The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
Voss by Patrick White
The Welcome to Country Handbook by Marcia Langton
Walkabout by James Vance Marshall
Connardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard
The Children's Bach by Helen Garner
On my recent trip to Sydney I visited the Hyde Park Barracks, basically a housing unit for convicted English criminals who were sentenced to "transportation," that is, exile to Australia for their crimes. The barracks are barracks, not a prison--Australia was the prison. But what does it mean for a whole continent to be a prison? Robert Hughes' history The Fatal Shore details the Australian transportation system from the landing of the "First Fleet" in 1788 to its end in the late 19th century. I was searching for a general history of Australia, but one thing Hughes' book makes clear is that, as far as European settlement goes, the history of transportation is the history of Australia, which makes it all the more incredible that, according to Hughes, the social stigma around the "Stain" made it impossible to talk about Australia's convict past for most of the 20th century. Australians might take comfort in Hughes' point that, in creating one of the world's safest countries, with one of its highest standards of living, the nation is proof against the eugenicist belief that "criminality" is a heritable trait.
Hughes makes pointed comparisons between the transportation system and the Russian gulag of the 20th century, both attempts to deal with social problems wholesale by exiling "problematic" sections of society. Transportation, Hughes notes, precedes Bentham's idea of the modern penitentiary, and its invention was an attempt to deal with what seemed like an insoluble problem: where do we put all these criminals? The First Fleet of 1788 dealt with a grueling eight-month ocean crossing to find themselves on the other side of the world in a poor harbor racked with disease and little arable land; with these meager tools they were meant to build their own society. Early Sydney was hell for soldier and prisoner both, and many soldiers remarked on how little difference there seemed to be between them. As free settlers begin to make their way to Australia, the "System" grows in its cruelty, becoming more punitive and violent, perhaps to make the class distinctions more obvious and iron-clad. A basic fact that I didn't understand is that convicts would be leased out as workers to free settlers. And yet, a prisoner who did well could receive a "ticket of leave" to work for themselves, and once their time was up, many stayed, becoming themselves powerful landowners who were sought after as masters by other convicts, being more understanding.
Hughes describes a 19th century Australia whose key social distinction is between "Exclusives" and "Emancipists"--that is, free settlers seeking to maintain their social superiority and freed convicts who had been elevated to the ranks of polite society. Although the elevation of "Emancipists" ended with the relatively liberal government of Lachlan Macquarie, whose successors were those who hardened and strengthened the penal system, this conflict seems to have shaped Australian society up until the moment that transportation ended and, embarrassed by "the Stain," everyone agreed to forget all about the System. Hughes tells an interesting anecdote about a former prison ship that briefly opened as a public attraction before being sunk by irate Tasmanians, whose former colony of Van Diemen's Land was the harshest and longest-lasting of the various colonies. As an aside, I thought that Hughes' book was really well-written for a general history, full of interesting anecdotes and a dry sense of humor that made it a real pleasure to read.
'Come, come. If we are not certain of the facts, how is it possible to give the answers?'
'The air will tell us,' Miss Trevelyan said.
The class distinctions between Exclusive and Emancipist provide an interesting window into Patrick White's classic novel of Australian exploration, Voss: Bonner, the explorer's wealthy patron, is a free settler whose "subscription" to the exploration is a kind of social expense meant to distinguish him as a gentleman. Bonner, like most of Australia's free settlers, is a mediocrity who takes advantage of the fresh country to make an attempt at a gentility that he wouldn't have had in England. The household servant, Rose, whose illegitimate pregnancy causes the family so much trouble, is an emancipated convict; in Laura's attempt to adopt Rose's baby (after her death) one can see the porous borders of early Australian society, and the desperation of those like the Bonners to keep them hardened. The novel's other Emancipist is Judd, the former convict who is Voss' foil on the expedition. Judd, having made his claim to the new country by toil and suffering, has a kind of practicality that Voss lacks; it's no coincidence that he alone survives the expedition. And yet, White makes it clear that Australia "belongs" to Voss, and not to Judd, by right of a kind of vision that Judd lacks, perhaps because Voss is outside the system that has so circumscribed the roles of Judd, Bonner, and Rose.
Voss' outsider-ness makes him, perhaps, more akin to the aboriginal people who make up such an important part of the exploration. Hughes describes how, among prisoners, Aboriginal Australians were thought of as being on the side of the jailers, since they had legal protections the prisoners did not, and were often used as "trackers" to bring back escapees. Judd ends up in a party with the older Dugald and younger Jacky, perhaps an uneasy union. But the country they enter into clearly belongs to those Aboriginal people who have never, like Dugald and Jacky, entered into a compact with white society--I recall easily one of my favorite scenes, where Dugald, having rejoined a tribe of Aboriginal kinsmen, rips apart the letters entrusted to him, whose pieces the tribe watches fly away in wonder. Voss and co. eventually find themselves in the keeping of another such group. Physically depleted by their journey, they are neither prisoners nor wards; they simply have nowhere else to go. There's a kind of mysticality at work here, a suggestion that the Aboriginal Australians belong to a kind of metaphysically different world, but I would argue that what is clearest is that "Country" belongs to them. Voss, by the power of his own vision and separateness, comes closest to achieving what has been natural to them for millennia.
There's something risky about revisiting your favorite books. Voss was my first of White's novels, and one thing that surprised me is that it is, prose-wise, rather ordinary compared to some of his other stuff, which tends toward the grotesque and the physical in ways that are not present here. It struck me actually as the most readable of White's books, which was a huge shock. But I was gratified to find it as good as I remembered. The psychic connection between Voss and Bonner's niece Laura produces the novel's most genius passages; the way that White manages to persuade the reader that Laura is present with Voss in the Outback even as she is physically in her Sydney estate takes one's breath away. And it was a special experience to read this novel just before my own trip to the Outback, where I got a great sense of the vastness of the hostile country from the hotel lobby bar where I spent much of my time sitting.
I turned to Marcia Langton's The Welcome to Country Handbook to help me understand a little more about the Aboriginal cultures that are, in a real sense, at the heart of Voss. As Langton points out, it is possible for Aboriginal people to make a remarkable claim to being the oldest living culture, perhaps up to 60,000 years old. Hughes describes the Aboriginal peoples encountered by the First Fleet as stunningly primitive compared to Native American societies encountered by settlers in North America; it is a wholly other perspective to consider that what the First Fleet found was a culture that had evolved in tandem with the continent over incalculable generations. Langton's book is an introduction to Aboriginal peoples for curious tourists, and hits some of the highlights one might expect: the 20th century renaissance and market for Aboriginal artwork, the political conflicts between Aboriginal Australians and the federal government, the diversity of Aboriginal languages and societies, etc.
I found this book mostly disappointing. First of all, 90% of what it cites are websites. It's written, too, like a website, perhaps one belonging to some kind of NGO: "Through storytelling, history, beliefs and knowledge about people, places and the world are relayed to each new generation." OK. To be generous, it seems to be written for a curious tourist who knows very little not just about Aboriginal Australians but Indigenous peoples, or race and culture more generally. That's fine, perhaps, but it means that there is a limit to the depth it is able to accomplish. Is it necessary to sit through a chapter that describes what racism is, or race?
But when the book does manage to say something specific, I found it pretty fascinating. I enjoyed learning, for instance, about the complex ordering of Yolŋu society, in which everything is considered to be one of two "moieties," even people, and marriage must be endogamous across these two moieties. Langton describes a highly ordered society in which dozens of familial relationships are recognized, if not more, and I got the sense--perhaps only through implication--that other Aboriginal groups have similar practices. Furthermore, I was interested in the way that Aboriginal Australians seem to share meaningful qualities with Native Americans and Black Americans, both as the original inhabitants of the country who were the victims of attempted genocide, and as a racialized class whose "blackness" forms a meaningful structure of their identity.
He took them shyly: wonderingly: not knowing what they were for. He put the worwora down, and examined the gift more closely. His fingers explored the elastic top. It flick-back was something he didn't understand. (Bark thread and liana vine didn't behave like this.) He stretched the elastic taut; tested it; experimented with it, was trying to unravel it when Peter came to his aid.
'Hey, don't undo 'em, darkie! Put 'em on. One foot in here, one foot in there. Then pull 'em up.'
Now let me turn to two novels that explore interactions between white European-Australians and Aboriginal people. The first is Walkabout, James Vance Marshall's novel about two young children who survive a plane crash on their way to Adelaide. Foolishly, the children begin to walk in the direction of what they believe to have been their destination, although they're still in the Northern Territory--and will never survive. They are saved when they come across a young Aboriginal boy on "walkabout," cast here as a traditional rite of solo exploration (but which, as I understand it, really refers to the period in which Aboriginal people employed on cattle stations would return to their communities in the off season). The Aboriginal boy has skills that the two white children desperately need; he shows them how to procure water from below the dirt and which plants are edible, as well as how to catch and kill wallabies and echidnas. The two children, who are from Charleston, South Carolina, refer to their new friend as "darkie."
Of the two, the young boy Peter adjusts most easily to their new reality, choosing to go naked as the Aboriginal boy does. The older girl, Mary, has more misgivings, and her embarrassment for the boy's nakedness leads her to make a gift of her own panties, which he puts on with much good humor. (What a moment there is here for scholars of both race and gender!) In this way, Walkabout presents what seems to my eye a pretty typical conflict between "civilization" and its antithesis. Mary's unthinking hierarchies are challenged by the Aboriginal boy, even as the novel reifies the difference between them. It must be said that the fate of the Aboriginal boy seems to reflect the tragedies of Australian history: he catches Peter's cold and dies, having sacrificed himself to save them. Interestingly, Marshall ascribes the boy's death partially to an Aboriginal belief that death is inevitable once it has chosen you, and must be faced with equanimity: even before he catches Peter's cold, the boy sees in Mary's hostility a kind of "evil eye" that presages his death. Whether there's any basis for this belief, I don't know, but I saw it again in the case of one of the hired hands of the next novel, Coonardoo.
But Coonardoo the playmate--Coonardoo whom he had seen long ago under the shower, young and slender, her lithe brown body, wet and gleaming, brown eyes laughing at him, her hair, wavy and sun-burnished, lying in wet streaks about her head. Coonardoo? Why should he hurt her by a harsh, indifferent manner he showed nowhere else?
Coonardoo is set on a cattle station in Western Australia in the early 20th century. It centers on Hugh Watt, the owner of the station Wytaliba. The life of a white man in the remote bush is a strange one, and Hugh struggles to find a white woman who will accept such a life. His first choice, Jessica, goes back home after a week, and his eventual wife, Mary, becomes so embittered by the experience that she takes their six daughters and moves back to the nearest town. Hugh finds brief comfort in a dalliance with Coonardoo, an Aboriginal housekeeper who he has entrusted, like his mother before him, with the station's management. The back of the book describes this dalliance as a kind of forbidden love, but I wonder if that's true--it might have been, perhaps, if Hugh's own ideological commitment to racial separation hadn't kept him from suppressing his feelings for Conardoo. In either case, the brief affair produces a son, Winni, whose favor by Hugh is what tips Mary off to her husband's infidelity.
Coonardoo is an interesting document on interracial relationships. It must have been quite scandalous when Katherine Susannah Pritchard published it in 1926, when I can only imagine that relationships between whites and Aboriginal people would have been rather outside the pale of literature. But Pritchard shows how such things might be possible on a remote station in the Australian bush, far from the polite society of town, where a white man might spend his life among the Aboriginal people attached to his station (they seem to be neither enslaved or employed, but associated somehow) while his nearest white neighbors might be a day's ride away. The villain of Conardoo is a station owner named Sam Geary who lives openly with his "gin" (I think this term is now considered offensive), who desires Conardoo for his own, and keeps pressing Hugh to sell his rights to her, whatever those might be. Is Geary's sin the way he treats his own Aboriginal wife, Sheba, or merely his openness about it?
After Mary leaves, Hugh finally accepts Coonardoo as his "woman," something that he had been loathe to do, but even then treats her coldly, never returning to her bed after the one sexual encounter that produced Winni. Part of me wants to read Coonardoo as a novel of repression about a man whose racial ideology is so strong he can never let himself embrace the one relationship that might have made him happy. But I wonder, too, if Pritchard herself is able to imagine this relationship, or if it remains elusive for the writer in her period. More troubling yet is that Coonardoo herself seems kind of an absence in the middle of the text, a character that the novel is really unable to look squarely at or understand--at least, that is, until the final chapter, when an older and disillusioned Coonardoo returns to Wytaliba at the end of her life to look up on its ruin, and think about what might have been.
Finally, a novel of modern Australia. Helen Garner's novel The Children's Bach is set in suburban Melbourne, where the reunification of two old college friends, Dexter and Elizabeth, causes a disruption in both their lives. Dexter is a family man, brash and outlandish, who rails against "Americanisms" while his wife Athena takes care of their two children. Elizabeth is more adrift, unmarried, cynical, living in an unfurnished loft. When the two run into each other, Elizabeth brings two new presences into the life of Dexter's family. The first is Vicki, Elizabeth's much younger sister, who finds in their suburban home a foothold in life that Elizabeth's loft will never provide. The other is Philip, Elizabeth's sometimes boyfriend, a rock musician who persuades Athena to run away with him on a holiday to Sydney, much to the obvious chagrin of Dexter.
I admit I didn't see the pivot in this one coming. Vicki describes Athena as "perfect"--the perfect woman, the perfect wife. And early on, she seems to have a kind of stolid devotion to Dexter and their life; Vicki admires the pair of them for their frankness with each other. But an early sign that all is not well with Athena is the way she talks about their disabled son, Billy. "Don't bother getting romantic," Athena tells Vicki, "There's nobody in there." She admits, "I'm just hanging on till we can get rid of him," and says, "I've abandoned him, in my heart." In a novel that is otherwise quite small, filled with minor domestic gestures, the cruelty on display here really stands out as shocking, as does the moment that Vicki and Athena bond over the impulse they share to push the boy in front of an oncoming car. Billy, such as he is, seems to represent a kind of problem, a challenge to the kind of life that Dexter and Athena live, that can only be solved by exile. Athena's sudden abandonment of Dexter makes sense in this context, then: "Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologise, never explain."
Back in Melbourne, Dexter commiserates by getting drunk with--and sleeping with--Vicki. This is a huge blow to his self-conception as a nobler person: "Tis was modern life, then, this seamless logic, this common sense, this silent tit-for-tat. This was what people did. He did not like it. He hated it. But he was in his moral universe now, and he could never go back." But it seems to me what Dexter fails to understand is that he's always been in this moral universe, however much he feels as if he has been above it, and Athena's abandonment of him for Philip is only proof that this is true. There's something very antiquated in Dexter's attempt to find moral absolution in the suburban family life, rather than its epitome, and he may be the only one surprised that such an attempt could fail.
I really enjoyed this one. Brent said there's something Muriel Spark about it, and though there might be a "Guy whose only seen Boss Baby" element to that, I think it's true. In its reticence, its cultivation of the opacity of these characters--which is what allows Athena's desperate move to shock us--I saw a bit of Henry Green as well. And part of that opacity is that I feel like there's something that eludes me about the novel, and makes me want to return to it; I don't think this will be the last book of hers I read.
So, this is an interesting place to end up: Australia's penal past makes it unique among world countries, but in its persecution of an Indigenous racial underclass, it ends up following familiar forms, especially to those of whose who are American. And in the end, though Dexter may hate the way that American culture imposes its ideas on Australians, it presents a 20th century story of suburban anomie that us Americans find utterly recognizable.
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