“Twisted Ghosts” Settler Envy and Historical Resolution in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth

MARC DELREZ

N A RECENTLY PUBLISHED SURVEY of contemporary Australian fiction, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004) is found to be I exemplary of the “rural apocalypse novel,” a specific subgenre which typically registers anxieties about political and religious extremism in outback Australia – usually by associating a Gothic element with the sedate routines of life in the country. It is the kind of literature where “remote country towns are imagined as parochial to the point of paranoia,”1 often with the consequence that an eruption of violence comes to disturb the mundane life-patterns or the natural rhythms apparently favoured by small-town communities. This cate- gory of apocalypse fiction in the country can be seen to encompass a number of significant recent Australian novels, such as Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), and Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster (1996), but also to gesture further backwards to such classics as Ran- dolph Stow’s Tourmaline (1963), most of Thea Astley’s production, as indeed most of Patrick White’s. What is possibly distinctive, however, about McGa- han’s particular treatment of the rural-apocalypse theme in The White Earth is

1 Ken Gelder & Paul Salzman, After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007 (Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2009): 23. 192 MARC DELREZ  that the book actually begins with the description of a catastrophe, as if the repressed violence implicit in the hidden tensions constitutive of rural society were shown also to have already erupted. This raises the possibility that some at least of Australia’s contemporary violence in fact echoes an earlier dis- ruption, thus bringing into play a pattern of endless repetition which is inter- estingly reminiscent of trauma. Indeed, the novel contains a “Prologue” which focuses on a character called William, a young boy said to be “halfway between his eighth birthday and his ninth,” who stands on the veranda of his home and contemplates, “huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.” The narrator’s comment, to the effect that “William said nothing, for there was no one to tell,” suggests that all of the book that follows ought perhaps to be understood as one of those attempts in writing to bear witness to the unspeakable, whether this is Hiroshima or the Holocaust. The mushroom cloud “casting a vast shad- ow upon the hills beyond”2 can then be read as a signal that the shadow of genocide will somehow darken the microcosmic world of the pastoralists which constitutes the setting for the novel about to unfold. This being said, it becomes clear at once that what the boy takes to be a disaster of major propor- tions, partly as an aspect of his inability to comprehend the event in the moment of its occurrence, boils down to a mere instance of family drama, since what he is witnessing is the death by fire of his own father – the latter is consumed in the blaze ignited by an electrical fault in his combine harvester while he is reaping a tinder-dry paddock of wheat. The fact that dozens of other farmers, having seen the smoke from the vantage-point of their surrounding properties, know “instantly what it [is]” (3), amounts to placing the accidental casualty into another kind of narrative, that of the common heroism implicit in the long march of settlement, whereby an intractable environment is slowly domesti- cated through sheer hard work and against terrible odds. The novel’s prologue thus serves the purpose of creating an ambiguous framework in which the well-rehearsed myth of the heroic pioneers is pitted against an altogether darker context, one that possibly subtends the former and subliminally points to the genocidal foundations on which the history of settlement was constructed in the first place. Also, the fact that the larger apocalypse recedes as the novel proceeds seems in keeping with an important aspect of McGahan’s characterization of

2 Andrew McGahan, The White Earth (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin): 1. Fur- ther page references are in the main text.