all in the one sentence. The play about life as a work of fiction really works, and I particularly liked his musings on the dramatic similarities between the Greek chorus and the secret service.
Harry Greene is definitely a flawed character, but flawed in the same grand way that the characters of classical drama are. All his intentions are good, but his ‘innocence’ (I use the word reservedly) takes him into places and circumstances that are way beyond him. He is both the betrayed and the betrayer, the world seems to rock on an unevenly weighted pendulum: which way, which way?
The current flavour of Australian politics has produced a spate of books in which writers ask difficult questions about where our national politics might lead us. Manfred Jurgensen’s book follows Linda Jaivin’s comedic The Infernal Optimist, Richard Flanagan’s Accidental Terrorist, Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost. Each takes the reader into a world of conspiracy, of circumstantial guilt, of violence and lost freedoms. It has become almost a subgenre of our national literature. Each author brings to the subject their own questions and insights. Jurgensen has a little of all of them: there’s his wry and ironic humour, there are accidents of identity, and there are the horrors of violence and the unfettered power of state-sponsored and outsourced intelligence.
The tortuous path of The American Brother reflects the complexity of its concerns. It is not a simple story with easy answers. The character of Harry Greene is satisfyingly multifaceted and he leaves us with a great resounding question: Was it the nature of intelligence and counterintelligence to create reality? (p 343)
SUSAN HAWTHORNE is the author of a novel, The Falling Woman, and has written widely on issues of globalisation, war and terrorism. Her nonfiction books include Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Bio/diversity and September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives (coeditor).
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