Tracks by Robyn Davidson

And it was perhaps the cold desolate lovelessness of the place that threw into sharp focus the magical and life-affirming qualities of the country around it. To enter that country is to be choked with dust, suffocated by waves of thrumming heat, and driven to distraction by the ubiquitous Australian fly; it is to be amazed by space and humbled by the most ancient, bony, awesome landscape on the face of the earth. It is to discover the continent's mythological crucible, the great outback, the never-never, that decrepit desert land of infinite blue air and limitless power. It seems ridiculous now, to talk of my growing sense of freedom given the feudal situation I was living in, but anything could be mended, anything forgotten, any doubt withstood during a walk through those timeless boulders, or down that glittering river-bed in the moonlight.

In the late 1970's, Robyn Davidson moved to Alice Springs, the town at the center of Australia's Outback, with one goal in mind: to obtain and train a group of camels in order that she might walk from the center of the country to the Western Australia coast. The trip, as Davidson describes it, is not just about getting to know the country, but getting to know oneself: alone for long stretches of time with only the camels and her dog, walking across some of the most featureless and inhospitable landscape on Earth, Davidson becomes not just independent and self-sufficient, but in tune with herself in a way that's not possible in Brisbane, or even in old ramshackle Alice. This is a kind of book that has become popular in recent memory--I'm thinking of Cheryl Strayed's Wild--but whereas those books always seem to be a kind of marketing strategy, when Davidson writes about self-actualization, I tended to believe her, not least because of the incandescent rage she expresses toward the demons of the press that want to turn her into tomorrow's headline.

Close to half the book is taken up with the preparations for the trip, which involve taking small jobs in restaurants and ranches in Alice Springs. I was really interested in Davidson's discussion of anti-Aboriginal racism in Tracks: the Alice Springs of the 1970's she describes is a place where whites drop slurs as easily as spitting on the ground. (It's also a place disproportionately filled with men, who frequently threaten young women like Davidson with rape.) Davidson paints herself as kind of a hothead who often leaps to the defense of Aboriginal Australians, and it's this fervor that really makes her seem honest and impolitic, though I would suggest there's a kind of blindness, too, in the way she throws around suggests of Aboriginal "demise." Later, on the trip itself, she's briefly joined by an Aboriginal man named Eddie who takes her through some of the track that she would not, and in fact would not be allowed according to Aboriginal tradition, traverse on her own. These sections, which depict a kind of free camaraderie despite a real language barrier, are some of the most charming of the novel. When Eddie leaves and Davidson faces the last, deadliest stretch of the trip, the book's tragic elements return to the forefront.

If this were a book about traversing an American desert, you might expect some stunning descriptions of landmarks, well-known and not. But the Australian desert is not like the American one; it's featurelessness is part of the essential nature that draws Davidson to it, and it's not possible--or so I gather, and so I understood as I crossed it by air a few weeks back--to impose a mental geography on it, unless perhaps you are an Aboriginal Australian moving along a songline, perhaps. So the focus, for the most part, becomes on Davidson herself, her self-sufficiency and stubbornness. (Though I really liked her description of what was then called "Ayers Rock," which she explains that no tourist mob could ever really reduce or diminish.) I thought it was especially funny how Davidson spent 100 pages talking shit about the clueless photographer that National Geographic sent to snap photos of her, right up to the point where she sleeps with him. That kind of hotheadedness and brashness is what makes you like Davidson, and what makes you believe in her.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

Henry hadn't been so excited in weeks. Months. That was the way it was, some days seemed to pass almost without being seen, games lived through, decisions made, averages  rising or dipping, and all of it happening in a kind of fog, until one day that astonishing event would occur that brought sudden life and immediacy to the Association, and everybody would suddenly wake up and wonder at the time that had got by them, go back to the box scores, try to find out what had happened. During those dull-minded stretches, even a home run was nothing more than an HR penned into the box score; sure, there was a fence and a ball sailing over it, but Henry didn't see them--oh, he heard the shouting of the faithful, yes, they stayed with it, they had to, but to him it was just a distant echo, static that let you know it was still going on. But then, contrarily, when someone like Damon Rutherford came along to flip the switch, turn things on, why even a pop-up to the pitcher took on excitement, a certain dimension, color.

Henry, the namesake "Prop" of Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., is the world's first fantasy baseball player--and I do mean fantasy. He spends all of his spare time simulating baseball games with three dice and a few dozen charts that describe what each roll means. With these simple tools, he's able to reproduce whatever can happen on a baseball field, from pop flies to sac bunts to home runs to rarer events like fights and injuries. Henry simulates whole seasons at a clip, pitting teams with names like the Pastimers against the Haymakers and the Beaneaters, and players with names like "Sycamore Flynn" and "Melbourne Trench." At this speed, the league takes on a history, and a lore, of its own, Henry watches fifty years of baseball history go by at a clip. As the league grows in imaginative size, so it takes over Henry's life, leaving him on thin ice at his accounting job. When a new star is in the midst of a breakout season, the energy and enthusiasm it provides gives Henry even a kind of sexual prowess at the local bar; but the league's slumps are Henry's slumps.

Fantasy baseball is the obvious touchpoint for The Universal Baseball Association, but there are others that make more sense. What Henry does is actually closer to a one-man roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons, combining personal modifiers and the power of chance. Like D&D, Henry's game is inertly mathematical until enlivened with the power of imagination, and imagination is where Henry thrives. At the beginning of the season depicted in The Universal Baseball Season, an up-and-coming pitcher named Damon Rutherford has thrown a perfect game at the onset of a season that promises to be legendary. The novel "drops in" to the perspective of the players themselves, caught up as Henry is in the larger narrative of Rutherford's rise and the magical tension of the games. (A stunning amount of the novel is just Coover describing, grippingly, the events of a baseball game.) I would suggest that what Henry really is is a writer, and that the book is a kind of metacommentary on the relationship between the novelist and the world he creates.

The crisis of the book is set off when a stray roll sets off the "Extraordinary Occurrences" chart--and an errant pitch hits and kills Damon, the star pitcher. The death is a seismic event in both the Association's life and Henry's, provoking existential questions. To what extent is Henry responsible for Damon's death? He is, after all, the one who made the chart. And what can he do about it? Is it permissible for him to "load the dice" and punish Jock Casey, the supercilious young pitcher who felled the young prince? Or is the crisis an empty one, the game all vanity, and something that should be chucked in the garbage bin entirely? Why is it that we got so invested in these fictional worlds? After all, aren't I, the reader, a little choked up when I read about Damon's father, the league legend Brock Rutherford, climbing down from the stands to get to the body of his son lying at the plate? In a Muriel Spark sense, Henry is both author and God, pushing his inventions around and hiding his hand.

In fact, I want to suggest one more touchpoint: the story in Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum about a computer simulation of life in which the relationship between the simulated beings and their programmers is a perfect analog of that of us and God, a relationship with an impermeable barrier at its heart. The Universal in Universal Baseball Association is pointedly chosen; to these players, the diamond is the entire world. Henry suggests the weirdness this produces early on when he describes the players as organizing themselves into political-type "parties," which actually might be more like sects. The culmination of this aspect of the novel is the bravura final section, and "in-universe" short story about a future generation of the Association where players ritualistically reenact the death of Damon Rutherford, now a kind of quasi-religious figure. It's unclear whether the player representing Damon is actually at risk of being killed; it's unclear whether anyone actually plays baseball anymore. It's totally strange, totally unexpected, and cranks the strangeness level of the novel nearly past what it can bear. But fascinatingly, it suggests that the players have a life of their own, and if God--Henry--is around, he's chosen not to make himself known.

The Orchard Thieves by Elizabeth Jolley

Never let fear come into your life, someone had said to her when she was still a schoolgirl. She had never forgotten this, and here she was, a threatened and frightened woman after being fearless all her life, simply because a daughter, the middle one, without warning and without explanation, had come home seeking sanctuary. When she thought about it, there was no safe place in her house if someone should come, the hunter or the huntress, after the middle sister. Nothing closed properly in the house, the windows were loose in their frames, any keys which still remained would not turn in the locks. She never tried to lock up the house. At night the household was especially vulnerable with three women and three small children and one unborn child sleeping there. She had to understand that she had been afraid for almost four weeks, ever since the arrival of the middle sister.

The woman at the center of Elizabeth Jolley's The Orchard Thieves is known simply as "the grandmother." The other characters, too, are reduced to their familial roles: "the youngest daughter," "the grandsons," "the aunt"--that is, the eldest and childless sister. Into this web arrives the middle daughter, known as, you guessed it, "the middle daughter," returning to Australia from England with her daughter ("the cousin") in tow and a baby in the oven. The middle daughter has experienced something harrowing, perhaps related to a lover, perhaps the father of the baby, although it's also hinted at that she has relationships with women. What it is, the grandmother is never permitted to know; her role is to provide sanctuary without question, and the reader is never permitted to know either. But the grandmother's anxiety is ignited: how can she protect her middle daughter if she doesn't know where the threat lies?

In the above passage, the grandmother claims to have been "fearless all her life" until this moment, but we can see that this is not true. Until the arrival of the middle daughter, her primary concern is for her three grandsons, who act in the story as a unit, and who are always up to some mischief or peskiness. A bowl of fruit, sitting in the kitchen, is too beautifully arranged for anyone to take from it in the daylight, but at night the grandsons sneak in to steal apples and grapes, one by one--the orchard thieves of the title. The grandmother is entirely aware of this, and fascinatingly, her fear for her grandsons centers on the knowledge that they will be, at some time in their life, the thief, rather than the victim. But the "Orchard Thieves" also refers to the adult children, including the youngest daughter's husband, who seize on the opportunity to discuss despoiling the grandmother of her home. Does the grandmother see this greed in them, too, as she sees it in the young children? Does she excuse it, even nurture it, also? Is it cruelty, or a natural way of things that must be endured?

Jolley is always such a cryptic writer. In a way, The Orchard Thieves is the most straightforward of her novels, which always feel like they either have a piece missing, or perhaps one added in. Here, it's what has happened to the middle daughter--keeping that information back is, I think, a remarkable kind of authorial restraint. But the story from the narrow perspective of the grandmother is not cryptic at all, though its narrowness is a kind of limitation of the kind that Jolley seems to like. The reduction of the characters to their family roles turns it into a kind of fable or parable about aging and motherhood. One's reminded of those spiders who offer their bodies as refuge for the eggs of parasitical wasps, only to be eaten up after they hatch, piece by piece.

Nothing by Henry Green

"I wonder if it's why the relatives won't come."

"No Philip really. You know what their whole generation is!"

"How d'you mean?"

"Well they wouldn't let a little thing like that, I mean of going to bed, what we've just been discussing, make the slightest bit of difference would they?"

"I don't believe it is a little thing."

"No more do I."

"That's where the whole difference lies," he said "between our generations. Their whole lot is absolutely unbridled."

Philip Weatherby and Mary Pomfret are two young lovers about to announce their engagement to their parents. The problem is, their parents, Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret, are old lovers, whose affair with each other once ruined both of their marriages and threw their entire social world into upheaval. This event--like most events in Henry Green's novel Doting--is talked about only obliquely, and we are left to intuit that, beneath the layers of British gentility and emotional repression, what happened between Jane and John was rather volcanic. The two parents set about sabotaging the marriage in the way only the British can, or perhaps the way only Henry Green's characters can, without ever openly or explicitly acknowledging that they're doing so. In fact, once Philip and Mary begin to inquire with Jane and John about a little worry that has been niggling at the back of their minds--is it possible the pair are half-siblings?--it's difficult not to see the writing on the wall.

Among other things, Nothing is a book about generational differences. Jane and John come from the generation that came up between the two world wars, whereas their children are the products of post-World War II austerity. They see themselves as infinitely more sober and earnest than their parents, especially about things like love and sex, which they somehow take both more seriously and less obsessively, or so they believe. There is something inverted about the parents, primarily concerned with their flirtations and social lives, and the children, whose lives revolve around work. Jane and John are flighty and selfish, but their children are worse: they're bores. It was never quite clear to me why Jane and John are so against the marriage of their children, except that perhaps they take the possibility that Mary is John's daughter seriously. Or perhaps it's simply that the children's conception of marriage as an institution of respectability and sacrifice threatens their own open, freewheeling flirtation, which has carried on for years, much to the chagrin of the current lovers to which they seem rather lightly attached.

And this is all, of course, circumscribed with the narrowness of permitted language among the English bourgeoisie. Only Austen, I think, is able to express such a range of feeling and personality within such narrow constrictions. Like Doting, which as I understand it is often seen as a companion piece, Nothing is almost entirely dialogue. In both books, Green acts as something like an invisible eye, recording the language of the English classes that would have been familiar to him. (And it's interesting to me how well Green, a pretty posh guy, captured the voice of the middle and lower classes over his career.) Green famously wanted his dialogue to express the opacity of the human mind, and to dramatize how little we understand from someone's words just what they are thinking of feeling. But often I felt the language here does something almost opposite, unveiling and exposing people's true intentions even as they try to keep them hidden. It's genius-level stuff, but I have to admit that I liked best the moments where Green lets himself intrude upon the conversation to offer one of his paragraphs of jagged modernist language. For all that is great about both Doting and Nothing, they often felt to me like a novelist running away from the height of his own powers.

Six Books About Australia

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

One prisoner, a former actor named William Hunt, "who in his younger days had belonged to a company of strolling mountebanks," disguised himself as an enormous "boomer" or male kangaroo. He nearly got across to Forestier's Peninsula before two picket-guards, thinking he really was a kangaroo, spotted him and gave chase, leveling their muskets. "Don't shoot, I am only Billy Hunt," the nervous marsupial squeaked, in their consternation."

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.

'Voss did not die,' Miss Trevelyan replied. 'He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it.'

'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.

Why should we learn about the history of human life and the environment in this country in the time before the British arrived? Because most of the human history on this continent is that of the First Peoples, who lived here for tens of thousands of years. Their descendants--the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples--continue to follow and respect the ancient traditions and customs that make this country unique. It is likely that these are the oldest continuous living cultures surviving anywhere on the planet.

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.

She felt compassionate: charitable: virtuous. Like a dignitary bestowing some supremely preciosu gicft, she handed her panties to the naked Aboriginal.

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.

She was like his own soul riding there, dark, passionate and childlike. In all this wide empty world Coonardoo was the only living thing he could speak to. Hugh knew; the only creature who understood what he was feeling, and was feeling for him. yet he was afraid of her, resented a secret understanding between them.

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.

What do tourists do? They walk, they stand, they look, they buy. They fumble for money on buses, not knowing whether to pay the driver or the conductor.  They visit famous monuments, fountains, old houses full of stone and shutters and anachronistic lace. They notice that the day without duty passes with the slowness of a dream. They know that their existence is without point. They envy those who go arm in arm, who have a home to go to.

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.