Subverting the Empire Subverting Subverting the Empire traces the influence of Australian colonial exploration on writers of contemporary Australian fiction. Exploration journals serve as points of origin for social myths that continue to exercise the national imagination. This book examines these myths Subverting the through a reading of the work of Thea Astley, Gerald Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction Explorers and Exploration in Australian Murnane and Rodney Hall. Paul Genoni is a lecturer with the Empire Department of Media and Information at Curtin University of Technology in Perth. He has a PhD from the University Explorers and Exploration of Western Australia. He has previously worked as a librarian, and has published in Australian Fiction widely on librarianship and Australian literature. Subverting the Empire is his first book. Paul Genoni Paul Genoni Paul generate and place barcode Cover map image courtesy of the National Library of Australia Subverting the Empire Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction Paul Genoni Subverting the Empire Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction Paul Genoni 2004 This book is published at theHumanities.com a series imprint of theUniversityPress.com First published in Australia in 2004 by Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd PO Box 463 Altona Vic 3018 ABN 66 074 822 629 in association with The Association for the Study of Australian Literature Humanities and International Studies Faculty of Arts University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba Qld 4350 www.theHumanities.com Copyright © Paul Genoni 2004 All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Genoni, Paul. Subverting the empire : explorer and exploration in Australian fiction. Bibliography. ISBN 1 86335 553 7 (print) ISBN 1 86335 554 5 (online) 1. Australian literature – History and criticism. 2. Explorers in literature. 3. Explorers – Australia. I. Title. A820.9352891 Typesetting and design by Vulgar Enterprises of North Carlton. Set in 10.5/14 pt Adobe Garamond. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 11 CHAPTER 1 EXPLORATION: the Australian experience 21 CHAPTER 2THE EVOLVING LITERATURE of Australian exploration 71 CHAPTER 3THEA ASTLEY: exploring the centre 97 CHAPTER 4GERALD MURNANE: exploring the real country 145 CHAPTER 5RODNEY HALL: exploring the land in the mind 195 Conclusion 239 Select bibliography 247 Endnotes 255 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a substantial debt to those who helped by reading and pro- viding feedback on drafts. Dennis Haskell supervised the PhD thesis from which this book was developed, and he was exemplary in his insight, promptness and attention to detail. Ann Ritchie and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth went beyond the normal requirements of friendship by providing close reading and numerous helpful sug- gestions. I would also like to thank all those who helped bring the book to life in other ways. Neil James encouraged me to make the effort, and my colleagues at ASAL provided the necessary support and a means to make it happen. Particular thanks are due to Chris Lee, Susan Lever and Pat Buckridge, and I am sure there are others who helped in ways of which I am not aware. The Department of Media and Information at Curtin University of Technology also provided generous assistance. Thanks also to those who provided less direct but nonetheless invaluable support. These include my friends and colleagues at the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture; John and Lydia Ralph and Cath Darcy for their friendship and interest; Angela Morsley for sharing her thoughts on Gerald Murnane, and Imre Salusinszky for the memorable Murnane Seminar in 2001. 7 8 SUBVERTING THE EMPIRE I am particularly in debt to those who wrote the books that went before. This includes those extraordinary explorers who not only made history but also left a literary legacy that continues to entrance and excite; to Thea Astley, Gerald Murnane and Rodney Hall for their remarkable fiction; and to those other writers and critics who have been intrigued by this anabranch of Australian literature, in particular Robert Sellick, Robert Dixon, Ross Gibson, Paul Carter and Simon Ryan. And finally to Reg and Joan and Lyn, who were there at the beginning and at the end, as I knew they would be. Some of the material in this book has been previously published in different form. Part of Chapter 5 was published as ‘The post- colonial explorer: Rodney Hall’s ‘The Second Bridegroom”, Westerly, 44:1, 1999, pp.14–26. Part of Chapter 3 was published as ‘Sub- verting the empire: exploration in the fiction of Thea Astley and Peter Carey’, Journal of Australian Studies, 70, 2001, pp.13–21. 9 I know the names (learned painfully through home- work) of several dozen capes, bays, promontories; and can trace in with a dotted line the hopeless journeys across it of all the great explorers, Sturt, Leichhardt, Burke and Wills. But what is beyond that is a mystery. It is what begins with the darkness at our back door. Too big to hold in the mind! David Malouf Johnno To put this another way, stepping into a story or constructing a map are much the same thing; and both are like tossing a stone at a window: the cobwebby lines fan out from the point of impact in all directions at once. Janette Turner Hospital Oyster INTRODUCTION Long before the major landmasses of the southern oceans had been discovered and charted, there had been speculation as to their existence. Conjecture focussed on the probable existence of a great southern continent, and dreamers began to conjure up images of the shape of its extremities and the wonders that lay in its centre. From the first, the centre of the continent was imagined in utopian terms, and as early as the fourth century B. C., Athens was the source of descriptions of ideal antipodean communities.1 It was not, however, until the mid-seventeenth century that the initial first-hand descriptions of the great southern continent began to reach Europe. In turn, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English and French maritime explorers returned with tantalisingly incomplete and often contradictory descriptions of the physical face of the southern landmass. As the outline of the continent was slowly sketched in, speculation intensified as to its true nature and the forms of life and society it supported. Writers of imaginative literature were quick to fill in the gaps in explorers’ charts and knowledge. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced many literary renderings of southern lands, in which the utopian vision remained prominent. There developed a genre of fiction peculiar to the imagining of the austral world, which typically depended upon the device of shipwrecked sailors being 11 12 SUBVERTING THE EMPIRE marooned on a southern continent or island, whereupon they stumble across a hitherto unknown utopian society. Overcoming numerous obstacles, they eventually manage to carry an account of their explorations back to the old world.2 Some of these imaginative accounts were remarkably prescient; a character in Richard Brome’s play The Antipodes – first performed in 1638 – asks the question ‘Are not their swans all black?’3 Given, however, the inadequate exploration, mapping and recording of the continent’s physical features, they were generally lacking in any semblance of reality. According to the utopian renderings, the centre of the continent was imagined to be the green and fertile home to a politically and socially advanced race. Denis Vairasse’s account of 1675, The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi: a Nation Inhabiting a Part of the Third Continent Commonly Called Terrae Australes Incognitae, includes what is probably the first vision of what became the most lingering symbol of the fertile centre: the inland sea. Vairasse’s Terrae Australes Incognitae is a symmetrical paradise with a lake in the heart of the continent, with an island in the centre of the lake, with a city in the middle of the island.4 These imaginary accounts indicated a developing fascination with the centre of the continent which, given the early reports of unprepossessing tribes on the coastal margins, seemed to be the only location where these ideal societies might yet be found. Moreover, in order to know a large landmass properly required more than a superficial knowledge of its perimeter. As Simon Schama has noted logic insisted that the essence of a land lay within its geographic heart. The romanticisation of landscape always presupposes penetrating the interior – it presupposes that somewhere in the interior there will be a primal home (the source of a river, or some fantasised mythic ur-wold, some dark and majestic wood).5 INTRODUCTION 13 Literature therefore provided what physical exploration could not yet achieve: an investigation of the heart of the great southern continent. From the first then, the exploration of Australia was a literary as well as a geographic enterprise. Indeed, the physical exploration of inland Australia was comparatively slow to commence. Even after the establishment of the first permanent settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788, the exploration of the interior was not undertaken in earnest for some three decades, and thereafter remained a slow and painstaking business. Colonists continued to imagine the continental interior into being long before it was explored. This speculation continued to be optimistic, based on the vastness of the area awaiting discovery and the apparently temperate latitudes in which the bulk of the continent was situated. As Ross Gibson and Carol Lansbury have pointed out, there was a lingering readiness, both on the part of those who had some first-hand experience of the land and many who didn’t, to believe that the bush and what lay beyond it would constitute an ideal site for expansion of the British empire.