“In the sea but not of it” Rites of passage and liminal spiritual perspectives in

the fiction of Tim Winton

by

Ian Donald Brunton

Thesis

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English)

Acadia University

Spring Convocation 2015

c by Ian Donald Brunton, 2014 i

This thesis by Ian Donald Brunton was defended successfully in an oral examination on Monday, 9 September, 2014. The examining committee for the thesis was:

Dr John Ball, External Examiner

Dr Herb Wyile, Internal Examiner

Dr John Eustace, Supervisor

Dr Lisa Narbeshuber, Acting Head

Dr Glyn Bissix, Chair

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate

Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English). ii

I, Ian Donald Brunton, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia

University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

Author

Supervisor

Date Contents

Abstract v

Acknowledgements vi

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Land’s Edge: Winton’sapproachtoliminality ...... 2 1.2 Theoriesofliminality...... 9

1.3 Ad hoc ritesofpassage...... 19

2 Short Fiction 25

2.1 “LanternStalk”...... 26

2.2 “Wilderness” ...... 35 2.3 “Laps”...... 47

3 Cloudstreet 55

3.1 Thehouseasaliminalspace...... 56

3.2 RosePickles...... 63 3.3 QuickLamb...... 67

3.4 FishLamb...... 83 3.5 Thehousetransformed ...... 93

4 Breath 96

iii CONTENTS iv

4.1 Surfingasamasculineriteofpassage ...... 97

4.2 Surfingasaliminalspiritualexperience ...... 109

5 Conclusion 118 Abstract

This thesis examines liminal conditions in the fiction of Western Australian author

Tim Winton in light of Victor Turner’s theory of rites of passage, Mircea Eliade’s analysis of religion, and Homi K. Bhabha’s and Manuel Aguirre’s abstract theories

of liminality. For Winton’s characters, liminal spaces, which most frequently reflect the Western Australian landscape, enable ad hoc rites of passage and spiritual experiences. Proceeding from Winton’s early short fiction through his novels Cloudstreet and Breath, this thesis traces the development of Winton’s views of liminal spaces, specifically their capacity for rites of passage and spiritual development that support meaningful transformation and negotiation of identity. Over the course of his career, Winton’s fiction displays an increasing pessimism about the possibility of achieving such transformation, due to the lack of communal ritual and spiritual practices to give shape to rites of passage.

v Acknowledgements

I wish to express my appreciation and gratitude to my supervisor, John Eustace, for his advice, ecouragement, and patience; to the faculty of Acadia University’s Department of English and Theatre for their enthusiasm and support; to the staff of

Vaughan Memorial Library, for tracking down innumerable and sometimes quite distant resources; to Zanne Handley and Ian Armstrong, for lengthy, rambling, inspiring conversations; to my fellow graduate students in the English department for moral support and mutual commiseration; to my parents, for their love and support; and to my sun and stars, Mike Butler, for his love, for his unbounded energy and unflagging support, and for keeping me going.

vi Chapter 1

Introduction

Throughout his career, Tim Winton has focused his writing on his native Western

Australia, and especially on the liminal space of its coastline—the narrow margin where land and sea meet. His first novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), and his penultimate, Breath (2008), take place almost entirely on the beach;1 Shallows (1985) and Dirt Music (2001), and the short story collection The Turning (2004) are set in coastal towns with a heavy emphasis on interaction with the beach and sea (fishing, swimming, surfing, beachcombing). The meeting of land and water also figures prominently in other short stories and in his novel Cloudstreet (1991). While the prominence of shorelines arises from the geography in which Winton locates his fiction, it also has significant implications. The beach represents a threshold between land and sea, a border-space that is neither truly land nor truly sea, yet influenced by both. It is a limen, an in-between space. In such spaces, rites of passage allow transitions between life stages and transformation and negotiation of identity. In Winton’s fiction, characters must typically improvise such rites of passage. When they do so successfully, their experience reflects Winton’s perceptions of the liminal as transformative and profoundly spiritual. As this study

1. Winton’s most recent book, Eyrie, was published when the bulk of this thesis had already been written.

1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 2

will show, however, over the course of his writing career, Winton’s fiction suggests a

shift of focus from successful ad hoc rites of passage to failed ones and an increasing pessimism about the potential of liminal spaces for forming a meaningingful or cohesive Australian identity.

1.1 Land’s Edge: Winton’s approach to

liminality

Winton has brought his preoccupation with the liminal nature of the Western

Australian coastline to the foreground in his book of essays, Land’s Edge (1993). The entire book consists of reflections on his lifelong relationship with beaches and the sea and land on either side of them. He describes himself as “a ‘littoralist’, someone who picks over things at the edges.”2 What he “picks over,” in Land’s Edge and in his other work, is the intimate relationship between Western

Australians and their still-wild coast.3 To Winton, the littoral is not merely the meeting of land and sea. As he demonstrates in Land’s Edge, he views it as symbolic not only of how Australians relate to their geography but also of the fundamental character of Australians, and Western Australians in particular. He suggests that the nature of the coastline shapes the Western Australian character throughout life and exerts a powerful influence even in its absence. While Winton refers frequently to “the sea,” he acknowledges that this signifies not the sea per se but that which borders the coast: “We are not a sea people by way of being great mariners, but more a coastal people, content on the edge of things.”4 It is the sea in relation to its margin that is important to the Australian character. “We are a race of veranda dwellers,” Winton writes, quoting Philip

2. Tim Winton, Land’s Edge (Sydney: MacMillan, 1993), 45. 3. Ibid., 45, 46. 4. Ibid., 21. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 3

Drew: “The veranda is an interval, a space, where life is improvised. The beach, in

Australia, is the landscape equivalent of the veranda, a veranda at the edge of the continent.”5 As the veranda is both part of the house and also outside, so is the

beach part of both land and sea, essentially an extended threshold between the two. Drew elaborates: “Land and sea run together and the beach becomes a contested zone, neither land nor sea, but a kind of sea-land. Its mixed nature and plurality

strikes us as enormously exciting.”6 Winton emphasises the importance of the “interval” or “space” of the beach as a limen to the Western Australian culture because

[n]owhere else on the continent is the sense of being trapped between sea

and desert so strong...In many places along this vast and lonely coastline the beach is the only margin between them. From the sea you look directly upon red desert and from the wilderness there is the steely

shimmer of the Indian Ocean. There are roos on the beach and shells out on the plain.7

Both sea and land are constantly present within each other where they meet at the shoreline, rendering the beach neither wholly one nor wholly the other and therefore

a threshold, a liminal space, just as the veranda is neither inside nor outside—and yet both at the same time. Winton describes the Western Australian coastline as a place “where the margins blur,” making clear definitions ambiguous.8

Each chapter of Land’s Edge begins with an anecdote that occurs on the beach or within sight of it, whether from land or water, and the events Winton narrates

are often transformative, or occasions of great joy—or terror. Winton comments

5. Winton, Land’s Edge, 21; Philip Drew, Veranda: Embracing Place (Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1992), 84. 6. Drew, Veranda, 85. 7. Winton, Land’s Edge, 22. 8. Tim Winton, “Eleanor Wachtel with Tim Winton,” By Eleanor Wachtel, Malahat Review, no. 121 (January 1997): 64. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 4

that on days when he cannot go to the beach, “the smell of rotting seagrass and the

blast of the Fremantle Doctor” remind him of the sea’s constant presence even inland.9 He also applies the liminal character of the beach to human interaction

with both the desert and the sea. He acknowledges that “we see ourselves as outback types,” but “we [always] head back to the coastal cities...Guiltily we spend the rest of our time living on the water or manoevering our way ruthlessly toward it.

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.”10 He suggests that Australians shy away from

significant engagement with the desert beyond camping and “our funny little pilgrimages” because, of the two, “the sea is more forthcoming; its miracles and

wonders are occasionally more palpable, however inexplicable they be.” While Winton admits the sea’s danger and antipathy toward humans, he hints at a profound ambivalence, even anxiety, toward the desert that makes it more difficult

for Australians to embrace than the bounty and possibility of “a vista that moves, rolls, surges, twists, rears up and changes from minute to minute.”11

Throughout Land’s Edge, a second concern emerges from Winton’s reflections on the miracles and wonders of the sea and the coastline, and that is his preoccupation

with spirituality. This spirituality is not separate from the liminal space of the coastline, but emerges within it, depends upon it, and reflects a life-long interest. Elsewhere, he acknowledges the influence on his writing of his upbringing in a

fundamentalist Christian church when he says, “I hope everything I write is imbued with the things I feel and believe and those things are Christian things.”12 Yet his

relationship with his Christian upbringing is ambivalent. He describes himself as a “hippy Christian”—Christian because he is “gloomy about people’s inherent nature

9. Winton, Land’s Edge, 34. The Fremantle Doctor is a cool onshore breeze that occurs every afternoon during the summer months in Perth, Western Australia. 10. Ibid., 21. 11. Ibid., 39, 21. 12. Winton, “Wachtel,” 66–7; Tim Winton, “Tim Winton,” in The Deep End: Talking about Believing and Not Believing, ed. Maria Zijlstra (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989), 18. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 5

but hopeful about their potential,”13 but hippy because he criticises the “silliness” of his childhood religion’s theology and its “black-and-white” perspective on morality,14 and is more concerned with what he sees as the greater spiritual challenge of getting along with people.15 When he speaks of the sea and the coastline, however, Winton’s spiritual language becomes more mystical, and simultaneously more ambiguous and more emphatic. He finds the phenomena of the coast “stirring, inspiring, strangely unifying and even religious in their nature.”16 He calls the coastline’s capacity to

allow him to escape and forget the everyday “a religious feeling.”17 When free-diving, he says, “I understand the Christian mystics for moments at a time. I

too feel swallowed, miniscule, ready. The diver, like the monk, however, contemplates on borrowed time. Sooner or later you have the surface to return to.” Winton draws a strong connection between these religious feelings and the

experiences of the natural world in the margin between land and sea, which he calls “blessings” and “miracles.” He invites the reader to “call them marvels or natural

wonders,” explicitly linking this spirituality with the landscape.18 He calls Australia “the most spiritual continent”—not because of the religiosity of its inhabitants,

which is low,19 but because of the inherent qualities of its landscape and by virtue of its long history of human occupation.20 Christianity and conventional religion typically make subtle appearances in Winton’s fiction, but there are frequent

13. Tim Winton, “Where Pigs Speak in Tongues and Angels Come and Go: A Conversation with Tim Winton,” By Beth Watzke, Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature 5, no. 2 (December 1991): 98. 14. Winton, “Wachtel,” 66. 15. Winton, “Tim Winton,” 18. 16. Winton, Land’s Edge, 28. 17. Ibid., 32. 18. Ibid., 22. 19. See James Jupp, “A Religious Society? Belief and Disbelief in Australia,” Dialogue: Journal of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia 27, no. 2 (2008): 12, accessed September 2, 2011, http://www.assa.edu.au/publications/dialogue/_pdf/download.php?id=2008_Vol27_No2. pdf. 20. The issue of Aboriginal spirituality in Winton’s writing will be addressed as it arises in his fiction. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 6

descriptions of a nameless spiritual experience related to the landscape. Winton

describes that spiritual quality of the landscape in terms of its liminality: “Australians are surrounded by ocean and ambushed from behind by desert – a war

of mystery on two fronts.”21 Here a “mystery” is not a puzzle to be solved, but, following religious mystics, something that cannot satisfactorily be explained in normal language.22 In this sense, it echoes the sublime, “the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought or sensation is defeated” yet “the mind gets a feeling for that which lies beyond thought and language.”23 For

Winton, this experience relates directly to liminal spaces. Australia, therefore, as a conceptual human nation, and especially Western

Australia, exist between ocean and desert as a liminal space, and the spirituality of both extremes impresses upon that narrow margin. Furthermore, it is the profound otherness of both ocean and desert that marks them as liminal and therefore spiritual spaces in themselves, and they demonstrate that otherness in their absolute indifference to the daily and vital concerns of humans. Winton writes: “I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like the desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly,” and he draws attention to their “overwhelming ambivalence.”24 As he elaborates elsewhere, faced with both ocean and desert,

you’re very quickly faced with your own smallness, anything on a human scale is instantly dwarfed. ...It’s good to have your ego knocked down

to where you have perspective. You realize that within hours, if you’re not careful, you will be dead. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that if you

21. Winton, Land’s Edge, 21. 22. Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 211. 23. Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), 3. 24. Winton, Land’s Edge, 39, 40. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 7

take too long to do something, the landscape will kill you. So it does

leave you with a sense of being marginal and conditional in terms of your existence. For me, it also has a kind of mystical element. I find it

easier to believe in things religious as a result of the landscape that I live in...It’s that sense that there is something bigger and there is that great speaking silence that works for me at the very least.25

Here Winton links the ambivalence of the Australian landscape—its indifference to human affairs—with the same aspect of spirituality, its acknowledgement of

“something bigger” and its capacity to overwhelm thought with its “great speaking silence.”26

While Winton finds spiritual meaning in the natural world, however ineffable or vague, he rejects a New Age approach to it. His appreciation of the landscape, and the coastline especially, is largely spiritual, but it is not, in itself, worship. He writes:

I don’t believe there’s anything cosmic or divine or morally superior about whales and dolphins or sharks or trees, but I do think that

everything that lives is holy and somehow integrated; and on cloudy days I suspect that these extraordinary [natural] phenomena [on the

Western Australian coast] ... are an ocean, an earth, a Creator, something shaking us by the collar, demanding our attention, our fear, our vigilance, our respect, our help.27

This is not to contradict his assertion of the natural world’s indifference to human affairs, but rather to suggest that the inherent spiritual dimension of the landscape

invites Australians to concern themselves with “something bigger” than their daily lives. 25. Winton, “Wachtel,” 65. 26. See Winton, Land’s Edge, 40. 27. Ibid., 28. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 8

Despite Winton’s suggestion that the sea is “the mere playground of our

hedonism,” the coastal limen is crucial to Australian life in serious ways, though sometimes that seriousness masquerades as play or hedonism. Following novelist

Robert Drewe, Winton locates “almost every Australian rite of passage...on or near the beach. The beach is where we test and prove our physical prowess, where we discover sex; it is often the site of our adulterous assignations, and where we go to

face our grown-up failures. In the end, it is where we retire in the sun to await the unknown.”28 This locating of rites of passage at the beach is part of the definition

and creation of Australian character; Winton’s work describes the “importance of the coastal border on the life of the characters, and the marginal aspect inherent in

Australia’s culture.”29 He writes that Australians think of themselves as “a nation of goers,” for whom the danger of the sea is crucial for their interaction with it and therefore to their character. He writes that Australians go to the beach not to relax

but to face a challenge, because

our sea is something to be reckoned with. We are reared on stories of shark attacks, broken necks from dumpings in the surf. ...I suspect we

go because of these warnings, at times, and not simply despite them....Being last out of the water after the shark siren, taking the biggest wave of the set, coming home with the meanest sunburn...these

are still badges of honour.30

This hedonistic machismo becomes a defining aspect of what it means to be an Australian man, and this pursuit of manhood within liminal spaces is a recurring

theme in Winton’s fiction. It comes to the foreground in Breath but this pursuit of a masculine identity obtains also in many other works. While it is heavily invested

28. Winton, Land’s Edge, 21; see Robert Drewe, ed., The Penguin Book of the Beach, with an introduction by Robert Drewe (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1993), 6. 29. Sahlia Ben-Messahel, Mind the Country: Tim Winton’s Fiction (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia, 2006), 133. 30. Winton, Land’s Edge, 40. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 9 in masculine competition, the pursuit of the “meanest sunburn,” for example, also implies a carpe diem attitude that unrepentantly ignores its consequences.

Because Winton situates most of his fiction on the Western Australian coast, liminal conditions abound, and this paradigm arises organically from the regional context in which he writes. As he demonstrates in Land’s Edge, however, his use of liminality is neither unconscious nor unreflective. Without using the word limen or its derivatives, he has articulated a philosophical context for his fiction that shares many features with more abstract formulations or theorisations of liminality. Winton views threshold spaces as ideal sites for rites of passage, transformative events and transitions between life-stages, and as possessing a profound spiritual quality that is fundamentally important to the capacity of rites of passage to effect transformation.

1.2 Theories of liminality

In theoretical discourse, liminality is the condition of the threshold—that which is neither in nor out. The threshold lies between defined states: outside and inside, land and sea. The threshold, like the veranda, is neither inside nor outside, but at the same time it also is inside and is outside: neither, yet simultaneously both. Because it does not belong to either side, the liminal space is essentially undefined.

Because it lies between two opposing conditions, however, it is in a sense defined by them, as it is the space between them, of them and yet not of them. Just as “there are roos on the beach and shells out on the plain,” the liminal space contains aspects of the two conditions on either side of it and often enables the passage of elements from one to the other, as an intermediary or transitory state.

In the 1960s and 70s, anthropologist Victor Turner was the first to develop a CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 10 theory of liminality, which ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep first articulated in his 1909 text Les rites de passage. Because his focus is on rites of passage, Turner refers to the liminal period, using temporal rather than spatial

vocabulary. He is concerned with the “period of margin or ‘liminality’” in rites of passage between the ritual subject’s separation from the social order and his return to it with a new social status.31 The rite of passage is fundamentally a process of

change or transformation, from one “state” to another: from childhood to adulthood, from single to married life; or initiation from society at large into a

smaller cultural subgroup, religious order, or political office.32 For Turner, the limen is a period of transition rather than a line or border.

It is the character of the liminal “period” that most interests Turner. In his formulation, during the liminal period, subjects stand outside the social order, no longer possessed of their former status but not yet having achieved the next. The liminal period “has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state.”33 Subjects are therefore ambiguous, “no longer classified and not yet classified” by the

social order, “neither one thing nor another; or may be both.”34 For Turner, the liminal phase is “essentially unstructured (...at once destructured and prestructured)” from the perspective of social schemes of categorisation.35 In the liminal phase of rites of passage, the subjects’ no-longer-and-not-yet status appears symbolically in two ways: by their association with death—“no longer” living in society—for example by being coloured black or buried, identified with the earth; and by their association with gestation and parturition —“not yet” among the living—for example sequestered in huts that resemble wombs.36 Subjects often must

31. Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93. 32. Ibid., 94–5. 33. Ibid., 94. 34. Ibid., 96, 97. 35. Ibid., 98. 36. Ibid., 96, 99. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 11 submit to some greater authority, and to remain silent, surrendering the power of language.37 Turner emphasises that one of the significant aspects of the liminal phase is its invitation to the liminars38 to reconsider and re-evaluate the received truths of their society—e.g., mythology, symbolism, gender roles—from a new and supposedly freer perspective. He calls liminality “the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence” and where the most important element is “the analysis of culture into factors and their free recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird...rather than the establishment of implicit syntax-like [social-structural] rules or the development of an internal structure of logical relations of opposition and mediation.”39 As the liminal state is unstructured in terms of cultural definitions and symbols, those codes do not determine the liminars’ analysis and understanding of their culture.

Because Turner is principally writing about rites of passage, however, the liminal period is always followed by “aggregation,” the assimilation of the liminars back

into the social structure at a different position than that from which they left it. While Turner calls the liminal phase “a realm of pure possibility whence novel

configurations of ideas and relations may arise,” in every instance those novel configurations emerge from the values affirmed by the social order in which the initiation takes place.40 Standard cultural definitions of “reality” are dissolved—or,

perhaps more accurately, suppressed, or masked—in the liminal state, and “aberrant possibilities reveal...the value of what has hitherto been regarded as the

37. Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti- Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 103. 38. I.e., the subjects of the rite of passage; persons in a liminal condition. Turner has also used the term “liminaries” to refer to such persons. See “Variations on a Theme of Liminality,” in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), 37 39. Turner, “Betwixt,” 105; Victor Turner, “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas,” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 255. 40. Turner, “Betwixt,” 97. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 12 somewhat tedious daily round.”41 The “novel configurations” are only novel to the eyes of the liminars, and function as masks that reveal and reinforce the values cherished by the society. Turner attempts to demonstrate that the liminal phase is unstructured, but its outcome is highly structured, as the liminars’ post-liminal state is pre-determined—or at least limited to a narrow few possibilities. Because a limen lies between two conditions, and because, especially in rites of passage, society

determines which two conditions can be adjacent, the limen cannot be totally free-form or a completely “free and experimental region of culture.”42 The pre- and post-liminal conditions, to use Turner’s vocabulary, determine the nature of the liminal; if they did not, liminars’ return to society would be chaotic, as the pre-liminal state could not determine the post-liminal state, nor could a society constrain the nature of the latter. In fact, any aggregation to society could not be certain at all; if liminars were truly free to combine cultural forms at will, they might choose not to rejoin society but might remain in a liminal state perpetually.43 Instead, Turner’s “esthetic of discovery” that at first glance seems to mean free experimentation indicates rather the exposure of initiands in a rite of passage to the sacra (literally “sacred things”), the sacred objects imbued with profound and

non-verbal meaning by his culture.44 It is that aspect of the liminal phase in which liminars are “alternately forced and encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them. Liminality may be partly

described as a stage of reflection.”45 In post-Turnerian liminal theory, the category of sacra need not be limited to physical objects for the principle to remain; in

Turner’s theory, in fact, the sacra are a means of causing reflection upon received cultural truth. Within liminal conditions, the “passengers” (another of Turner’s

41. Turner, “Variations,” 38. 42. Turner, “Passages,” 255. 43. See ibid., 261. 44. Turner, “Passages,” 239, 263; Turner, “Betwixt,” 102–3. 45. Turner, “Betwixt,” 105. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 13 terms for those passing through a liminal phase), caught in the tension between two contradictory qualities (boyhood and manhood, within and without, sea and land), are allowed, even compelled, to confront the contradictions and the epistemological categories that give rise to them. Turner takes as his quintessential rite of passage the passage from youth to manhood and constructs a “typical” rite, consisting of three stages: the separation of the ritual subject from ordinary society; the liminal period, which is the rite proper; and the reassimilation of the subject into society, which Turner calls

“aggregation.”46 In the separation stage, subjects must symbolically die in order to detach themselves from their social status; in the aggregation stage, they must symbolically be born in order to acquire their new positions in society. During the intervening liminal period, therefore, subjects are ritually associated with both death and birth. They may be “buried, forced to lie motionless in the posture and direction of customary burial, may be stained black, or may be forced to live for a while in the company of masked and monstrous mummers representing, inter alia, the dead, or worse still, the un-dead.”47 This mimicry of death corresponds to the “no longer” aspect of Turner’s liminal theory: they are no longer living. In the “not yet” aspect, subjects may symbolically take the role of embryos or newborn infants. In fact, Turner notes that both death and birth may be present simultaneously under the same signs, so that subjects may live in a hut that is simultaneously a womb and a tomb; by lunar symbolism, as the moon waxes and wanes; or by nakedness, which is the condition of both the newborn and the corpse awaiting burial.48 This duality of symbolism is characteristic of the liminal, which is “neither this nor that, and yet is both.” The simultaneous occupation of a single sign-space by two opposing meanings is what makes the liminal condition as powerful as it is.

46. Turner, “Passages,” 232; Turner, “Betwixt,” 94; Turner, “Variations,” 36. 47. Turner, “Betwixt,” 96. 48. Ibid., 99. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 14

Philosopher and historian of religion Mircea Eliade points out that there is a difference between age-group rites of passage (the transition from adolescence to adulthood, for example) and initiation into social subgroups such as political office or religious societies: while the latter apply only to certain number of individuals, everyone must undergo the passage to adulthood, and by extension the other “life-crises” Turner identifies: birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, and death.49

For Eliade, the essential element of passage to adulthood especially is its elevation of the human being to a religious state; that is, the rite of passage implies that a man

is not complete as he is in a secular, adolescent state, but that in order to “become a man in the proper sense he must die to this first (natural) life and be reborn to a

higher life, which is at once religious and cultural.”50 Here Eliade echoes Turner, in that death and rebirth are common symbols in rites of passage. One must die to society, pass through a liminal period of being-and-not-being, and be born to a new

place in society. Eliade writes that “one does not become a complete man until one has passed beyond, and in some sense abolished, ‘natural’ humanity.”51

Eliade sees the limen as essentially a space of passage between opposites, rather than primarily a temporal phase. He writes that the threshold of the church or

temple “is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes

possible.”52 It is thus simultaneously a border and a space, but a space of crossing. Eliade further argues that the threshold “indicates the distance between two modes

of being” rather than only their contiguity. This “distance” is not physical, but the ontological difference between self and other, here and there. The narrowness of the

49. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (1957; New York: Harvest, 1959), 186; Turner, “Betwixt,” 94. 50. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 187. 51. Ibid., 187, emphasis added. 52. Ibid., 25. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 15 border between the two emphasises the gulf between their natures.

In fact, Eliade goes on to suggest that the sacred space itself is the threshold, because “properly speaking, the temple constitutes an opening in the upward direction and ensures communication with the world of the gods. . . communication with heaven [is] the paradoxical point of passage from one mode of being to another.”53 Here communication is a form of passage and therefore has a liminal quality or functions within liminal spaces. This suggests Winton’s spiritual experience of the shore line and the ocean, where he “understands the Christian mystics,” and it also reflects his representation of both the ocean and the desert as liminal, spiritual places as well as the threshold between them that is the beach.

An important function of spirituality or the sacred in Eliade’s writing is that of orientation. He writes that “nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation—and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point”; that is, orientation is necessary in order to know one’s current state and is always relative to an external, stable referent.54 This fixed point of orientation for Eliade is the sacred—space or time—because the sacred is “the only real and real-ly [sic] existing space” because it is eternal, unchanging, and not subject to the chaos of the every-day; it is an “absolute reality.”55 Thus the revelation of the sacred “is equivalent to the founding of the world” and of human capacity for identity in relation to and living in that world. Eliade writes that life “is not possible without an opening to the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos.”56

For Eliade, then, liminality provides rites of passage, spirituality, and a fundamental orientation necessary for human existence. Indeed, all three are necessary; a person is incomplete without the spiritual component of life, acquired

53. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26. 54. Ibid., 22. 55. Ibid., 20. 56. Ibid., 34. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 16 only by ritual passage through liminality. Conversely, spirituality also provides rites of passage, orientation, and liminal conditions; and rites of passage, as in Turner’s theory, provide orientation and spirituality because of their liminal nature. The interdependence of these elements suggests, in fact, a kind of threshold, a boundary of multi-directional crossing and communication. Turner and Eliade focus their theoretical work on concrete instances of liminality in human society, especially in ritual. Rites of passage and crossings between worlds depend on time and space and human interaction with society and the supernatural.

More recently, theorists have built on the anthropological work of Turner and Eliade, but moved beyond material specifics into abstract and philosophical approaches to the liminal. In an attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of liminality, cultural theorist Manuel Aguirre emphasises the essential characteristic of liminality: “the threshold has meaning only from the spaces adjacent to it.”57 It is not an independent or autonomous space, but one defined by the spaces on either side—yet “it is the great paradox of the threshold that it defines the spaces that beget it,” for the threshold functions as a boundary between two entities, while those two entities create the boundary itself. Aguirre insists, however, that this conventional understanding of the limen as a line between two spaces results in binary interpretations, either-or conditions, “whereas dynamics—crossing, transference, change and interaction—is the whole raison d’ˆetre of the limen.”58 As in Turner’s observations, the threshold therefore becomes not a zero-width border but a space which can be occupied and traversed; unlike Turner, Aguirre explicitly argues that the threshold is a space which partakes of the states on either side of it.59 For example, from the indoor

57. Manuel Aguirre, “Austin’s Cat, and Other Observations Towards a Theory of Thresholds,” in Mapping the Threshold: Essays in Liminal Analysis, ed. Nancy Bredendick (Madrid: Gateway, 2004), 11. 58. Ibid., 9. 59. Ibid., 13. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 17 perspective, the threshold might be “outside,” while from outside it might be

“inside.” The distiction depends on the direction of travel. Similarly, the beach is part of the land or part of the sea depending on the position of the observer. This means that the limen itself is always-already “beyond” or “other,” and the liminal condition is one of passing beyond. Postcolonial and poststructural theorist Homi K. Bhabha takes the crossing and

communication that Eliade describes in his study of the liminal as crucial to the development of identity. He extrapolates from Turner’s anthropological theory and

uses it to develop his own theory of liminality in the realm of poststructuralism and identity politics. In Bhabha’s formulation, a boundary between two opposing

conditions is not where something ends, but “the place from which something begins its presencing.”60 The term presencing suggests not only physical contiguity but also the enunciation of self, the articulation of subjectivity.61 The border is

therefore not (only) the furthest demarcation of the self, but (also) the nearest point of the other, that necessary external referent by which the self can begin to be

defined (cf. Eliade above). The border becomes the space occupied by both self’s and other’s articulations of identity, just as, in Aguirre’s terms, a shoreline is “a

shifting strip with ever-shifting contours which make it.. .much more than a mere line.”62 Bhabha writes: “It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective

experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.”63 Further, “identification is a process of identifying with and through another object,

60. Homi K. Bhabha, introduction to The Location of Culture (1994; London: Routledge, 2004), 7. 61. Emily Eakin, “Harvard’s Prize Catch, a Delphic Postcolonialist,” The New York Times (Novem- ber 17, 2001): It can only suggest, however, as Bhabha is notorious for his dense, sometimes im- penetrable jargon. Emily Eakin traces some of the criticisms levelled against Bhabha’s writing. See, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/17/arts/harvard- s- prize- catch- a- delphic- postcolonialist.html. 62. Aguirre, “Austin’s Cat,” 14. 63. Bhabha, introduction to The Location of Culture, 2. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 18 an object of otherness.”64 That is, it is within or across this liminal or “interstitial” space that self and other negotiate the terms of identity in reference to each other. For Bhabha, therefore, as for Turner, Aguirre, and Eliade, the liminal space and the crossing and communication it facilitates are fundamental to identification and the orientation of the self to the rest of the world. Bhabha’s theory of liminality more strongly suggests the “realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” than does Turner’s.65 The “third space” that Bhabha describes is one of hybridisation, the combination of mutually opposing identities within the interstitial limen of contact, conflict, and negotiation, to create a new form that identifies at once with both of its progenitors and with neither. Not only new cultural forms, however, but new ways of thinking emerge from this interstitial space, because “hybridity is precisely about the fact that when a new situation, a new alliance formulates itself, it may demand that you should translate your principles, rethink them, extend them.”66 Where in Turner’s theory the liminal space invites reflection upon cultural values because it is inhabited by unfamiliar forms, Bhabha here argues that such reflection is not limited to the liminal; the liminal space gives rise to new forms which can then cross its borders and require acknowledgment and accommodation by the postliminal state —here allowing “postliminal” to refer to temporal or spatial conditions on either side of a limen, and crossing in either direction. That is, for

Turner what occurs in the liminal period remains there, while for Bhabha it can and does extend far beyond it.

Against these variously abstract theories, Winton grounds his ideas of liminality in very specific geographic and cultural realities. In Winton’s view, the tension

64. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Third Space: Community, Culture, Difference,” By Johnathan Ruther- ford, in Identity (London: Lawrence / Wishart, 1990), 211. 65. Turner, “Betwixt,” 97. 66. Bhabha, “The Third Space,” 216. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 19 between land and sea, between the bush and the surf of south-western Australia, resists the “occlusion of ‘the real’” that is the danger of the universalist tendencies of theorists such as those cited above.67 Winton does not write about liminality in

Western Australia; he writes about Western Australia, and its liminal spaces form integral components of that landscape and culture that fascinate him and lend a sense of cohesion to his writing.

1.3 Ad hoc rites of passage

Rites of passage as Turner and Eliade describe them are events defined and prescribed by cultures for specific ends. They have the force of tradition behind them, and their results have the support of cultural sanction. In the case of rites of passage for life crises—birth, puberty, marriage, and death—it is expected in such cultures that most if not all members of the culture will undergo the same rituals, for the same reasons; will pass through the same liminal spaces; and will rejoin society with the same new status. When a boy reaches a certain, socially agreed-upon age, he will undergo the same ritual as other boys his age, and usually the same ritual as generations of boys have undergone before him; having completed the ritual, he is by definition a man. This creates an ordered society in which the status and nature of every member is known within the society’s categories and epistemology. Because such social orders and rites of passage are inextricably bound up with religion, each member is also placed within the society’s cosmology.68 In the modern West, however, this is no longer the case. Eliade and Turner emphasise the inherent connections between rites of passage and religion in the cultures they study, and these are cultures that typically comprise a single unified social and religious order. Charles Taylor, however, in his study A Secular Age

67. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 21. 68. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 438–9. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 20

(2007), describes the process by which the modern West has fundamentally transformed religion from a social contract into an individual persuasion.69 Where religion, which gives meaning to the social order and therefore also to ritual, ceases to be common belief and practice for society as a whole, rituals become meaningless and are abandoned. In the case of the modern West, where many religions exist side by side along with the absence of religion itself in the public sphere,70 rituals (such as rites of passage) practiced within any one religious context have no significance beyond the sphere of those individuals who choose that context; that is, rites of passage are only meaningful to the individuals who choose to participate in them, rather than the society that (no longer) enforces them.

The task of enabling transitions through life therefore devolves on the individual, and this is the kind of rite of passage that Winton writes throughout his fiction. The world that his characters inhabit is (almost always) recognisably that of

Western Australia, which suffers a double “disenchantment” of the excision of the spiritual dimension of human life: in the project of colonisation, white settlers declared the land empty and thereby attempted to erase the spiritual connection of the Aboriginal peoples with the land; and the settlers had themselves by that time already been long severed from any form of indigenous spirituality of their own by the Reformation, which Taylor cites as one of the major turning points of Latin Christendom away from a comprehensive social religious order toward an individualistic, private spiritual preference.71 Similarly, Tony Grey writes:

The supremacy of science over traditional religious explanations of phenomena, together with some spectacularly bad policy decisions, had secularised most of our society. The result is, for many, the closing off of

formal or ritual outlets to express the spiritual dimension, often leading 69. Taylor, A Secular Age, 147–9; Jupp, “A Religious Society? Belief and Disbelief in Australia,” 6–7. 70. Taylor, A Secular Age, 1. 71. Ibid. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 21

to frustrations or even bizarre perversions.72

Winton’s characters, therefore, have inherited no singular socially sanctioned rites of passage to give order and structure to their lives or to mark life crises. They must improvise rites of passage as needed; or even happen upon them accidentally, and even sometimes without being aware that a rite of passage is taking place. Taylor also notes that in societies that have not suffered this “disenchantment,” their shared religious framework tends to have an intimate relationship with the land they inhabit, its geography and landmarks;73 Winton’s fiction, therefore, conversely reflects an anxiety toward the Western Australian landscape and an intense desire to form a new, spiritual connection with the land through rites of passage. Taylor

describes the way modern religions

have tried to avoid the movement to what I call “excarnation”, the transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship,

practice, so that it comes more and more to reside “in the head”. The resistance to excarnation takes various forms. Yogic practice is one

example. But we also see a host of earlier rituals which have been continued with a new meaning or transformed. In the classic equilibrium

of the “higher” civilizations, prior to the Reform of Latin Christendom, many of the pre-Axial forms of collective ritual were integrated into the new religion; and the new disciplines of the minority of religious

“virtuosi” also had an important place for bodily expression; not just yogic practice, but also the rituals and forms of cenobitic life.

The aim is, not to return to the earlier sacralizations of sex and violence, but to find new forms of collective ritual; rites of passage;

72. Tony Grey, Jabiluka: The Battle to Mine Australia’s Uranium (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994), 284; Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolo- nial Nation (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 63. 73. Taylor, A Secular Age, 150. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 22

individual and small group disciplines of prayer, fasting, devotion; modes

of marking time; new ways of living conjugal sexual life; and new works of healing and sharing, which could give bodily and at times public

expression to the worship of God; or the search for Nirvana, or for Moksha.74

Taylor points out that resistance to “excarnation” takes place in “collective ritual,” that is, ritual performed by a community. This does not mean that an entire community undergoes a rite of passage, but that a rite of passage requires a community from which the initiand becomes separated and which he or she rejoins after the liminal phase. Furthermore, it is not enough for the individual to leave the community, pass through a liminal state, and rejoin the community; the community must have some part and influence in the nature of the liminal phase, must provide meaning and motivation for the ritual, and must recognise the transformation upon the individual’s return. The liminal spaces in Winton’s fiction serve, in part, to provide the “third spaces” where the “new forms” Taylor describes here can develop, in the same way that Bhabha sees newness entering the world. These new forms are, in Winton, ways of negotiating a spiritual connection and belonging to the land.

This study will explore the ways those liminal spaces figure in Winton’s fiction, in comparison with his own stated philosophy in Land’s Edge and other sources,

such as interviews; and with the theories of Turner, Eliade, Aguirre, and Bhabha. Chapter 2 will begin with three of Winton’s early short stories. “Lantern Stalk”

presents rites of passage similar to those described by Turner, and incorporates a spiritual dimension that reflects not only Turner’s theories but also Eliade’s notion

that becoming a man is a spiritual transition, yet Winton calls into question the desirability of becoming “a man” and demonstrates that the liminal space enables a

74. Taylor, A Secular Age, 613–4, emphasis added. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 23 healthier option. In “Wilderness,” the rite of passage likewise draws heavily on spiritual elements to effect change in its characters, emphasising the uncanny nature of the liminal phase. In “Laps,” the main character invokes the liminal space of the beach to accomplish a significant personal transformation. All three stories figure the liminal in the landscape as well as in more abstract forms, and all three show a certain optimism that such improvised rites of passage can effect meaningful transition and change. Chapter 3 will focus on Winton’s magnum opus, Cloudstreet. In this novel

Winton’s use of liminal conditions is varied and wide-ranging both in its representations—how Winton establishes liminal spaces—and in the effect of such

spaces on the narrative. Cloudstreet concerns primarily the coming-of-age of Western Australia into its regional identity, and rites of passage figure prominently in its representations of liminality; individual transitions such as those from boyhood

to manhood abound, but so too do collective or communal transitions that affect entire families and communities. Interstitial spaces in Cloudstreet provide sites of

renegotiation not just of individual but of communal and even national identity, as the nation itself comes of age, represented microcosmically in the liminal conditions

in and around the house at Number 1, Cloud Street. Here, however, individual transformation depends on communal context and cannot occur in isolation. Chapter 4 will examine Winton’s novel Breath, whose action takes place almost entirely on beaches and the surf. It is a coming-of-age novel, describing a rite of passage that directly addresses questions of manhood and spirituality. Breath also

critiques ad hoc forms of rites of passage and spirituality, for here they do occur in isolation, lacking any kind of communal oversight. This suggests that without such

social context rites of passage fail to effect positive change, and the lack of such a context can be disastrous. Here Winton offers a harsh critique of contemporary Australian attempts to construct meaningful identity, especially masculine identity, CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 24 in liminal rites of passage. While these concerns echo throughout his body of work,

Breath represents a growing cynicism toward the validity of such constructions, both for individuals and for society. Chapter 2

Short Fiction

In Winton’s early short fiction, rites of passage are hopeful events. The characters who experience liminal conditions tend to achieve transitions or transformations as direct results of those liminal experiences, and those transformations are generally positive, desirable, and empowering. Winton is not content, however, to follow Turner’s tripartite ritual structure of separation, liminality, and return too closely; he alters it, interrupts it, extends it, and reinterprets it for his characters (and readers) in contemporary Western Australia. He also often omits the stage of re-aggregation, leaving it to the reader’s imagination. Like Turner, who is far more interested in the liminal phase and all but ignores the return of the subject to society, Winton focuses on the experiences that lead his characters to transformation and tends to imply rather than state explicitly the effects of those transformations on individuals and communities.

In three short stories, the transformative power and spiritual nature of liminal space come to the foreground. “Lantern Stalk” describes a traditional masculine rite of passage into which a more unconventional yet more effective one intrudes, resulting in nested rites of passage and liminal conditions that call into question issues of masculinity and religious tradition. In “Wilderness,” characters experience

25 CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 26 transformation in liminal space in the bush, where uncanny elements force them to re-evaluate their assumptions and outlook. In “Laps,” an improvised rite of passage takes place at the beach in order to effect a healing transformation.

2.1 “Lantern Stalk”

Optimism pervades the story “Lantern Stalk” (Scission, 1985). Here, Winton describes a rite of passage bearing marked similarities to Turner’s ritual structure, which functions as an unofficial yet socially organised and approved initiation to manhood. Indeed, this story comes closest of any of Winton’s works to reflecting the ritual structure of separation-liminality-return; significantly, it also presents, and, to some degree, seems to challenge, one of the most traditional forms of masculinity to appear in Winton’s writing. The adolescent Egg participates in a military activity called a lantern stalk, in which cadets attempt to reach a lantern undetected by their officers. Egg becomes disoriented and stumbles upon an isolated farmstead, where he participates in a naming ceremony for a newborn baby. After this ceremony, Egg hears the sound of a truck horn, the signal to end the lantern stalk and to summon him to rejoin the cadets. At the end of the story, it is clear that Egg has undergone a significant and positive transition from an adolescent state to a more mature one.

Yet Winton alters the straight-forward tripartite ritual structure that Turner describes. There are, in fact, two rites of passage represented in “Lantern Stalk.”

The first is the lantern stalk itself and Egg’s participation in the cadet organisation.1 This rite of passage reflects the ritual structure described by Turner, comprising phases of separation, liminality, and re-aggregation. It is also heavily invested with notions of masculinity and hierarchy, which reinforce the formal structure of the ritual. 1. The cadet organisation is not named, but it is probably the Australian Army Cadets. Compare Egg’s experience in “Lantern Stalk” with that of Vic Lang in“Immunity,” in The Turning (Australia: Picador, 2004; Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006), 293–98 CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 27

The lantern stalk is a highly structured ritual, which begins with a troop of adolescent boys participating in their regular cadet activities.2 The cadets are transported to a remote location, and a horn sounds, formally marking the

beginning of the lantern stalk.3 The boys separate and venture into the bush, completing the separation phase of the ritual and entering the liminal. Turner writes that some form of invisibility, whether literal or symbolic, is typical of the

liminal phase of rites of passage,4 and the darkness renders the cadets invisible. The objective of the lantern stalk is to reach the lantern undetected by the officers—that

is, they are to remain invisible from the moment they are separated from the community (the officers) until the moment they reach the lantern.

The lantern stalk is a test, and as such it fits neatly into Turner’s description of rites of passage. He notes that in some aboriginal American cultures, “boys on their lonely Vision Quest inflicted ordeals and tests on themselves...due to obedience to

the authority of tradition.”5 These tests determine whether the liminar is qualified to assume a given post-liminal status, and part of those qualifications is obedience

to tradition; that is, if one is not obedient, one is not suited to the status in question, regardless of one’s ability to complete the tasks assigned. In the lantern

stalk, besides being required to obey orders, the cadets are tested on their ability to evade detection as a military exercise; failure to evade detection means failure to pass the test and the premature ending of the rite of passage—two of the cadets fail

early, when an officer’s voice barks, “Middleton and Smythe—you’re dead! Back to the truck.”6

The location of the lantern stalk further emphasises its liminal quality. The boys are “trucked out into the hills by the sea,” where Egg can smell the sea, “a long way

2. Tim Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” in Scission (Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1985; London: Picador, 2003), 42. 3. Ibid., 45. 4. Turner, “Betwixt,” 95. 5. Ibid., 100. 6. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 45. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 28 off.”7 The smell of the sea from a distance, inland, mirrors Winton’s own frequent reliance on this orientation toward the coastline even in its absence and his awareness of it as a liminal space.8 This spatial liminality reinforces the cadets’ invisibility and therefore their participation in a rite of passage. The procedures and mechanics of the lantern stalk are highly structured, reflecting the rigid hierarchy of the cadet organisation, but its purpose is not clearly articulated: the officers do not say why this activity is taking place. There are, however, hints that the stalk supports ideas of masculinity and manhood, if only by implication. Captain Temby addresses the cadets as “men,” eliciting a cheer because “they liked to be called men.”9 Manhood is also at least one motivation of

Egg’s mother in her insisting that he first join the cadets and second participate in the lantern stalk: she “said it would make a man of him.”10 His mother’s concern with a traditional form of masculinity is reflected in Egg’s awareness that “people said she wore the pants” in her marriage.11 Masculinity and manhood therefore seem to be issues that Egg and the other cadets have in their consciousness as they set out to stalk the lantern in the hills by the sea, and “the bush has traditionally been seen as the site of masculine identity.”12 This makes this ritual very similar to those that Turner describes; in fact, the passage from adolescence to manhood is Turner’s principal example of rites of passage.13 A second rite of passage interrupts this structured, militaristic, and traditionally masculine ritual. This one, however, does not so clearly follow Turner’s ritual structure; instead, it is much less formally structured and develops organically within the liminal phase of the lantern stalk. It thus suggests a model of liminality

7. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 43, 45. 8. Winton, Land’s Edge, 34. 9. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 42. 10. Ibid., 42–3. 11. Ibid., 45. 12. Beth Watzke, “On the Verge: Place in the Early Fiction of Tim Winton,” in Reading Tim Winton, ed. Richard Rossiter and Lyn Jacobs (Sydney: Angus / Robertson, 1993), 16. 13. Turner, “Betwixt,” passim. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 29 more like those of Aguirre and Bhabha, in which liminal space allows freedom to discover new ideas, rather than that of Turner in which tradition predetermines discoveries within liminal space.

The second rite of passage does follow Turner’s ritual structure, though loosely. The separation phase occurs when Egg, crawling through the dark bush to avoid detection, falls over a steep bank and loses sight of the lantern.14 Winded, dizzy, and disoriented, he leaves the lantern stalk and walks for some time openly and “brazenly...for the sake of getting it over with.”15 He is “tired of playing soldiers” and feels no further obligation to obey the authority of the officers by continuing to play by the rules of the lantern stalk. The pre-liminal phase of the second rite of passage corresponds to the liminal phase of the first. The liminal phase of this second rite of passage begins when Egg sees a light in the darkness. He follows it, at first believing it to be the lantern but soon discovering that it is light from the windows of a farmhouse.16 He has become lost and is beyond the social order of the cadets and the rules of the lantern stalk. In this new liminal phase, he does not know what, if any, rules apply, and his discoveries are not pre-determined. Instead, he is free to observe something he has never seen before. What he sees, and comes to participate in, is a naming ceremony for a newborn baby. This, too, is a rite of passage, marking a “life crisis,”17 but Egg is not the ritual subject. He is one of the community—even as he remains the liminal subject of his own rite of passage (which is still contained within yet another rite of passage). The features of the naming ceremony also contribute to Egg’s liminal phase and, again, echo characteristics that Turner identifies in rites of passage. This rite focuses on spirituality and integration in an egalitarian community, rather than

14. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 46. 15. Ibid., 47. 16. Ibid. 17. Turner, “Betwixt,” 94. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 30 the aggressively militaristic masculinity and hierarchy of the lantern stalk. The ceremony itself is explicitly religious, in that the community “claim[s] God’s promises for this baby” and commit to “the sacred duty of raising this kid up to hear God.”18 Their sharing bread and wine reflects the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, yet Egg notes that this is no orthodox Christian service: instead, it is “like a secret society, a Resistance meeting.”19 By such invocations, the farming

community has created a sacred, and therefore liminal space.20 By standing in a semicircle around the fireplace,21 and by including Egg without asking who he is or

how he comes to be in the middle of the bush,22 they have eliminated all social distinctions between individuals and flattened social difference.23 Egg’s vision of

ducklings peeping from between the folds of a woman’s dressing-gown, where she is keeping them warm,24 and his discovery that the “white parcel” in one man’s arms is a baby, suggest the “revelation of sacra.”25 This liminal space therefore has much

in common with what Turner describes, even as it seems to be a more revolutionary and counter-cultural space of possibility.

The differences between the two rites show in Egg’s reactions to them. Egg describes the cadet troop and the lantern stalk as “playing soldiers” and “a game

they could play without shame.”26 It becomes clear, however, that his participation is not entirely voluntary and that he does not enjoy either the lantern stalk or the cadets generally: “His mother had insisted he come. He was bewildered. So many

pieces of equipment. Everything proceeded too fast.”27 Similarly, “Egg had found

18. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 48. 19. Ibid., 49. 20. Hein Viljoen, “Journeys from the Liminal to the Sacred in the Interior of South Africa,” in Beyond the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature, ed. Hein Viljoen and Chris N. van der Merwe (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 194. 21. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 47. 22. Ibid., 50. 23. Turner, “Betwixt,” 99, 100. 24. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 48. 25. Turner, “Betwixt,” 102. 26. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 42. 27. Ibid. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 31 make-believe soldiering fun at first,” suggesting that he no longer finds it fun.28

Indeed, once the lantern stalk is under way, Egg lies on the ground in the dark to avoid being seen and has “the inclination to just go to sleep there and then, give the

whole thing a miss. The whole exercise was stupid.”29 As a result of this apathy, Egg does not pay close attention to where he is going, and consequently falls over a bank, which leads him to the farmstead. It is at this point that Egg begins to have

stronger emotional reactions to events: “His heart felt engorged... He was afraid.”30 Throughout the ceremony in the farmhouse, these feelings persist, and when his turn comes to hold and bless the baby, “Egg felt panic. ... His knees creaked. He wanted to run away.”31 During the celebration that follows the ceremony, profound emotions continue to assail Egg: “He could do nothing but stand and watch and listen and feel the panic of wonder. ... He was dizzy; it was the light-headedness of the jogger.”32 This difference in Egg’s reactions to the two

rites of passage suggests that he does not take the lantern stalk seriously, while the naming ceremony has a profound effect on him. The lantern stalk is “a game” and

“make-believe,” while the naming ceremony is “serious business.”33 While the lantern stalk is apparently heavily invested with issues of adolescence and

masculinity, as a rite of passage it is contrived and artificial. For all its structure and organisation, its precise purpose is vague—it is form without function. This artificiality is reinforced by the fact that the cadets’ officers are described as

“teachers in fancy dress,” as if they are wearing costumes that do not match their true identities.34 Similarly, the sergeant major is “a school prefect and he played full

back in the school [rugby] team”—he, too, is playing a role not his own, and Egg’s

28. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 43, emphasis added. 29. Ibid., 45. 30. Ibid., 47. 31. Ibid., 49. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Ibid., 49. 34. Ibid., 42. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 32 identification of him with the school team draws attention to the fact that the lantern stalk is a game rather than a serious ritual undertaking.35 In contrast, the ceremony in the farmhouse seems particularly honest. One woman wears a pink

dressing-gown; the baby’s father is crying with undisguised emotion; and the man leading the ceremony is not concerned with formal language even in this solemn ceremony: “What I was gunna say is that this kid is a bloody miracle. ... er...Bill,

what’s the [child’s] name again?”36 The use of slang and the lack of “fancy dress” suggest a simple sincerity in contrast to the cadets’ preoccupation with appearances

and performance of received hierarchical roles. Similarly, the precise relationship of this naming ceremony to orthodox Christian ritual is uncertain. It contains

elements of baptism, in the pledge of the adults to raise the child “to hear God,” but no baptism—immersion in or pouring of water—occurs. Instead, the ritual has an ad hoc quality, as if its structure is less important than its implications for the

community. The wine and bread of communion seem to pre-figure, rather than precede, the “beer and cake” of the celebration.37 Where the lantern stalk suggests

form over function, in the naming ceremony function is far superior to form. Egg therefore begins in an artificial rite of passage and falls—literally—into one

that is sincere and authentic. He realises that he is “stalking the wrong light.”38 On the literal level, he is stalking the light from the farmhouse when he is meant to be stalking the lantern set up by the cadet officers. When read retrospectively,

however, this passage suggests that “the wrong light” is the lantern he has been stalking until this point: his pursuit of it and of the values of the cadets is a wrong

undertaking. That he “pressed ahead anyway” once he realises he is not stalking the cadets’ lantern suggests that he places more value in discovering the source and

significance of this new light than in the lantern stalk that was his erstwhile

35. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 42. 36. Ibid., 48. 37. Ibid., 50. 38. Ibid., 47. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 33 objective.39 Given his disinterest in the lantern stalk, this is not surprising.

According to Turner, this kind of experimental discovery is one of the possible functions of liminal space: “any action or process undertaken to discover something

not yet known... In liminality, new ways of acting, new combinations of symbols, are tried out, to be discarded or accepted.”40 Here Egg chooses to experiment, to investigate the source of the light he has discovered.

This light is not merely the light of a Tilley lamp and a fireplace streaming from the farmhouse windows, but something more profound. The naming ceremony is

explicitly religious. It is also linked with the Christian ritual of communion, and at the end of the ceremony the group says, “Amen.”41 Therefore the new “light” that

Egg has discovered in the liminal space of this farmhouse suggests the light of God, in contrast to the “wrong light” of the cadets’ pursuit of masculinity. This new-found spirituality echoes Winton’s own references to the “great speaking

silence” and “that sense that there is something bigger” than material existence: Egg “was more than himself. He felt deeper and wider. He felt as though he was

more.”42 His participation in the ritual in the farmhouse allows him to experience spiritual growth into “more” than he was, in a way that the cadet activities have

not granted. This theme of growth and expansion appears in the central figures of the story—Egg and the newborn baby. The name “Egg,” short for “Eggleston,” calls to

mind the image of a single living cell that, when fertilised and nourished, grows, expands, and develops into a complex creature. In his pre-liminal state, Egg is this

undeveloped egg. The rite of passage he experiences in the liminal space of the farmhouse, however, represents his birth into existence as a more developed human

being, the expansion of the egg into something “more” as a result of nourishment or

39. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 47. 40. Turner, “Variations,” 40. 41. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 49, 50. 42. Winton, “Wachtel,” 65; Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 50. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 34 fertilisation. That fertilisation is the result of the explicit religiosity of the naming ceremony, for it contrasts with Egg’s previous lack of spirituality. His mother has kept Egg away from church because of her contempt for what she perceives as her husband’s deficient masculinity.43 In the liminal space of the farmhouse, Egg experiences a new form of spirituality, and it moves him and effects a profound change in his confidence and sense of self, making him feel “more” than he was. The emphasis on growth from egg to a more human Egg is underscored by the fact that the religious ceremony he discovers is a naming ceremony for a baby, who is protected and nourished by the spirituality of the community members who pledge to raise him. By proxy, they pledge to raise Egg “to hear God” as well; during and following the ritual, Egg’s sense of self expands as he is “born” in response to the “something bigger” that the farmers invoke in their religious language. This expanded consciousness, brought about by a rite of passage in the liminal space of a remote, isolated farmstead, displaces Egg’s adolescent anxieties about school, girls, and the stability of his parents’ marriage. Those thoughts, which occupy him during the lantern stalk, disappear once he discovers the farmhouse and the new experiences he finds therein, and eventually give way to a consciousness of himself as more—of greater potential and greater confidence—than he had hitherto imagined. When he hears the horn signalling the end of the lantern stalk, Egg leaves the celebration and steps outside, and his worries have vanished: “The locked

fingers of his ribcage relaxed. He was not afraid. He...began to run.”44 Winton does not tell the reader where Egg is running, nor why. The final phase of the second rite of passage (viz., Egg’s discovery of the farmhouse ritual) would be his return to the lantern stalk. He hears the truck horn that was prescribed to mark the end of the lantern stalk,45 and leaves the party.46 Winton does not include this

43. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 44. 44. Ibid., 51. 45. Ibid., 43. 46. Ibid., 50. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 35 re-aggregation in the story, however; the story ends at the moment Egg leaves the party in the farmhouse. In what manner Egg rejoins the cadets remains unwritten, only hinted at by his experiences in the liminal space of the farmhouse, and complicated by the fact that with the sounding of the truck’s horn, the lantern stalk has already ended before he can return. However, the lack of fear and the act of running suggest a confidence that is not present in Egg’s earlier inattentive crawling. Egg has been transformed by his experience in the farmhouse, in the liminal space and the ritual that occurs there. He has failed the lantern stalk, since he has not reached the lantern before the horn sounds, but he has achieved something else that he seems to find more valuable.

2.2 “Wilderness”

In “Wilderness” (Scission, 1985), two separate rites of passage develop in the liminal space of the bush when the paths of different characters intersect. A husband and wife have been hiking through the bush, and they discover that a third character has hacked a clearing and begun building a dwelling. Their decision to investigate leads them to a transformative and hopeful rite of passage even as the dwelling’s builder undergoes his own eagerly anticipated transition. In this story, as in

“Lantern Stalk,” the liminal possesses a spiritual quality, yet here it merges with the frightening and the grotesque.

The liminal moves away from the ocean and into the bush, even more so than in “Lantern Stalk.” For Winton, of course, the ocean is never truly absent, and in this story a reminder comes early on: “They could not see the ocean but they knew it was less than an hour away. They had not come to see it.”47 Even here, the ocean and shoreline serve as points of reference and orientation. Where Winton has noted

47. Tim Winton, “Wilderness,” in Scission (Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1985; London: Picador, 2003), 62. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 36 that Australians recognise the spiritual nature of both ocean and desert but prefer the former,48 in “Wilderness” he turns toward that more threatening mystery. The story “insist[s] on the pressure and attraction of the surrounding bush, which becomes a place of personal revelation and reality.”49 Liminality appears in more complex and subtle forms here than in stories set on or near the sea. Most clearly, it manifests as a marginal space that contrasts with the centre-self of home and civilisation; within the bush, too, a more subtle kind of liminal space is constructed with the intrusion of human space into the bush.

The contrast between civilisation and the bush represents that between centre and margin. Here that margin functions as the “marches” that Aguirre describes as liminal border-spaces,50 and therefore the bush becomes an opened space for the manifestation of difference or newness.51 This space exists in two parallel forms. First, the husband and wife who are walking through the bush use this hobby of bushwalking as an escape both from their jobs as school-teachers and from the ennui of their marriage in which they have nothing in common.52 It takes place in “the ambivalence of the Australian bush—an environment that is situated between Antarctica and civilisation.”53 This ambivalence offers an escape, “a shelter against

the malevolent city.”54 This liminal space is “other,” “loaded with natural and strange sounds.”55 For the story’s other character, the bush is also an “other” space. He first enters the bush in an effort to clear his head and think,56 making it similarly a place for escape from the pressures of the city.57 The attraction of the bush as a spiritual

48. Winton, Land’s Edge, 21. 49. Ben-Messahel, Mind the Country, 101. 50. Aguirre, “Austin’s Cat,” 12. 51. Bhabha, introduction to The Location of Culture, 5; Bhabha, “The Third Space,” 211. 52. Winton, “Wilderness,” 65. 53. Ben-Messahel, Mind the Country, 119. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 166. 56. Winton, “Wilderness,” 79. 57. Ben-Messahel, Mind the Country, 207. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 37 place is already present in his consciousness as a fundamental aspect of Australian existence: the bush/desert exerts an influence on the Australian identity just as the ocean does. This character sees the bush as a place where he can escape the pressures of work, which he believes are causing him a nervous breakdown,58 and subsequently sees the bush as a spiritual centre because it is a liminal space. For the walkers, however, the bush fails to manifest as a liminal phase because they approach their bushwalking hobby in the same aggressively rational manner in which they work and live their daily lives. They use detailed maps and compasses, meticulously plan each route, and never deviate from their schedule.59 The space they traverse is therefore charted and fixed. The possibility of discovering the unknown is further negated by the wife’s habit of reading her bird-identification book as she walks: her husband notes that “While you’ve got your beak in that book you’re not even seeing the birds.”60 They justify their reliance on maps, compasses, timetables, and books with frequent appeals to “common sense,” “logic,” “reason,” “rational learning,” and “certainty.”61 It is only when they encounter the mysterious dwelling that liminality manifests fully, and with it the potential for transformation. The dwelling catches their attention in a way the landscape and wildlife do not precisely because it is out of place. That the intrusion of human construction into the wilderness is disturbing to the walkers is demonstrated by their repeated description of the building as “impossible,”62 their attribution of its construction to a “lunatic” and ”criminal,”63 and their insistence that “it makes no sense.”64 They are also disturbed by their own turning aside from their walk: “they had left their planned route, broken the timetable. In all their

58. Winton, “Wilderness,” 79. 59. Ibid., 65–6, 69. 60. Ibid., 63. 61. Ibid., 64, 68, 74, 82. 62. Ibid., 65. 63. Ibid., 66, 71. 64. Ibid., 65. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 38 walks this was the first time. They had digressed.”65 In their disturbance there is a degree of fear of the uncanny. Sigmund Freud writes that the uncanny (unheimlich) is not that which is merely unfamiliar, but that which is both unfamiliar and yet also secretly familiar, though potentially distorted.66 Here, the dwelling is a familiar type of structure, as the walkers recognise the materials and the kind of structure it is; yet they cannot comprehend the purpose and motivation behind its construction.

The only context they can imagine for building a house in the bush—viz., extreme environmentalism—they reject: “He’s no econut, that’s for sure. Look at the materials, the way he’s hacked the bush.”67 Indeed, the walkers never learn the reason for the construction, as the only person who knows, the builder, dies having spoken only a single word (“No”) to them. The dwelling remains a mystery and therefore unsettling. Yet it undeniably becomes their focus as they are determined to discover its secrets, and it creates a new kind of liminal space. The uncanniness of the dwelling in the bush shocks the walkers out of their comfortable (heimlich) habit of walking from point A to point B and confronts them with something disturbingly different and other. The hacked clearing and the half-finished dwelling become more “real” than the vast expanse of bush through which they have walked inattentively. This enhanced realness begins to mark this space with sacredness. Eliade notes that sacred space is more ontologically real than profane space in part because it is distinct and utterly unlike in character.68 The dwelling so confounds the walkers’ expectations of the bush that it captures their whole attention. This leads to the manifestation of new experiences and even new understandings of themselves and their relationship in a new liminal space created by the intrusion of human works

65. Winton, “Wilderness,” 63. 66. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 245. 67. Winton, “Wilderness,” 72. 68. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 20. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 39 into the natural world.

Having digressed and entered a new liminal space filled with the unfamiliar, the husband and wife experience new perceptions of each other as they lurk in the bush

and watch as the builder collapses. The woman glances at her husband and feels “something turn in her belly. She thought: He looks sort of handsome when something gets his whole attention. ...she was admiring him. ... In that cramped

lair there was a novel intimacy.”69 This excitement and intimacy seem to be unique to the liminal space: “There was none of this at home. Their home was a place of business. No time, no gestures, no thoughts wasted.” Recognising the uncanniness of this sudden intimacy, the woman “felt the impulse to explain their [unusual] behaviour as a means of passing time. But the feeling was hollow.” Ordinary or accustomed behaviours do not carry over to the liminal space because it is essentially different from the pre- and post-liminal spaces.70 Just as Egg discovers new ways of understanding his sense of identity in a liminal space, in this liminal space the woman discovers a new way of relating to her husband that is markedly different from their business-like marriage in which “they had almost nothing in common.”71 The liminal space enables this discovery and the capacity to act on it: the man and woman forget about the unconscious builder and have sex in their hiding place in the bushes. The builder in the clearing wakes and leaves, and the husband and wife resume their normal, practical personae.72 The husband wonders how he will make these events credible when he narrates them to his colleagues.73 They are still concerned to discover the builder’s purpose and unravel the mystery of his construction. For the builder, his motives are not mysterious, but they remain ambiguous.

69. Winton, “Wilderness,” 68, 69. 70. See Turner, “Betwixt,” 97. 71. Winton, “Wilderness,” 65. 72. Ibid., 71–2. 73. Ibid., 73–4. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 40

They are rooted in religious inclinations, though their ultimate purpose is never revealed even to him. Religion and Christian allusions densely permeate “Wilderness.” Yvonne Miels writes that despite the strong presence of a religious element, Winton’s work is “never dogmatic nor evangelical” and that it does not “require an especial familiarity with the Bible or assume a religiously educated reader.”74 In this story, however, Winton employs many references to Christian scripture and imagery, and where he does not quote directly from Christian sources his phrasing often echoes the tone of such works. The builder himself does not seem particularly religious, and he does not understand many of his own impulses. The presence of religious language, however, is consonant with Eliade’s and Turner’s conceptions of the liminal and draws the reader’s attention to the spiritual dimension of the in-between space. The first invocation of religion comes from the walkers. When they first catch sight of the flicker of light from the aluminium frame of the dwelling, the woman thinks, “God, don’t let it be a car,” which idea strikes her as “a desecration.”75

Similarly, when she enters the clearing and sees the dwelling, she exclaims, “My God.”76 These exclamations and the concept of desecration are religious idioms that

conflict with the rationalist, almost utilitarian, outlook that she and her husband espouse: they take up bushwalking as a hobby rather than the Gestalt Club because they are “afraid of religion and expense.”77 Later, when they are hiding in the

bushes, the woman receives bits of chocolate like “a communicant,” that is, in the manner of a Christian receiving communion in the rite of the Eucharist.78

The perspective shifts to the builder, whose interest in religion is more obvious and whose thoughts are filled with Christian allusions. Collapsed from fatigue in the

74. Yvonne Miels, “Singing the Great Creator: The Spiritual in Tim Winton’s Novels,” in Rossiter and Jacobs, Reading Tim Winton, 29. 75. Winton, “Wilderness,” 63. 76. Ibid., 65. 77. Ibid., 66. 78. Ibid., 69. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 41 clearing, he dreams that he is “raised up to Heaven.”79 He wakes “to find himself earthbound, [and] he let out a groan.”80 When he returns, even more exhausted, he feels that “his body was failing him; it did not understand that all things were possible.”81 This echoes Matthew 19:26: “But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.’”82 He prays, “God help, God help me.”83 When he finally collapses, in his delirium he tastes the salt of his sweat and thinks, “Remember...you are salt,” alluding to Matthew 5:13, in which Jesus refers to his followers as “the salt of the earth.” When the walkers loom over the builder in their concern, he sees them as angels.84 But it is not only his exhaustion that brings on his religious thoughts. A year before, after two disturbing hallucinations at work, “he decided to drive out of the city to the hills to think,” and there he experiences a powerful emotional attraction to the bush and hears a voice: “‘Go into the wilderness and wait,’ it said, and the logic of it made him nauseous with excitement and apprehension. He had no doubts as to who had spoken.”85 The disembodied voice, “coming up out of the ground,” evokes both the theophanies of God—e.g., the burning bush in Exodus 3:1–12—and the importance of place in Winton’s fiction, where it “functions...to define, link, and transcend the boundaries of the internal, subjective space of identity with the external, geographical spaces of Western Australia.”86 This linking of the internal with the external—and of God with the man’s hallucinations—raises questions about the nature of the voice and his mental state, yet he has no doubts. He believes that he has been set a divinely ordered mission, which takes over his life. In addition to spending all his weekends and vacation time hacking the clearing and building the

79. Winton, “Wilderness,” 68. 80. Ibid., 70. 81. Ibid., 73. 82. See also Mark 10:27 and Luke 18:27. 83. Winton, “Wilderness,” 73. 84. Ibid., 75. 85. Ibid., 79–80. 86. Watzke, “On the Verge,” 21. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 42 dwelling, he dreams “foreign dreams in strange languages,”87 a kind of subconscious glossolalia. A recurring version of this dream includes the phrase, “Ich kann nicht anders... ,” which is a reference to Martin Luther’s declaration, “It is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here I stand—I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.”88 The builder believes he is doing God’s will, and so his conscience compels him “to build, to measure, to carry, to make” this dwelling.89

Even the repetition of the word “wilderness,” which occurs thirteen times in the text (not including the title), and the instruction to go into the wilderness and wait, invokes the biblical narrative of John the Baptist, who cites the prophet Isaiah’s words, “A voice cries out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”90 Similarly, “wilderness” recalls the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.91 Surrounded by so much religious language, the builder’s structure in the clearing becomes no longer a simple dwelling or shelter but a religious structure: a temple or church. In Eliade’s formulation, a temple is a threshold to communication between the human world and the divine.92 Such communication occurs in the builder’s dream of being lifted up to Heaven, in his vision of the man and woman as angels, and in his eventual death and the ascent of his spirit. Thus, for the builder, the liminal space of the bush, the border-margin, enables the spiritual event toward which he believes he has been working all his life.93

For the walkers, the religious dimension of the liminal space is far more subtle. Their discovery of a new (physical) passion between them reflects the revelation of sacra that Turner describes as a fundamental aspect of the liminal phase of rites of

87. Winton, “Wilderness,” 80. 88. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 13th ed., s.v. “Martin Luther.” 89. Winton, “Wilderness,” 75. 90. Isaiah 40:3, Matthew 3:3, Mark 1:3 91. Matthew 4, Mark 1 92. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 25, 26. 93. Winton, “Wilderness,” 72. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 43 passage, which is also connected to its religious aspects. While there are no formal rites of passage in “Wilderness,” the sequences of events can be understood as subtle variations of Turner’s tripartite ritual structure. As in “Lantern Stalk,” these rites of passage are not communal or social events, but improvised and accidental ones that enable transition and transformation because they happen to follow the same structure that van Gennep and Turner describe. Separation occurs when the walkers digress from their predetermined route in order to investigate the unknown and when the builder goes into the hills to escape his visions. Return or re-aggregation occurs when the builder dies, and when the walkers finish carrying him out of the wilderness.

In between, both the builder and the walkers experience the revelation of sacra through visions, though in very different ways. The builder sees visions of the stars and heavens, of his soul’s ascent, and of angels. These visions validate the religious impulses that have moved him to create the clearing and dwelling through backbreaking labour that ultimately leads to his death from exhaustion.

For the walkers, the revelation of sacra is disturbing rather than validating, yet it is here that Winton hints at the potential and promise of rites of passage. Here again the uncanny appears in two ways. First, the husband and wife perceive the builder not only as mad but also as half-monstrous. From their perspective, he is described as “hunched” and moving “with the hesitancy and weakness of an old man. His coarse breathing was quite audible.”94 Strange noises herald his comings and goings: a “metallic rustle” and a “jarring thud,”95 “the shuffle and creak of the barrow wheel across the clearing, and then...bashing through the scrub.”96 Later, “the undergrowth rattled and snapped and screeched against the metal of the barrow.”97 The builder collapses, “beating futilely on the earth, weeping. The sound

94. Winton, “Wilderness,” 67. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 71. 97. Ibid., 74. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 44 became more and more animal.”98 The walkers also only see him in poor light and

not clearly.99 The combination of describing him and his sounds as both “animal” and “metallic” hints at machinery or an automaton, which, Freud argues, is

uncannily disturbing because of its transgression of the boundary between living and non-living objects.100 He becomes even more monstrous with the implication that he may be a

colleague: like the husband and wife, he is a school-teacher, and when they are carrying him out of the wilderness the wife thinks back to the “warm, sensible staff

room at her school,” which bears a striking resemblance in its description to the staff room in which the builder has his first vision.101 Thus the builder is both

familiar because possibly a co-worker and unfamiliar because distorted by the night and his madness. In the same way, the husband and wife have visions of each other transformed

into monstrous, uncanny versions of themselves. Exhausted by the effort of carrying the sick, dying builder out of the wilderness, they see each other transformed into

figures of the builder himself. The woman perceives her husband’s laboured breathing as “mechanical, hurtful to hear,”102 similar to descriptions of the builder’s

breathing, and she avoids looking at her husband because “in his fatigue he looked as mad as the man they were carrying.”103 Similarly:

Her husband saw the mask of her face. It had begun to remind him

of the mummified monster he saw in a film as a child. The image had terrified him and his father had laughed coming out of the cinema. His

laugh had sounded so confident, so matter-of-fact, and as he grew he

98. Winton, “Wilderness,” 74. 99. Ibid., 76. During the day, the builder is unconscious face-down, and the walkers remain in hiding in the bushes, unable to see him closely. 100. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 227. 101. Winton, “Wilderness,” 81–2, 79. 102. Ibid., 78. 103. Ibid. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 45

came to remember his unreasonable fear with disdain. But he felt it

again now when his wife’s tortured face came into his vision, stronger with each step as the light grew.104

Turner notes that in rites of passage the display of sacra is often accomplished by the use of grotesque imagery,105 sometimes including masks,106 in order to reveal fundamental truths about a culture. Here, visions of grotesque masks reveal not

foundational truths of a culture but inner truths of the husband and wife themselves. The woman sees the familiar face of her husband transformed into the

madness of the builder, the uncanniness of the combination rendering his face frightening. In Freud’s reading, the uncanny manifests here because the builder’s

madness makes him seem less human; his actions do not match those of a rational human, and therefore give rise to the fear that he is controlled by something alien or mechanical.107 She notes that the madman’s eyes “followed her in an odd, unalert

way,”108 suggesting an automaton.109 The inscrutability of the builder’s motivations causes an automatic fear of such unknown factors. The husband sees in his wife a reminder of a suppressed childhood terror.110 The superimposition of the grotesque on his wife’s features blends the familiar and the unfamiliar with a frightening result.

Furthermore, the severely ill madman represents an anxiety toward death. The walkers decide without debate that they must transport him out of the wilderness because he is dying.111 This nearness to death is even greater from the perspective of the reader, who is privy to the builder’s dreams of being lifted up to Heaven, his sense of looking out from his eyes as if having “scratched two holes in the lid of his

104. Winton, “Wilderness,” 82. 105. Turner, “Betwixt,” 104. 106. Ibid., 102. 107. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 226. 108. Winton, “Wilderness,” 75. 109. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 226. 110. Ibid., 241. 111. Winton, “Wilderness,” 75. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 46 own coffin,”112 and his puzzlement that “things proceeded so slowly. He had imagined death and ascent into Heaven as more or less instantaneous.”113 Death is therefore a strong presence in the latter part of the story, and the madman’s

delirious, semi-comatose state emphasises his similarity to a corpse even as he shows some signs of life. This ambivalence, Freud argues, is characteristic of the uncanny in general,114 and he also observes that the uncanny is experienced “in the highest

degree in relation to death and dead bodies.”115 Turner writes that death is a common symbol in rites of passage,116 so this intense experience of the

uncanny—for the walkers and the reader—indicates an informal transition or transformation within the liminal space of the bush.

What is the nature of this transformation or transition? As in “Lantern Stalk,” the final phase of the rite of passage is left largely unwritten, and its nature must be inferred from sparse details. For the builder, his transition is the clearer: he passes

from life, through the liminal space of the “temple” he has constructed, into death. He hears

the final blow of his heart and the comforting silence that succeeded it. He felt himself slipping, curving, lifting away, rising up through the

orifices of his body with a silent hiss that sent his warm core out and away into the impossible, colourless light. He did not look back to the figures embracing on the ridge with his body shrouded beside them;

there was no time and no need.117

The “comforting silence” indicates a peaceful death and implies a positive, hopeful

expectation in the builder.

112. Winton, “Wilderness,” 74. 113. Ibid., 78. 114. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 226. 115. Ibid., 241. 116. Turner, “Betwixt,” 94, 96, 99. 117. Winton, “Wilderness,” 82–3. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 47

For the walkers, the ending of the story is more obscure. After the arduous task of lugging the wheelbarrow and its limp passenger through the intractable bush, the effort causing their frightening hallucinations of each other as mad and monstrous, they reach the spine of the ridge “and took the fresh yellow sun in their surprised faces, ... [and] lost their grip on the barrow. ... They gazed like animals at the Land Rover.”118 After the ordeal of the night, marking the liminal phase of their rite of passage, the “fresh yellow sun” indicates the end of the liminal phase, as does their sighting the builder’s Land Rover as a sign of civilisation after their time in the wilderness. The sunlight is not only a positive and optimistic symbol, but it also represents a new beginning with the close of the liminal phase and their return from it with a new perspective,119 having seen each other in a new and frightening light during their ordeal. The reader receives one final hint as to the outcome of this rite of passage: their “embracing on the ridge.” Compared to their previous reliance on reason and “common sense,” and their having nothing in common and showing no affection to one another, this exhausted embrace seems instead more like their passionate lovemaking in the bush, and suggests that their relationship has been changed for the better by their passage through a complex liminal space created by the intrusion of a man-made temple in the bush.

2.3 “Laps”

Reintegration and reconciliation with the community is the goal presented in “Laps” (Minimum of Two, 1987). This story describes a process of transformation for the character Queenie Cookson, which occurs in the liminal space of the beach, where she swims laps in an effort to reconcile her past. She constructs a rite of passage for herself that operates on multiple scales, yet it is open-ended and

118. Winton, “Wilderness,” 82. 119. Aguirre, “Austin’s Cat,” 13. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 48 incomplete at the end of the story, as in “Lantern Stalk.”

“Laps” follows the events of Winton’s 1985 novel Shallows, in which Queenie successfully fights the whaling establishment of the town of Angelus but as a result becomes a pariah. Outcast and exiled from her home town since then, she has lacked a clear sense of identity:

All this time, she thought, ... I’ve gone to fat. It took her seven

years to find will again, to shrug off defeat. She had come from her home town a loser, an outcast; she left

behind a grave and a crusade and a well of bitterness, and somehow she’d turned her mind to being a mother and relearning how to be

married. These things were good shelters.120

Motherhood and marriage may be shelters from her past, but they constitute “seven years of softness” uncharacteristic of Queenie; she is “not trained to be that way.”

They are mechanisms of escape, and for seven years she does not confront her history. Then she “began to swim seriously again” and “knew she could be hard again.” She accomplishes this by swimming laps “up and down between the groynes” at Perth City Beach, close to shore, neither on land nor truly at sea.121

She swims in the liminal space of the beach, and as in much of Winton’s fiction it is this space that allows her to leave softness behind and become hard. The process recalls Turner’s rites of passage: in order to leave behind one state—softness—Queenie enters the liminal space of swimming laps at the beach where she can be transformed, and emerges in a new state—hardened, prepared to confront her past and the town of Angelus. She is “ready to go back.”122 It is notable, however, that her transition or rite of passage is neither formally

120. Tim Winton, “Laps,” in Minimum of Two (Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1987; London: Picador, 2003), 60. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid., 62. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 49 structured nor culturally endorsed. It is not a traditional ritual. Unlike Turner’s rites of passage, Queenie does not undergo formal, ritual separation from and reintegration with her community, nor are her activities within the liminal space determined by custom or by the oversight of a community. She is not exposed to foundational cultural truths.123 She enters the liminal space in the time and manner of her own choosing, for her own ends. The only ritual is the frequency with which she enters the water to swim laps, so that the swimming itself becomes a ritual. In that sense, however, it becomes a symbolic act with the power to transform her.

The ocean “is a source of strength and renewal for Queenie” that enables her to discover ways to “survive the traumas and stresses” of her life.124

The spiritual dimension of Queenie’s transformation is subtle, but nevertheless present. When she first begins to swim laps, she feels it as “pain” and a “penance” because of the difficulty of forcing an unconditioned body to exercise.125 Penance is

punishment for sins in a religious sense, and Queenie’s “sins” are her separation from her home town as a result of her anti-whaling protests, her bitterness, and the

fact that she believes she has abandoned her father’s grave in Angelus—again, a separation from her community. As penance for past deeds, her liminal state

depends on the pre-liminal state and is conditioned by it; she must pass through the liminal state because of her pre-liminal state. Penance also echoes Turner’s suggestion that the liminal phase of rites of passage can include “ordeals” that test

the subject’s fitness for the state to which she aspires.126 She argues to her husband, Cleve, that returning to Angelus is “the point of the exercise.”127 She swims laps,

making herself “hard” again, in order to be able to return to Angelus and face her past.

123. Turner, “Betwixt,” 102. 124. Watzke, “On the Verge,” 21. 125. Winton, “Laps,” 60, 61. 126. Turner, “Betwixt,” 100. 127. Winton, “Laps,” 65. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 50

Queenie also deliberately observes the similarity between the words “exercise” and “exorcise.” This similarity echoes the word-play she engages in with her daughter, Dot: the name Dot is linked with the “dot” of an egg-yolk and then with

“[t]win dots. A colon. Three, an ellipsis.”128 The single dot is a period, a full-stop; a colon anticipates (among other possibilities) an explanation for what has gone before; and an ellipsis suggests either something missing or something unfinished.

All of these reflect Queenie’s mental state and her purposes in returning to Angelus. She seeks an explanation for her history and that of the town; her connection to her hometown is missing; and her business with that town is unfinished. More significantly, the reference to exorcism implies the exorcism of Queenie’s

“demon”—her bitterness toward her past. The religious implications of exorcism colour the text with spiritual concerns and emphasise the use of liminal space for personal transformation.129 Rather than continue to live with her bitterness and guilt, she wishes to become a more fully realised human being, and in Eliade’s construction of humanity this requires a rite of passage through the liminal.

For Queenie, this passage is her swimming. While she physically does not really travel to cover distance, as swimming laps means swimming back and forth repeatedly between two fixed and arbitrary points, the importance of swimming for Queenie lies in the cumulative distance she swims and the effort required to condition her body to do so. Swimming is also a reaffirmation of her connection to her family: her father taught her to swim by throwing her out of a boat and requiring her to learn to swim in order to survive.130 This suggests another rite of passage, from childhood to adolescence, and by taking up swimming again after her exile from Angelus, Queenie links her healing to her family line, affirming an ordering of the world.131 Again, however, being thrown out of a boat is not a formal

128. Winton, “Laps,” 63. 129. Viljoen, “Journeys from the Liminal to the Sacred in the Interior of South Africa,” 192. 130. Winton, “Laps,” 61. 131. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 22. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 51 rite of passage such as Turner describes. While it has a similar outcome (transition or transformation, in this case from a child unable to swim to a more experienced person who can), it lacks any ritual structure of separation and aggregation. The act of swimming, however, has ritual significance of its own. Eliade writes:

The waters...precede every form and support every creation...immersion in water signifies regression to the preformal, reincorporation into the undifferentiated mode of pre-existence.

Emersion repeats the cosmogonic act of formal manifestation; immersion is equivalent to a dissolution of forms. This is why the symbolism of the

waters implies both death and rebirth. Contact with water always brings a regeneration—on the one hand because dissolution is followed by a

new birth, on the other because immersion fertilizes and multiplies the potential of life.132

By swimming in order to heal herself and make herself “hard again,” Queenie is regressing to the “preformal” or “undifferentiated mode of pre-existence.” This

echoes Turner’s description of liminal subjects’ inhabiting womb-like dwellings and taking on the social status of as-yet-unborn embryos, and, like Turner’s liminal

phase, here the waters are simultaneously birth and death.133 Just as for Bhabha the liminal space is that of “new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation,”134 by entering (and then exiting) the water

Queenie can achieve a “regeneration” of her identity with her symbolic death (immersion) and rebirth (emersion). In another story in the same collection,

swimming functions in the same manner as in “Laps”: the “blind, busting effort” of exercise exorcises the bitterness in a girl’s relationship with her mother.135

132. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 130. 133. Turner, “Betwixt,” 96. 134. Bhabha, introduction to The Location of Culture, 2. 135. Tim Winton, “The Water Was Dark and It Went Forever Down,” in Minimum of Two (Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1987; London: Picador, 2003), 28. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 52

Queenie has not yet achieved such reconciliation through her swimming, however, and her visit to Angelus, and particularly to the farmstead once owned by her father, proves disappointing. Where “no one had been denied entry” to the property before, now a sign on the gate forbids trespassing, and the land is “overgrazed and guttered” from misuse.136 The caretaker denies Queenie entry to visit her father’s grave. When the caretaker is out of sight, however, Queenie, Cleve,

and Dot defy the prohibition and drive through the property to get to the beach where once Queenie and Cleve had met, where Dot had been conceived, and where

several of the significant events of Shallows took place. Queenie tells her daughter that it is “a special place,” but Cleve rejects this association of meaning with the

land: he says, “It’s just a place.”137 Queenie hesitates, then agrees with him, but it is not clear whether she truly agrees and has put the events associated with the land behind her, or whether she wishes to avoid an argument. Throughout “Laps,”

especially during the Coupars’ visit to Angelus, Queenie’s thoughts and reflections are not conveyed to the reader; she observes but for the most part does not

comment on the current state of her home town. Queenie avoids further comment, but a place is never just a place. Spaces

“become sacred because we attach very strong personal meanings to them...like your father’s deathbed.”138 Indeed, such spaces “retain an exception, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of [a person’s] private universe, as if it were in

such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.”139 Queenie goes swimming again

and returns to the pattern of her childhood, “smacking across the tops of the swells as she had done behind the old man in the boat all those years back. She kept the

hill in sight. She struck out, not invincible but strong. And she knew she could

136. Winton, “Laps,” 70–1. 137. Ibid., 72. 138. Viljoen, “Journeys from the Liminal to the Sacred in the Interior of South Africa,” 194. 139. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 24. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 53 swim it all out of her; it was only a matter of time.”140 Her keeping the hill in sight where her father is buried echoes her swimming behind her father’s boat as a child, keeping him—and therefore the same past which she has returned to confront—in sight, and this suggests that she does not agree that this is “just a place,” as it still carries meaning for her and is, in some sense, sacred to her. It also mirrors the opening scene of the story in which she swims at a different beach, where, “[a]s she tilted her head to breathe, she would often see on the beach her husband and daughter keeping pace.”141 In the earlier scene, she sees her husband and daughter; in the later, she sees her father’s grave. This suggests a regression, a preoccupation with the past that has made her bitter and lacking in her own identity, rather than

with the present and with putting that past behind her. At the same time, she believes she can “swim it all out of her,” with time and effort: she has not yet completed the liminal phase of her rite of passage. She has returned to the beach to

continue healing, yet she believes that, with time, she can complete the transition and the healing.

In addition to the small-scale rite of passage of swimming laps—entering the water, swimming in the liminal space of the beach and the surface of the ocean, and

emerging again onto land—the story functions as a larger rite of passage for Queenie. In this larger register, Queenie enters the water at City Beach and begins her liminal phase. This liminal phase continues as she journeys to Angelus to

confront her past. She closes the liminal phase in one sense when she swims again at the end of the story, at a different beach: the act of swimming frames the liminal phase with spiritual references to exorcism and baptism (immersion in water). Yet in another sense, her rite of passage is incomplete. She has not yet emerged from the water at the end of the story and has not completed her transformation. She has not made peace with her past and keeps the hill in sight as she swims. She is,

140. Winton, “Laps,” 73. 141. Ibid., 60. CHAPTER 2. SHORT FICTION 54 however, confident that she will complete her transition, given time and continued effort. Her intention to “swim it all out of her” suggests that only swimming remains in this transformation and that it does not depend on repeated or continued visits to Angelus. By the end of the story, therefore, a ritual pattern has been established and Queenie knows of what the remainder of her rite of passage consists. She is optimistic regarding the outcome because “it was only a matter of time”—indeed, the outcome seems inevitable.

In Winton’s early short fiction, then, rites of passage tend toward positive and optimistic outcomes, even if those outcomes are deferred—as in “Lantern Stalk” and

“Laps”—or only hinted at, as in “Wilderness.” In the absence of culturally prescribed rites of passage, characters are left to construct their own, or, more commonly, to undergo rites of passage unintentionally and even unawares. The results of these improvised and accidental rites of passage are changes in character and outlook that Winton does not explain but that suggest positive transformations: from adolescent ennui to confidence in “Lantern Stalk,” from bitterness to the expectation of healing in “Laps,” and from a dry, utilitarian marriage to a passionate embrace in “Wilderness.” Through these transformations, Winton suggests that such ad hoc and accidental rites of passage within liminal spaces can effect transitions similar to those described by Turner in more

traditionally structured contexts. These stories are hopeful for the potential of rites of passage in constructing new, healthy forms of identity that are tied to the

Australian landscape. Chapter 3

Cloudstreet

Winton’s 1991 novel Cloudstreet is perhaps his best-known work and one that earned him the Miles Franklin Award. Salhia Ben-Messahel describes it as “legendary,”1 and Jason Steger calls it “one of the most loved Australian novels.”2

It describes the development of two Perth families, the Lambs and the Pickleses, from 1944 to 1964, encompassing along the way such historical events as World War

II, the Korean War, and the Cuban Crisis, as well as Australian politics and social injustice.3 The lives of the Lambs and the Pickleses are linked symbolically to the development of the nation; just as they pass through rites of passage in liminal spaces, so too does Australia itself come of age. Winton explores the liminal qualities of the south-western Australian landscape in developing his characters and their opportunities for transition and transformation, placing them in in-between locations such as rivers and thresholds. These rites of passage, however, sometimes end in failure: where characters enter liminal states without the support of a community, they often fail both to achieve transformation and to return to the community and thus end the liminal phase. Only when a rite of passage occurs within the context provided by a community does it result in transformation, and

1. Ben-Messahel, Mind the Country, 1, 2. 2. Jason Steger, “The Sea Side of Tim Winton,” The Age, April 25, 2008, 22. 3. Ben-Messahel, Mind the Country, 8–9.

55 CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 56

this suggests a criticism in Cloudstreet of solitary or individualistic human existence

and its lack of potential to accomplish such transformation. The novel hints also at a critique of the decline in Australian religiosity and its impact on the availability of

rites of passage, but this is a muted, almost hesitant, critique that serves to support the larger focus on the need for community. The grand historical sweep of the novel, however, demands a political reading, in which the Lambs and the Pickleses

represent the people of Australia, and their rites of passage the efforts of Australians to renegotiate their national identity in light of their national history.

3.1 The house as a liminal space

The house that gives the novel its name is a microcosm of the continent of

Australia, in which the inhabitants interrogate Australian identity as they struggle with the importance of family, community, and history. The Pickles family has

inherited this house, but they find it unsettling and foreign—or rather, it causes them to find themselves unsettled and foreign:

The Pickleses move around in the night, stunned and shuffling, the

big emptiness of the house around them, almost paralysing them with spaces and surfaces that yield nothing to them. It’s just them in this

vast indoors and though there’s a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed, and though families are still getting

telegrams and waiting by the wireless, women walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks, the Pickleses can’t help but feel that all that is incidental. They have no money and this great continent

of a house doesn’t belong to them. They’re lost.4

4. Tim Winton, Cloudstreet (Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1991; New York: Scribner, 2002), 41, emphasis added. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 57

The language of this passage reflects colonial representations of Australia. The

Pickleses have come to the house as settlers, with no history or identity connected to this place. Just as European settlers experienced the new continent of Australia

as a disturbing emptiness in need of mapping and naming but elusive in its profound otherness,5 the Pickleses experience the house as “spaces and surfaces that yield nothing to them.” These “spaces” must be filled and occupied, for unused

space is problematic; its “surfaces” are like blank pages that must be over-written in order to define them and make them “yield” to the meaning the Pickleses would

inscribe on them. This echoes the British approach to the colonisation of Australia; declaring the continent terra nullius, the colonisers defined it as empty and blank

and therefore free to be inscribed in British terms. The shuffling paralysis of the Pickleses, however, suggests a profound anxiety about that perceived emptiness, an awareness that any emptiness is dependent on their own insistence on that

emptiness; the spaces and surfaces do not yield to their attempts to inscribe their ownership of the house because those spaces are already inscribed with a history,

just as the continent of Australia had long been inhabited before the arrival of European colonists.

The history of the house is one of racial violence, which stands easily for Australia’s own colonial history.6 The previous owner of the house was a “respectable” widow who had “cheated several people” to get it.7 She takes in

Aboriginal girls in order to “make ladies of them so they could set a standard for the rest of their sorry race.”8 Her aim is to assimilate the Aboriginal women into

white culture by training them to be “ladies” according to white society’s

5. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (London: Faber / Faber, 1987), 46. 6. Stuart Murray, “Tim Winton’s ‘New Tribalism’: Cloudstreet and Community,” Kunapipi 25, no. 1 (2005): 87; Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass, and Lynette M. McCredden, Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature (Hindmarsh, SA: ATF Press, 2009), 295. 7. Winton, Cloudstreet, 35. 8. Ibid., 36. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 58

definitions and expectations. She teaches them “how to make their beds and wash,

how to dress and how to walk.”9 The ultimate goal is the transformation of these women into whitened models for their race. This is an echo of the “stolen

generations” of Aboriginal youth who, between approximately 1910 and 1970, were

systematically removed—by means of force, duress, or irresistible coercion—from their indigenous families, in order to be relocated in

government or church institutions or white foster homes. Assimilationist eugenics, derogation or disregard for indigenous culture, and outright

racism, combined to construct a state intervention aimed at eradicating, above all, Aboriginality itself.

...[The] individual stories of removal are, almost without exception, stories of abuse, mistreatment, cruelty, and degradation.10

These girls are unhappy, having been kidnapped and imprisoned in this house and

subjected to attempts to eradicate their Aboriginality.11 They try to escape but “are tracked down and returned to the house.”12 Finally, one of them revolts against

imprisonment by committing suicide; the widow forces the others to look at the dead body in the library and then evicts them all. A few weeks later, seated at the

piano in the same room, she suffers a heart attack and dies. The house is boarded up and “held its breath,”13 as if preserving these events and their ghosts until humans once again occupy it.

The Pickleses are unable to engage with this history or feel they truly belong in the house because of their adherence to a fixed prior identity. Despite their new

9. Winton, Cloudstreet, 36. 10. Gail Jones, “Sorry-in-the-Sky: Empathetic Unsettlement, Mourning, and the Stolen Genera- tions,” in Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New World, ed. Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 163, 164. 11. One could also draw parallels to Canada’s Aboriginal school system of approximately the same time period. 12. Winton, Cloudstreet, 36. 13. Ibid. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 59

environment, they retain their old patterns of behaviour. Sam continues to gamble,

promptly losing the two thousand pounds he has inherited along with the house, and he nurses bittersweet “useless warm memories” of his youth.14 Dolly clings to

memories of her notoriety in Geraldton: “She misses the idea of herself as well. Back in Geraldton people knew her. They all whispered behind their hands, ... but at least she was somebody, she meant something.”15 Rose is “looking prissy and

lost. In the middle of the night she’s there poking her head out of the window as if to get her bearings.”16 Her “bearings,” like those of the entire family, are references

to the environment of Geraldton and their history in that community. In the house at Cloud Street17—a metonymic representation of Perth and an analogy of

Australia—those references are no longer valid, and the Pickleses’ continuing dependence on their missing referents leaves them feeling lost, just as European settlers in Australia experienced disorientation due to the cognitive dissonance

caused by the extreme difference between their inherited categories of knowledge and the observable realities of the Australian landscape.

This results in the house’s history being locked behind “surfaces” and inaccessible. That history cannot enunciate its presence, because no space has been

opened to allow for dialogue and negotiation of identity. This offers a parallel to Australian colonialism that refused to acknowledge either the pre-colonial history of Aboriginal peoples or the violence and abuse committed against those peoples by

settlers. By insisting on the inscription of white discourse and the blankness of Australia’s “page,” the settlers must remain foreign, just as the Pickleses feel that

“this great continent of a house doesn’t belong to them.” There is no indication, however, that the Pickleses are aware of the house’s history. Their first encounter

14. Winton, Cloudstreet, 40–1, 42. 15. Ibid., 42. 16. Ibid., 43. 17. Following the convention of critics writing about this novel, and the practice of the novel itself, I use “Cloud Street” to refer to the street and “Cloudstreet” to refer to the house itself. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 60 with the haunted library room is Rose’s excitement about living in “a house with a library! But she got halfway through [cleaning the room] and quit. ...No, it wasn’t for books. The books could come in her room, and this room, well it could just stay closed.”18 She demonstrates no awareness of the two deaths that have occurred in this room, only that the room unnerves her. Likewise, later in the novel, Sam sees one of the ghosts but does not recognise her or identify her with the house or its history.19 The Pickleses seem oblivious to the history of the house. The first stage in the process of opening a space to allow for dialogue between past and present, and reconciliation between the Pickleses and the house’s ghosts, is the division of the house down the centre line and the arrival of the Lamb family as subletters. The Pickleses live on one side of the house and the Lambs live on the other. The corridor in the middle of the house serves as the border between their territories. This border is, in fact, a space, comprising the corridor, the stairway, and the haunted library room, and both families must venture into this space in the course of their daily lives, coming into contact with each other and experiencing the site where the other “begins its presencing.”20 Sam Pickles describes this border-space as “no man’s land,”21 indicating that it belongs to neither family and marking it as undefined space and a site of contact and especially conflict. Initially, this neutral territory serves to separate the two families. The section titled “Across the Corridor” (pages 51–2) shows both families observing each other across the threshold of the corridor but unwilling to cross that threshold themselves and interact within its liminal space. They see only their differences, and emphasise otherness: “Just the sound of [Oriel’s] boots coming her way was enough to get Dolly looking for an exit. That woman was plain. Plain and plain bossy... There

18. Winton, Cloudstreet, 40. 19. Ibid., 343. 20. Bhabha, introduction to The Location of Culture, 5. 21. Winton, Cloudstreet, 49. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 61 was an uneasiness about the whole place.”22 Dolly’s anxiety and uneasiness are the results of her fear of the unknown or “uncanny” in Oriel Lamb; they do not interact face-to-face, but Dolly is aware of Oriel’s presence in the “other” space across the corridor. By not speaking to each other, the families defensively attempt to reinforce the borders of their identities, enabling identity through otherness. Each side defines itself in opposition to and in competition with what it perceives in the other. When Sam starts winning at the races, the Pickleses “looked out across the fence and saw the Lambs digging noisily in the garden in their patched clothes, their square ordinary bodies dark with sweat, and they felt they had gotten back the edge.”23 This sense of superiority is mirrored in Lester Lamb’s description of the

Pickleses “across the corridor...They’re broke... They’re poor as us. And lazy—look at em, waiting for the boat to come in”; and in Sam Pickles’ belief that “they’d never go hungry, that lot [the Lambs], but neither would they have it high on the hog. Their way was alright if that was as far as you could see,” but Sam believes himself, and his family, superior to labour for its own sake.24

When interactions do occur within the corridor, however, they signal the “new tribalism” that makes the house “a reformed national space as well”25 and bring about the renegotiation to reform such a space. The first suggestion that the threshold-space provides this opportunity comes shortly after the Lambs move in:

A long time after the house went quiet, [Rose] heard a door open

across the hall. She got out of bed and pulled the door the tiniest bit to see a boy in pyjamas at the landing window looking out at the starless

sky. In a moment of light she saw his face turn her way. His eyes were black. He was beautiful.26 22. Winton, Cloudstreet, 52. 23. Ibid., 87. 24. Ibid., 56, 76. 25. Murray, “Tim Winton’s ‘New Tribalism,’” 88. 26. Winton, Cloudstreet, 51. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 62

Rose’s first attraction to Fish Lamb occurs in the no-man’s land of the landing and begins the gradual creation of a new family/identity through the unification by marriage of Rose to Quick Lamb and the birth of their son Harry. As with Bhabha’s description of borders, in the in-between space of the landing what will ultimately become a new, redefined family “begins its presencing” in Rose’s first glimpse of Fish. The courtship between Rose and Quick also takes place in the house’s interstitial space, when they begin their love affair in the haunted library.27 The interstitial space is transformed into a “third space,” neither on the Lambs’ side nor on the Pickleses’, yet inhabited for the first time by a new family formed from both, which gives rise to a new, (literally) hybrid identity in the form of Harry. This hybrid identity represents “a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation”28 of what it means to be a Lamb or a Pickles, and by extension an Australian.

Other events within the interstitial space of the house demonstrate its function as a space of renegotiation by similarly drawing the two families together beyond their own borders. The end of the war occasions a spontaneous celebration:

Rose rushed to the landing. Downstairs she saw that Mrs Lamb

giving her mum a roast chook and a plate of fruit. The old man was breaking open a bottle of grog he’d got from who knows where. There were a couple of Yank sailors out in the hallway and that wet eyed Mr

Lamb squeezing his accordion fit to wring blood from it. She went down into it and couldn’t help but have a smile cracking

her chops. She danced a barn dance with a yank and got a smack across the bum passing the old man on the verandah.

Here, said Quick Lamb, holding out a jar of humbugs.

27. Winton, Cloudstreet, 313. 28. Bhabha, “The Third Space,” 211. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 63

She went elbow deep for them.29

Here Rose goes beyond the borders of the Pickleses’ domain, “down into” the chaotic, liminal contact zone, where she cannot help smiling and celebrating. The two families share food and candy. Such joyous abandon seems possible only in the space between the two families; nowhere in the novel does such an unbridled celebration, free of acrimony or criticism, occur within either family’s own side of the house, within their own borders. This establishes the pattern for the ultimate unification of the two families, their engagement with and resolution of the house’s history, and their establishment of their own belonging in the house.

This pattern proceeds through the experiences of the younger generation: Rose Pickles, Quick Lamb, and Fish Lamb. These characters experience separation, a liminal phase, and reunion, though their respective rites of passage take very different forms. Those rites of passage are informal and often self-imposed rather than grounded in social structure, and this complication results in rites that are extended and, in some cases, that the subjects fail to complete.

3.2 Rose Pickles

Rose Pickles’ liminal experiences are closely connected with the space of the house and its relationship to other spaces. Her family’s side of the house is her “centre” and everything else is “beyond.” Her curiosity about the “other” is piqued by seeing Fish Lamb in the hallway, and she ventures beyond her own threshold into the liminal in order to find meaning and identity apart from her family.

Rose resists identifying with her family because of tensions with her parents. She disapproves of Sam’s compulsive gambling and Dolly’s drinking. Her mother’s

29. Winton, Cloudstreet, 80. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 64

behaviour particularly offends Rose, and she responds with deliberate attempts to

offend Dolly in return. When she becomes anorexic, she is pleased to learn that it annoys Dolly because others think Rose is being starved;30 she pours out every

bottle of liquor she finds in the house, not to curb Dolly’s drinking but “out of spite.”31 Rose also feels ashamed and embarrassed by the poverty caused by her parents’ vices32 and their blaming it on bad luck rather than their own actions,33 and this shame spurs her revolt against her family. The first instance of Rose looking to the other rather than to her own family for inspiration is her first glimpse of Fish when the Lambs first move into the house.34 This attraction persists and seems to increase, to the point where “Rose loves that weird boy, she knows it.”35 Yet she acknowledges that her attraction can never be satisfied: “It’s ridiculous—she’s too old for him and he’s a slow learner and a tenant and a Lamb, for gawdsake, but he’s just the grousest looking boy, and his hot blue

eyes make you go racy inside.”36 In contrast, she comes to see her own mother as ugly and repulsive: “She watched [Dolly] smear on all the makeup she needed these days to look halfway decent. Dolly was getting old and puffy. Smoke was curing her brow and cheeks and she had to try very hard to look her best.”37 Shortly after this,

Rose admits to her father that she no longer loves her mother38 and then tells Dolly that she hates her,39 and “I’m gonna love my children, I swear to God.” She thus implies that Dolly does not love her children, and that Dolly has been a poor

mother. Rose rejects Dolly as a role model and strives to be different, to distance herself from Dolly and from identifying as Dolly’s daughter.

30. Winton, Cloudstreet, 143. 31. Ibid., 141–2. 32. Ibid., 162. 33. Ibid., 142. 34. Ibid., 51. 35. Ibid., 158. 36. Ibid., 159. 37. Ibid., 143. 38. Ibid., 169. 39. Ibid., 175. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 65

Rose also discovers experiences in the house’s liminal space that differ from the shame and poverty in the Pickleses’ half of the house. As noted, the end of the war causes a great celebration in the corridor.40 In the liminal space, a carnivalesque freedom is possible. The transgressive nature of this celebration is evident in Quick’s assertion that “Mum’ll kill us” for passing out candies without receiving payment.41 The normal rules no longer apply in the liminal, celebratory space.

Forced by her family’s poverty to get a job, Rose eagerly ventures beyond Cloudstreet to work at the switchboard of Baird’s department store. She immediately feels more confident: “she’d never felt so capable in all her life.”42 She sees it as “a great womanly adventure.”43 For Rose, this becomes a kind of rite of passage, in which she strives not only to become an adult woman but also not to become an image of her mother. Rose separates herself from the community—her family—by leaving the home to enter the workforce and undertake an adventure that she hopes will make her a woman. Eliade argues that because the initiation to womanhood occurs at the outward sign of puberty—first menstruation, growing secondary sex characteristics—that initiation is individual, whereas boys are typically initiated to manhood at a particular age and therefore as a group.44 Rose, at the age of sixteen, has already passed puberty with little comment but displays a physical transformation due to her anorexia; she then separates herself from the community by going out into the world to work. At the switchboard, she is hidden from public view, just as a girl entering womanhood in ritual is typically confined to “a special cabin, in the bush, or in a dark corner of the house,” hidden from view and touch.45 She learns from the other women on the switchboard to set up meetings with men over the phone lines, having them wait in some predetermined

40. Winton, Cloudstreet, 80. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 179–80. 43. Ibid., 181. 44. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 194. 45. Ibid., 193. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 66

public place “so you could spot him as you walked past, anonymous in the crowd,

and if he was a dag, as most Nice Voices turned out to be, you just walked on.”46 This, too, suggests seclusion and invisibility. This seclusion itself has a liminal quality: Rose is outside the home, yet removed from public space. This position, public-yet-private, allows her to feel “confident as all getout; full of cheek and fun.”47 She arranges these rendezvous with men partly in order to participate in the culture of the switchboard workers, though “she had to lie to keep up.”48 This reflects Eliade’s assertion that while girls are initiated to womanhood individually they “are then initiated collectively by old[er] women who act as their instructors.”49 Rose begins her training on the switchboard oblivious to the presence of her coworkers, dominated by the board itself at the imposing supervisor Mrs Tisborne.50 Rose’s actions echo a rite of passage from adolescence to womanhood. It is an incomplete rite of passage, however, because it does not conclude with the necessary re-integration with the community. Rose remains aloof from her family and Cloudstreet. Having left school at the age of sixteen to work in the

“menstrual hut”51 of the Baird’s switchboard, she remains there to the age of 24. She begins dating one of the Nice Voices, despite not having completed her rite of passage by emerging from seclusion. In an effort to adopt Toby Raven’s cultural idiom, more intellectual and sophisticated than that of her family, she allows that identity to completely eclipse her own:

He quoted Rimbaud by the river and Freud by the sea and Rose shut up and listened, let herself be taken along by the sheer force of him. He

took her to clubs, to balls at the uni where people were stylish and confident in a way she’d never seen. ... They ate Italian food, Greek 46. Winton, Cloudstreet, 280. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 194. 50. Winton, Cloudstreet, 181. 51. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 193. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 67

and Polish, drank in the Latin Quarter with Toby’s friends, and ignored

all sports.52 She read Scott Fitzgerald, discovered Henry Handel Richardson.53

It becomes gradually apparent, however, that Rose is a trophy for Toby or a source of material for his poetry: “Every time she opened her mouth [in the company of his friends] he’d scowl. She’d always put something into a conversation that would stop things dead.”54 Rose’s attempts to sever herself from her family—to avoid the final re-integration of a rite of passage in favour of joining an entirely different community instead—ultimately leave her humiliated and weeping on the bank of the river. In this other liminal setting, she meets Quick Lamb, and begins the love affair that will ultimately complete her rite of passage.

3.3 Quick Lamb

Quick Lamb experiences liminality by escaping the house and engaging in activities in the bush and other areas outside the urban centre that bear striking resemblance to Turner’s rites of passage. He is separated from his community (the house, his family); he passes through a liminal state marked by visions, ordeals, and transformation; and he rejoins his community. For Quick, his transformation through the rite of passage is at once one from boyhood to manhood and from an unintegrated to an integrated position. That is, when he leaves the community, he does not understand the importance of belonging to a community, and only by undergoing ordeals and learning in the liminal state does he come to appreciate it. However, because Quick typically undertakes liminal phases in order to escape his problems and his responsibilities, denying the role of his community, such liminal

52. Winton, Cloudstreet, 290. 53. Ibid., 291. 54. Ibid., 292. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 68 experiences result in failed rites rather than transformation, and only when he affirms the importance of community is he able to complete his rite of passage. Quick’s liminal experiences are based in geography and the landscape of southwestern Australia. They occur on, in, or beside rivers and beaches, rural farmlands, and the “wheat belt.” This is part of Winton’s continental metaphor, in which the Cloud Street house represents or stands for the continent (both as a landmass and as a political entity). Where Rose finds the liminal in the microcosm of the house, Quick finds it in the macrocosm of the land. This is a gendered distinction: Rose’s experiences are urban and domestic, while Quick performs (or attempts to perform) the Australian type of the bush-savvy male, the cowboy/hero.

Comparable to Rose’s anxiety toward her mother as a role-model and traditional female domestic roles is Quick’s anxiety toward father figures and male roles. These masculine roles are tied to issues of spirituality by Quick’s visions during his liminal passages, and both Turner and Eliade observe this link between rites of passage and spirituality.55

Quick’s liminal experiences mirror those in “Lantern Stalk” and “Wilderness,” not only in their reliance on the landscape but also in their informally structured, ad hoc rites of passage. A typical example from Cloudstreet is a family day-trip to Fremantle. Lester buys a boat, apparently on a whim, and faces the problem of how to get it home:

Everyone stands around and looks at everybody else—except Fish who’s looking at the water, and the old girl who’s looking at absolutely

nothing and no one, and in a moment the old man turns to Quick and says:

What about you row it home, boy? Dead quiet.

55. Turner, “Betwixt,” 95, 103; Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 187, 193. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 69

On me own?

You can take someone. Up the river, you mean?

The old girl goes and gets in the truck. The door slams so hard bits of rust fall off it. Yeah, you could put in at Crawley. That’s not far from home.

Hat spits. It’s miles, Dad. Don’t be daft. She’s looking at him like he’s the most dickheaded human she’s ever encountered and it hurts

Quick to see. I can do it, he says.

Right. Good bloke, Quick. Who’s goin with him as first mate? Fish, says Quick. I want Fish. Quick sees the panic in the old man’s face and he knows he’s pushing

it here, but he knows he’ll win. It’s man on man. Orright. If he wants to. If yer careful.

And Quick smiles up a storm.56

Lester addresses Quick as “boy” even as he offers him an adult task that the rest of the family believe Quick is too young to accomplish. Quick asserts that he can indeed complete it, and insists on taking Fish with him. This causes even Lester consternation, but Quick “knows he’ll win. It’s man on man.” This change from boy to man is exactly the transition represented and promised by the task of rowing the boat upriver. It separates Quick (and Fish) from the family, requires an ordeal in the form of physical effort, and will reunite him with his family as a man instead of a boy. Yet it is not a formal rite of passage; it is an impromptu event, an improvised solution to the problem of getting the boat home. There is no ritual behaviour, no indication that Lester offers the task to Quick with the intent of

56. Winton, Cloudstreet, 109-110. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 70 inducting him to manhood, and the reactions of Oriel and Hat clearly indicate that the task does not have the support of the community. The task becomes a transition, or the potential for one, by virtue of its liminal site and Quick’s desire to prove himself equal to a task suited to an adult man. At nightfall, after rowing for hours, Quick and Fish are still on the river, and Quick has his first mystical experience:

It’s quiet for a few moments and then they begin to sing, and once they start it’s hard to give it up, so they set up a great train of songs

from school and church and wireless, on and on in the dark until they’re making them up and starting all over again to change the words and the

speed. Quick isn’t afraid, and he knows Fish is alright. He lies back with his eyes closed. The whole boat is full of their songs—they shout them up at the sky until Fish begins to laugh. Quick stops singing. It’s dead

quiet and Fish is laughing like he’s just found a mullet in his shorts. It’s a crazy sound, a mad sound, and Quick opens his eyes to see Fish

standing up in the middle of the boat with his arms out like he’s gliding, like he’s a bird sitting in an updraught. The sky, packed with stars, rests

just above his head, and when Quick looks over the side he sees the river is full of sky as well. There’s stars and swirl and space down there and it’s not water anymore—it doesn’t even feel wet. Quick stabs his fingers

in. There’s nothing there. There’s no lights ashore now. No, there’s no shore at all, not that he can see. There’s only sky out there, above and

below, everywhere to be seen. Except for Fish’s giggling, there’s no sound at all. Quick knows he is dreaming. This is a dream. He feels a

turd shunting against his sphincter. He’s awake, alright. But it’s a dream—it has to be. Are we in the sky, Fish? CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 71

Yes. It’s the water.

What dyou mean? The water. The water. I fly.57

Despite Quick’s almost desperate assertion that it must be a dream,58 this sequence is presented as real. The fact that Fish seems to share the experience suggests that it does occur and that Quick is neither dreaming nor hallucinating—indeed, Quick

“strains to stay awake”59—and this allows instead for an experience analogous to Turner’s revelation of sacra, the imparting of sacred knowledge.60 This mystical

experience occurs in the liminal space of the surface of the river, and the boys’ singing—especially songs from church—transforms the river into a sacred liminal

space, Eliade’s “opening in the upward direction”61 toward the divine. Quick sees the sky resting just above Fish’s head, resembling more the biblical cosmology of the firmament as an object or barrier than the astronomical understanding of the

sky as unbounded space that Quick would know just as he “knows the planets from school.” His vision of the planets contrasts with his vision of the sky just above his

brother’s head and suggests that this vision is meant to impart not scientific knowledge but sacred.

At the age of sixteen, Quick arrives at the kind of understated existential crisis that frequently drives Winton’s male characters into the margins in search of

identity and meaning. He goes walking and fishing in order to escape “the teeming house where there was always some fit of yelling, some quiet tussle, some jostling

57. Winton, Cloudstreet, 114. 58. Winton argues against the label “magic realism” for his writing (and Cloudstreet is the most likely of his works to be assigned this label), on the grounds that he sees no distinction between reality and peculiar events. See, for example, page 231. Yet there is no requirement for magic realism to posit a fundamental distinction between “magic” and “reality.” In fact, this is precisely what makes a work magic-realistic. 59. Winton, Cloudstreet, 115. 60. Turner, “Betwixt,” 102–3. 61. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 72

spectacle in progress.”62 These solitary activities seem to isolate him from

understanding the human condition; when his teacher shows him the horrors of the second World War, Quick is shocked: in a pamphlet titled Belsen: a record, he sees

“photographs of great piles of...of great piles,” i.e., of dead bodies and burned corpses.63 He reacts numbly: “Quick went downstairs and out the back where the mulberry tree had stained the old girl’s tent the colour of a battalion field hospital.

Fish was out there talking to the pig. Corn stood chest high down behind the chicken wire. Next door Mrs Pickles was laughing drunk again.” The indifference with which Quick observes his environment suggests his inability to process the violence of the war, which, according to Freud, is among the most affective manifestations of the uncanny.64 “Now he sat with pictures in his lap that were beyond sadness and misery. This was evil, like Mr Bootluck the minister used to go on about at the Church of Christ. Here were all those words like sin and corruption and damnation.”65 It is his need to come to terms with these horrors that leads Quick first to quit school and then to leave his family: “I’m going bush, Mum.”66

His need to get away into the wilderness echoes similar compulsions in Winton’s other works: in “Lantern Stalk,” Egg goes jogging in order to escape the home where his parents are in a state of constant conflict with each other,67 and he experiences an unexplained sadness in the presence of Stephanie Dew. Similarly, in Winton’s first novel, An Open Swimmer, Jerra Nilsam struggles to understand his identity and circumstances and goes on long camping trips to the seashore in an attempt to discover meaning.68

Quick’s motives for leaving are complicated by the time and place that he

62. Winton, Cloudstreet, 137. 63. Ibid., 140, ellipsis in original. 64. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 241. 65. Winton, Cloudstreet, 140. 66. Ibid., 144. 67. Winton, “Lantern Stalk,” 44. 68. Tim Winton, An Open Swimmer (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982; London: Picador, 2003); See Watzke, “On the Verge,” passim. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 73

chooses to tell Oriel of his decision. He does so at the Anzac Club, which represents

“glorious memories of manhood and courage,”69 which Oriel and Lester believe to be important. Oriel reacts to Quick’s announcement by thinking, “He couldn’t go,

he was one of hers, he wasn’t old enough, he wasn’t ready.”70 The issue of manhood and masculinity is thus part of Quick’s motivation, even though—or because—Oriel does not consider him old enough to go off on his own to pursue glory and courage.

She does not consider him a man, while Quick is desperate to become one. As “the bush has traditionally been seen as the site of masculine identity,”71 he takes it upon himself to create a rite of passage. He separates himself from the community and enters a liminal phase.

This liminal phase takes him to the “wheatbelt...a strap of land surrounded by the rest of the world.”72 This “belt” of crop land suggests one of the models of liminality that Aguirre describes: the wide border-space or “marches” which were

“neutral band(s)” of land surrounding populated and defined territories, “not simply more or less imaginary lines but actual tracts of land and, thus, two-dimensional areas.”73 Aguirre notes that it “is not the land-beyond-the-threshold but a threshold-territory.” Entry into this “place that is not a place” results ultimately in

returning from it changed or transformed, never returning in the same state as one left. Indeed, this is the fundamental function of liminal spaces: rites of passage transform the passenger from one state to another, and “third spaces” are the sites

of contact and negotiation between self and other that result in new forms. Aguirre points out that while English-language treatments of rites of passage often speak of

“re-aggregation,” van Gennep’s phrase is aggr´egation au monde nouveau—that is, “aggregation to a new world” or, more loosely, “aggregation to the world, anew.”

69. Winton, Cloudstreet, 144. 70. Ibid., 145. 71. Watzke, “On the Verge,” 16. 72. Winton, Cloudstreet, 195. 73. Aguirre, “Austin’s Cat,” 12. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 74

One returns from the liminal phase to find the old world changed by one’s new perspective, which develops in the liminal phase as a result of experiencing the tensions of in-between, of no-longer-but-not-yet.74

That changed perspective in Quick Lamb is meant to develop from his experiences in the wheatbelt, working various solitary jobs and having visions. While he is shooting kangaroos, one of them kicks him in the chest and badly injures him. He passes out and wakes to see “his brother Fish rowing a box across the top of the wheat.”75

HARVEY ORANGES says the box. The oars are tomato stakes. Fish’s body is silver with flight.

Fish? Carn. Quick stares. The box comes to a halt a few feet out from him and

Fish is leaning out, causing it to rock precariously. It’s floating up there. I’m under it, thinks Quick, I’m under water, under something. God

Almighty, I’m gonna drown. Carn, says Fish. He lowers his hand.

Quick lies still. That’s not his brother that’s a man. That’s a man’s arm. Carn, Quick. Let’s go fishin.

Fish? Yeah?

Am I orright? Fish widens his eyes a moment, then closes them to let out a long

crackling laugh. Quick squints at the sound of it, cowering. When the

74. Aguirre, “Austin’s Cat,” 13. 75. Winton, Cloudstreet, 200. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 75

laugh is all emptied out, Fish rests his chin on the gunwale of the fruit

box, looks down dreamily. Carn, Quick.

Quick looks up, uncertain. Carn, Quick. I can’t.

The dog is whining, turning circles. Quick?

I can’t, I can’t! Ya love me?

Yes! Yeah, Fish. Quick struggles to keep the panicky weeping out of his throat. But, I just can’t move. Fish is looking at the dog now. Bill looks back, agitated.

Where you goin, Fish? Fish leans down, slouching the box over till you’d expect the sound

of water or night sky sloshing into it and arms the dog up into the box. Quick feels a bead of saliva fall on his brow.

You goin home, Fish? The Big Country. The box rights itself again and Bill barks in excitement as it pulls

away a little. Fish holds the dog between his knees. He’s too damn big for a fruit box. He looks bloody stupid, that’s what, a man rowing a

crate. Across the wheat. Across the still waters of the sunburnt crop wherein lies Quick Lamb breathing without help, with the Southern

Cross hanging above, rippling now, badly seen, beyond the surface. He took my bloody dog.76

76. Winton, Cloudstreet, 200–1. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 76

This passage echoes their rowing upriver earlier in the boat Lester purchased,

particularly with Quick’s expectation of hearing “night sky sloshing into” the box. It also contrasts with Fish’s drowning, where Fish slips beneath the water and

becomes trapped under the family’s fishing net while Quick tries to pull him up.77 Here Quick is under the water and Fish is above. Quick’s perspective is inverted: he is the drowning man and Fish is offering to save him, whereas in the event that changes the Lambs’ lives forever, Fish was the drowning man. Before Quick leaves his family, his father enjoins him to reach out to help Fish,78 and here Fish reaches

out to Quick instead. Fish’s repeated exhortations/invitations (“Carn, Quick”) seem to imply an unspoken but understood destination, which Quick calls “home”

and Fish identifies as “The Big Country.” The presence of the constellation called the Southern Cross may hint at Christian symbolism: drowning stands for baptism, “The Big Country” a euphemism for Heaven, and Fish’s question, “Ya love me?”

echoes a catechism in which Fish represents Christ. He repeatedly calls Quick to accompany him and invites him to go fishing, as Christ calls His disciples by saying,

“Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”79 There is also nationalistic symbolism: the Southern Cross, a prominent constellation in the sky of the

southern hemisphere, appears on the flag of Australia, and “the Big Country” is an apt description of Australia itself, the world’s sixth largest nation by area; the phrase could also refer to Cloudstreet as a representation for Australia. This

multivalency, where both Christ and Australia seem to be valid referents,80 makes interpretation difficult, but it is certain that Fish implores Quick to come with him,

to return “home.” While all Quick has to do to return home is take Fish’s hand, more importantly he must be willing to accept a change in his perspective, as

77. Winton, Cloudstreet, 29. 78. Ibid., 93–94. 79. Mark 1:17 80. Cf. Turner’s examples of ritual liminal spaces that incorporate both birth and death symbolism simultaneously in “Betwixt,” 99; page 13 above CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 77

indicated by the fact that he is now the one under water and in need of saving. He

says several times, “I can’t...I just can’t move,” indicating that he is paralysed and cannot change his perspective; therefore Fish leaves, and Quick sees the Southern

Cross “rippling now, badly seen, beyond the surface.” It is rippling and distorted now because of Quick’s unwillingness to accept a new perspective. He soon doubts the vision itself: “He thinks about Fish coming in the fruit box. Am I orright? he

thinks. Was he telling me true? What was he saying? Was I delirious?”81 Again, however, the events seem to be real: the next time Quick wakes up, the dog is

gone.82 Quick’s relationship with Lucy Wentworth demonstrates that his perspective is

unchanged. Lucy’s father had hired Quick to shoot kangaroos and then finds him unconscious after his vision of Fish; Lucy cares for Quick as he heals, and then seduces him.83 Quick thinks of his part in their relationship as being “along for the

experience” and he does not think about Lucy often.84 He still shows signs of apathy and ennui. As time goes on, “things had just gone along like this without

him caring either way. She was around, he was around; he got used to it.”85 This lack of engagement and investment suggests that his outlook has not changed since

he was lying on his bed and staring at pictures of sad people on his bedroom walls.86 He is still “not sure about himself, what he thinks, what he’ll do.”87 Quick’s rite of passage turns out to be a failure. He becomes very sick, glowing like a light bulb, and his Uncle Earl and Aunt May have to return him to Cloudstreet and his family. He is unconscious or delirious and so cannot participate in the rite of passage’s third phase of rejoining the community. He essentially rejoins

81. Winton, Cloudstreet, 205. 82. Ibid., 201. 83. Ibid., 201–3. 84. Ibid., 204. 85. Ibid., 206–7. 86. Ibid., 92–3. 87. Ibid., 208. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 78

the community in the same position from which he left it, disturbed by his liminal

visions but fundamentally unchanged by them. Winton seems to be undercutting the trope of the lone Australian male being endowed with manhood by virtue of

“going bush.” In the short stories, those who encounter the liminal in the wilderness do so in communities: Egg’s liminal experience is shaped by the farming community he discovers, and the walkers in “Wilderness” discover a human being who needs

their help. Quick Lamb, however, goes into the bush to escape having to interact meaningfully with other people and as a result does not experience the

transformation he seeks as a rite of passage. He actively resists forming meaningful connections with people, preferring the solitude of fishing and kangaroo-hunting and

driving a truck for Uncle Earl. When he picks up a hitchhiker who asks to be taken to Cloudstreet, Quick instead drops him off at a distance from the house; when the hitchhiker invites him to come with him, “Quick Lamb laughs fearfully and guns the

Dodge away,”88 unwilling to interact with people beyond casual conversation. His relationship with Lucy Wentworth is shallow, even apathetic. The house at Cloud

Street is a community, and Winton clearly emphasises the importance of participating in one’s community rather than “running away” to try to solve one’s

problems.89 Quick consistently tries to run away and escape his problems in order to acquire a new identity. Winton argues that one can only find—or create—this identity within a community and in conference with other people. In this Winton seems to agree with both Bhabha’s and Turner’s conceptions of the liminal as a transformative space.

Transformation takes place in one’s interaction with the other. For Bhabha, it is the conflict and difference between self and other that give rise to newness and hybrid identities within the liminal space opened by that conflict, while for Turner the liminal phase of a rite of passage fundamentally occurs within the context of a

88. Winton, Cloudstreet, 210. 89. Ibid., 240. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 79 community that determines the form and manifestation of rites of passage.

Similarly, for Winton, the liminal requires an openness to the other in order for rites of passage to be effective in transforming the subject. Quick Lamb resists such openness and rejects community, preferring to believe that performing the Australian myth of the lone bushman will make him a man. This is precisely why he fails his rite of passage and is returned to Cloudstreet unchanged, merely haunted by the visions of himself running away from things.90 He will not participate in a genuine rite of passage until his love affair with Rose Pickles, which begins on the liminal space of the river and proceeds into the liminal space of the house’s corridor and library room, and most significantly occurs in conjunction with other members of the community and in the context of the community and its history. Quick’s courtship of and marriage to Rose Pickles are his true rite of passage, occurring within the context of their families and the house, combining Turner’s rites of passage theories with Bhabha’s emphasis on hybridity. It occurs primarily in liminal spaces, emphasising the in-between nature of Quick’s, and, by analogy,

Australia’s, coming of age. The beginning of the affair between Rose and Quick occurs over the river. Rose has just fled an embarrassing scene with the aspiring writer Toby Raven and the intellectual elites of Perth and has come to the river; Quick and Fish are in a boat, fishing, and they hear her crying. She asks for a ride, and due to the liminal nature of the river “the moment she gets in the boat she can’t stop bawling”:91 the social standards of emotional restraint no longer apply in the otherness of the river’s space, its confounding of land and water. Once the crying passes, she and Quick talk, and they fish together. A transformation begins: “What happened earlier tonight is becoming hard to believe; the whole time with Toby, it’s receding so

90. Winton, Cloudstreet, 214. 91. Ibid., 308. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 80 quickly as to be a little alarming.”92 She even observes that she no longer feels any anger. The conversation becomes more intimate. Late at night, they arrive at Cloudstreet and “burst into the empty dark library while the rest of the house sleeps.”93 In yet another liminal space—the library that belongs to neither the Lambs’ nor the Pickleses’ side of the house—their love affair begins: “They meet, two points of light sparking up the dark, their mouths gentle upon one another, shocked into sobriety in seconds. Around them the shades hover and hang, twitching.”94 Once again, human interaction is required for liminal space to effect transformation. Their love-making causes the ghosts to twitch as it creates

...a balloon of heat inside the cold nausea of that dead room whose

timbers twist and creak; a new dwelling place. Love rattles the wallpaper and darkness recedes into itself a fraction when they shout exultant into each other’s mouths.

After they’ve dressed and gone, lunging out into the daylit house with news for the world, their sudden love remains in the room, hanging

there like incense.95

Their “sudden love” creates “a new dwelling place” in the in-between space of the library, directly signalling the hybrid identity that is to arise from the union of the two families through Quick and Rose. The apprehension of the ghosts at this sudden intrusion and threat suggests a (perceived) conflict between the existing history of the house and the desire of its living inhabitants to create their own history and identity.

After their wedding, Quick seems to have finally completed his passage into manhood. He has a new-found sense of responsibility in his desire to support his

92. Winton, Cloudstreet, 312. 93. Ibid., 313. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 314. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 81

family, and a new-found sense of moral duty: he joins the police force because he

wants “to fight evil.”96 Rose, however, exhibits a desire at odds with the new, hybrid identity that is being formed: “I want to live in a new home,” she says; “I

don’t want to live anywhere old, where people have been before. Clean and new, that’s what I want.”97 She is attempting to break with history in the form of the Cloud Street home and its inhabitants: “they’re them now, and we’re us.”98 They

order a new home in the suburbs and work hard to pay for it, but Quick longs for a connection with his family history, “often [lying] awake [at night] thinking about

it.”99 In a novel where family history is central and even the perpetually intoxicated Dolly Pickles longs for belonging in a community,100 Rose’s aversion to old, lived-in

places, and history itself, is alarming. The advent of the serial killer nicknamed “the Nedlands Monster” brings the issue of community to the fore. This character is Winton’s adaptation of the

methods and even appearance of Eric Edgar Cooke, who was executed in 1964 for a series of murders in Perth.101 As the Nedlands Monster’s murders accumulate and

become highly publicised, Rose is paralysed by fear: “I’m scared, Quick, said Rose. I don’t sleep all night. You can’t leave me here on my own. I’m going mad. I can’t

even read. Even in the day, I’m frightened.”102 Rose and Quick move back into Cloudstreet for “company [and] protection” from the killer.103 Once back in the house, “Quick felt safe here, he felt within his boundaries.”104 This suggests that the

tiny apartment and their newly built house are beyond those boundaries—marginal

96. Winton, Cloudstreet, 327. 97. Ibid., 326. 98. Ibid., 328. 99. Ibid. 100. Ben-Messahel, Mind the Country, 328. 101. Tim Winton, “The Quiet Australian: An Interview with Tim Winton.” By Amy Brown and Catherine Bisley, The Lumi`ere Reader (June 12, 2007), accessed August 3, 2012, http://www. lumiere.net.nz/reader/item/1077. 102. Winton, Cloudstreet, 366. 103. Ibid., 368. 104. Ibid., 369. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 82 and other, and therefore unsettling, the realm of the uncanny where the Nedlands

Monster becomes a greater and more menacing threat. Back in the Cloudstreet house, however, neither Quick nor Rose expresses further fear of the murderer; instead, they become oppressed by the haunted library room in which they have taken up residence. Rose suffers “a late recurrence of morning sickness,” and for Quick in “the room dark, quiet and airless, two strange miserables burst off the walls and are at each other’s throats. It’s exhaustion he thinks, and lack of air. That steely old hag and the darkeyed girl going at it, mute and angry like the pictures on his wall in his childhood sleep.”105 Both Quick and Rose convince themselves that the problem is the lack of light and air in the room, so Quick cuts a window in the wall.106 They live “in the middle, in the old room they called No Man’s Land.”107 In this room that is at once the liminal space of “No Man’s Land” and also firmly within the boundaries of a community that provides comfort, companionship, and protection, Rose gives birth to her son, Harry, a hybrid of Lamb and Pickles. Just as Quick only achieves a passage to adulthood once he accepts being part of a family and community, so too the combination of liminal space and community makes the birth of Harry a transformative event:

The room goes quiet. The spirits on the wall are fading, fading, finally being forced on their way to oblivion, free of the house, freeing

the house, leaving a warm, clean sweet space among the living, among the good and hopeful.108

The room sighs, the house breathes its first painless breath in half a century.109

The birth of Harry the hybrid in the liminal space between the two families effects

105. Winton, Cloudstreet, 369, 370. 106. Ibid., 374. 107. Ibid., 376. 108. Ibid., 384. 109. Ibid., 385. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 83 the healing of the house’s scars; by extension it represents the reconciliation of modern Australia with its history of racial abuse by the development of a new way of being Australian. What this “new way” is, is unclear; Harry is only a baby, suggesting the potential of a new way that has not yet matured. Yet this emphasis on community and history is problematic in Cloudstreet. While both Rose and Quick cannot complete their rites of passage without embracing their families and family history, the manner in which they do so erases the larger history of the house and that of Australia for which it stands representative. The library ghosts vanish as if they have never existed, along with Fish’s memory of them, gracefully allowing the white settlers of the house-continent to forget that there was anyone there before them. Thus the actions of the Lambs and Pickleses suggest that white Australians belong on the continent by virtue of their having been transformed by liminal sites and that Australia’s history of racial violence must be elided in order to accomplish white belonging. Quick and Rose are required to accept and embrace their own white family history, but all they ever know of the larger history of the house is that the library makes them feel sick. They erase the house’s history rather than attempt to embrace and learn from it. Harry represents new possibilities of Australian identity, but only for white Australians.

3.4 Fish Lamb

Contrasted with the nascent potential of Harry is the perpetual infancy of Fish Lamb. His experience of liminality is an abstract one, influencing the structure of the novel and providing the narrative space in which the story’s negotiations of identity are enabled. Fish represents the liminal phase of the novel’s characters, the house, and the Australian nation simultaneously, drawing them together in a multi-layered rite of passage, yet Fish himself never grows up. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 84

Fish’s partial drowning is the catalyst that introduces the Lambs to the house at

Cloud Street. It is an interrupted rite of passage; Oriel interrupts the transition from life to death with her efforts to save her son’s life:

and suddenly it’s all just haste and the darkness melts into something warm. Hurrying toward a big friendly wound in the gloom...but then slowing, slowing. He comes to a stop. Worse, he’s slipping back and that

gash recedes and darkness returns and pain and the most awful sickfeeling is in him like his flesh has turned to pus and his heart to shit.

Shame. Horror.

Fish begins to scream...they were all shouting loud enough to hide the awful, the sad, the hurt groan that Fish let out when the air got into his lungs. Never, never was there a sadder, more disappointed noise.110

His rushing toward the “big friendly wound in the gloom” suggests a death-experience of travelling toward a bright, welcoming light, and the hurt and sickness is an intense grief at having been denied that everlasting bliss—as evangelical Christians, the Lambs would believe in a traditional Christian afterlife.

He is denied this ecstatic experience of death “by the sheer force of [Oriel’s] will,”111 but his rite of passage has begun. His partial drowning is the separation phase, separating him from his family so thoroughly that he no longer recognises Oriel.112

The Lambs realise that “not all of Fish Lamb had come back”113 and that “It’s like Fish is stuck somewhere...like he’s half in and half out.”114 Fish’s partial recovery—and partial death—permanently damages the faith of the hitherto piously

110. Winton, Cloudstreet, 31. 111. Michael McGirr, “Go Home Said the Fish: A Study of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet,” Meanjin 56, no. 1 (1997): 62. 112. Winton, Cloudstreet, 66, 69. 113. Ibid., 32. 114. Ibid., 69. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 85

Christian “Lambs of God.” In fact, “no one believes anymore: the disappointment

has been too much.”115 They leave their home in Margaret River because “you can’t stay in a town where everything blows up in your face—especially the only miracle

that ever happened to you.”116 Fish’s drowning forces the Lambs to Cloudstreet and begins their story. His drowning is therefore not only a death, but also a birth, for the family and for Fish himself. He appears to be either mentally damaged or severely traumatised by the event; from this point on, he lives as a child, “barely more than a baby in the head.”117 He never grows up, requiring constant care and monitoring to keep him from escaping to the nearest body of water and attempting to complete his rite of passage into death.

His suspended rite of passage keeps him in the liminal phase, and he inhabits both life and death simultaneously, occupying a kind of “third space” within himself. This gives him a dual perspective that gradually surfaces as the narrative voice of the novel. His mental (and social) abilities appear to be those of a small child, yet he also seems exclusively able to communicate with the ghosts of

Cloudstreet. While other characters are aware that the library room has a profoundly unsettling atmosphere, only Fish interacts with the ghosts. This interaction becomes more intense toward the end of the novel; one morning Sam hears a thumping sound coming from the library room, where Fish is in the habit of playing tunelessly on the piano, and upon investigation he discovers that it is Fish, thumping the walls in agitation:

Sam felt a bolt of panic. The boy didn’t even seem to see him. He

stepped into the room where the atmosphere made his stomach twist, and when he turned he saw the most vicious-looking old bitch he’d ever

seen in his life. She was white and dressed in some outfit from another 115. Winton, Cloudstreet, 47. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., 173. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 86

time... Sure that he might shit himself at any moment, Sam Pickles

took the boy by his shoulder. Fish went limb and weepy against him. She won’t let me play! the boy sobbed in his man’s voice.118

Sam’s reaction to the room—its atmosphere “made his stomach twist”—is typical of the inhabitants of the house; it is similar to Rose’s reaction to moving into the library room later in the novel. Only Fish interacts with the ghosts themselves as if they were living people capable of preventing him from playing the piano. This indicates Fish’s own straddling of the line between life and death. Indeed, the very fact that he habitually spends time in the no-man’s land of the library where no one else is willing to go indicates his liminal state. Similarly, while other characters can hear the speech of the pig the Lambs keep in the backyard, to them it is gibberish, yet Fish can understand and converse with the pig.119 The pig is initially intended for slaughter, but Fish’s ability to communicate with it, and his befriending it, saves the pig’s life. These unique abilities point to Fish’s inhabiting border-spaces between concrete and familiar categories and the uncanny other. Fish not only inhabits liminal spaces within the narrative, but also represents liminal space in himself. The first-person narrator who interrupts the story periodically almost always addresses Fish Lamb directly, and always in the present tense. This omniscient narrator’s identity is hinted at only once, early in the novel—immediately after Fish’s partial recovery from drowning, he describes “me in Oriel’s arms...having the drool wiped from my lips”120—and is only made explicit in his last utterance, in which he alludes to his division and reunification:

I’m a man for that long, I feel my manhood, I recognize myself whole and human, know my story for just that long, long enough to see how

we’ve come, how we’ve all battled in the same corridor that time makes

118. Winton, Cloudstreet, 343–4. 119. Ibid., 128–9. 120. Ibid., 47. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 87

for us, and I’m Fish Lamb for the seconds it takes to die, as long as it

takes to drink the river, as long as it took to tell you all this, and then my walls are tipping and I burst into the moon, sun and stars of who I

really am. Being Fish Lamb. Perfectly. Always. Everyplace. Me.121

This scene is the completion of the picnic by the river that opens the novel,122 framing the story with Fish’s “second death.” Michael McGirr writes: “In spite of its epic quality...the whole novel takes place in a moment. The novel begins and ends in a single bittersweet scene...in which Fish Lamb...breaks from the company of his extended family and re-enters the water.”123 The four-hundred pages in between are just that: in-between. The “moment,” “as long as it took to tell you all this,” is an interstitial moment of cultural negotiation in a liminal space that is opened by Fish’s rite of passage from life (through birth) to death. The entire twenty-year history of Cloudstreet, from “the big emptiness of the house around them”124 to “halfway to belongin here,”125 occurs in the border-space between the two halves of Fish’s divided self. What the narrator-Fish calls “my story” is a negotiation of contemporary Australian identity in a narrative third space, in which white settlers, surrounded by the emptiness of a continent undescribed by European discourse, gradually write their discourse on the landscape and thereby achieve belonging. The narrator-Fish, however, draws attention to this process of over-writing.

Other characters within the frame of the novel seem unaware of the house’s history; when Sam enters the library, he sees only a “vicious-looking old bitch” but does not identify her as a previous owner of the house, nor as the oppressor of aboriginal girls. Like Rose and Quick, he feels uncomfortable in the room but does not express

121. Winton, Cloudstreet, 424, emphasis added. 122. Ibid., 1–3. 123. McGirr, “Go Home Said the Fish,” 61. 124. Winton, Cloudstreet, 41. 125. Ibid., 411. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 88 awareness of the reasons for it. It is the narrator, eventually identified as half of

Fish Lamb, who describes the history126 and the reactions of the ghosts to the invasion and progressive colonisation of the house by its living inhabitants.127 The narrator continually reminds the reader of the presence of the ghosts that represent a history of forced assimilation, even as the characters seem only vaguely aware that there is something wrong with the house. When Rose allows Fish to touch her swollen belly to feel the baby kick, Fish comments, “The ladies won’t like it.”128 He is referring to the ghosts, accurately predicting the horror of the ghosts when Quick and Rose move into their library, yet there is reason to think that Rose interprets this to mean that Fish believes, in his simple-minded way, that Oriel and Dolly will be upset about the hybrid identity that will arise from Harry’s birth. Rose does not comment on Fish’s reference to the ghosts, and in the preceding paragraph she has been thinking of both Oriel and Dolly. Yet Fish’s prediction reminds the reader of the presence and reality of the ghosts of a violent history. This serves to highlight the characters’ apparent ignorance of that presence. When Harry is born, therefore, and the narrator claims that the spirits are “finally being forced on their way to oblivion” as “the house breathes its first painless breath in half a century,”129 the irony is jarring; that such a brutal history should be so easily erased, rather than acknowledged and redressed, draws attention to the flaw in this idealised vision of a new Australian identity, where the injustices inflicted on aboriginal people can be reconciled by creating more white babies. The moment of Fish’s death and enunciation, the telling of his story, occurs “in the dawn moment at which Australia’s first serial killer, the Nedlands Monster, is hanged.”130 Hanging, too, is a rite of passage, a formalised transition from life to

126. Winton, Cloudstreet, 35–6. 127. Ibid., 314, 384. 128. Ibid., 378. 129. Ibid., 384, 385. 130. McGirr, “Go Home Said the Fish,” 62. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 89

death, and here it also a national transition from youth to maturity. The hanging

evokes Australia’s convict history, and that it is the last hanging in Western Australia suggests an attempt to throw off the “cultural cringe” of feeling inferior

under the European gaze, an attempt to create a new Australian identity.131 This “dawn moment” is explicitly linked with Fish’s story: “The sound of [the water] has been in his ears all his life and he’s hungry for it. Mind you, the world goes on

regardless. In Fremantle Gaol they’re cutting a man from the scaffold and taking the bag from his head still afraid.”132 The capture and execution of the Nedlands

Monster suggests a coming-of-age to adulthood for (Western) Australia, leaving behind its identity as a British penal colony and becoming a nation in its own right.

It is a rite of passage that occurs within the liminal space created by the division of Fish Lamb, whose own rite of passage into death is finally completed. In fact, multiple rites of passage are conflated in Fish’s “second death.” He experiences his

“manhood,” suggesting the passage to adulthood that his brother, Quick, and the nation both have sought throughout the novel and that Fish himself will never

experience in life. He knows “how we’ve all battled in the same corridor that time makes for us,” suggesting the corridor of the Cloudstreet house. The link with the

Nedlands Monster emphasises the parallels between Fish, the house, and the nation. Fish’s rite of passage is one between multiple states, suggesting “a threshold between more than two spaces.”133 It occurs in the physical liminal space of the

river, just as both Rose and Quick experience many of their liminal states in relation to rivers. The threshold between land and water figures throughout

Cloudstreet as the site of transitions and transformation, of the construction of new understandings of identity through contact with the other.

The river as a liminal space bears considerable symbolic weight in Cloudstreet.

131. Jennifer Rutherford, Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy (Carl- ton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 116. 132. Winton, Cloudstreet, 423. 133. Aguirre, “Austin’s Cat,” note 1. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 90

The novel opens and, except for the epilogue, closes on the bank of the river, and

nearly “everything of importance...that occurs in the book occurs on, or in relation to, the river.”134 Quick and Rose experience visions and transformations on the

surface of the river, and Fish sinks beneath its surface to open a narrative space for the story to be told. But the river is also a significant religious symbol, and because Winton’s background, like that of white Australia, is Christian, the religious

symbolism of the river is also Christian. Oriel observes:

life always came back to the river. A long time ago she’d been baptized in a river. She’d kissed Lester Lamb by the river the first time long before that. And that night, that long horrid night by the estuary

at Margaret, when her men had walked on water and the lamp had gone out, that’s what had brought them here to this life with one son gone

and one missing and a feeling in your chest that you didn’t know yourself anymore.135

Here Oriel highlights multiple religious allusions in the river. First, she recalls her baptism in the river, the Christian rite of passage into the community of faith. That

“her men had walked on water” suggests Christ’s walking on water.136 The lamp’s going out symbolises the family’s loss of faith. Her feeling of no longer knowing herself indicates the significance of that loss: without a shared cosmology in the form of religion and its rituals,137 there is no sense of identity and orientation.138 There are other allusions to biblical texts, some of them very obscure: the narrator-Fish quotes Ezekiel 47:9,139 and Quick quotes Isaiah 19:5–8,140 both of

134. Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass, and M. McCredden, Intimate Horizons, 298. 135. Winton, Cloudstreet, 176. 136. Matthew 14:22–33, Mark 6:45–52, and John 6:16–21. 137. Taylor, A Secular Age, 147. 138. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 20–4. 139. Winton, Cloudstreet, 178: “wherever the river goes every living creature which swarms will live, and there will be many fish, for this water goes there, that the waters of the sea will become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes.” 140. Ibid., 203: “And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 91 which refer to rivers and waters. Quick also quotes Psalm 23:4.141 This last passage is the most recognisable: “Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me, a bit of his brain said” as he nearly crashes a truck. As with other references to Christian faith, it is a relic of the Lambs’ prior religious identity, which they have since abandoned, yet not fully erased. As Winton observes,

Everything that happens in the past stays. Nothing goes away, it’s all present—in DNA, in memory, in collective unconscious, you know,

it’s in our biology. Every bit of shit that was put in the river gathers up in the fish and ends up in your body. And there’s things in families that

stick around, you know, violence doesn’t disappear from families. In a cultural sense, the origins of cultural violence don’t dissipate either, they stay and they mutate.142

Like the cultural violence of the house’s history that lingers in the haunted library and in the reader’s consciousness, like the drowning of Fish Lamb that changes his family’s lives forever, their Christian background continues to influence them, and the Christian origins of white Australians continue to leave their marks on the present. Winton is not so much nostalgic for the rigid Christian faith of his (and the Lambs’) upbringing, as he is conscious of its fundamental import for understanding what it means to be an Australian. The religious significance of the river, and its importance in Winton’s exploration of Australian identity, is further underscored by the novel’s epigraph: “Shall we gather at the river / Where bright angel-feet have trod... ” These are the first lines of Robert Lowry’s 1864 hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River?”143 Its lyrics speak

And they shall turn the rivers far away and the brooks of defence shall be emptied and dried up: the reeds and flags shall wither, be driven away, and be no more. The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish.” 141. Winton, Cloudstreet, 213. 142. Winton, The Quiet Australian. 143. Robert Lowry, “Shall We Gather at the River?,” NetHymnal, January 17, 2013, http://www. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 92 of laying burdens down on the margin of the river, being delivered by grace, and the ending of the earthly “pilgrimage” to the “throne of God,” at which “our happy hearts will quiver / With the melody of peace.” In the hymn, the river symbolises the flow of grace from God,144 and it is a joyful, hopeful song. The phrase, “The beautiful, the beautiful river,” which occurs several times in Cloudstreet and always from Fish Lamb’s split perspective,145 comes from the refrain of this hymn, invoking this optimism for peace, grace, and joy, and also emphasising Fish’s spiritual role and the link between the river and spirituality. The name “Fish” echoes the early

Christian acronym ICHTHYS, the Greek word for “fish” which also stands for the phrase, “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour.”146 The narrator-Fish—i.e., the part of

Fish that did not return from death—refers to the other, human Fish “down there on that side of the water,”147 as if the divine realm is simultaneously under the river and also above the material world; similarly, the earthly Fish refers to stars “up in the water,”148 again placing the water above the earth and indicating that the water is identical with the spiritual realm. When Fish begins to invoke “the water” and

“the big country” when Lester is telling him a story, Fish has a “dreamy” look on his face; Lester thinks, “Oh, God,” and “Fish looks smiling upon him,” the archaic phrase hinting at both a biblical register and a link with the word “God.”149 Fish therefore seems to be a figure of Christ, having two natures, human and spiritual, having descended into death and partially risen again to life. That his return to human life is only partial suggests Winton’s ambivalent relationship with Christian faith,150 even as Fish continually invokes “the beautiful, the beautiful river” to cyberhymnal.org/htm/s/w/swgatriv.htm. 144. Cf. Revelation 22:1: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God.” 145. Winton, Cloudstreet, 178. 146. I.e., “Iesous Christos, Theou Yios, Soter.” 147. Winton, Cloudstreet, 92. 148. Ibid., 165. 149. Ibid., 192. 150. Winton, “Wachtel,” 66. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 93 remind the reader of grace and peace, despite the pain and disappointment that the characters experience throughout the twenty-year span of the story.

3.5 The house transformed

At the end of the novel, the house, standing for (Western) Australia, has been transformed by the liminal rites of passage experienced by its inhabitants. Where the house comprised two territories with the “no man’s land” of the corridor between them, it is now unified by the marriage of Quick and Rose, their taking up residence in the library room, the birth of the hybrid Harry, and the exorcism of the ghosts of the house’s history. In the brief epilogue, the unity of the house is demonstrated by Oriel Lamb and Dolly Pickles:

Sun poured careless into the quiet yard where vegetables teemed in the earth and fruit hung, where a scarfaced pig sang sweetly at the sky

and a small congregation amassed in the light. Beneath the ancient mulberry tree whose blood stained the soil around her, a square little woman unpegged and folded a tent, taking it corner to corner, minding

its brittle, rimed fabric, smacking the dust from it. Another woman stepped forward, tottering a little. She crossed the long gash in the

ground where yesterday there’d been a fence, and she took a corner of the tent herself. The little boxy woman and the big blowsy woman

folded end to end till the tent was a parcel that they hefted to their shoulders across the greensmelling grass, and then they went inside the big old house whose door stood open, pressed back by the breeze they

made in passing.151

151. Winton, Cloudstreet, 425–6. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 94

The setting is idyllic, suggesting a renewal and promise in the fertility of the earth and perhaps echoing the “new heaven and new earth” that God promises to parallel the bliss of Eden.152 In combination with the presence of “a small congregation”—presumably the Lambs and Pickleses coming to watch their matriarchs—the sweet singing of the pig hints at a religious celebration, a church service. The “blood” of the mulberry tree suggests a sacrifice, the death of Fish

Lamb, so that there is another factor uniting the families: grief. Yet the religious overtones suggest that the blood may refer to the sacrifice of Christ and its redemptive function and to the possibility of hope. Dolly “crosses the long gash in the ground where yesterday there’d been a fence,” in order to help Oriel take down the tent in which she has lived in self-imposed exile (another form of liminal space!) for fifteen years and move back into the house. The removal of the fence that has until now divided the families and marked the borders of their respective territories indicates that no such border or division now exists. Just as Fish is no longer divided, the “great continent of the house” is one and its inhabitants are now one family by virtue of the birth of Harry. Oriel and Dolly do not speak, for the liminal narrative, dialogic space has closed with Fish’s (second) death; even the haunted history of the house is silent.153 This suggests an idealised history of Australia in which the disturbing history of colonialism has been overwritten with the present and white Australians are “halfway to belongin here.”

Finally, the door stands open, inviting them in where the house has always seemed to resist its occupation by the Lambs and the Pickleses. That the door is

“pressed back by the breeze they made in passing” suggests that even more than accepting their presence, the house now yields to it and will allow them to shape its future now that they have nominally reconciled themselves to its past. The Lambs

152. Revelation 21:1 153. David Crouch, “National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories,” in “Spec- tres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors,” special issue, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2007): 100. CHAPTER 3. CLOUDSTREET 95 and Pickleses have achieved a belonging in the house and in Australia.

This unity and belonging represent the final re-aggregation of the various rites of passage figured in the liminal spaces of Cloudstreet. In the thresholds between land and water, between one side of the house and the other, and between life and death, the Lambs and Pickleses have been transformed and have developed new concepts of identity and of what it is to be Australian, and they finally rejoin their “new tribe” with a new vision. The double death of Fish Lamb serves as the catalyst to bring the two families together and opens a narrative third-space in order to allow transformation by telling the story, while the experiences of Quick and Rose emphasise that rites of passage can only be truly effective and transformative when they occur in the context of a community. Running off alone into the liminal spaces of rivers or wilderness in an attempt to construct an identity divorced from community or history results only in perpetuating the agony of existential crises experienced by many of Winton’s characters. Chapter 4

Breath

In Winton’s 2008 novel, Breath, the theme of failed rites of passage continues from

Cloudstreet with greater emphasis; in this novel, Winton more deeply explores the possibility of failure and narrows his focus to the passage from adolescence to manhood. Here, liminality appears as the sport of surfing, which takes place on the surface of the ocean, between air and water, on a surfboard that acts as an intrusion of land onto the sea. Through surfing, characters enact in this liminal space rites of passage that reflect Winton’s anxieties toward masculinity and spirituality. Both cases contain ambivalence. Winton calls into question, and ultimately rejects, traditional tropes of Australian masculinity, but the alternatives he examines are problematic and marked by failure. Simultaneously, the novel represents a distrust of traditional, institutional spirituality, yet it also remains wary of the possibility of encountering the sacred without a social framework. Rites of passage in this novel often entail an encounter with the sacred and with masculinity, yet ironically it is failure in these rites of passage that leads to a (somewhat) favourable outcome. The activity of surfing presents the most prevalent image of liminality in Breath.

While that activity actually occurs only a few times in the novel, a majority of the text is preoccupied with surfing: longing for it, anticipating it, reflecting upon it,

96 CHAPTER 4. BREATH 97 romanticising it, remembering it. Occurring at the coast, at “land’s edge,” surfing is a liminal activity in the physical sense. Not only does it occur where water approaches land, but it also takes place on the surface of the water, where water meets air and moves toward the sky. This movement of water toward the sky imitates Eliade’s assertion that a spiritual venue is “an opening in the upward direction,”1 enabling communication with the sacred, and this gives rise to the religious-ecstatic experiences that the novel’s characters experience while surfing. Surfing is itself a rite of passage in imitation and miniature. The surfer rises into the air on the surface of a wave, hangs motionless for a moment, and then returns. Surfing therefore represents liminal moments within liminal spaces.

4.1 Surfing as a masculine rite of passage

The liminal nature of surfing first becomes apparent to the novel’s protagonist, Bruce Pike, as a young teenager, when he first sees others surfing and reflects on how beautiful it is in its uselessness:

How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something

pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers, ...men did solid, practical

things... [Loonie and I] talked about skill and courage and luck—we shared all

that, and in time we surfed to fool with death—but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.2

This emphasis on the contrast between the stodgy practicality of the town of

Sawyer and the pointless beauty and grace of surfing is crucial. To Bruce it 1. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26. 2. Tim Winton, Breath (New York: Picador, 2008), 25, 26. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 98

represents the extraordinary, the other, the unknown, the exotic. The town of

Sawyer reflects a Protestant work ethic, as do Bruce’s parents, immigrants from Britain, old-fashioned and not given to play. Play—that is, experimental behaviour

not intended toward practical ends—is a common theme of liminality.3 Because the liminal space does not conform to the rules of the pre- and post-liminal phases, but is instead a space of possibility,4 it is an ideal site for free-form experimentation.

Seeing surfers for the first time, Bruce recognises that the activity has no practical value and is anathema to the ethic of Sawyer. It is an activity that occurs in a time in between practical considerations, in a space that is in between land and sea, and in between sea and sky. Bruce reflects that “dancing on water” carries “the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful,”5 marking the activity as beyond the threshold of social approval. It is this venturing beyond that threshold into the realm of play that enables both the rites of passage and the ecstatic experiences that form the

core of the novel. It inspires Bruce to “translate [his] principles, rethink them, extend them,”6 especially in relation to masculinity; he observes that in Sawyer,

“men did solid, practical things,” that it is strange “to see men doing something elegant,” and that “there wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men.”7

Beauty here is remarkably similar to Turner’s description of play: pointless and impractical. Bruce’s use of the word “beauty” hints at a challenge to Sawyer’s rigid gender roles, from within the liminal activity of surfing. Yet he will replace Sawyer’s

concept of masculinity with another, even more destructive one, undermining the transformative potential of surfing.

The arc of the novel is concerned with the passage of Bruce and his friend Ivan “Loonie” Loon from adolescence to manhood. Both boys find their fathers

3. Turner, “Variations,” 40. Here, “play” refers to free-form activities rather than, e.g., sports which are governed by rules and boundaries. 4. Turner, “Betwixt,” 97. 5. Winton, Breath, 26. 6. Bhabha, “The Third Space,” 216. 7. Winton, Breath, 25. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 99 insufficient role models of masculinity. Bruce’s father, in addition to being withdrawn and conservative, is afraid of the ocean and has forbidden Bruce to approach it;8 meanwhile, Loonie’s father, abandoned by his wife, consoles himself with other women. Both fathers embody the town of Sawyer, “a place of sheer boredom...from which escape is impossible.”9 Bruce describes Sawyer as “Like my parents,...so drab and fixed that it became embarrassing.”10 The boys yearn to escape, and this yearning first appears in their attraction to the forbidden ocean. Bruce’s father in particular represents a form of manhood that Bruce rejects from the beginning. The fact that he is an immigrant from Britain marks him as inherently, always-already not-Australian and therefore unworthy of imitation; he represents “the ‘feminised’ but still patriarchal society” that is anathema to Australian masculinity.11 Roie Thomas writes that “Mr Loon provides a role model of unfettered despair and neglects every facet of positive fatherhood.”12 Both fathers are silent presences in the novel, acting most often in mute gestures rather than direct communication, such as Bruce’s father’s tossing his first surfboard out of his shed without explanation or warning as a tacit rejection and condemnation,13 or his refraining from doing so with later surfboards that the boys purchase with money earned through hard labour.14 Once the boys defy their fathers by venturing to the ocean and taking up surfing, a new model of Australian masculinity presents itself that immediately highlights the failure of their fathers as masculine role-models. Linzie Murrie

8. Veronica Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme: Tim Winton’s Breath,” in Negotiating the Sacred (Monash University, 2008), 1, accessed July 8, 2014, http://arts.monash.edu.au/ ecps/conferences/negotiating-the-sacred/2008/brady-paper.pdf; Winton, Breath, 21. 9. Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 1. 10. Winton, Breath, 38. 11. Linzie Murrie, “The Australian Legend: Writing Australian Masculinity/Writing ‘Australian’ masculine,” Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 56 (1998): 68, 69. 12. Roie Thomas, “Inspire, Expire: Masculinity, Mortality and Meaning in Tim Winton’s Breath,” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 4, no. 2 (June 2010): 60. 13. Winton, Breath, 27. 14. Ibid., 34. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 100

describes the Australian “legendary” masculinity thus:

Our man is practical rather than theoretical, he values physical prowess rather than intellectual capabilities, and he is good in a crisis

but otherwise laid-back. He is common and earthy, so he is intolerant of affectation and cultural pretensions; he is no wowser, uninhibited in the pleasures of drinking, swearing and gambling; he is independent and

egalitarian, and is a hater of authority and a ‘knocker’ of eminent people. This explicit rejection of individualism is echoed in his

unswerving loyalty to his mates. ...His independence, his inarticulateness, and his nomadic existence

all position him outside of society at large, but not outside of all society. Among his mates—where his independence is sacrificed to the obligations of group loyalty—his masculinity is given legitimacy.15

Male characters abound in Winton’s writing who fit this description in whole or in part: Jerra Nilsam in An Open Swimmer and several short stories, Jim Buckridge

in Dirt Music, Vic Lang in The Turning, and Scully in The Riders, to name just a few—though Winton’s characters are usually unsatisfied with this form of masculinity. In Breath, Bill “Sando” Sanderson is “a big, woolly headed bloke” who occasionally shows up to surf,16 yet he shows no involvement in the local surfing community. The other surfers recognise and defer to his skill, yet he does not speak to them or seem to acknowledge them in any way. Even after he strikes up a relationship with Bruce and Loonie, when he surfs at the Point with them and “the

Angelus crew” he does not speak to them or acknowledge them. He lives in an isolated house in the bush with his wife, Eva. Throughout the novel, Sando interacts only with Eva and the two boys, never the larger society. He is “outside of

15. Murrie, “The Australian Legend,” 68. 16. Winton, Breath, 39. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 101

society at large, but not outside of all society.”17

Sando becomes a “guru” to the boys, “teaches them to really surf, egging them on to bigger and bigger waves, and revels in their worship of him.”18 His

encouragement of riskier and riskier surfing behaviour appeals to the boys’ craving for something different from the boredom of Sawyer. Due to the “emasculation” of their fathers, “it is little wonder the boys are attracted to the image of Sando’s

machismo.”19 That machismo manifests as a “masculine tendency to self-deification”20 along with a mastery of “his own dangerous world of power and splendor.”21 While Sando insists that “a man’d be stupid not to be scared” of some of the dangerous waves he encourages Bruce and Loonie to surf with him, and that

“fear’s natural...there’s no shame in it,”22 if one does not surf these waves despite that fear he earns Sando’s contempt.23 Like Winton’s nation of “goers,”24 Sando insists on extreme risk as the essence of surfing and of being a man. Only by accepting the challenge of big waves can the boys earn the approval of their guru and adopted father-figure. Actually successfully surfing the big waves is secondary: the crucial factor is attempting in spite of the risk of drowning or injury. Sando has established a rite of passage to manhood in which the liminal phase requires an ordeal, a demonstration of courage.25 That rite of passage extends over the course of the boys’ adolescence rather than being a single event. It comprises multiple surfing excursions of increasing risk and

danger, like waves following one another. The boys have followed Sando into a liminal state, separated from their former surfing community by virtue of their

17. Murrie, “The Australian Legend,” 68. 18. Thomas, “Inspire, Expire,” 56. 19. Ibid., 60. 20. Ibid., 57. 21. Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 3. 22. Winton, Breath, 116. 23. Ibid., 147. 24. Winton, Land’s Edge, 40. 25. Cf. Turner, “Betwixt,” 100. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 102

association with him, “the little Brahman circle” of elite surfers.26 Both Bruce and

Loonie undergo this rite of passage, with vastly different results. Loonie, obsessed with risk and the adrenaline rush of danger,27 rejects Sando’s argument that fear is

natural,28 while accepting eagerly every surfing challenge that Sando sets for the boys. There is a parallel between the two. Loonie frequently manipulates Bruce into daring him (Loonie) to engage in risky behaviours: “He would actually dare you to dare him,”29 or, even more emphatically, “just as he had a native genius for manufacturing a physical challenge where there was none, Loonie could find an accusation in any endorsement, and before long, with barely a word on your part, he’d have himself wound into an indignant fury and you’d find you’d somehow dared him to prove himself.”30 Sando is similarly manipulative, though sometimes subtler than Loonie. He takes the boys to “Barney’s,” so named for the resident great white shark that makes the site potentially dangerous; when Loonie expresses his fear of the shark, Sando taunts him: “Now you can shit yourself all you want. Pants down, son, knock yourself out.”31 Bruce observes that this response will guarantee that

Loonie will accept the challenge. Sando makes his motives explicit, saying he has brought the boys to Barney’s to “make men of you...Thought you had the nads for it,” because they have surfed large waves at the Point where the biggest danger is “water over sand.”32 Inevitably, Loonie rises to the challenge, unable to bear being called “sooks” who are “just gonna sit here like a coupla girls.”33 The gendered

language emphasises the masculine stereotype of adulthood that Sando is establishing as the only viable counter to the boys’ “terror of being ordinary.”34 It is

26. Winton, Breath, 142. 27. Ibid., 33. 28. Ibid., 116. 29. Ibid., 33. 30. Ibid., 110. 31. Ibid., 73. 32. Ibid., 74. 33. Ibid., 75. 34. Peter Kelly, “Knowledge Practices and the Truths of Youth-at-Risk: Breath, Allegory, and the Social Scientific Imagination” (2009): 4, accessed July 8, 2014, www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp- CHAPTER 4. BREATH 103

a masculinity founded primarily on risk-taking, like Winton’s nation of “goers.”

Once that ideal of masculinity is established at Barney’s, it becomes the driving force of the rite of passage in which the boys are swept along as if in a powerful

wave, and Sando skillfully manipulates the boys into taking bigger and bigger risks. They ask about a particular big wave they’ve seen:

Ah, said Sando. Old Smokey. That’s what it’s called.

Has anyone surfed it? I asked. Sando studied me a moment. Well, he murmured. That’d be telling,

wouldn’t it.35

Later, once the boys have had a taste of danger, Sando’s coyness provokes them into

“pester[ing] him to tell us about Old Smokey. At first he was elusive about the bombora, but we kept at him until he gave up tidbits of information in his cagey, elliptical way; it was maddening, but it charmed us.”36 That charm is strategic and

deliberate on Sando’s part in order to manipulate the boys into taking on the risk posed by the dangerous bombora: “Right from the get-go Loonie was desperate to

surf Old Smokey...I dreaded it, was tantalized by the prospect, and the worse Sando made it sound, the harder it was to resist the thought.”37 Eventually both boys successfully surf Old Smokey, and their rite of passage begins in earnest: “Under Sando’s tutelage we ate carefully and worked on our fitness. He taught us yoga. We grew stronger and more competent, expected more of ourselves and forsook almost everything else for the sake of our shared obsession.”38 Old Smokey itself functions as a miniature rite of passage, an initiation into “a select and peculiar club...within the tiny surfing community,”39 similar to the rites of passage

content/uploads/2009/04/ikp2kelly.pdf. 35. Winton, Breath, 58. 36. Ibid., 84. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 102. 39. Ibid. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 104

Turner describes in initiations into secret societies or clubs.40 Loonie and Bruce have passed through the liminal space of Old Smokey, both ocean and land and yet not truly either, have passed the test, and have achieved entry into the inner circle.

The larger rite of passage, however—the transition from adolescence to manhood—is not yet complete. Sando proposes attempting a new site called the Nautilus that not even he has attempted. This is the final test, and it is one that

Bruce fails. He decides that he is unwilling to take the extreme risk involved, and earns Sando’s contempt:

I thought I brought surfers with me [Sando says]. Men above the ordinary.

I shrugged. Pikelet, mate. We came to play. He was grinning as he said it but I felt a sort of menace from him

then. I didn’t give a damn. My mind was made up. He wheeled around in disgust.41

Bruce refuses to attempt the wave, and it is his refusal to take the risk that is his failure. In contrast, Loonie attempts the wave, but does not successfully surf it—his attempt alone, his willingness to take the risk, is celebrated while Bruce’s “cowardice” is simply not discussed.42 From this point on, he is excluded from the private club of extreme surfers; he is “convinced that Sando no longer took [him] seriously, that Loonie didn’t regard [him] as an equal anymore.”43 Losing Sando’s respect and Loonie’s friendship44 emphasise that because he has failed the rite of passage, he can no longer participate in the community; just as in “Lantern Stalk”

40. Turner, “Betwixt,” 95. 41. Winton, Breath, 147. 42. Ibid., 148. 43. Ibid., 150. 44. Ibid., 159. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 105 those boys who do not obey the rules fail automatically, Bruce fails to obey the authority of the community and therefore fails the rite of passage. Loonie, however, succeeds precisely because he conforms to the ritual expectations of the community. He does not succeed in surfing the wave but earns “honour in defeat” by making the attempt.45 His success here not only earns him Sando’s favour—including a trip to Indonesia—but also sets him on a course of reckless thrill-seeking that costs him his life. In later years, Bruce hears news:

Loonie died in Mexico, shot in a bar in Rosarito, not far from Tijuana. Some kind of drug deal gone bad. Maybe he did business with

the wrong cops. For years stories had made their way back to me, sightings on the northern beaches of Sydney or in Peru or the

Mentawais. His reputation for fearlessness endured. He surfed hard and lived hard and seemed to finance it all with drug scams and smuggling. It was said he bought his way out of Indonesia several times, that he had

contacts in the TNI. I wonder about his apprenticeship to Sando, how much more than just surfing it might have involved—all those side-trips

to Thailand, the long, unexplained absences, surfboards arriving from all over the globe—and whether Sando’s family money had been augmented

by his darker business interests.46

This reckless lifestyle follows directly from Loonie’s pursuit of risk and danger. The rite of passage that Sando constructs for the boys only fuels and encourages Loonie’s obsession with risk, his obsessive need to “play chicken.”47 As Bruce observes, “Any game would do as long as it was dangerous.” He also notes that for Loonie the risk is a need: “he was greedy about risk.” In this respect, the rite of passage does very little to transform Loonie; it only validates his thrill-seeking

45. Winton, Breath, 147. 46. Ibid., 211. 47. Ibid., 33. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 106 behaviour by establishing it as a desirable model of Australian masculinity. His untimely and violent death suggests a critique of this approach to manhood in Winton’s worldview.

Because Bruce fails the rite of passage by refusing to take the risk of surfing the Nautilus and is therefore cast out of the “little Brahman circle,” he eventually goes on to investigate alternative models of masculinity. First, however, he becomes secretly involved in an affair with Sando’s wife, Eva, and this initiation into manhood via sexuality depends on the same kind of mortal risk: in addition to the risk of discovery by Sando, which Bruce fears constantly, Eva requires Bruce to choke and suffocate her during sex. In this Eva is little more than a substitute for

Sando. Roie Thomas notes that Eva is even described in rather masculine terms:48 “Her breasts and buttocks were block-like. Even her calf muscles, which squirmed beneath my fingers, had corners. She had wide, blunt hands with square nails and deep ruts at the joints, and her feet were the same.”49 Just as Bruce is first addicted to the thrill of surfing, he becomes addicted to sex: “you wanna give up getting laid, in the interests of fairness? [Eva asks.] I shook my head, sheepish.”50 He tries to give her up, but goes back, feeling “mad, reckless, doomed.”51

Eva holds the key to the ultimate failure of the rite of passage that Sando sets for the two boys. Eva is as much addicted to risk as Sando or the boys; having been an extreme freestyle skier, now excluded from that culture by a knee injury just as

Bruce is excluded from the surfing clique, she nurses bitterness and anger just as Bruce feels crushed and lonely.52 Bruce notes: “at twenty-five [Eva] was as solipsistic as any teenager, not much better at considering the higher physics than I was. And there was something careless about her that I mistook for courage in the

48. Thomas, “Inspire, Expire,” 58. 49. Winton, Breath, 175. 50. Ibid., 165. 51. Ibid., 168. 52. Ibid., 178–80. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 107

same way I misread Sando’s vanity as wisdom.”53 All four characters seem stuck in

adolescence, as if they are suspended in a liminal state of transition: on the surface of the waves, or in mid-air with one’s skis forming a defiant cross against the sky.54

As Eva has not completed her rite of passage, still focused bitterly on the sport she loved and has lost, she cannot guide Bruce successfully through his rite of passage. Likewise, Sando cannot guide the boys to manhood, being essentially a solipsistic

teenager himself. Therefore he can only lead Bruce and Loonie into the liminal space; he cannot lead them out, never having left it himself. He still glories in risk

as the be-all and end-all of manhood. Loonie believes in this ideal wholeheartedly and it leads to his death. Eva, too, eventually pursues her risky sexual cravings into

an early grave.55 Sando goes on to preside over a business empire, transferring his thrill-seeking to “risk in the financial sense.”56 Only Bruce moves on to a different kind of manhood.

After a failed marriage and a period of mental illness—about both of which he provides few details—Bruce stumbles upon a kind of rite of passage very different from the one offered by Sando:

For a while I shared a humpy with a defrocked priest. ...

We lived beside a dry salt lake that rippled and swam against itself all day. Parched and cracked as it was, it seemed the lake was always

full, never really empty at all. Long after I straightened out and he gave me back my keys, I stayed on—six months in the end. The old man

slept inside on a steel cot and I rolled out my swag under the pulsing stars on the dry lakebed. During the day we sat in the ragged shade of his verandah while things rose up off the salt before us. We laughed at

every shimmering mirage in shared disbelief. The priest said he hadn’t 53. Winton, Breath, 173. 54. See ibid., 180. 55. Ibid., 208. 56. Ibid. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 108

touched a drop in fifteen years, that he’d gotten beyond magical

thinking. But the salt lake kept him on his toes. And I saw what he meant. It was full of surprises.57

There are no details of the visions he sees or what “surprises” the lake offers, but the similarity to Quick Lamb’s own experience in the wheat belt suggests that the visions may be of similar personal significance and insight. Bruce denies the kind of completion of the rite of passage ultimately achieved by Quick, however:

I didn’t exactly pull myself together—I got past such notions—but bits of me did come around again, as flies or memories or subatomic

particles will for reasons of their own. Bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow I cohered. I went on and had

another life. Or went ahead and made the best of the old one.58

He seems to be rejecting the kind of rite of passage he experiences with Sando; that he is undecided as to whether he “went on and had another life” or “made the best of the old one” suggests an ambivalence toward discrete stages of life and firm notions of having achieved manhood. He is likewise rejecting the possibility of an idealised, cohesive identity such as those ultimately constructed in Cloudstreet. His adulthood seems to be merely accidental, or inevitable, not dependent on rites of passage or proving himself a man. Indeed, when he later sees television footage of a skiing accident, he has to look away “in an effort to stay calm. It wasn’t Eva this nightmare repetition reminded me of—it was the memory of my former self—and the slow-motion replay an illustration of how my mind had worked for far too long.”59 Bruce is disturbed by the reminder that his risk-taking behaviour as a surfer could have resulted in severe injury or death and moreover that he considered this kind of recklessness crucial to becoming a man. 57. Winton, Breath, 212–3. 58. Ibid., 213. 59. Ibid., 215. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 109 4.2 Surfing as a liminal spiritual experience

The extended liminal phase that represents the rite of passage for Bruce and Loonie

also has an element of spirituality, in which surfing itself becomes a religious experience—or at least an experience of the sacred. While demonstrating considerable ambivalence toward conventional images of Australian masculinity,

Winton also demonstrates an ambivalence toward spirituality and religion; Bruce’s ecstatic experience of surfing suggests a distrust of conventional/institutional

religion, but the ultimate failure of his (and Loonie’s, and Sando’s, and Eva’s) rite(s) of passage suggests a parallel distrust of ad hoc, New Age spirituality. Just as with rites of passage themselves, Winton seems to perceive that spirituality must exist within a communal context that provides structure and forestalls dangerous mistakes.

Bron Raymond Taylor writes of the many aspects of surfing and contemporary surfing culture that resemble religion, such as its myths of origin, its engendering compassion, and the ecstatic union of the individual surfer with “Mother Ocean.”60 This last mirrors the experience of Bruce when faced with the beauty of surfing and the adrenaline rush of the thrill-seeking behaviour that characterises the rite of passage. From Bruce’s very first experience of surfing, he describes it as “a moment of grace.”61 The reference to grace suggests a nod to a Christian worldview, implicating such a traditional and institutional worldview in the liminal spiritual perspectives presented by the novel. These “rare moments of grace”62 are Bruce’s

experience of the sacred, which Sando also recognises in his ad hoc hippie philosophy: “it’s not even about us...It’s about you. You and the sea, you and the

planet”;63 “Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God. The rest of it’s just sport’n

60. Bron Raymond Taylor, “Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (2007): 924. 61. Winton, Breath, 26, 218. 62. Ibid., 218. 63. Ibid., 77. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 110

recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.”64 However, the “hand of God”

is not necessarily a positive or beneficent force in Winton’s writing. In Cloudstreet, the “hand of God” represents treacherous, overwhelming bad luck; in Breath, it

represents the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans at the heart of existence.”65 This mysterium is both the moments of grace and beauty, and Bruce’s paralysing terror when faced with the deadly force of the Nautilus. As Winton writes in Land’s

Edge, “I love the sea but it does not love me.”66 The sea is both utterly beautiful and utterly dangerous, “quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both

hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly.” Sando acknowledges this danger, but treats the ocean, via surfing, as an object he

must conquer at all costs; Loonie refuses to fear the sea and treats it only as a means to satisfy his craving for risk. Only Bruce acknowledges that the sea is genuinely dangerous and threatening.

Thomas attempts to analyse the four main characters of Breath (Bruce, Loonie, Sando, and Eva) according to Søren Kierkegaard’s continuum of spiritual consciousness, noting that they are, “as with all Winton’s characters, difficult to define in any one category.”67 He argues that Bruce comes closest of them to

Kierkegaard’s “Religious” category, i.e., to direct experience of the sacred.68 Similarly, Veronica Brady writes that Bruce’s “experience of the sacred...gives meaning and dignity” to his human relationships.69 Yet Bruce’s spirituality is limited and seems more to suggest that “the possibilities for transcendence out of despair are never closed off” entirely,70 than to suggest that Bruce achieves such transcendence. Bruce comes closest of Breath’s characters to reaching for and

64. Winton, Breath, 78. 65. Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 1. 66. Winton, Land’s Edge, 38. 67. Thomas, “Inspire, Expire,” 54. 68. Ibid., 63. 69. Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 4. 70. Thomas, “Inspire, Expire,” 63. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 111 recognising the sacred, yet he does not quite touch it.

Bruce perceives organised religion as something he must resist. The world that he and Loonie inhabit is governed by “the kind of non-negotiable secularity in which

‘time and meaning have hardened into a kind of leaden meaninglessness’ since it offers no hope of anything different, no sense of ‘the gathered time’ of the sacred.”71 This conventional spirituality is presented as foreign and incompatible with the

Western Australian landscape; the European spiritual framework—like the European social context represented by Bruce’s parents—is “unlikely” and “scarcely possible” in Australia. Brady links this European convention of spirituality to a “social and ideological conformity”72 and suggests that it forces Bruce and Loonie to embark on a quest to discover a more meaningful and authentic spirituality. As the imposed, foreign spirituality of conformity is impossible due to its incompatibility with the landscape, that which the boys are seeking must logically be rooted in the landscape—in the meeting of land and sea in the surf that for Winton is the defining characteristic of Western Australia.73

Brady briefly argues that Breath “illustrates the dangers of the sacred when it is not socially or culturally anchored.”74 The fundamental difference between Bruce’s and Loonie’s approaches to the sacred, according to Brady, is that Bruce “is submitting to another, to a reality beyond the self” because his family life “has given him a sense of an order beyond self and of its limits—in contrast to Loonie, who acknowledges no authority beyond the self, is recklessly and defiantly fearless and in the long run does not survive.”75 This distinction leads Bruce to find “a purpose in the world,” trying to save lives as a paramedic.76 This anxiety about the sacred outside of the constraints of a social context also appears in Sando’s ad hoc

71. Taylor, A Secular Age, 719; Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 2. 72. Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 2. 73. Winton, Land’s Edge, 22. 74. Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 2. 75. Ibid., 4. 76. Winton, Breath, 216, 218. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 112

collection of vaguely spiritual symbols. He is the boys’ “guru,”77 teaches them yoga,

reads Lao Tzu and Carlos Castenada;78 the three of them are “the little Brahman circle.” Like the interior decoration of his house, his spirituality is a hodgepodge of

“artefacts from places [Bruce] could only guess at.”79 The liberal appropriation of Hindu symbols (guru, yoga, Brahman) mirrors New Age “hippie” spirituality. Eva describes it as “guru shit and bad manners”80 and Loonie describes it as “hippie shit.”81 Ultimately, Sando does not present an “aquatic nature religion” of surfing82 but a motley collection of ideas that serve primarily to support a “masculine

tendency to self-deification.”83 It is a reflection of the surfing spirituality developed in the 1960s that Taylor describes as “blending anti-establishment and

anti-hierarchical attitudes with holistic metaphysics that were connected to psychedelics, religions originating in Asia or found in indigenous societies, America’s own metaphysical traditions, and neo-Paganism.”84 The spirituality he constructs for himself and the boys is a narcissistic one that claims to respect the sacred sublime but only in so far as it can serve the adrenaline rush.

A subtle trick of language also reveals that conventional religion should be resisted. In the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—a linguistic

ambiguity links breath and spirit. In Hebrew, the word ruach can mean both “spirit” and “breath,” as can the Greek pneuma. (The Arabic ruh means primarily “spirit” but is cognate with ruach.) Significantly, in Genesis 1:2 the word ruach can

be translated “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (New International Version) or “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (New Revised

Standard Version). This ruach exists prior to the moment of creation, just as the

77. Winton, Breath, 166. 78. Ibid., 60. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 133. 81. Ibid., 77. 82. Taylor, “Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion,” 924. 83. Thomas, “Inspire, Expire,” 57. 84. Taylor, “Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion,” 931. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 113 surfer creates a religion on the surface of the ocean, a liminal state that suggests the primordial void before creation. It is simultaneously breath and spirit. Bruce and Loonie’s rebellion against traditional religion is “a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath,”85 a rebellion against the boring tradition of Sawyer and Bruce’s parents. Bruce and Loonie seek total control over their breath in their various risky activities in and on the ocean, and seek total control over their interaction with the sacred, rejecting the received model of their culture, whose symbols seem “scarcely possible” to them. The frequent focus on holding one’s breath emphasises the importance of spirituality in the liminal state within the novel. This autonomous spirituality that manifests in moments of mortal peril is dangerous and destructive in part because it “acknowledges no authority beyond the self.”86 The spirituality Sando promotes has no communal context of “something bigger”87 that might provide boundaries, because the boys and Sando consider themselves above any constraints and “extraordinary.” Sando says of the experience of surfing challenging waves, “You’ll be out there, thinkin: Am I gunna die? Am I

fit enough for this? Do I know what I’m doin? Am I solid? Or am I just. . . ordinary?”88 Here Sando negates the importance even of their tiny clique,

“the little Brahman circle” of elite surfers because “it’s not even about us.” The repetition of “I” indicates that the only concern is the self, the ego—and the perception of that self in competition with other isolated egos (“Or am I just... ordinary?”). For Sando, Bruce, and Loonie, to be ordinary is the ultimate sin, a capitulation to the conventions of the dull town of Sawyer—in contrast to the ultimate virtue of standing in isolated glory due to one’s unmatched surfing skill. This is how Sando appears to the boys, and this is the status to which they aspire.

The surfing spirituality of the novel is one of self-deification.

85. Winton, Breath, 43. 86. Brady, “The Sacred and the Social Extreme,” 4. 87. Winton, “Wachtel,” 65. 88. Winton, Breath, 77, ellipses in original. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 114

Only Bruce ultimately decides that such solipsistic spirituality is empty and

devoid of meaning and goes on to find meaning in helping other people, which has more in common with conventional religion than with Sando’s “hippy shit,” in

which the only context of meaning is the testing of one’s own skill and courage against (rather than in mystical union with) “Mother Ocean.” Bruce heals from his mental breakdown in communion/community with other people, first in a

psychiatric institution89 and then sharing “a humpy with a defrocked priest.”90 The presence of the priest particularly points to the importance of community and social context when encountering the sacred: a priest is a representative of institutional religion with a defined community and restraints upon the experience of the sacred for the sake of protecting that community. That he is defrocked reflects Winton’s anxiety toward institutional religion, yet it is the priest’s “missionary zeal” in hiding Bruce’s car keys that forces Bruce to stay long enough to heal and become capable of rejoining society. Bruce retains an aspect of solitary spirituality, and it is unclear whether this is a

positive or a negative quality. The mature Bruce reflects on his adolescent rite of passage and flirtation with death while playing a didgeridoo, an Aboriginal

Australian musical instrument used for sacred rituals. Bruce uses it appropriated and divorced not only from its culture but also from its communal ritual (sacred) context. While Bruce’s use of it in effect creates a liminal phase in which he can

revisit his adolescence and reflect on the rite of passage and its implications for his experience of the sacred, he does this in a self-absorbed, solipsistic fashion. He

describes the art of playing the instrument as “cycling air through and through, doing little more than explaining yourself to your self while you’re still sane enough

to do it.”91 His playing of it punctuates the novel periodically, the breath-control

89. Winton, Breath, 209–10. 90. Ibid., 212. 91. Ibid., 19. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 115

similar to that of his free-diving and surfing as well as to the fact that those

breath-games, like risky surfing, gave Bruce a sense of the sacred; but his reduction of it to a kind of masturbatory talk-therapy suggests the appropriation of the

didgeridoo by the New Age spirituality movement, in which “the vibrational sound of the didgeridoo can be used to reconnect with one’s own and inner sense of power, healing and knowing.”92 This is divorced from the traditional Aboriginal

secret-sacred contexts in which the didgeridoo is used “in ceremony such as circumcision ceremony, for dancing, and for love songs...Non-Aboriginal people

have tried to take hold of the didgeridu but they just don’t seem to be able to understand it.”93 Such contexts are communal: dancing and love songs imply the

presence of others, and circumcision is typically a collective rite of passage.94 Bruce, however, plays it alone: “I blow [the didgeridoo] at the brutalist condos that stand between me and the beach. I blow at the gulls eating pizza down in the carpark,”95

and “I blow the didj until it hurts, until my lips are numb, until some old lady across the way gives me the finger.”96 He blows at buildings and gulls rather than an

active audience that can participate or respond to the music, and he is unconcerned with any kind of communal context for the didgeridoo; the only human reaction is a

rude and dismissive gesture from “some (anonymous) old lady.” Significantly, Bruce learns to play the didgeridoo from Sando, and even then Bruce treats it as a form of self-therapy: “I liked the way it sucked energy from me and drew hard feelings up

the way only a good tantrum could when I was little.”97 Similarly, when Sando “got into a mood I left him to his own thoughts and consoled myself. ..alone with the

didj.”98 That blowing the didgeridoo is consolation further emphasises its

92. The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, s.v. “Maningrida, the didjeridu and the Internet” (by Murray Garde). 93. Ibid. 94. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 194. 95. Winton, Breath, 9. 96. Ibid., 216. 97. Ibid., 126. 98. Ibid. CHAPTER 4. BREATH 116

therapeutic role in Breath, and that Bruce does this alone emphasises the solitary

nature of this practice. There is little of the sacred in the didgeridoo for Bruce because he has removed it from any communal practice or cultural context.

Sando’s motives for teaching Bruce to play the didgeridoo are unclear, though it is consonant with his “hippie” philosophy to appropriate practices at will from indigenous cultures.99 It is also possible that he teaches Bruce to play as a method of breath-control. Bruce approaches the practice just as he approaches free-diving and surfing: “I blew until I saw stars...or until Sando took the thing off me.”100

This musical instrument that has been in use in northern Australia for “at least 1500 years” becomes just another way for Bruce to flirt with risk and adrenaline.101

Divorced from, and denied, a communal framework, the didgeridoo offers no spiritual or sacred meaning. Thus Bruce remains aloof from community and is therefore unable to fully heal.

By telling his story he is “doing little more than explaining himself to himself” and seems to be attempting to justify his actions and his incomplete rite of passage rather than seeking to leave the liminal phase. Like Rose Pickles hidden behind the department-store switchboard, even in public and at work Bruce is solitary, having set himself apart from society and family; unlike Rose, he shows no interest in re-aggregation with the community. Therefore his spiritual life is limited to isolated and transient “moments of grace” in the solitary act of surfing.

Like Cloudstreet, Breath argues for the importance of a communal context to ground rites of passage and spiritual experience. The latter novel, however, more fully explores the consequences of a lack of such context, whereas in the former, ultimately all liminal phases come to an end with re-aggregation and all

99. Taylor, “Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion,” 931. 100. Winton, Breath, 126. 101. The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, s.v. “didjeridu.” CHAPTER 4. BREATH 117 third-spaces are closed with the successful negotiation of new identities. In both novels, Winton demonstrates that it is possible to fail a rite of passage; in the former, such failures are remedied, while in the latter they are not. As Bruce never completes his rite(s) of passage successfully, he remains in ritual isolation, continuing to engage in the pseudo-spiritual practices he learned from Sando’s religion of self-deification. Though he has found “meaning” in serving the public as a paramedic, there is little otherwise to suggest that he has made any genuinely meaningful transition from adolescence to adulthood. Chapter 5

Conclusion

A pattern emerges in Winton’s treatment of liminal spaces, rites of passage, and the development of authentic Australian spiritual identity. His approach to liminality bears some remarkable similarities to the theories advanced by Turner and Eliade, yet it also differs in several significant respects. Turner and Eliade focus on small-scale, unified societies where communal ritual is fundamental to the social order, while Winton writes in a cultural context where there is no unifying social order and formal rites of passage are lacking. He therefore writes about transitional rites that owe more to circumstance than to a cohesive ritual programme. His characters experience rites of passage as needed, without the benefit of tradition; rites of passage are improvised or accidental. Indeed, those few that are highly structured—for example, the lantern stalk—seem ineffectual. The effectiveness of Winton’s ad hoc rites of passage seems to change over the course of his writing career. In his early short fiction, the texts are optimistic about the potential for individuals to negotiate meaning within liminal spaces and thereby to effect transitions between life stages or to come to greater understandings of their identities and their relationships with each other. In “Lantern Stalk,” Egg is transformed by his participation in a liminal ritual so that when he returns to his

118 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION 119 peers he is no longer afraid. In “Laps,” Queenie “knows” she can heal herself and reconcile herself with her past, given enough effort in the space between land and sea as she swims laps at the beach. Likewise, in “Wilderness,” all three characters achieve transformation: the husband and wife pass through the uncanny horrors of their rite of passage, and the mad builder slips away into the heaven for which he has yearned.

In Cloudstreet, however, rites of passage become more problematic. Winton places more conditions on their success: it is not enough for characters to leave the community, experience liminal conditions, and return. The liminal conditions themselves now must take part in the social context from which the passenger has been separated and to which he or she will return. Return or re-aggregation becomes significant here; Turner’s tripartite ritual structure must be completed, and one cannot remain indefinitely in liminal space and still achieve transformation.

Winton upholds transformation and transition as fundamentally important. His landmark novel interrogates the relationship of post-war Australia to its colonial history and insists that some form of transformation must take place in that relationship in order for Australia to have a complete, coherent, healthy identity. In order to accomplish this reconciliation, characters must undergo liminal phases, but those experiences must be shaped by a community, even though these rites of passage remain improvised and loosely structured. When such transitional rites occur within the embrace of a community—within the library room between the Lambs and the Pickleses, for example—they succeed; when they do not, as is the case with Quick when he goes bush, they fail. In fact, some rites of passage in Cloudstreet bear striking similarities to those in the short stories, yet their outcomes are different. Quick “goes bush,” seeks manhood, and has visions, just as Egg participates in a manhood initiation ritual in the bush, and the walkers pass through the bush and experience disturbing visions. CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION 120

Yet where Egg and the walkers pass successfully through their liminal rites of

transition, Quick does not. Only within the embrace of his community and family can he achieve transformation through a liminal phase. This suggests a growing

concern on Winton’s part that neither individual nor national identity can be negotiated or transformed in isolation. Winton is developing an argument that “we are all in this together.”1 Ultimately, in Cloudstreet, this togetherness triumphs,

and where solitary rites of passage have failed they are re-imagined in a communal context that ensures successful passage, transformation, and reintegration.

In Breath, Winton shifts his focus slightly; still concerned to demonstrate that without a social context rites of passage cannot succeed, he narrows his focus to the

negotiation of manhood. Here he also demonstrates that rites of passage can not only fail, but fail catastrophically. The characters in Breath attempt to achieve manhood by chasing after a model of masculinity that Winton shows to be shallow and narcissistic, and they end up dead or psychologically scarred as a result. This seems to indicate that Winton’s perspective on ad hoc rites of passage has become more pessimistic still, to the point where there is no truly successful rite of passage in the novel. It is a condemnation of stereotypical notions of Australian male identity and individualism, yet, unlike Cloudstreet, here Winton offers little in the way of an alternative. There is no social structure that redeems the characters, except that Bruce Pike ends up less damaged than Loonie.

Throughout these texts, liminal conditions are linked with religion and spirituality—or the “numinous,” as Miels prefers to describe such moments in

Winton’s work.2 That description seems increasingly appropriate, as the nature of spiritual symbols in Winton’s work has changed along with his portrayal of liminality. In “Lantern Stalk” and “Wilderness,” the spiritual symbols are overwhelmingly Christian, firmly grounded in Christian tradition and scripture: the

1. Taylor, A Secular Age, 443. 2. Miels, “Singing the Great Creator,” 30. CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION 121

farmhouse naming ceremony mirrors the Christian Eucharist, and “Wilderness”

abounds with references to Christian ideas. In Cloudstreet, religious references are fewer, and more obscure; still predominantly Christian, this symbolism is subdued and, linked primarily with the divided character of Fish Lamb, presented with an ambivalence that acknowledges the importance of Christianity in Australia’s history but hesitates over its importance for the future. In Breath, Christianity is present only as something to rebel against; here spirituality is figured in New Age terms, an ad hoc assembly of quasi- and pseudo-spiritual beliefs and practices in the service of an individualistic, self-aggrandising masculine ideal. The same themes surface in Winton’s latest novel, Eyrie (2013). The main character, Tom Keely, inhabits a liminal space between earth and sky in a high-rise apartment building, and, like Rose Pickles, remains in this liminal space with no motivation to rejoin society. Keely wrestles with social pressure to match the masculine and spiritual ideal represented by his deceased father, while he is surrounded by New Age forms of pseudo-spirituality. His extreme pessimism regarding the mining industry and its destruction of the environment echoes Winton’s increasing pessimism toward the possibility of negotiating meaningful forms of Australian manhood and cultural identity. The significance of the parallel between the religious impulse and rites of passage in Winton’s writing is not clear. The religious impulse degrades from a communal

Christian one to a shallow, selfish New Age one, while Winton becomes gradually less optimistic about the effectiveness of improvised rites of passage in a secular society that lacks any other way of realising social and personal transitions. Winton’s writing increasingly suggests a conflict between the need for rites of passage and the secularisation of society, a conflict that he critiques, sometimes harshly. He does not offer an explanation or a solution; as in his early short stories, the solution or outcome is deferred, left for the reader to extrapolate. Winton’s CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION 122 liminal spaces allow for the creation of new ideas and conceptions of identity in

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