An Ambivalent Ground: Re-Placing Australian Literature

An Ambivalent Ground: Re-placing Australian Literature

James Paull

A Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of New South Wales

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Title: An Ambivalent Ground: Re-placing Australian Literature

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Narratives of place have always been crucial to the construction of Australian identity. The obsession with identity in Australia betrays longstanding uncertainty. It is not difficult to interpret in this uncertainty a replaying of the deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and more broadly cultural claims to the land. Such insecurities are typically understood negatively. In contrast, this thesis accepts the uncertainty of identity as an activating principle, appropriate to any interpretation of the narratives and themes that inform what it means to be Australian.

The process of “re-placing” Australian literature shifts the understanding of nation towards a landscape that speaks not so much about identity as about the constitutive performances of everyday life. It also converges with the unhomely dimension that is the colonist's ambiguous sense of belonging. We can understand this process with an analogy used in this thesis, that of music – the colonising language, and noise – the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet revealing the spatial realities of place. Traditionally, cultural narratives in Australia have disguised the much more complex way in which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of Australian identity. Rather than a text or a narrative, place is a plenitude, a densely intertwined performance space, a performance that constantly renders experience – and its cultural function – transgressive.

The purpose of this thesis is not to displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative. Rather, it offers the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. The narrative in the thesis represents an aggregation of such an ambivalent ground, addressing the persistent tension between place and the larger drama of colonialist history and discourse.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 2 INTRODUCTION 4 Making a Place 4 An Ambivalent Ground 8 Key Concepts in An Ambivalent Ground 16 a) Post-colonial Theory and Place 16 b) Ambivalence in the Work of Homi Bhabha 18 c) Modernity 19 d) The Poststructuralist Attention to Place 21 e) Spatial History 24 f) Australia and the Antipodes 25

1) THE PENAL COLONY: PRISON AND ESCAPE 29 Prison-house Beginnings/Prison-house Endings I 29 Prison-house Beginnings/Prison-house Endings II 43

2) THE ANTIPODES: ENCLOSURE AND COMMON 58 An Inversion in Nature 58 Grotesque and Melancholy in Colonial Writing 67 Re-placing the Boundaries of Power: The Contact Zone 74

3) FROM MUSIC TO NOISE 87 A Noisy Protest 87 From Music to Noise 92 Re-placing the Piano 98

4) THE 1890S: NARCISSUS AND ECHO 106 Approaching the 1890s: Arcadia and the Bush 106 A Man's Country 115 White Nation 121 (Mis)Reading the Country: Such is Life 131 a) The Bush Etiquette 132 b) In the Back Country 138

5) RE-PLACING NATION I 150 The Spirit of Place in an Ambivalent Land 153 Modernist Trajectories 168 The Poetic Challenge to History 179

6) RE-PLACING NATION II 190 Black Swans of Trespass 191 A Different Country 196 Roads and No Roads 217

CONCLUSION 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY 242

1 ABSTRACT

Narratives of place have always been crucial to the construction of Australian identity. The obsession with identity in Australia betrays longstanding uncertainty. It is not difficult to interpret in this uncertainty a replaying of the deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and more broadly cultural claims to the land. Such insecurities are typically understood negatively; pronouncements are thrown to the public that affirm a more unified and positive sense of history. Rather than investigate this trend, this thesis accepts the uncertainty of identity as an activating principle, appropriate to any interpretation of the narratives and themes that inform what it means to be Australian.

Fundamental to this uncertainty is a provisionality in the post-colonial experience of place that is papered over by misleadingly coherent spatial narratives that stem from the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology. Place is a model for the tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual rhizomic formlessness of daily life. Place is the ‘ground’ of that life, but an ambivalent ground. The narratives of place in Australia, although they may oscillate widely between the utopian and dystopian, nevertheless typify experience in the way history organizes into a linear narrative the actual formlessness of this daily life. An Ambivalent Ground approaches postcolonial Australia as a densely woven text. In this text, stories that describe the founding of a nation are enveloped by other stories, not so well known, that work to transform those more familiar narratives. “Re-placing Australian literature” describes the process of this transformation. It signifies an interpretative practice which seeks to recuperate the open- ended and rhizomic experience of place that remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood. In re-placing Australian literature, the thesis explores the interwoven nature of history, language and space, and demonstrates how this relationship transforms identity politically and poetically.

The process of “re-placing” Australian literature shifts the understanding of nation towards a landscape that speaks not so much about identity as about the constitutive performances of everyday life. It also converges with the unhomely dimension that is the colonist's ambiguous sense of belonging. We can understand this re-placing of place with an analogy used in this thesis, that of music – the colonising language, and noise – the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet revealing the spatial realities of place. Traditionally, cultural narratives in Australia have disguised the much more complex way in which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of Australian identity. Rather than a text or a narrative, place is a plenitude, a densely intertwined performance space, a performance that constantly renders experience – and its cultural function – transgressive.

The purpose of this thesis is not to displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative. Rather, it offers the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. It tries to affirm cultural difference without reducing the term to the doctrinal assumptions associated with identity-politics. Thus, the landscape should not be understood as either the space of the penal colony or the space mapped by those convicts who escape its confines; rather, like

2 the relation between music and noise, it emerges through the oscillation between the two. “Re-placing” Australian literature means exploring this often repressed oscillation and allowing it to resonate in its varied and unresolved forms on the cultural map. The narrative in the thesis represents an aggregation of such an ambivalent ground, addressing the persistent tension between place and the larger drama of colonialist history and discourse.

3 Introduction

Making a Place If one were to select a passage that dramatizes the basic concerns of this thesis, it would be an encounter in Peter Carey's memorable novel, Illywhacker (1985). In keeping with the episodic sprawl true to the work's picaresque form, the scene offers a self-conscious meditation on the problematic foundations of the Australian nation. There are two people: narrator, Herbert Badgery – abandoned by a wife whom he sought to imprison within domesticity, burdened by the demise of a once grand plan to equip his country with its own truly independent aviation service, currently homeless, penniless and responsible for his two children – and Leah Goldstein, whom Badgery has just encountered and who shares with him, at least for now, a wandering life.

Despite the common ground a basic difference emerges. As Herbert instinctively prepares a place for them Leah confronts him: "Excuse me, what are you doing?" "Fixing up." "You sleep with me once and you think you own me." "No." If you had seen her once you would know that she could not be owned. "Just making a place." "This is not your place and never can be." (Carey 1985: 305-06)

The dialogue elaborates the vulnerability inherent in an ostensibly innocuous act: "It is a public land," I said. "It's a reserve, and if I take out a mining lease I'm entitled to build a hut here, providing I continue to demonstrate that I'm actually working my lease". "There you go, land-house, house-land, you can't help yourself, can you, Mr Badgery? You're true blue. Dinky-di. You think you can put up some shanty and that makes it your place, but you can't, and it will never be. Are you listening to me?" I did not want to lose my temper. "Leah, what have I done to deserve this?" "Forget what we did. The matter is obvious. The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it is anybody's place it is the blacks'. Can't you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you." (307)

Leah Goldstein is making explicit a much broader and more complicated set of concerns. Here there can be no simple act of "settling down". But Badgery is no fool; he embodies a profound, intractable problem that has become painfully evident on a ground where transparent truths are no longer evident. Both are confronting the cultural baggage they carry: their national ideals, unthinking material acquisitiveness, the correlation between property and patriarchy, the way nationalist jargon colludes with British (and Western) imperialism. And beyond all such matters lies an even bleaker tacit awareness: a silent, disavowed history of dispossession and genocide invoked by the ghostly presence of the Aboriginal landscape.

It is not at all fanciful to see in Badgery's desire to settle down an important antecedent in the political philosophy of John Locke. Locke, seeking to distinguish the moral fundamentals from Restoration England, argued that property transcends the machinations of an elected legislative assembly. The "rights" of all men, to which any political system should address and respect, is an extension of the "divine being": these rights manifest in the form of labour, industry and ownership of property (Locke 1947: ii. 5). Locke wrote that "every Man has a Property in his own Person" meaning that to preserve one's essential freedom is to adhere to this ontological constant. Finally, it is property, in the guise of enclosure ("inclosure") which bests illustrates Mankind's progress from its most base existence to a political economy. Land becomes valuable, civilized when "enclosed" from the "Common" and it becomes enclosed when "man tills, plants, improves, cultivates... as property" (ii. 5: 136).

The concept of "enclosure" provides the bedrock for understanding issues relating to subjectivity, language, landscape and history. It is certainly this intellectual tradition that most concisely demonstrates a basic epistemological difference between indigenous and European modes of territorial occupation. For the colonist the land is empty because it awaits enclosure – the transmutation of what is base into gold. This is what separates Leah and Herbert. The latter might be displaced, but the condition is superficial rather than profound; he cannot escape the ideology of possession. It is as if, standing at his

5 tradition's boundary, he can only see an otherness destined to remain distanced, untouchable. This is paradigmatic of post-colonial ambivalence. It is the condition that continually frustrates the colonist; even on the margins his is a way of seeing caught between possibility and failure.

Goldstein cannot truly escape this predicament either. But her position does differ. She is not seduced by the essentialist desire to "go native", yet her favouring a more provisional relation to the land expresses something in common with indigenous modes of knowing. Her land accepts absence as much as it lets breathe a state of exile so peculiar to what it means to be Australian. Furthermore, she readily accepts the need to acknowledge the burden of white history and, in so doing, hold some kind of dialogue with the haunting presence undermining colonialism's claim to the country. In short, hers is a ground significantly open to paradox - in making a place it is natural to be simultaneously aware of one's residual displacement, one's unhomely condition.

The above episode richly dramatizes the anxiety Australians sometimes experience when confronting their landscape and history. Such anxiety is as understandable as it is inescapable. Our lives have been shaped by stories that have dramatized the building of a nation as if it were part of a natural evolution of the European tradition. Consider how H. M. Green saw the task of evaluating Australian literature (1930, 1985). His unrivalled surveys of national writing understood its topic as a "branch of the tree", that is, as a natural continuation of the parent tradition. The organic metaphor used by Green is a standard device in Australian literary history. One of the earliest surveys, "The Fiction Fields of Australian Literature" by Frederick Sinnett, also used it, but he spoke of his topic in terms of prospect rather than accomplished fact. Although not completely confident of the future produce, the national literature must nonetheless resemble "the exhibition of good specimens of agricultural produce" (Sinnett 1966: 48).

In both ideological and textual terms, literature, or at least the institutionalization

6 of literature, is an indispensable feature of the imperial enclosure of the new country. It reveals how the colonist must "till, plant, improve and cultivate" an otherwise worthless land. The picturesque associations signified by such terms as "cultivation" are also important. Brian Elliott's study of Australian verse, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, observes that only when "colonial ambivalences" had settled down did poetry in the recently acquired land become "an accomplished fact" (Elliott 1967: 27). What is suggested here is that the emergence of a national literature is proportionate to the effective settlement of the land itself. And settlement means quashing what is deemed ‘unpicturesque’. Ambivalence is not really part of nation-building; if it is, then it belongs to premature scribbling destined to be resolved in works more worthy of the appellative ‘great literature’.

However, there is a clearly discernible counterpoint to these assumptions. In at least the realm of the post-colonial novel, works that have attracted critical applause by no means transcend ambivalence. On the contrary, they foreground it, as we have seen in Illywhacker. Or think of the equally epic novel written half a century earlier, Capricornia (1938), a text that has formal and thematic affinities with Carey's rambling narrative. What the writer and critic, Mudrooroo Nyunga, wrote of Xavier Herbert's story could apply to Carey's: they are "great Australian yarns". He further argued that the sprawling episodic narrative used by Herbert contains an "ironic dialectic" born out of "the opposition between primitivism and civilisation" (Herbert 1990: xiii). The ironic dialectic helps an audience to see how the nation is haunted by its abject other.

The urgency in Leah Goldstein's rebuke of Badgery characterizes the wider communal belief that the familiar stories of nation-building no longer work. Beneath the often chauvinistic rhetoric, Australia today, as the referendum on the Republic in 2000 demonstrated, remains very uncertain about its identity, whether one understands the term culturally, politically or economically. It is the contention of this thesis that such ambivalence needs to be grasped as an activating principle, appropriate to any revision of the narratives and themes that inform what it means to be Australian. If the nation has been and remains colonialist in temperament, it does not follow that its stories are devoid

7 of cultural heterogeneity. One of the tasks at hand is to bring together diversity of difference with some of the most representative tensions, conflicts and histories specific to Australia, which range across genre and history, and remain unresolved.

An Ambivalent Ground At least officially, Australia was founded to house Britain’s most reprehensible criminals. Not surprisingly then, the prison provides a particularly fitting metaphor for observing how national and more broadly imperial ideology controls the heterogeneity of everyday life. The complex of place necessarily falls within the discursive walls of the prevailing ideology of power, but it cannot be confined by them. Re-placing place involves discussing literature and other important textual practices in ways that affirm the transgression and transformation of received cultural forms.

It may seem unduly excessive to assign the term "place" such importance. After all, does it not simply denote something given and self-evident? In one sense, yes, but so too does "everyday life", a term closely linked to place. Such areas seem given, but this perhaps relates more to the way they are understood in commonsense discourse. Herein lies the problem: when such terms are given, they tend to be seen as passive and empty entities. Consequently, people overlook their constitutive significance. There is then a pressing need to rethink these terms. Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life offers a beginning. For him everyday life refers to continual action; areas lose their abstract value to the extent they are inhabited and made into a place. This suggests a basic conflict of interests in the ways official space can be, and mundanely is, transformed. Indeed de Certeau tried to make explicit a significant power struggle. Official spaces such as cities and institutions become places when they are transformed by the mundane actions ("tactics") of nameless participants. Such actions elude formal measurement crucial to any system of power - for de Certeau they are "determined by the absence of a proper locus" (de Certeau 1984: 36). Far from being given, they locate the "space of the other" (Ibid).

The idea of place providing an important counterpoint to official representations

8 of cultural identity has obvious value to the kind of reading proposed in this thesis. It also assumes a deeper, more complex texture when the space of the other intersects with the "unhomely" character of Australian settler history. This term derives from Freud's influential 1919 essay on the "uncanny", which discussed the conflictual relation the subject experiences when s/he is torn between the sense of being home (heimlich) and not at home (unheimlich).1 The discordant nature of this experience usefully describes the unease the colonist undergoes in a world far removed from Britain and other usually equally geographically remote societies. Too often discordance is repressed and Australians simply end up becoming, in A. D. Hope's memorable phrase, "second-hand Europeans". But the unhomely, or unheimlich, is synonymous with how we need to approach place because it helps understand its provisional character as well as acknowledge dislocation and insecurity as legitimate forms of experience.

The relation between dislocation and Australia's historical environment is as much physical as it is psychological in form. The condition has been longstanding, indeed perhaps ancient given the associations the continent has carried in maps and imaginative texts produced during the Renaissance and Middle Ages (Wallis 1988). Long before the First Fleet arrived, Australia was the Antipodes, a land Other to Europe, a strange and fantastic space that inverted the familiar, a world that pinpointed the most remote boundary of civilisation. Generally, the associations were negative - the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese did not pursue the idea of settlement. When the British also took interest in the region, Dampier wrote of the "natural Deformity" of the "Savages". Cook arrived with a scientific entourage and a more positive attitude, but it was the topsy-turvy that most impressed scientists. The name "Botany Bay" was Cook's way of acknowledging the plethora of botanical discoveries being made. What was most remarkable was that these discoveries did not fit into accepted botanical classifications (White 1981: 6).

Although it assumes many guises, it is not difficult to see an ironic dialectic

1An important demonstration of this position can be found in Uncanny Australia (1998) by Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs.

9 between the Antipodes and white settlement. In the first decades can be found the ironic yet tension-filled observations of Barron Field and Thomas Watling pondering as they did just how to describe the settlement (see chapter 2). A few decades before Federation, the writer, Marcus Clarke was pondering the possibility of literature in a land infused with "weird melancholy". In the mid-twentieth century crudely inverted figures of authority in Sidney Nolan's "Ned Kelly" paintings chronicled a world where insider/outsider continually jostles. Today postcolonial academics deconstruct tired national narratives by explicitly deviating from official cultural routes. Thus Stephen Muecke can conclude his No Road by advising us "to leave the bitumen, to leave the roads and finally get lost and maybe find a way again" (Muecke 1997: 133). In Australia the absence of a proper locus has never been far when thinking about identity and cultural value.

Re-placing Australian literature therefore chronicles an inherently manifold, always ambivalent, interpretative process – one which should be situated in the broader post-colonial revision of Australian literature. On one level, it explores a provisional landscape that speaks not so much about Identity as about the constitutive performances of everyday life. Such events need to be placed more firmly on a cultural map because, as I have already commented, they reflect the important and defining role of mundane practices in our individual and collective lives. On another level, such a landscape reflects an inescapable historical relation with Australia's persistently antipodean identity. This means that any discussion of the spaces so delicately transformed into places also converges with the unhomely dimension that is the colonist's ambiguous sense of belonging. In the act of re-placing place, one is speaking of an inhibited movement, an inherently flawed and often anxiety-laden practice.

Re-placing literature, then, charts the tension between the coherence stemming from the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology and the actual rhizomic formlessness of daily life. Place is the ‘ground’ of that life, but an ambivalent ground. The narratives of

10 place in Australia, although they may oscillate widely between the utopian and dystopian, nevertheless typify experience in the way history organizes into a linear narrative the actual formlessness of this daily life. The six chapters in this thesis approach Australia as a densely woven 'text'. In this text, stories that describe the founding of a nation are enveloped by other stories, not so well known, that work to transform those more familiar narratives. This is the dialogical relation that makes possible the "re-placing" of nation and identity. By this term the thesis refers to a recuperation of that provisional and rhizomic experience of place that remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood. The following chapters represent an aggregation of post-colonial difference in the way(s) they explore the interwoven nature of history, language and space, and demonstrate how this relationship transforms identity politically and poetically.

Chapter 1 takes up one of the earliest and most enduring of themes in the text, that of the nation's penal beginnings. At least two things from the historical episode are important: the stigma of imposed exile, and the thematic of incarceration. The former issue illuminates just how deeply embedded dislocation is in Australian writing; the latter, I argue, provides an indispensable trope for understanding issues pertaining to identity-formation, language and cultural value. One immediately thinks of Michel Foucault's famous use of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish, and my intention in using images associated with the penal colony has been greatly influenced by his example. However, Foucault downplayed an account of history that saw its subjects transform and, in a sense, escape the Janus-like walls of the prison. Textual examples of escape add a quite distinct layer to understanding the complexity of the colonial prison and its relation to such intimately related concepts explored in the thesis such as subjectivity, nationhood, language and ambivalence. This strategy also serves to initiate my engagement with the nation's colonialist history, while seeking to understand the richly paradoxical way the space of power is transformed. One can understand how our topic cannot readily be extricated from the rubric of Western power and governance. One can also recognize how, by favouring a more provisional relation to the land, an unfolding of different possibilities, each progressively more removed from the panoptic enclosure represented by the colony, can unfold.

However, in the more profound sense of belonging, the chapter also demonstrates a basic failure to transcend in any definitive sense what might be called the "prison- house" culture - a culture that should not be confused with the more modest one once designed to house what William Pitt described as "some of the most incorrigible criminals in the Kingdom". The relation between Australian literature and the colonialist prison-house establishes a platform for seeing the burden of white history and is thus part of a broader tension dramatizing a people whose way of seeing was continually caught between failure and possibility, between ideological modes of confinement and escape.

Chapter 2 explores the antipodean complex: a country positioned on the margin of Europe, whose radical difference produces tensions that bring into question cultural value. The chapter surveys the period of early settlement and colonial art and literature more generally. It is almost a truism then to say that this is a richly ambivalent ground. However, the variety of forms ambivalence takes demonstrates the many-sided qualities of settlement. They also bring into question the norms of the colonising discourse. The novelty of the land may seem to some as freakish, and this quality could elicit reactions which oscillate from the whimsical to nightmarish. For others novelty provided the foundation for a "new Britannia", while for others a different kind of "Man" might emerge – not just a transplanted European, but someone shaped by indigenous influences. In colonialist discourse, the Antipodes is a key geo-political trope that Europe deploys in order to construct its Other. I regard it as a template of identity in the formation of Australian society, helping us understand why dominant narratives have always seemed so fragile and tenuous. Although this template should not to be confused with the performative and rhizomic experience of place, it does profoundly influence how the experience of Australian place both disrupts and remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood.

The final part of this chapter proposes how cultural difference more specifically emerges from the dialogical tension of power and difference that was raised in the concluding part of the first chapter. If understood in terms of boundaries that serve to

12 facilitate dialogue rather than exclusion, the process of “re-placing” the boundaries of enclosure identifies a provisional landscape that speaks not so much about identity as the constitutive performances of everyday life. Australian place occupies the space between different ways of seeing: between the progressivism of the colonialist enclosure of space and the locally contingent practices of performative transformation. On this ground, literature and history begin to speak differently: they acknowledge the burden of white history and, in so doing, open the way for some kind of dialogue with the haunting presence we earlier witnessed undermining colonialism.

The spatial possibilities introduced in the preceding chapters are developed in the next chapter by closely reading a single text, a short-story by the colonial writer, John George Lang, which tells of the transportation of a piano to a family living on the frontier of N.S.W. The musical instrument and its cultural baggage was (and remain) metonymic of what might be termed the "civilizing mission". But on the frontier pianos are not simply pianos, while music can be subsumed by noise. To some readers, such episodes might seem whimsical or degenerative, but a re-placing discerns in such sounds the hybrid possibilities carried by the dislocated colonising discourse.

Chapter 3 demonstrates the quotidian production of cultural difference. The possibilities this represents are of immense significance to a post-colonial reading as they impact profoundly on the areas of language, subjectivity, history and literature. However, as the chapter concludes, the possibilities generated by post-colonial difference are silenced by the way the colony is "enclosed". The conclusion of the chapter in fact provides the mise en scene for what follows in the story of white settlement. Standing at the boundary, the colonist silences the noise of cultural difference. The act adds a poignant and frustrating layer to the reading of ambivalence – one which resonates today, as already noted in the discussion of Herbert Badgery. Re-placing Australian literature means not simply speaking of (or celebrating) difference; rather, it is to ponder how from the beginning, the shifting signs of the nation reveal a people whose way of seeing was continually caught between possibility and failure.

13 In chapter 3, the tension of colonialist discourse is explored through the relation between music, the colonising language, and noise, the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet attuned to the spatial realities of place. The conclusion of the chapter suggests that white settlement's enclosure of place was symptomatic of a more profound "ideological deafness", a world attuned only to music. The idée fix in Australian society emerges in how narratives of place in Australia have disguised the much more subtle way place disrupts and diffracts those narratives.

Re-placing literature entails mapping how the spatiality of difference renders colonialist discourse provisional. This process can be elaborated more clearly by turning attention to the nationalist text of the 1890s, the subject of chapter 4. The "1890s" carries considerable problems for any revisionist position. Nationalist historians have long privileged the period in ways that have tended to marginalize particular groups, such as women. Even when these biases are removed, one must confront the racism that seems to grow proportionately to the "indigenization" of white settlement and its attendant pastoral dream – so effectively recorded by the Heidelberg artists. In short, nationalist discourse means that the provisionality in the experience of place is papered over by a coherent array of narratives that characterize the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology.

Given how Australian nationalist mythology coincides with the rise of the nation- state, it seems inevitable that the coherency of its narratives becomes more deeply entwined in the representation of Australianness. When juxtaposed with the bush legend, spatial experience becomes peripheral to the narration of identity. To fully describe its tenuousness, I have turned to the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus. The latter, a beautiful young man, is entranced by his image, and so remains unaware of the nymph, Echo, standing close to him. She is turned to stone, silent yet residual in her haunting presence which one day might be acknowledged by Narcissus. The relationship of Echo and Narcissus introduced in chapter 4 and developed throughout the remaining chapters is a key metaphor for the way Australian society has resulted from the systematic enclosure (physical and ideological) of place. The figure of Narcissus represents how our society has consistently failed to enter into meaningful dialogue with the landscape and

14 its indigenous peoples. The figure of Echo, as proposed in my readings of stories, images and novels of the period, is less a text or a narrative; rather, it is a spatial plenitude which continues to haunt Narcissus on the boundary of language and experience.

In the act of taking possession, the colonist finds himself challenged by an unwanted presence, which itself comes from the land and its past. Clearly, there could never be any simple act of settling down. The conclusion of chapter 4 is that to invent a national Narcissus meant confronting Echo. This basic tension marks postcolonial writing in Australia throughout the next century. Nationalism fails in its creative endeavour to represent Australia because its particular drama cannot accommodate the peculiar yet everyday dialectical tension which we have seen persistently haunt the narrative of European settlement. For the writers and artists that followed the generation of the 1890s, a basic recognition emerged that it was necessary to occupy a different ground to the one mapped by nationalism and the broader web of colonialist discourse, one that returned to the provisionally defined landscape of earlier colonial culture straddling the space between insider and outsider, centre and margin, belonging and exile.

The process by which this realignment or “re-placing of nation” occurs influences the argument and narrative developed in the concluding chapters. In chapter 5 the pattern I outline is drawn from the period from Federation to that of the mid-century. Chapter 6 takes up the narrative from the mid-century and concludes with a developed reading of a contemporary work which maps in extended form the nomadic movements of hybrid subjects who reject the fetishisation of place, appropriate the language of empire without reiterating the cultural cringe, and postulate modes of being in the world that successfully incorporated the unheimlich of colonialist history and identity. In both chapters, I am interested in a creative tension which is fundamentally dissonant to the discourses of colonialist power, cultural or otherwise. This power is always characterized by the way its discourses seek to enclose and regulate place. “Re-placing the nation” reinterprets the complex modes of “return” that see the provisionality of place challenge and transform the territorializing claims made through cultural imperialism.

15 Key Concepts in An Ambivalent Ground The re-placing process proves to be inimical to empiricist models because I understand it as a complex existing only to the extent it is continually practiced and performed. There has been a tremendous surge of interest in academic literature in recent years and it spans many disciplines while reflecting different working premises. What remains common to the literature is the emphasis on the local, the performative and the transformational. Here I will endeavour to introduce some of the concepts that play (implicitly or explicitly) an important role in An Ambivalent Ground.

a) Post-colonial Theory and Place

Post-colonial theory examines the relation between imperialism and its transplanted discourses within the colonized society. The most comprehensive definition of this process is offered by the authors of The Empire Writes Back (1989):

We use the term ‘post-colonial’, however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression (Ashcroft et al 1989: 2).

Stephen Slemon augments the above definition when he states his preference for the kind of model that

…[is not] used synonymously with a post-independence historical period in once- colonised nations, but rather when it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture… (Slemon 1991: 3).

Post-colonialism is, therefore, an interpretative strategy that attends to the difference distinguishing colonized societies from Western (Eurocentric) cultural norms. The prefix strategically affirms a method less chronological than revisionist in intention.

As Slemon’s comment reveals, post-colonialism addresses the theme of resistance to colonialist power. In a collection of essays, the editors see colonialism as a field of discursive representation, or "archive". The post-colonial reading divides the archive into

16 two forms: the first archive is a form of writing "from countries which were formerly colonies of Europe".

The second archive of post-colonialism is intimately related to the first, though not coextensive with it. Here, the post-colonial is conceived of as a set of discursive practices, prominent among which is resistance to colonialism, colonialist ideologies and their contemporary forms and subjectificatory legacies (Adam & Tiffin 1991: xii).

Resistance to colonialism has generally been understood in terms of nationalist discourse. Frantz Fanon described nationalism as the "whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence" (Fanon in Ashcroft et al 1995: 151). However, post-colonial theory has criticized nationalism because of the way it tends to legitimate essentialist notions of cultural identity – typified by the négritude movement. It favours the process that sees Western textual forms "abrogated" and "appropriated" by the margins of the metropolitan centre and eventually transformed without privileging an alternate hegemony.

However familiar the word "place" might be, it is by no means entrenched as a theoretical term in post-colonial theory or the social sciences. In a recently published introduction to post-colonial theory there is no mention of the term in either the glossary or main text (Childs & Williams 1997). In contrast, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin privilege the term, seeing it signify one of the basic ways the "margin" resists incorporation into the "centre". The "lack of fit" reflects the "heterogeneity" of post-colonial societies generally (Ashcroft et al 1989, 1995). It has generated tremendous creative energy, which was typified when the Canadian poet, Dennis Lee, spoke of the difficulty of "speaking unreflectingly" in a "space which is radically in question for us" (Lee in Ashcroft et al 1995: 398). Place radically draws into question the most basic notions of environment, language and history. It also serves as the "continual reminder of the separation and yet of the hybrid interpenetration of colonizer and colonized" (391).

17 b) Ambivalence in the work of Homi Bhabha

The principle of transformation advanced by this thesis has been greatly influenced by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). For Bakhtin, language, and the value-systems attached to its genres, was neither pre-given nor fixed, but processural or "dialogical". Dialogism has been a very important concept for post-colonial theory. It refers to the unresolved dialectic where the conflict lies between two opposing tendencies in language: the centralizing (“centripetal”) force, which is codified in official generic models) and the decentring (“centrifugal”) force. The resulting heteroglossia of language signifies the pluralism of experience, but this can only be properly grasped when we take into account the "two embattled tendencies" (271) marking the dialogical imagination.

Dialogism is similar to those concepts in the work of one of the most important of post-colonial theorists, Homi Bhabha. His key concepts of the colonial "stereotype", "mimicry" and "ambivalence" describe how the colonialist subject struggles within the fabric of discourse. The stereotype relates to the way colonialist power fixes its other within the ambit of normative or civilizing discourses. Forced into subordination, the subject is "interpellated" (Althusser 1971) into existence through its capacity to mimic the language of power and privilege. The mimic is no original, but while condemned to imitate the original its performative actions ensure that it can never quite be like the colonising discourse even when it imitates it. In this sense, colonialist discourse is residually “ambivalent” – a term denoting how and where the binarism between self and other is ruptured and blurred. Ambivalence is laden with psychic tension as the subject is caught between the poles of identification and difference. This anxiety-laden "in between" space intersects with the topography of place because it locates a spatio- temporal dimension that sees the dialogical process grounded in the local and everyday. Bhabha has written of this location as a "third space", which he defines "the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space… that carries the burden of meaning of culture" (Bhabha 1994: 38-9).

Ambivalence for Bhabha is everywhere in that the colonising power never

18 operates in any singular or monolithic way. His account of colonialist power consistently reveals contradictions that can be interpreted to contribute to a counter set of values and meanings representative of submerged histories (Papastergiardis 1996: 178). His idea of the textual sign as inherently "doubled" or "split" cuts across the often-polarizing effects of minority discourse. It instead addresses the basically discordant condition of language and experience. In the interests of ideological and narrative coherency, the nation-state downplays the subject’s relation to alterity and so represses the subversive dimension of ambivalence. To read Bhabha is to recuperate this subversive dimension.

c) Modernity

If place is used in this thesis to address the complex of settler colony writing, the word itself obviously intersects with our everyday language in a variety of ways. Whether used in a connotative or denotative sense, place remains basic for describing the idea of community in English. We use the word alongside various synonyms: "region", "locality", "city", and "country", even "world". Place expresses where and how people interact with a multiplicity of spaces; it invokes the location where otherwise general, abstract realms become humanized by everyday practice.

Although demonstrably crucial, the term has only recently become prominent in the social sciences. Recent encyclopedic accounts by David Harvey and Derek Gregory testify to the current theoretical importance of place. Harvey follows the position advocated by Emile Durkheim: that time and space are social constructs and envelop everything people do. "Place", Harvey notes, becomes an inevitable factor in how people relate to their world – thus the word is necessarily basic yet manifold, common yet slippery in use and meaning (Harvey 1996).

A pivotal concept running alongside place and its relation to the post-colonial interrogation of European imperialism is "modernity". The general characteristics of modernity relate to technologies of Western industrial capitalism. In this sense, the term

19 functions conterminously with the expansionism of colonialism and its modes of production: ceaselessly expanding, changing, exploiting and reorganizing social relations and cultural value. Post-colonial discourse has examined the consequences of colonialism and capitalism merging in ways which result in a new conception of space as well as new forms of subjectivity that enable the experiencing of the world (Said 1978; Spurr 1993).

Globalization can be viewed as the consequence of modernity. Definitions of globalization differ. Immanuel Wallerstein divides the world into "core" and "periphery" areas predicated in different economic systems. Giddens and Harvey have argued that because of globalization the world has undergone a process of time-space compression as global media, computer software. First World market-systems cohere to bypass the boundaries of the nation-state and local networks. The threat to "traditional" geographical barriers generates new questions about identity and value. The intensification of exclusionist forms of nationalism and the affirming of local communities are among the more notable responses to the geo-political topography of modernity. Harvey argues that modernity has made it impossible for us to think about the question of value without invoking place because of the way the term brings into play the local and the performative. For this reason he is attracted to the work of figures like Bakhtin and Michel de Certeau – the latter seeing in place the flux of everyday life that nonetheless offers "an indication of stability" (de Certeau 1984: 117). Given its affirmation of the local and the everyday, place exists precariously in relation to agendas that privilege the abstract and universal, hence its subversive quality.

In The Fate of Place (1998) Edward Casey argues that the exclusion of place signifies a longstanding bias in Western epistemology. From Aristotle’s conception of space as a vacuum waiting to be filled through the conception of absolute space in seventeenth century physics, space has been conceptualized as void-like – chaos awaiting architectural order. Casey also interprets the recent interest in place as a response to the homogenizing consequences of modernity. He reminds us that, however marginal the episteme, place cannot be extrapolated from the most elementary definitions of

20 community in Western thought:

Both ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’ go back to Greek words that signify place: polis and ethea, ‘city-state’ and ‘habitats’, respectively. The very word ‘society’ stems from socius, signifying ‘sharing’ – and sharing is done in a common place (Casey 1997: xiv).

Casey concludes that the reason place has been, to use Heidegger’s word, "veiled" from standard accounts is that its radically provisional value expresses not so much identity as the constitutive performances of everyday life. Place and its connectedness with the body’s kinaesthesia, for example, transform rather than conform to either order or chaos. A placial account of experience thus intimates a middle path: a dimension attuned to the lived dynamism of mundane acts like walking. Strange yet familiar, such acts overlap with the re-placing of cultural difference in the way they prove elusive to the panoptic discourse of Western hegemony.

d) The Post-structuralist Attention to Place

Although post-colonial theory tends to be suspicious of the post-structuralist interest in the instability of signification, instability does not necessarily imply the deferral of meaning. Post-structuralist accounts concern sustained investigations into language that question the efficacy of the Cartesian subject and expose the relation between power and knowledge. More specifically, attention to place has emerged concurrently to the destabilizing implications of these investigations. It has come to be understood as subversive of reductionist accounts of identity. The post-structuralist attention to place provides crucial strategies for any revisionist account of the nation-state.

For Michel Foucault, the conception of space emerged in tandem with his interest in power. Power cannot be abstractly formulated because its epistemic genealogy is always architectural in character, hence his interest in sites like the brothel, the colony, the library, the clinic, the school and, of course, the prison. Even the concept of "discourse" lends itself to a geographical conception of relation as Edward Said has

21 demonstrated (Said 1978). If discourse relates to a collection of statements revolving around a unitary, stabilized object of knowledge, this object cannot be divorced from a geo-political dimension. Thus the discourse about the East always revolves around spatial notions that render the object an exotic landscape.

Foucault never evinced any real interest in place per se. However, his eventual advocacy of the present epoch as "above all the epoch of space" led him to single out the centralizing role of space as a mode of simultaneity, a force bringing together near and far, the disparate and dispersed (Foucault 1986: 22). This definition is, as Casey notes, a "primary predicate of space with a basic property of place" (Casey 1997: 298). For Foucault, the juxtaposing of difference within a radical singularity typified the "heterotopia": the heterogeneous spaces harbouring relations in every society (Foucault 1986: 23). This definition takes up the thought of Walter Benjamin in terms of simultaneity ("time of the now") and de Certeau in terms of the disruptive practices he associates with everyday life.

The correlation between place and subversion can be more fruitfully seen in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their A Thousand Plateaus (1987). The authors explore the principle of movement generated by people and actions that prove elusive to institutional centres. Their ideal model for this movement is the nomad who occupies the fringes of cities and towns, but is constantly on the move. "Nomad science" (or "minor science") opposes the capital of "royal science" in that its aim is never to capture experience within an unassailable hierarchy of knowledge (a "tree system"). Nomad science is amateurish, improvised and contiguous with the local terrain the subject inhabits. Like the "bricoleur", the improviser who uses whatever materials are at hand and continually makes meaning as s/he goes, nomad science "deterritorialises" official systems and so discloses a world on the margins of discourse.

Another important concept proposed by Deleuze and Guattari is the "rhizome".

22 The rhizome is a root-form that spreads erratically. It cannot be traced to any one origin; its composition resists traditional organic associations (bamboo rather than grass). The rhizome grows across surfaces, not downwards. The key to understanding the rhizome relates to its basically heterogeneous pattern. Its growth cuts across formations and transforms them. Because it has no single root, the rhizome encourages a reading strategy to resist hierarchical models. The rhizome represents the nomadic principle of "deterritorialisation".

The desire to see place as the topography of radical difference belongs to the broader questioning post-structuralism has brought to "metanarratives" that legitimate Enlightenment thought (Lyotard 1984). The need to make room in critical discourse for experiences integral to our everyday practices forms an important component in the thinking of writers like de Certeau and Foucault. This is clearly indebted to the influence of Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard. In different ways both of these men sought to recuperate what they saw as the repressed yet central dimension of identity: the spaces we inhabit and experience in meaningful ways. Bachelard introduced the concept of "topoanalysis" to identify the sequence of fixations growing out of the intimate places central to the subject’s sense of self – this he did by focusing on the house and its correlating spaces (Bachelard 1967). Heidegger sought to make room (raum) by distinguishing “dwelling” from empiricist formulations of place:

The environment does not arrange itself in a space which has been given in advance, but its specific worldhood in its significance, articulates the context of involvement which belongs to some current totality of circumspectively allotted places (Heidegger 1973: 138).

Dwelling anticipates the willingness of post-structuralism to inscribe hermeneutic legitimacy upon marginal spaces. Despite the political controversy surrounding Heidegger’s affiliation with Nazism, his notoriously difficult prose shares with Bachelard a position in which historical subjects, however burdened, occupy places that remain provisional in meaning and open to alternate and invaluable possibilities.

23 e) Spatial History

If the post-structuralist attention to place partly involves a return to Heidegger and Bachelard, then these writers are, in themselves, concerned with returning to the broader origins of history and identity. As suggested earlier, this is a result of the way place has been occluded in normative representations of culture and experience. As part of an interpretative process, place always signifies the re-reading of dominant representations, finding out by negotiating with the density of the historical record what has been left out of our stories and why.

As a product of the Enlightenment Australia is predicated on the kinds of assumptions Heidegger saw as veiling place. European settlement involved the importation of an authoritative culture expressed in various forms: literature, art, law, education, and the military. The linguistic codification of colonial space saw English assume responsibility for representing experiences that emerged out of white occupation. The teleological bias inherent in the ‘civilizing mission’ structures the story of the country’s history: from modest beginnings to the positive emergence of the nation. But surely there was something else at work. Australia was not an empty space simply awaiting its rightful owners; it was already occupied, it already carried histories, maps, and languages. Furthermore, the story of British occupation could be understood differently, less as a simple march forward than as a story that carries with it the traces of uncertainty and hesitancy.

For Paul Carter, the traditional telling of stories signifies the hegemony of "imperial history", a discourse resembling Said’s definition of Orientalism in the way it contracts historical experience into theatre. In imperial history the historian is all seeing, someone who reinscribes the view of the continent as a space of timeless opportunity. The thesis of The Road to Botany Bay (1987) is that Australia did not passively await naming; rather, it only came into existence through the multiple strategies of naming that concurred (inevitably) with the event of European colonialism. Spatial history sets about locating the elusive moment when the origins of names and therefore of places begins to

24 resonate. Often this occurs in the provisional nature of exploration and its hesitant relation to the landscape it experiences. Captain Cook offers one key example. In contrast to the Linnaean system of naming botanical objects as used by Joseph Banks, Cook named the eastern coastline subjectively and historically – not in the sense of fact, but in the sense that names reflected the passage of Cook’s encounter with his world (Magnetic Island, Disaster Bay). Names were not denotative but connotative of the transitory nature of exploration in a world yet to be enclosed. In this context Australia was experienced as a place, that is, a "space with a history".

Spatial history is important because it subverts imperial history’s rhetorical and ideological claim to the country. By exploring European occupation as something provisional and open-ended, spatial history locates in the most telling sense places where colonialism was itself questioned and even transformed. In this context the language of the colonist can be understood as a palimpsest, a text that is never finalized, but is always in the process of being written. The palimpsest contests the veracity of white ownership of the land by seeing the colonist’s relation to it in performative terms, hence the importance of literature in Carter’s methodology. History no longer tells the story of "what happened". It operates dialectically with a poetics, that is, the Aristotelian interest in a past that "might have happened" (Carter 1992b: 187).

f) Australia and the Antipodes

The central proposition of this thesis, that Australia has been brought into existence through different kinds of discursive strategies, has its antecedent in the writings of art historian Bernard Smith. Peter Beilharz argues that it was Smith who first saw Australia as a space that existed to legitimate and resist the colonising gaze of Europe (Beilharz 1997). In European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) Smith argued that the eighteenth century reaction against European neo-classicism began as a result of Western exploration and settlement in exotic locales throughout the Pacific. This is why he spends much time discussing William Hodges, the painter who accompanied Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific, for here can be found a striking indication of what Smith sees as a

25 pre-Romantic energy transforming classical decorum. In Place, Taste and Tradition (1945), Smith had already put forward the idea that colonists did not so much see a real physical landscape as see a vision that itself belonged to earlier European ways of seeing. This history saw the landscape existing on the margins of Europe – the Antipodes. The term came into use during the sixteenth century in conjunction with Renaissance European exploration; it was synonymous with terms like terra incognita and terra Australis. It refers to a landscape that exists through a binary relation to Europe, one that inverts normative, metropolitan projections. What Smith termed "antipodal inversion" describes the way Europe saw the southern continent. This is typified in Peron’s view of the "freakish and whimsical" or Field’s view of Australia as a topsy-turvy land (Smith 1960: 225-229).

To be antipodean is to live on the margins of the European imagination. Australia is synonymous with the grotesque, the fantastic, the other. This framework informs why weary European travellers in search of radically distinct experiences have found Australia appealing (D.H. Lawrence and Bruce Chatwin are notable examples of the genre). For the colonist, the meaning of the Antipodes is more complicated. One of the most significant themes to emerge sees the landscape as projecting the failure of the British to settle in any triumphal sense. As expressed in its earliest form by Thomas Watling, Australia is conceived as a bastard state founded on the anti-heroic themes of exile and imprisonment. Although such abjection tends to be directly rejected by nationalist discourses, it continually ruptures the thin, fragile veneer of the nation’s official representations. The result is one that sees the antipodean subject anxiously roaming the landscape caught in a world that oscillates between national belonging and exile.

The Antipodes can be approached as a complex that exists only to the extent it is continually practiced and performed. Smith suggested this when he interpreted European art in the Pacific in a way that asserted the primacy of the local. Thus colonial art and literature projected a place where radical cultural difference bent and transformed the perceptual experience of the European. The colonial margin resonates in subversive

26 rather than simply negative ways. However, as Ian McLean reminds us in his compelling survey of Australian art, White Aborigines (1998), the Antipodes shows how deeply colonial experience legitimates imperial narrativity. This is more obvious in the case of early colonial and nineteenth century texts in which homesickness and psychic dislocation feature prominently. But it is also carried over into twentieth century Australia. Myth-making projects like that of Gallipoli simultaneously project the collective inability of the nation to break from the imperial centre (the Law of the Father). And this inability of course overlaps with the basic failure to hold dialogue with the land and its indigenous peoples.

McLean sees spatial history as a profoundly Eurocentric ideology. Following Smith, he sees the Antipodes as a key geo-political trope Europe deploys in order to construct its Other. Within the history of European settlement in Australia, this trope is never separate from the ways the colonist remakes his or her identity. Much of the time it results in anxiety, but sometimes it results in emplacement - a new and more prosperous world for a new and distinct kind of subjectivity. At least two problems emerge with a positive take on emplacement: such a process is invariably idealized; secondly, and more disturbing, emplacement can only be achieved by proclaiming an autochthonous standing, and this can only result by displacing the Aborigine – something the cultural archive makes very clear.

McLean’s thesis is important because it helps us see how myriad, even counter- discursive forms of colonial experience, at some level legitimate imperial narrativity in Australian culture. In terms of appreciating spatial history, we should understand that its post-colonial celebration of cultural pluralism should not be accepted as the endgame of critical discourse. As my particular use of the take on the myth of Narcissus and Echo, and the more overarching metaphor of the prison-house used throughout this thesis, are meant to suggest, an account of post-colonial society needs to be more firmly understood in terms of a paradoxical legacy that cannot be truly resolved. An ambivalent ground describes a landscape whose inhabitants are trapped between possibility and failure.

27 However, it is not the intention of this thesis to argue, as McLean does, that spatial history should finally be seen as the most recent chapter in the long history of rhetorical dispossession. Re-placing literature is a model for the tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual formlessness of daily life with its performatively attuned practices. An Ambivalent Ground approaches postcolonial Australia as a densely woven text. In this text, stories that describe the founding of a nation are enveloped by other stories, not so well known, that work to transform those more familiar narratives. By this process, the thesis offers a recuperation of that provisional and spatial experience of place that remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood. In "re-placing" Australian literature, the thesis explores the interwoven nature of history, language and space, and demonstrates how this relationship transforms identity politically and poetically.

By fleshing out critical differences between McLean and Carter, I have tried to define more astutely the ambivalence that attends the relation between place and Australian writing. In any case, the purpose of this thesis is not to displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative. Rather, it offers the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. Thus it tries to affirm cultural difference without reducing the term to the doctrinal assumptions associated with identity-politics. This has meant developing a strategy of locating a different, more hesitant, mode of contact made between the colonist and the environment. Such contacts disclose a ground where meaning is neither given nor inevitable, where incommensurable yet uniquely local exchanges can be heard to proliferate.

28 Chapter 1 The Penal Colony: Prison and Escape

A man's eyes can only see what they've learnt to see – Charles Kingsley Yeast

Prison-house Beginnings/Prison-house Endings I In a recent exhibition of Australian photography in Canberra, an art critic commented on a selection of institutional photos of Port Arthur convicts taken during the final years of transportation. She noted how some effort had been made to make the men appear respectable – names rather than numbers identifying their character. She also expressed surprise at the way these photos hinted an identity neither identifiably criminal nor socially respectable (Ferran 2000: 8-9). The apparent civil appearance of the men photographed seemed to contradict the criminal stain continuing to persist in the colonies as they approached the birth of nationhood.

Such photos offer one of many opportunities to reflect on the paradoxical relation between contemporary Australian identity and the nation's inglorious beginnings. The need to reflect further on our convict legacy is probably unavoidable. For the first half- century of white Australia's history, the nation could be properly described as a penal colony. Convictism profoundly influenced the way the landscape was developed. And when the shackles had been freed, convict experience would continue to linger as a painful memory - its abject associations regularly surfacing in public discourse. The historian, John Hirst, provides a good example of this:

Since the colonists had imposed the vow of silence about their origins upon themselves, even a mention of the convict past was enough to cause anguish. In 1899 a newly-appointed governor gave great offense by sending this message: "Greetings, your birth stain have you turned to good" (Hirst 1983: 217).

Such pronouncements signified a desire for redemption, but could redemption be claimed for a people unwilling to acknowledge their original stain? Repression may have been the mood of Federation, but enduring themes of Australian writing – exile, alienation, incarceration and visionary quests – only reinforce just how deeply embedded is the

29 legacy of convictism. Dig beneath the surface and it remains a key feature of our collective identity, from the earliest ballads telling the story of "some poor lads who were sent to Botany Bay" to the bicentennial study offered by journalist-writer, John Pilger, in his film, The Last Dream (1988).

The timbre of convictism has always moved between the grotesque and the melancholy, and today is no different. For example, Pilger begins his study of a flawed Australian society with an admission of his family's sad convict history. This in turn reminds us of the pervasive influence of Manning Clark, whose multivolume History invokes a biblical pessimism deriving from the writer's connection between convictism and trauma of exile, psychic as much as physical. Convicts were originally perceived as degenerate objects sent to NSW because, as William Pitt put matters to the House of Commons in 1791, the penal colony offered the cheapest means of getting "some of the most incorrigible criminals out of the Kingdom" (Shaw 1955: 43). Little wonder then that a "vow of silence" would descend upon discussion about the nation's origins, especially for those who might later entertain aspirations that Australia might become, as one contemporary novelist put it, "that great America on the other side of the sphere" (Melville 1988: 112). But one need not mention Freud to appreciate how, by silencing the incorrigible element, one was repressing what was always implicit anyway, that is, the possibility of redemption in a land of opportunity and hope. The photographed convicts displayed in Canberra are in part a document of the way the Antipodes occupies the margin of Europe: a nuisance to be disposed and forgotten.

Whatever the attendant anxieties, such a position did not preclude hope and vision. In a way, things have come full-circle today: shame has become fascination. Families search the archives to trace their convict ancestry. A convict heritage is regarded as a status symbol by most people. Francis Greenway's Hyde Park Barracks has been opened to the public to reveal the different, sometimes contradictory, layers of its social evolution. Even the abject has become acceptable: Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore was an international bestseller partly because it gruesomely detailed the horrors of the "convict archipelago".

Perhaps such perceptions are not the product of recent revisionism. The penal experience was from the very start structured by the opposite poles of abjection and redemption. What brought the two poles together was the civilizing discourse that affected all experience. The photos show how the convicts are neither brutes nor completely redeemed in their appearance for they remain slightly dishevelled, civilized but not quite. The convicts grasp their freedom, but they do so in the garments of the institution that has literally clothed and thus condemned them. Their ambiguous being is a document of how the civilizing discourse never simply repressed, but continually produced new objects and new relations

Such a paradox should not be confined to those labeled as incorrigible criminals. Neither freedom nor incarceration can be construed naively; nor should the penal colony, or the landscape upon which it is imposed. All are terms that are simultaneously monolithic and flexible, oppressive and productive because the civilizing discourse is something continually exercised rather than fixed. This understanding needs to underpin any study intent on avoiding essentialist associations about identity when examining the relationship between Australian writing and colonialism.

The function of penalism as a civilizing discourse is made nowhere more forcefully and lucidly than in the literature of convict punishment itself. The oppressive features of transportation were never far from discussion of punishment and reformation during the period penalism held sway in the colonies. In early voyages to Australia, convicts suffered violent punishment inflicted by often brutal masters. The punishments ranged from execution, flogging to being ironed to ringbolts. Administrative strategies initially centred on menial tasks such as scrubbing decks and mending clothes. However, one of the most effective strategies proved to be the forming of schools and libraries. Under the supervision of the ship's surgeons, convicts learned how to read and write within an atmosphere steeped in religious and moral reformation. It is not an exaggeration to interpret these maritime "houses of correction", as one writer has done, as offering the earliest adult educational programs in Australia (Whitelock 1974).

It is both instructive and fascinating to consider in detail the transformational role of education within the physical apparatus of punishment and coercion as described in original narratives of transportation. No better illustration can be found than C. A. Browning's The Convict Ship. First published in London in 1847, Colin Arrott Browning’s The Convict Ship: A Narrative of the Results of Scriptural Instruction and Moral Discipline as These Appeared on the ‘Earl Grey’ during the Voyage to Tasmania, expresses a fervent and systematic attempt by the author to instruct convicted criminals during the passage to the antipodean penal colony. Responsible for the education of more than two hundred and sixty men, Browning (a surgeon and devout Evangelical) accepts his duties with the utmost seriousness. The aim of the text is not simply spiritual, but pragmatic and didactic. In its espousal of Christianity as a morally proper theme for the subject, The Convict Ship comes to express the modus operandi of educational reform.

The "house of correction" presents an ideal space in which can be conveyed the redemptive message of Christianity. By redemption, Browning is not at all concerned with superficial changes in the subject’s behaviour; the house of correction must completely transform the convict’s attitudes and beliefs:

It was not mere outward decorum and correctness of moral deportment... not a mere superficial reformation of speech and manners; we desired to see that change effected which would ensure future good conduct upon right and divinely- approved principles (Browning 1847: 51).

From the outset the metalanguage of Christianity is grounded in earthly rituals; more precisely, it operates as the source of pedagogical technology. Browning’s sincere but narrow-minded "narrative of redemption" offers an elementary description of subject- formation and the environment in which it emerges. The primary relations described in the text are organized between teacher and student, master and convict, redeemer and redeemed. The spiritual content operates as a pretext for foregrounding the pedagogy necessary to redeem the convict. So a phrase such as the following (usually seen

32 typifying the Surgeon’s naivety) 1 needs to be understood differently:

God has shown us in His writings what is necessary to accomplish these great and paramount objects (31).

The word "writings" is most significant because it stamps out clearly what this modest account of the voyage out is all about, that is, what the author describes a "scheme of education and discipline".

On a very basic level of interpretation, it makes sense to read The Convict Ship as an allegory for the civilizing mission, specifically in the important sense that education was to be used during the period of colonial rule throughout the world. Post-colonial critics have long drawn attention to the importance of education as a discourse of social control (Docker 1978; Viswanathan 1989). With this context firmly in mind, it is not difficult to see how Browning’s narrative, however modest in itself, offers a microcosm of the drama of education as played out in the colonies. Equally significant, it also dramatizes that moment of transition in colonialism when the sovereignty of governance is rendered secular. Like other colonial administrators, such as Lord Macauley, Browning privileges English as normative or ‘universal’ while representing those outside of this hierarchy as ‘barbarous’ or ‘uncivilized’. If the convict is no longer to remain a "victim of the darkest ignorance", he must be forced to access the language of empire - what Browning would most likely describe as the "writings of God":

The earliest opportunity was embraced to ascertain... how people stood as to their ability to read and write (33).

The results of the survey:

Read and write, 53; read only, 23; read a little, 65; know their letters, 45; ignorant even of the alphabet, 77...; educated 76; uneducated, 187.

Charles Bateson interprets Browning’s pedagogic impact to reflect only the author’s bias:

1 The point is made by Charles Bateson in his The Convict Ships, 1770-1868, p 77

33 "it seems clear that the majority of the convicts found it simpler and more profitable to play the hypocrite than to stand out against well-meaning religious fanatics" (Bateson 1959: 77). This is an enticing point in itself and will be discussed in the latter stages of this chapter. But for now it is necessary to acknowledge that, however self-promoting (or naively earnest) Browning appears, he was describing the way the English language was being codified within the colonising voyages. Not without significance, Bateson does in fact emphasize later on in his account how the schools were significant in that they "imparted to convicts some rudimentary knowledge" (Ibid 308).2 Perhaps it is Bateson who is being somewhat naive here; for him "rudimentary knowledge" is glossed over as a simple cultural norm. But as Browning reminds us quite powerfully in his first-hand account of the vessel housing the convicts, education involved nothing less than shedding the light of English (its language, its civil discourse) upon the "victim of darkest ignorance".

To build briefly on the "rudimentary knowledge" crucial to educating the convict, it is important to situate a text like The Convict Ship within the context of the civilizing mission. The very notion of writing itself is significant because it intimates how language now coincides with print rather than orality - the epistemological shift that occurs with this discourse is, of course, crucial (for example, Ong 1982: 118-121). The standardizing of signs outside of the body’s traditionally performative role also reminds us of the emergent impact of modernity. In this secularized environment where time and space become compressed, literacy functions within globalizing discourses thanks to the standardizing and mass-reproducible forces Benedict Anderson terms "print capitalism" (Anderson 1991: 42-6; Febvre & Martin 1958).

It perhaps then should not seem surprising to conclude when reading The Convict Ship that its account of colonial subject-formation clearly anticipates how a civilizing discourse like English literature would later serve to encode the civil subject within the fetish of English cultural norms (Bhabha 1994: 102-122). Consider two aspects of this foretelling. Firstly, recall the concept of the Filtration Theory as it was deployed in

2 Bateson argues that the majority of convicts (75%) were in all likelihood literate (Bateson 1959: 308).

34 colonial India around the same time as Browning’s passage to the Antipodes. A debate occurred between two philosophies of administration that focused on appropriate usage of language. On the one hand, Orientalist scholars advocated programs emphasizing the virtues of Eastern culture; on the other, the Anglicist position (typified in Lord Macaulay’s 1835 Minute to Parliament), sought to promulgate a European-based literature, which at this point shifted between sacred and secular texts. Viswanathan shows that unifying these positions was the desire for a common form of governance: specifically, by coopting an influential native elite as the conduit of Western knowledge; generally, a hierarchical model of cultural dissemination was designed to standardise cultural difference (Viswanathan 1989: 31-34). In parallel fashion The Convict Ship expresses this as the sine qua non of successful educational reform. As with the model utilized in India, the disciplinary space of the convict ship embodies an elevated set of values gradually spreading downward from those in power to those in need of guidance, "from the governor down to the humblest warder... to the defenceless and lost" (ix).

This hierarchical technology is relevant to the second way Browning’s narrative describes the modern civilizing process. This concerns the elevated role of the book in education. If printing machines standardized vernacular, the book made possible the contraction of space and time into a globalized environment. For Browning, the need to make visible the book to the convicts is nothing short of paramount importance. His chief desire is for them to live "in constant contact with Divine truth", that is, "God, as revealed in the gospel of His Son, is continually set before them... Christianity - Bible Christianity, is kept perpetually in their view" (43). It is not, I suggest, Christianity as a transparent authority on offer here. Consider the way Browning’s own narrative when it is described in the preface to The Convict Ship:

Place this book... in every convict’s cell - and it will show that is admirably fitted to inspire the wretched inmate with the best desires and hopes and to point out to him a feasible, and tried, way of escape from the miseries in which he is involved (v).

On offer is the (English) book as a source of universal truth. It is surely not mere coincidence that such offerings occur at a historical point when British imperialism is

35 busy transforming the world.

"Written as they are in the name of the father and the author, these texts of the civilizing mission immediately suggest the triumph of the colonialist movement in early English Evangelism and modern English literature" (Bhabha 1994: 105). Although Bhabha is referring to another colonial context, he might well be summarizing the relation between The Convict Ship, its prominent Evangelism and its coincidence with the disciplinary technologies underlining the development of English literature. Any doubt that might linger about the perceived relation is perhaps best answered by Browning’s own observation of the convict’s rite of passage. He sees them moving upward and away from the physical and epistemological darkness of the space below- deck into a world where "new and interesting relations... as teachers and pupils" can develop and provide the author with his most cherished memory:

It is difficult to imagine any spectacle more impressive than that of 263 outcasts, consigned... to the horrors of transportation... all seriously engaged in the solemn worship of the Most High (36)

The panoptic space housing "new and interesting relations" might occupy a remote period in time and space, but it remains an important first step to the re-placing process. Why is this? By examining narratives like The Convict Ship and by recognizing the familiarity of their reformatory doctrines, the answer becomes straightforward: it simply is due to how, by transposing the penal colony, antipodean colonialist power signified new and more effective ways to intervene in the name of authority, value and experience. Although thinking of a different context, Browning's contemporary, Herman Melville, was being truly astute when he wrote "the world's a ship on its passing out... and the pulpit is its prow" (Melville 1988: 41).

To recapitulate: the convict ship and its correlative, the penal colony, represent something quite distinct from the shameful place housing criminality. It foregrounds the space

36 where new and interesting relations will develop, a new historical space where subjects can be brought out of darkness to metamorphose into student and civilian. This is the stuff of allegory. The relationship between the convict ship and its bringing light to those condemned by their "darkest ignorance" shows how a strange and fantastic space on the boundary of Europe could be transformed by the redemptive light cast southwards by the Enlightenment.

The penal colony has always been crucial to narratives of Australian identity. The redemptive light it projects offers one of the earliest examples about how space is redeemed by colonialist power. And it remains so. Artists and novelists today interpret the penal colony as a world which is both a dystopian beginning and a paradigm of the civilizing discourse that affects all colonialist experience from earliest settlement to contemporary Australia.

Consider, for example, Gordon Bennett's recent highly iconic Self-Portrait: Interior/Exterior. Made from mixed media, it consists of two panels of equal size, each signifying an exterior/interior space and a whip vertically placed alongside. The painting of each panel appears to be black on an initial inspection - signifying the commonsense identification of Aborigines with skin colour. Closer examination shows an array of surfaces at work which, in turn, assert the influence of a number of modernist art traditions. So the almost monochromatic use of black quotes the spiritually motivated abstractionism of the Suprematist painter, Kasimir Malevich; the vein-like design beneath the black penetrating an otherwise smooth pictorial surface reveals the drip paint style of Jackson Pollock. Both of these techniques occur throughout Bennett’s work; they typify his methodology, which has been described as that of postmodern "appropriation": an expressive tactic which helps deconstruct the assumption that what is portrayed here (or anywhere) is an identity (or object) essentially pregiven, whether racial, iconographic or linguistic. This strategy clearly follows the postmodernist aesthetic expressed by such artists as Imant Tillers: a conscious attention to language and the ways expression operates within a tissue of existing models.3 More significant is the way the red line

3 On the topic of appropriation in Bennett’s work see ‘Philosophy and painting: Gordon Bennett’s critical

37 signifying blood - the inscribing of a wound upon the ‘skin’ of each panel (made further explicit by the words "cut me" and the presence of the whip) - urges the viewer to look further than the postmodernist preoccupation with a general aesthetic of writing and representation. Bennett has termed this technique of scarification "welt" and it turns up in his History Paintings. The welt pieces disrupt the metaphysical concerns of Malevich and assert what Bennett calls "a little physical realism", namely, the inscription of the black body (McLean & Bennett 1996: 50). Such realism recognizes the corporal and spiritual punishment of indigenous peoples throughout their contact with colonialism.

For all its "physical realism", the scarification technique forms a bond with Browning in that it recognizes the continual interpenetrating of language and colonialist power. To see the body by means of the markings of power is to interpellate the subject into the culture of a dominant society. In this sense, the experience that Bennett ostensibly notates as Aboriginal invokes a broader act of "re-memberance". The welts exceed any one form of contact with colonialism because they invoke traces of the cross- cultural civilizing journeys bound up with Renaissance exploration and the middle passage. Above all, by re-membering the penal experience, Self Portrait brings into play the view that creativity and subjectivity are condemned to reside within a prison-house culture. What starts as an investigation into individual identity, ends up hinting at a realm of dystopian commonality.

In its fusing of themes and images, Self-Portrait positions the indigenous Australian within a comprehensive governing system of power entirely shaped by the relation between nation and colonialism. This is perhaps why the image appears strange yet familiar, new yet old. On one level the lacerated skin recognizes the residual presence of the penal experience in Australia. Any discussion of the nation’s beginnings cannot avoid invoking at some point the referent of punishment and incarceration. It should not be overlooked that the nation’s founding artistic figures include not only the convicts, Thomas Watling, Francis Greenway and Michael Massey Robinson, but religious- administrative figures like Samuel Marsden, who is chiefly remembered by his nickname,

aesthetic’ in McClean and Bennett 1996.

38 "the Flogging Parson". The following excerpt describes one convict’s sufferings under Marsden:

Next was tied up Paddy Galvin, a young boy about 20 years of age. He was ordered to get 300 lashes. He got one hundred on the back, and you could see his backbone between his shoulder blades. Then the Doctor ordered him to get another on his bottom. He got it, and then his haunches were in such a jelly that the Doctor ordered him to be flogged on the calves of his legs. He got one hundred there and as much as a whimper he never gave (Hughes 1987: 189).

In remembering the nation’s penal beginnings, it seems impossible to avoid the kind of scene Edward Eager, a convict, described when addressing the prisoner’s arrival in the colony: "he is put to hard labour; placed under the most rigid control, subjected to summary punishment, flogging, working in irons, solitary confinement for every instance of disobedience, idleness or neglect" (Baker 1984: 75). Like the convict photos, Bennett’s image recognizes the melancholy that haunts the nation. But flogging also expresses a basic trope for the more dynamic mode of sovereignty which has emerged over peoples throughout modernity. Franz Kafka would turn to the apparatus of the penal colony in his famous story of the same name in order to dramatize in creative terms the fantastic power of the modern State. In his story the body is literally inscribed with the words "HONOUR THY SUPERIORS!" (Kafka 1999: 144). Bennett follows this account of identity formation in such a way that it also intersects with the question of Aboriginal-Australian identity. His deployment of scarification signifies a legacy of common interests in the relation between modern subject-formation and white Australian history. By picking up traces that linger perhaps in the darker recesses of the colonial archive, Self Expression is less interested in either a unitary representation of Aboriginal identity or history in the narrow sense of a narrative of white settlement. Instead the markings creatively pinpoint a productive technology that both constructs and binds very different peoples even in the present-day.

Something of Bennett’s critical strategy informs the work of his contemporary, the novelist-theorist, Mudrooroo Narogin, especially the 1992 novel Wildcat Screaming. If Bennett comes at the penal experience obliquely, Mudrooroo’s treatment offers an

39 explicit attempt to explore the interrelation of subject-formation, Aboriginal identity and European colonialism.4 This is both understandable and necessary. Long before the European formulation of discipline and punish, the southern colonies had emerged within a network of "manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body" (Foucault 1978: 93). Whatever the controversy of Mudrooroo’s Aboriginal identity, he shares with Bennett the basic "writerly" strategies of postmodernism, influenced both by a culture that celebrates the "death of the author"5 and the influence of Foucault. Wildcat Screaming deconstructs an Aboriginality predicated on a metaphysics of presence and, in true Derridean fashion, moves the indigenous subject into a field where the "supplement" of cultural difference blurs the boundary separating white and black identity. This is most concisely evident when the novel quotes at length Foucault’s account of the panopticon. By focusing on education, Mudrooroo resists treating the young protagonist’s ‘development’ within liberal ideals of inner growth. Instead development narrates a growing intuition that what we mean by ‘power’ is not a negative system of constraints and repression, but a space of production responsible for inescapable forms of surveillance.

As the author’s pictorial appropriation of two panoptic diagrams suggests, the novel is playful in its treatment of the Foucauldian paradigm.6 These illustrations can be

4 Although recent developments have questioned the legitimacy of Mudrooroo’s Aboriginal identity, I believe this does not affect the significant intersection of interests his work has with Aboriginal writing generally. At any rate, his position in Aboriginal or Nyunga writing, both as a literary theorist and novelist, has long been a defining model for the complex intertextuality which characterizes much Aboriginal Australian writing. 5 As ‘Colin Johnson’, Mudrooroo produced the ‘first’ novel by an ‘Australian Aboriginal’ - an event bringing with it the trappings of Western modes of cultural production and consumption. One way Mudrooroo has responded to this scenario is to transform his authorial name in order to affirm his tribal affiliation (the area of Narogin) and Nyunga (the tribal name). The novel Doin Wildcat positions this process firmly within the textuality of Western-based writing systems (Narogin 1989). 6 There are two diagrams of the panopticon in the novel that parody the famous image associated with Bentham, that is, Harou-Roumain’s plan for a penitentiary. My reference to Foucault acknowledges the influence of this image in his formulation of the relation between power and knowledge. The prisoner is depicted in his cell; at prayer, he genuflects before a central inspection tower. It is a truly ‘Benthamite’ image and, in this sense, offers a familiar statement of the disciplinary formation of the subject which so fascinated theorists like Foucault. As in Bentham’s proposal, the image articulates the spatial design of the panopticon: the circular structure of the building is divided by cells, equal in size and each of which can be perceived from the central tower. The power expressed in the panopticon derives from the visibility created by the tower’s centralized and elevated perspective. To be seen is to be codified by power.

40 viewed as straightforward imitations or parodies of First World theoretical imports, but their real significance lies in the way they help conceptualize what for the novel emerges as the unquestionable basis for representing Australia’s genealogy. "Panopticism", as Foucault argued, does not stop with the penitential configuration; indeed this is little more than a specific architectural environment. What is important is how this space becomes a disciplinary place. The panopticon transcends specific institutions. It exercises rather than fixes power and is deployed endlessly through an array of instruments and levels of application. The house of correction and the modern school are two such "specialized" institutions; they express both internal relations of control and the way these relations are not consigned to specific periods or locations. Such "productive" relations are deployed by institutions like the state apparatus so as to standardize society as a whole. Beyond this, notions of visibility and surveillance function in profoundly subtle ways (Foucault 1977a: 215-216).

Foucault’s thesis is central to Wildcat Screaming because it enables an audience to revise its liberal definition of the prison from a place of repressive power to a specific configuration responsible for the production of new objects, new information and new relations under the guise of moral reformation or redemption. This too is a work concerned with seeing the nation as a prison-house culture. The discursive incarceration is precisely the kind that regulated the narratives of nation – narratives that have their corollary in the coherent narratives of place that occlude the chaotic potentiality of everyday life.

To approach the nation means returning to its shadowy yet inescapable foundations. Anachronisms like the nineteenth century "house of correction" have their initial meaning charged with a broader significance that exceeds the boundaries of ethnicity, genre and chronology. This understanding is best demonstrated by the treatment of two characters, deliberately ambiguous in their ethnic status. Firstly, Robbie Singh, Wildcat’s cellmate and mentor on the ‘inside’, is presented sympathetically by virtue of his Indian ethnicity. But any assumption of marginality within the Anglo-Celtic nation is bypassed when Singh’s privileged insider status becomes evident through his

41 involvement with the Panopticon Prison Reform Society: a hierarchical or "pyramidal" system for profit and exchange linked to outside networks (the community, the state, and the nation). Singh defines the panopticon as a reformatory system tied to the principle of self-empowerment. Given its prison beginnings, Australia stands as an ideal world for the implementation of this model as made clear in a discussion between Wildcat and Singh:

I stare at him and ask: ‘What is this, this panopticon?’ He waves his hand around: ‘This.’ ‘You mean the cell?’ ‘No, the entire prison system, including that...’ ‘You mean the peephole?’ ‘Precisely.’ ‘And all else?’ ‘Yes, and I even extend the system beyond the walls.’ ‘The outside?’ ‘Definitely, Australia was founded on the prison system.’ (51)

Similarly ambiguous is Constable Jackamarra, an Aboriginal policeman assigned to infiltrate the prison and investigate its supposedly illegal monetary schemes. Jackamarra’s racial convergence with Wildcat extends further the connection between Wildcat and Singh. But again, rather than dwell on racial notions of kinship (or marginalization), the relationship discloses that what the two have equally in common is how the panoptic order structures a disciplinary system that redeems the prisoner’s fallen state and calls him into a wider, more productive network of relations. Thus Jackamarra’s experiences within the prison parallels Wildcat’s in that they too associate ‘development’ with the subject’s growing awareness of his complex affiliation with European technologies of governance:

Under surveillance, always under surveillance, but then hasn’t he always been?... Eyes marking him out, tagging and following him from the first missionary Father to the police college... to the eyes in the street which glide across him, his body and classify it with him and himself (106).

Like Wildcat, Jackamarra comes to grasp that the most basic definition of his identity has always operated within the matrix of a universal watching. Of course, the novel is not lapsing into crude generalizations here. Jackamarra’s report, which exposes Singh, is

42 completely disregarded by white authorities. Thus, his position resembles Wildcat’s in that Nyunga identity is largely silenced. But in seeing Aboriginality within a system that monitors and redefines his professional and personal identity, Jackamarra comes to share with Wildcat an important rite of passage. Both men end by understanding their identity in relation to the shifting topography of surveillance and incarceration.

Whether the task is critically or creatively executed, clearly the excavation from colonial history of the penal discourse has important implications for discussing language, history and space. Beginning with the return to Botany Bay, whether through pedagogical texts of the period or contemporary imaginative essays, a reading ends with the same basic conclusion: that the prison and its genealogy provides not only a historically appropriate trope, but is arguably the pivotal trope for the inextricable relation between the environment and the nation's residual disciplinary and redemptive technologies. Given that literature can never be completely extrapolated from colonialism, this insight provides an important prelude to the task of re-placing Australian literature. Far from being an anachronism, the penal colony offers an indispensable analogue for seeing experience as part of a multifaceted functioning of colonialist discourse.

Prison-house Beginnings/Prison-house Endings II The stain of transportation carries in its stories an excess that has become an enduring feature of convict literature. Around the Bicentenary, Robert Hughes capitalized on this quality when documenting the penal experience. In so doing, he brought back into fashion the view made famous by Marcus Clarke a century earlier when he dramatized transportation as the ultimate "chamber of horrors". Whatever century, the penal experience was a visceral world of abject horror, a world where one "abandoned his humanity" (Clarke) in order to survive.

It should be remembered that Clark wrote his great novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, at a time when creative writers were renewing the "prose of controversy" (H. M. Green) that had criticized transportation and advocated penal reform during the

43 1830s. Other major figures alongside Clarke were William Astley ("Price Warung") and J. F. Archibald, editor of the Bulletin. It has been stated that the world documented by these writers is the fictional equivalent of the abolitionists of the 1830s (Wilde et al 1985: 185). They were elaborating the position that saw convicts doubly condemned in that they became more depraved in the colonial "sink of wickedness" (Sydney Smith) than at the time of their arrival.

Perhaps the view of equivalence tends to simplify the transformational capacity brought by the creative process. Literature reveals much more about the texture of experience than positivist discourse because of its capacity to present verisimilitude, and so produce reality rather than simply representing something given. This is especially significant in a re-placing because the notion of heterogeneity challenges the view of the penal colony as a monolithic and unchangeable entity. Like any institution, however pervasive, the penal colony was itself subject to the living human responses of different kinds of people. Such a view brings to mind Edward Casey's valuing of place, a term which is radically provisional as it expresses not so much identity as the constitutive performances of everyday life (Casey 1997). Place and its connectedness with the body’s kinaesthesia transform rather than conform to either order or chaos (see Introduction).

There emerges a basic tension that from the outset characterizes the critical task of re-placing place. In a very general sense place identifies an inevitable factor in how people relate to and transform their world. But in the case of a foundational narrative like the penal experience, any such transformation cannot ignore the equally inevitable factor of the colonist's constrained sense of belonging. The reason for this ambiguity partly arises from the way antipodean subjectivity residually exists in relation to the shifting topography of surveillance and incarceration.

Rather than paper over such tensions yet again by the deployment of misleadingly coherent narratives that stem from the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology, it is, rather, the tension between the coherence of colonialist discourse and the actual transgressive formlessness of daily life which directs us to an ambivalent ground. For this

44 reason, the true beginnings of an ambivalent ground lie in the inhabited and hesitantly transformed spaces created between the prison and freedom, between incarceration and transgression. It is to this we will now turn.

That the inherently excessive drama of an oppressive penal justice could also disclose a ground of difference is apparent in the short story by Price Warung, "How Muster-Master Stoneman Earned His Breakfast". The story typifies the author’s chillingly detached and ironic style, one that excoriates the penal code through calculated humour exposing its brutality by casual description. The story, briefly: a convict by the name of Glancy is systematically tortured prior to his execution in the early hours of an ordinary day in colonial Australia. He is being punished for an attempted escape from the prison. This gives his gaoler, Muster-Master Stoneman, the opportunity to torture Glancy before his already-designated execution. The story’s success depends on the way these grim events envelop every aspect of the composition. The convict is in fact less a name than a number, no. 17, 927 to be exact. An audience is horrified by the treatment of the convict. Awaiting execution, he is subjected to one hundred lashes ("a canary"); then "his groaning and bleeding body, which had received the full hundred of flaying stripes, lay on the pallet of the cell". The body is rubbed down with salt - "something to ‘arden yer, Glancy ol’ man". When hanged, the body ("a mass of carrion") is "huddled into a shell".

Glancy initially seems remote from civil definitions of subjectivity; the pain enveloping the prisoner is baroque, a trope for when sovereign rule brutally dictated methods of punishment. More subtly, the body transposes corporal punishment into the kind of metaphor we saw explored by Gordon Bennett: the body as parchment encoded by the colony. The body is memory because it carries in its everyday practice the markings that expose the convict of his degraded being in the world.7 Yet there is

7 Torture exceeds the merely external and, in turn, transforms the wholly unjust force of power. Elaine Scarry has made this point imaginatively clear in her study of bodily pain. If the pain suffered under the act of torture is "objectified" by the sufferer, the torturer has achieved his central aim, for this event defines the essence of the victim’s experiencing in a way that centralizes the presence of the torturer

45 resistance. Glancy not only despises Stoneman’s authority; he openly challenges it and, in a sense, succeeds in this challenge for what is his escape but a titillating demonstration of the capacity to move against and outside the prison’s walls. His errant desire intimates how penal technologies linked to colonialist identity-formation could not entirely prevent their subjects from transgressing the way power maps the landscape.

In the case of convict Glancy, however, the memory of humiliation and pain proves disturbingly overwhelming. Despite successfully escaping, he returns of his own volition. Having ventured beyond the prison walls, the convict spits on a convict’s grave and retreats back to the prison. In one sense, his retreat may simply reiterate a familiar theme in convict literature: the convict’s sense of futility and suffering envelops any desire to live and welcomes death as a form of reprieve from the penal system. But Glancy does not even seem to consider an alternative beyond the walls. He is not only someone other to the colony; he is doubly incarcerated. He can only see the prison and can only imagine a world licensed by its authority, however cruel. The final flogging of Glancy does ironically redeem the prisoner because it anticipates in his penultimate act - incidentally, an act signifying agency - the conclusive triumph of the penal colony’s panoptic rationale. In the very act of escape, Glancy finally legitimates the prison’s panoptic authority because his suffering confirms the futility of escape.

Warung ends by playing out the scenario that we will see in varying guises throughout the more coherent mythic narratives upholding the nation, namely, the ideology of terra nullius. Beyond the walls of the colony lies an uninhabitable space, one devoid of cultural value. In an equally significant, and alarming, sense, nothing appears to exist ‘outside’ the prison. Whatever routes taken by those branded by power, the journey will be played out along the road mapped by the colony’s official founders. The inability to see beyond the walls of the prison is paradigmatic of Australia's prison-house culture. It reveals the prevailing ideology of European settlement, that of enclosure (see Introduction). Clearly, Herbert Badgery's ancestor is Glancy, but the connection I make

(Scarry 1985: 38-41). Thus the world is condensed to the space of the room inhabited by the torturer and the victim. The origin of suffering - the rudimentary sign of the room’s physical and conceptual standing - is the torturer.

46 has nothing to do with popular interest in family genealogy; both men are caught within the web of ideology when they passionately express their alienation without seeing beyond their given world.

Glancy's struggle may have ended in torture, death and the legitimation of the panoptic space, but it also revealed something of the tension and conflict paradoxically produced by the penal colony's oppressive forms of punishment. At the very least, his physical transgression marked a boundary to immediate confinement. And while Glancy chose not to take seriously as to what might lie beyond this boundary, many of his kind did.

When we think of the extremities of convict literature, we think not only of punishment, but escape in the most dangerous and transgressive sense. Many convicts would have gone into the bush armed, but it is doubtful whether they had a compass let alone adequate food provisions. In 1791 Governor Phillip reported some thirty escaped convicts found wandering lost in the bush. Yet the men were by no means without sense of direction; Phillip observed that their destination was China, which they supposed was only one hundred and fifty miles away. First Fleet Officer, Watkin Tench, was fascinated by this calculation and interviewed the convicts in question at Rose Hill Hospital. The importance of China (and India) as an escape-route energised other attempt: for example, William Buckley and three men absconded from the Sorrento penal settlement in 1802, as did numerous convicts in Tasmania.

Officers of the First Fleet tended to dismiss the notion of China as exemplifying the childish rationale of the convicts, but this overlooked at least two things: firstly, that China functioned metaphorically, a trope representing freedom, or at least a direction towards freedom; secondly, that the place being mapped by British cartographers was far from being fixed within positivist discourse. From the thirteenth century, China had become synonymous with Asia as a result of Marco Polo's Description of the World, and it is likely that the visions convicts entertained about China elongated the old

47 geographical tradition in which the Great South Land was part of Asia. In his History of Australian Discovery and Colonization, Samuel Bennett ruminated that "the illiterate classes of last century possessed, not withstanding their want of booklearning, a vast fund of tradition in which fact and fiction were wonderfully intermingled" (Bennett 1865: 166). This is an important observation because it recognizes the heteroglossic texture of experience. But whether one sided with fact, fiction or both, the view of Asia as proximate to the new colony was not necessarily in fundamental conflict with administrators or planners of the period, some of whom sought to open trade relations with the East Indies, China and India. And Bennett recognized that "the junction of Australia with China", while similar to the "traditionary knowledge" of the Great South Land, should be balanced with fact. He observed that "the Chinese, it should be remembered, had been accustomed to visit the northern coasts of Australia, and they had numerous settlements in the Indian Archipelago in very remote times" (166).

What convicts were accentuating was the profound ambivalence attending the question of identity and belonging in Australia, and it is not surprising that some of the most important commentaries on this topic remain in convict literature. The literature is inherently hybrid given the way it is made up from memoirs, journals, letters and folk ballads as much as fiction. Whatever their literary value, no-one can question the intensity of insight the narratives sometimes bring into questions of representation, value and place, as already demonstrated in the works by Price Warung and C. A. Browning. This is partly because of the way hierarchical modes of power feature so dramatically. However, to understand the penal experience described by these narratives as merely an analogue for power would be essentially one-dimensional. As Warung and the broader history of convict escape suggest, the penal colony is a metaphor of the tension between the coherence of imperial control and the actual mundane transgressiveness of daily life.

Re-placing convict experience is perhaps most tellingly illustrated in one of the seminal novels of convict literature, James Tucker's Ralph Rashleigh, written sometime between 1845 and 1850, and a work that fuses elements of memoir and fiction. Although superficially about the convict, Rashleigh and his experiences, – narrated in picaresque

48 form – it is also about bushrangers, convicts and Aborigines. For this reason the novel has been described as a "survey" (Green 1989: 17). However, there is much more to the novel than just a survey; for one thing it anticipates Warung by dramatizing the intensity of the prisoner's alienation from the form of slavery that barbarically scars his body, and the novel moves far beyond Warung's drama in that it sets about exploring an alternative world beyond the walls of the prison.

What is the world outside the prison-house walls? In his excellent reading of Ralph Rashleigh, Robert Dixon makes a number of observations stemming from his argument that Ralph's adventures narrate the protagonist's "progressive alienation" from the landscape he moves through. Significantly, Dixon does not accept the landscape as simply given; rather, it is a cultural text ("continental page") upon which is imprinted colonial history, from Aboriginal beginnings to civil society. Rashleigh's journey passes through "recognised phases of civil society", but in reverse order (Dixon 1981: 302-315). The most remarkable episode of this journey comes when Rashleigh, having escaped the colony with a band of bushrangers, contemplates the panorama of inland settlement:

Immediately in front of his [Ralph’s] present position was a precipice some hundred feet in height, whose ragged breast sank down to the broad expanse of the low country; but immediately at its base the Nepean River, here narrowed to about the distance of a hundred yards between its banks, rushed with tumultuous force around the greater part of the hill on which they stood, from which immense masses of rock have apparently been detached by some long past convulsion of nature, and now lay in the bed of the torrent, causing the rapid waters to flash around them in sheets of snowy foam. Far to the right and left the winding convolutions of the stream might be seen at intervals appearing through the foliage, here in magnificent sheets of water, and anon, beyond a projecting promontory forming a low range of hills, the river seemed contracted into the semblance of a dazzling silvery riband that sparkled in the beams of the morning sun.... As far as the eye could reach in front was an expanse of nearly level woodland, broken here and there by cultivated patches of a greater or lesser extent, and thinly studded with solitary farmhouses, cots and one or two hamlets with their churches (178-179).

The fusion of sublime and picturesque genres brings to mind the paintings of Eugene von Guerard and Augustus Earle. The sublime represents the highest and most exalted

49 experience and remedied the abject associations of the colony's melancholy criminal class. The eminent physician and friend of Joseph Banks, Erasmus Darwin, had written a poem about Botany Bay in which New World prosperity was linked with the personification of the sublime:

Where Sydney Cove her lucid bosom swells, Courts her young navies, and the storm repels; High on a rock amid the troubled air HOPE stood sublime, and waved her golden hair (Lansbury 1970: 7)

The scattering of farms and other habitations thus belongs to the aesthetic that normalizes the progressivism of European occupation. However, the moment is violently disrupted when Ralph is jolted out of his reverie:

The maize fields, too, which were now in full blossom, and gracefully waved their lofty tasselled tops over many an acre of rich soil of the river bank, formed no inconsiderable item in the charms of the landscape, the appearance of which Rashleigh surveyed in a reverie of pleasure, until the iron hand of Foxley smote upon his shoulder, and his deep voice demanded, “Are you dreaming?” (Ibid).

Dixon is correct to single out this moment; it is a remarkable passage because it concisely dramatizes the epistemological conflict underlining and subverting any unitary projection of the colony. Foxley deliberately ruptures the “text” Rashleigh gazes over because he recognizes that this beautiful landscape cannot be extricated from elaborately woven rhetoric, one signifying the interests of an alien power. His obstinate refusal to conform to the projection provides an important example of subaltern presence and, more broadly, of the struggle that renders place so manifold and contradictory. In short, Foxley teaches the hapless Rashleigh to see differently, that is, to see the new land through the branded eyes of a criminal rather than those of the emerging landed gentry. The ground they occupy remains significantly open to paradox because it speaks of the colonist's physical and psychic estrangement from the land.

50 A crazed prototype of the colonial bushranger, Foxley represents the convict's alienation from the form of slavery that barbarically scars his body. While sharing Glancy's hatred of the penal colony, Foxley literally moves far beyond Glancy's incarcerated state. Or does he? Nietzsche wrote: "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory – this is the main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth" (Nietzsche in Grosz 1994: 131). Like Glancy, Foxley has been hurt and the wound continues to burn in his memory. It is this characteristic that separates the bushranger from Rashleigh, who is ostensibly more passive in his resistance to confinement. When Foxley interrogates Ralph about his penal experiences, the bushranger’s idea of escape is revealed as never simply a "taking to the bush", but a direct confrontation of his former oppressors ("knock the beggar's brains out"). Foxley seeks revenge upon those who have confined him.

As with many of the episodes described in Ralph Rashleigh, Foxley is dramatized with baroque embellishment. The bushranger scenes dramatize with shocking brutality Foxley’s punishment of persons responsible for abusing the bushranger during his time of imprisonment. All victims are tortured without mercy in the most harrowing of ways: one man is tied to a nest of flesh-eating ants and left to die. In the torture of O’Leary, a former master of Foxley who apparently had beaten the convict "for neglect of work", Foxley has the man tied to a tree where he is systematically whipped, constantly prevented from fainting from the pain and eventually hanged by a makeshift rope, a deliberately prolonged attempt to exacerbate the victim’s sufferings. Foxley justifies his actions:

‘I would not shorten his well-deserved sufferings a single second, for a thousand pounds! He did worse than a dog’s deed, and he is now dying a dog’s death, as he ought’ (164).

However dramatic the effect of such brutality, we should not overlook the central irony it contains. The scene clearly revisits the pain and humiliation imposed upon Foxley and other convicts. And whether one approves or condemns the revenge, Tucker's

51 novel does show a man ultimately trapped by the oppressive identity imposed upon him by the penal colony. Thus he addresses one of his victims:

‘Look in my face, wretch! I am Philip Foxley, that you got flogged for neglect of work. Don’t you know me? ... I never forget to pay my debts’ (156).

As already suggested in the reference to Nietzsche, Foxley dramatizes the condition of "resentment" (ressentiment). Resentment is the language of the "slave", one whose subjectivity is informed by a hatred of the "master". When resentful, one is driven only by the desire to overcome the other, to live by fulfilling revenge. Nietzsche writes: "This inversion of the value-positing eye - this need to direct one’s view outside instead of back to oneself - is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all - its action is fundamentally reaction" (Nietzsche 1969: 36-37). It refers to the reactionary nature of resentment, that is, one unable to move anywhere but in response to the "hostile external world" of power’s making. Foxley’s world sees him remain forever incarcerated. He cannot exist without dividing the world into good and bad; he identifies the colony only with negation, corruption, torture and death. His view is, in the final analysis, Manichean.

If Foxley remains enclosed by the walls of the prison, Ralph Rashleigh's actions are more complicated. Dixon has drawn attention to the way the convict crosses the "continental page" of civil society, albeit in reverse order, something he regards symbolizing Rashleigh's "progressive alienation" from the colony. However, although alienation certainly characterizes the convict at all stages, it is possible to see in his movement something inherently enabling and positive. This becomes apparent especially when we compare Rashleigh and Foxley, the latter so burdened by the baggage of the penal experience. The former moves differently; his passivity may be a weakness by those who cherish oppositional actions that are 'intended', but if one privileges a more hesitant relation to the land, then it is not difficult to see in Rashleigh's movements an unfolding of different possibilities, each progressively more removed from the panoptic enclosure represented by the colony. Ralph will go through a series of adventures

52 culminating with his joining an Aboriginal tribe, where he is initiated and resigns himself to "end his days with the blacks".

Foxley was burdened by his cultural baggage; in contrast, lightness marks Rashleigh's journeying, and it is this quality which appears inextricable from the convict's potential success in bringing into radical question the values of civilized society. It is there from the start, that is, when he is initiated into the convict world:

The convicts in the meantime were all marched to the forecastle and ushered into a washing-room, where each man was obliged to strip, get into a large tub of water and cleanse himself thoroughly... when they had been divested of their whiskers and got their hair closely cropped, the metamorphosis was so complete that Rashleigh no longer knew any of those who had arrived with him (49).

If we understand Rashleigh as someone whose colonized identity has robbed him of individual agency, then it follows that the convict symbolizes a disempowered subject. However, the keyword in this passage is surely "metamorphosis". On one level, this belongs to the picaresque genre with its depiction of the 'rogue' (picaro) who plays out the role of servant of several masters. By the final major episode of the novel Rashleigh undergoes his penultimate transformation:

One morning the old black doctor presented him [Ralph] with a dark-coloured kind of pigment with which he made signs for Rashleigh to anoint his skin. On compliance with this request the parts touched by the composition quickly assumed the tinge of rusty iron; and on repeating the application daily for about a fortnight, the whole of his body, save the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, was changed into a dark-brown hue... Ralph Rashleigh, though naturally of a ruddy complexion, now really differed but little in colour from any of the sable sons of the forest... (283).

Rashleigh has gone from being convict to escapee and from bushranger to Aborigine. But is he really any of these people? Is it not, rather, his ability to transform, to play the role expected from his superiors, that is the issue of importance?

Playing the role is, of course, very much embedded in our history and language. It

53 is richly suggested on board the Earl Grey where C. A. Browning intoned the benefits of the civilizing mission. Bateson, a critic of Browning's narrative, saw in the redeemed convicts a conscious performance in which by playing the "hypocrite", they could blend in rather "stand out against well-meaning religious fanatics" (Bateson 1959: 77). Rather than incur the wrath of institutionalized power, the colonial subject could perhaps contest the master by mimicking the language of oppression. There are some notable examples of this strategy in history, one of the most celebrated being the convict, Billy Blue. Blue was a creole probably born in British America. In 1796 he was sentenced to transportation to Sydney for stealing sugar from a ship. The convict became a folk hero, a friend with Governor Macquarie among other things - the land he owned became known as Billy Blue’s Point. Yet as Philip Morgan observes in his article, "Encounters with Africans and African-Americans", Blue’s importance lies as much in his role as jester; apparently, Blue demanded, under the guise of jest, that everybody, high and low, salute him. Morgan writes that he "was a trickster, mocking and mimicking whites, playing out a role performed by countless other Africans and African-Americans" (Morgan 1991: 217-219). In donning the cap of the fool, Blue was able to contest the language of oppression differently to that of overt aggression - exemplified in the practice of another rebel black and First Fleet transportee, John Caesar.

It is possible to take from such examples a struggle performed by countless numbers of men, women and children indirectly attempting to gain the upper hand. Stephen Slemon has argued that Bhabha's idea of ambivalence derives from a view of resistance less to do with people intending oppositional actions than recognizing "overdeterminations inherent in colonialist representations (Slemon 1994: 23-4). For Bhabha, representation carries with it displacement, a "doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two places at once" (Bhabha 1994: 44). This is why mimicry is so important in the colonialist context. It locates the supplement that ruptures the "original". While "almost the same" as the colonialist representation, the subject is "not quite" (89). More emphatically, the French feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray, sees in mimicry a kind of play that transforms subordination into "affirmation" (Irigaray 1985: 76).

54 If mimicry helps keep the ground Rashleigh occupies significantly open to paradox, so too does the novel's more transparent drama, that of repeated escapes from the penal colony. Rashleigh repeatedly traverses various landscapes; he continually leaves his ambiguous home to travel on roads that mean his getting lost. These are the kinds of roads that always signify journeying beyond the prison-house; they give direction to the convict desire to escape. In this sense, Rashleigh belongs with those people looking for China: nomads transgressing the panoptic rationale of stasis and order. The routes they set off on were by no means original, but they transgressed the territorializing principle of colonialist enclosure, revealing in the convict's intensity of movement (and alienation) a dimension of spatial experience elsewhere to the order of civil society. Like the mimic, the escapee negotiates with the map of power in his undetermined movements. At the level of liminal experience, Trinh Minh-ha writes of the journey as something very close to the subject's everyday life: s/he can "negotiate between home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture or, more creatively speaking, between a here and there, and an elsewhere (Minh-ha 1994: 9). But in the more transgressive tradition of Australian placial history, Rashleigh's nomadic intelligence produced a counter-culture to imperial territorial restriction. While the colony underwent mapping stratagems that neutralized distance and fixed substances, convict escape made the ground fluid again. It thus succeeded in postulating that what lay at the core of colonialist experience was a space where fact and fiction are continually interwoven.

The convergence of fact and fiction is further demonstrated in Rashleigh's first encounter with the Aboriginal tribe, with whom he will eventually spend four years. Yet in doing so, it also spells out in the most lucid terms possible just how fragile was a truly radical mode of provisonality in a more truly pluralist formulation of Australian society. When at first surrounded by the natives, an exhausted and terrified Ralph is approached by an old man:

The black who now approached was one of the most revolting specimens of humanity that can possibly be conceived. A very few white hairs only remained upon his polished skull, forming a thin circle around it. His beard, however, was more luxuriant than usually falls to the lot of any Australian aboriginal. One of his

55 organs of vision had been utterly extinguished, leaving in its room only a raw and bloody cavity. His other eye appeared to be more than half obscured by rheum. His body was emaciated by sickness until it scarcely possessed more substance than a shadow (257).

Tucker based this encounter on Sir Thomas Mitchell's Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, and it is possible that Tucker may have even accompanied a road party under one of Mitchell's assistant surveyors in 1830-31. During this time the author formed a friendship with Alexander Burnett, Mitchell's overseer, and whose job was to establish contact with natives. It was Burnett who provided the description of the old Aborigine with one eye (Healy 1989: 38-9). As J. J. Healy observed in his classic Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, the objectivity of Tucker's account cannot help but be influenced by the "subjective texture of Burnett's recollections" and, in turn, by Tucker's own need to conform to the prevailing mood of the colony that, in the words of Tucker's contemporary, Charles Griffith, "a state of nature (as it is so called) is not the state natural to man" (Healy 1978: 45). The redemptive image of Cook's "noble savage" has reverted to Dampier's description of "natural Deformity". By the end of the transportation era, the idea of freedom beyond the walls of the prison-house, even in a textual space open to the interweaving of fact and fiction, could not include the world of the Aborigine. Freedom did not mean living beyond civilisation.

Upon rescuing a white woman, the convict returns to civil society and runs a sheep station before he is killed when pursuing some marauding Aborigines. The irony is unavoidable, and has been discussed by Healy in his essay on Tucker. Rashleigh does become truly in-between in the final part of the novel, but the mood is overwhelmingly negative. The woman he rescues cannot accept him as a white man, "such is the power of habit" she admits, while the tribe that had adopted him rejects him: "You white fellow now. No more blackfellow" (302). Alongside such paradox, the freedom Rashleigh has been granted entails living on the frontier, yet finally inscribes the boundary as an environment inextricable from unspeakable violence and dispossession. And finally death – the image of Rashleigh "cruelly maltreated by these bloodthirsty barbarians" – does not bring closure, but simply deepens the psychic anxiety of the colonist whose tenuous hold

56 of the land finds expression in residual fear of further attack from the grotesque Other.

The penal colony offers a modern audience much food for thought. One can understand how our topic cannot readily be extricated from the rubric of Western power and governance. One can also recognize how, by installing –“re-placing” – a more provisional relation to the land, an unfolding of different possibilities, each progressively removed from the panoptic enclosure represented by the colony, can unfold. Yet in the more profound sense of belonging, this ambivalent ground never really transcends what I have termed the "prison-house" culture - a culture that should not be confused with the more modest one once designed to house "some of the most incorrigible criminals in the Kingdom". The relation between Australian literature and this prison-house describes the burden of white history, and is thus part of a broader post-colonial tension. From the beginning, the shifting signs of the nation reveal a people whose way of seeing was continually caught between failure and possibility, between ideological modes of confinement and escape.

57 Chapter 2 The Antipodes: Enclosure and Common

An Inversion in Nature Earlier we noted how difficult it has been for Australian society to overcome its convict beginnings. The story of Ralph Rashleigh tapped into the profound sense of exile, as well as alienation, of those living in the penal colony. However, not all convicts had to resort to desperate escapades in order to venture beyond the prison walls and inscribe their sense of place. Some convicts were free to move beyond the walls and then return with information that served different needs: strategic knowledge to the burgeoning empire, the craftsmanship of art, personal exploration and intimate self-reflection. One of the most celebrated of these is Thomas Watling, an educated man who was charged with forgery at the age of 26 and transported to NSW in 1791. Upon arrival, Watling was assigned to Surgeon-General, John White. Watling's work includes over five hundred drawings of landscape, birds, mammals, plants, insects, reptiles and studies of Aborigines - most of them watercolours. He also wrote a series of letters to his aunt in Scotland in which he described his life in the early colony, and which were published in 1794 as a small volume of thirty two pages.

Watling's ostensible job was to draw picturesque views of Sydney, but his roads have been interpreted to carry a deeper ambivalence that modified the doctrinal assumptions of progress his art sought to uphold. In order to appreciate this tension, one must contextualize the art with the letters to his aunt in Scotland. In these, Watling challenged the idyllic descriptions he saw in Cook and asserted instead a view that saw the "face of the country" as "deceitful". It was the illogicality of the land that haunted him. For example, despite "having every appearance of fertility", its vegetation remains "productive of no one article in itself fit for the support of mankind". Watling wrote as a man doubly condemned. He protested his sentence both for its severity and for his innocence of the charge. As someone cut off both from justice and the landscape of home, Watling saw life through the grip of discontent. He observed that "the air, the sky,

58 the land are objects entirely different from that a Briton has been accustomed to see before". He stressed how "our longest day coincides with your shortest; and vice versa". Elsewhere he commented that "the generality of the birds and the beasts sleeping by day, and singing or catering by night, is such an inversion in nature as is hitherto unknown" (Watling 1945: 23-31).

Watling appears a peculiarly modern figure today partly because of the psychological tensions in his art and letters. As a convict, he saw the land through the eyes of enforced exile, a stigma that added to his already gloomy disposition. He was sensitive to the relation between power and knowledge, knowing all too well how his skills as a draughtsman contributed to the same "philanthropic and liberal minded nation" that marks him a prisoner. Watling in fact displayed some arrogance as an artist. For example, he described his work for White as "non-descript productions of the country", and went on to describe himself as a "genius in bondage" forced to work for a "very mercenary sordid person" (Watling 1945: 36). Many of the drawings were probably made at the request of officials for scientists and natural history dilettanti in England (Hindwood 1970: 17). The mix of subservience and natural talent perhaps heightened self-awareness of his awkward relation to predecessors and contemporaries who authoritatively described the country. He often insinuates that landscape art is of greater significance than poetry, ornithology, botany and cartography because of its greater accuracy and elegance. Cook is described for his "mistake eulogisms", the poet for his dwelling on "numberless beauties" and romantic scenes", while the "curious ornithologist" and "prying botanist" find "ample gratification in their favourite pursuits in this luxuriant museum" (Watling 1945: 26).

The genre of the picturesque that the convict utilizes was well equipped to deal with both general and detailed views of the colony, its new and indigenous peoples, and a frame that could interweave details of interest to the botanist and bird-lover. Yet despite its range, the picturesque does not sublimate Watling’s more basic, persistent frustration with the inescapable oddness of this world: "the landscape painter may in vain seek here for that beauty which arises from happy-opposed offscapes". To remedy this Watling

59 considers rearranging what he sees: "were I to select and combine, I might avoid that sameness and find engaging employment" (25). Whatever the result, it is clear that the artist feels oppressed by a landscape so fundamentally resistant to received ideals of proportion and harmony. His art is then never simply documenting what lies before the man’s eyes; rather, it is a conscious process grappling with the psychic-physical separation of the Antipodes and Europe.

The disjunction caused by striking opposites causes Watling’s perceptions to be anxiety-ridden and melancholic. He is the first really significant writer to demonstrate how the settler landscape is from the very start infused by melancholy. While the drawings and letters provide evidence of the rapid manner by which British settlement gained a foothold in the land, they are also expressions that subtly undermine the idea of progress being unitary and linear. The scene of progress might be indisputable, but it is the sadness which characterizes the writer’s homesickness that dominates the way in which the landscape is perceived. The first letter includes this passage:

In my saddest hours and God knows there are many of them, I have observed you are then most busy with my memory. Melancholy’s sombre shadow louring over my soul, endears the fleeting moment by impelling me to write to you. Indeed, it is solely owing to this despondent state of mind, that ought I have produced for these last four year proceeds. When this gloom frowns dreadful over the vista of my being, I but too much indulge the dreary prospect – exploring the wide domain of my adversity terminated only by the impending darkness: hence it is, that whatever flows from my pen, or is laboured by my pencil, affects, in some degree, the tone of mind that possesses me at the period of its production (18).

Ross Gibson has described how Watling’s sense of dislocated being plays nothing short of a constitutive role in the narrative form of the letters. For example, in describing Port Jackson, the convict-artist will begin prosaically but within a few lines will let intrude a more personal set of references (Gibson 1988). The narrative of continuity and development is a device the exile deems egotistical; in contrast the descriptions he provides are short and abrupt precisely because they are open to continual distraction, be it the result of the writer's "melancholy tenor", or "each wild idea as it presents itself" (Watling 1945: 22-3). Fragmentation and discontinuity pervade – what the author

60 describes as a "heterogeneous and deranged performance" (38). As Gibson observes, there is never any attempt to project the fallacy of pure division between subject and object.

It is significant that in witnessing the development of British occupation, Watling failed to take delight in the idea of progress; instead he described a psychic topography of exile and alienation. Watling saw in the colony an uncertain ground signifying the residual lack of fit between Europe and Australia. Of course, one should be careful when amplifying the author's condition. According to John White, Watling was writing at a time "when Hunger was very pressing, and may cast some reflection on Government from the distress of the moment" (Hindwood 1970: 18). Furthermore, the letters cover a very short period in Watling's life in NSW. The last letter is dated 12 May, 1793; it was not before 1796 that he was granted a conditional pardon, after which he disappears from the record until 1806 when he is charged with forgery in Edinburgh. But even if the artist's disposition was compounded by local and temporary influences, there can be little doubt that Watling perceived in the landscape a deeper and more enduring tension.

Narratives of place have always been crucial to the construction of Australian identity, and they have often betrayed an uncertainty that reveals deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and cultural authority. The tension Watling discerned when describing the country is symptomatic of how the notion of the Antipodes radically distinguished the colony from Europe. The landscape conveyed for Watling a dissonance in its refusal to conform to the colonising discourse. As Gibson suggests, his melancholy world intimates the broader ideological failure of the British to settle in any triumphal sense - Australia is conceived as a bastard state founded on the anti-heroic themes of exile and imprisonment. In contrast to the pomp and circumstance of flag-raising, antipodean place inverts the colonising myth of discovery and conquest, and diminishes the idea of Paradise in a new country. Many early writers in Australia shared this basic outlook, most famously perhaps the judge and poet, Barron Field, who in 1819 used the principle of inversion to explain the forbidding nature of the country theologically. For Field, Australia was conceived during the Fall, the ground was cursed

61 and so this "barren wood".

Antipodal inversion could also provide a creative impetus for Western modes of knowing. Bernard Smith’s classic European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) is partly a sustained account of the way the Pacific challenged and transformed given categories of science and romanticism, by virtue of its peripheral location in the dominant episteme. Peron, who journeyed with the French zoological expedition on board the Geographie and the Naturaliste (1800-1804), saw in N.S.W. an extreme form of this periphery in which the illogical and freakish reign supreme:

It must be allowed that, in this as in many other phenomena New Holland defies our conclusions from comparisons, mocks our studies, and shakes to their foundations the most firmly established and most universally admitted of our scientific opinions. As we proceed in speaking of this continent, justly denominated by the English the unequally and wonderful, we shall find still other and not less inconceivable examples of these apparently whimsical freaks of nature (Peron in Smith 1989: 225-226)

This is a classic example of the Antipodes as the absurd other of Europe; it also demonstrates how by inverting Western dominance, the hierarchy of the centre could be disrupted and ridiculed. To inhabit the periphery of the metropolitan centre might also be a source of a newly creative and intellectual enterprise.

Peron and his ilk were travellers briefly passing through the continent. Watling craved to return home, but was for an inexorable amount of time condemned to live in an alien world. So too Barron Field, whose Fresh Fruits of Australian Poetry and Geographical Memoirs describe a man who could "hold no fellowship with Australian foliage". Field described Australia as "the land of contrarieties". Like the convict, this position stemmed from the alterity of the land – things should conform to the seasonal proportion of Europe, Field reasoned; without this it became impossible to speak intelligibly about the human condition. Thus Field reasoned in his Geographical Memoirs: "'For ever fresh’ is a contradiction in terms; what is ‘for ever fair’ is never fair; and without January, in my mind, there can be no May. All the dearest allegories of

62 human life are bound up in the infant and slender green of spring, the dark redundance of summer, and the sere and yellow leaf of the autumn" (Field 1825: 424). However, if this meant producing a literature that failed on the scale of coherency and proportion – a ground "therefore curst"/"And hence this barren wood" - it did not mean that one could not write about the country. To write in this world meant acknowledging what it meant to be on the outside of things, to be on the bottom of the metropolitan hierarchy. And the result was not necessarily gloomy; it could be humorous as Field showed in the poem "Kangaroo" where the freakish animal challenges the genre rather than simply being assimilated within it: "Thou can’st not be amended: no/Be as thou art; thou best art so" (494-496).

Clearly, it is not difficult to observe how the radical provisionality of post- colonial place is energised by the uncertainty of identity signified by the Antipodes. Yet like the escaping Rashleigh, Watling's ambivalence was deeply embedded in the more coherent and authoritative spatial narratives imposed upon the landscape by the discourses of colonial governance. A lofty example is Arthur Phillip's serene contemplation of the colony:

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement, arising gradually out of tumult and confusion; and perhaps this satisfaction cannot any where be more fully enjoyed than where a settlement of civilized people is fixing beyond a newly discovered or savage coast’ (Phillip 1970: 122-123).

The image of order growing out of confusion is crucial to understanding how the colonizer settles the country not just physically, but culturally. The idea of "order" is a most important theme in the work of those early artists in the colony who, although disparate in temperament, were united in the way their art served to represent progress on the margin of the British Empire. These men included Watling, Joseph Lycett and George Raper. Their drawings of Sydney Cove are arrangements that consciously stress the balanced growth of European occupation - the roads winding across hills bind dotted homes and settlers within a schematic of ordered development. Phillip's desire for ordered settlement was always an ideal throughout white settlement, although the evils of

63 transportation did not seem conducive to its realization. When Edward Gibbon Wakefield formulated his theory of "systematic colonization" in Newgate Gaol in 1829, he was developing a later though similar belief that assisted emigration could be successful if it followed a "well-arranged and well-conducted scheme" (Wakefield 1829). Wakefield's theory was, of course, a principle applied specifically to the settlement of South Australia.

Phillip's description of order can hardly be understood as simply an abstraction of space and time. It is very much bound up with an aesthetic of order, which was vital in the cultural possession of the land. In this sense, Watling and Philip were in the same boat. Early colonial artists crafted order out of chaos by representing the emerging colony as a world quite distinct from its antipodean origins. Their art was also one of transforming ostensibly empty space into a space with a History. Watling was among the very first to acknowledge the rapid speed that saw the British gain a foothold on the land: "To see what has been done in the space of five or six years, of clearing, building, and planting, is astonishing" (Watling 1945: 33).

The classification process behind this ordering was, at its most basic, that of differentiating between a cultural void and plenitude, between the untamed and tamed, between the common and enclosure. The political philosophy of John Locke had argued that the "rights" of all men, to which any political system should address and respect, is an extension of the "divine being": these rights manifest in the form of labour, industry and ownership of property (Locke 1947: ii. 5). For Locke, "every Man has a Property in his own Person". It was property, in the guise of enclosure ("inclosure") which bests illustrated Mankind's progress from its most base existence to a political economy. Land became valuable, civilized when "enclosed" from the "Common" and it became enclosed when "man tills, plants, improves, cultivates... as property" (ii. 5: 136). The concept of "enclosure" was to prove the conceptual template of colonization. The land was empty, just as in England the Common awaited its transformation into property.

By the early nineteenth century it was already clear what the enclosure of the

64 antipodal common meant in terms of settlement. In Statistical Account of the Settlements in New Holland, Wentworth would describe the town of Sydney from the "excellence of its situation alone". This meant detailing how "the numerous coves and islets both above and below it, the towering forests and projecting rocks, combined with the infinite diversity of hill and dale on each side of the harbour, form together a coup d'oeil, of which it may be safely asserted that few towns can boast a parallel" (Wentworth 1820: 22). In the "Advertisement" to his Views in Australia, Joseph Lycett wrote that "the hiding places of yet more savage men have become transformed into peaceful villages or cheerful towns" (Lycett 1824). The editors of an early anthology of Australian verse were correct when they observed the pioneer’s "conflict with the seemingly unconquerable" to be resolved when "cast in pleasant places".1 But such pleasant places were not necessarily to be found in the nationalist frontier legend. They were, for a writer like Wentworth, already discernible in the "new Arcadia" of 1823 (Wentworth 1823: 14).

From the time of Plato, Australia signified another world - at times a fantastic space populated by wild beasts, at other times a kind of shadowy non-place. The era of European exploration transformed the southern landscape into a more specific site of strategic importance. Geoffrey Blainey argues that the reason for British settlement was because of this strategic importance, partly understood in terms of the flax and tall pines Cook discovered and, probably more important, the way travelling via southern Australia enabled ships to reach the Spice Islands more quickly than via the Indian Ocean (Foss 1981: 34). Antipodean space was enclosed into something tangible when European expansion mapped the modern world. Significantly, by the time settlement of Western Australia and South Australia occurred during the 1830s, Europe was becoming increasingly 'English'. Western Australia and South Australia were partly founded to forestall the French gaining a foothold. Manning Clark wryly observes that by the time the Swan River had been claimed in 1829, "there was not so much as an inch of Australia or Van Dieman's Land left for the French, Spaniards, Dutch, Russians, Americans, or the aborigines of New Holland" (Clark 1973: 21).

1 The anthology is referred to by Brian Elliott, Op Cit. pp., 26-27.

65 Strategic expansion brought with it a more confident rhetoric conveyed through different layers of cultural discourse. When the surveyor, Major Thomas Mitchell, named the region he had travelled over "Australia Felix", he wrote of this region as "a lasting monument of British power and colonization" that would "engraft a new and flourishing state ... by such means as England alone can supply" (Mitchell in Clark 1973: 98). Some years earlier in Van Dieman's Land, the painter, John Glover, whose reputation for his "Claude-like views" of the mountains and lakes of Britain and Switzerland was already distinguished, wrote in a catalogue to his first exhibition in the colonies that here it was possible "almost every where [sic] to drive a Carriage as easily as in a Gentleman's Park in England" (Glover 1835: 10). William Charles Wentworth's poem, "A New Brittannia", dedicated to Governor Macquarie as the "first fruits of Australasian poesy", recasts the "glories" of the mother country "in another sphere" (Wentworth 1823). But the evolutionary schematic described throughout the nineteenth century did not have to be 'English' to signify its real message. The surveyor who chose the site for Adelaide, William Light, drew his inspiration from Greco-Roman architecture and art. In his lecture to an excited public at the School of Art and Mechanics' Institute in Van Dieman's Land in 1849, Benjamin Dutterau used the idea of Plato's Academy in Athens as the model for enlightened colony's noble pursuit of knowledge. In 1871, the radical, John Dunmore Lang, envisaged Australia as a "Grecian mother city" nurturing "a whole series of flourishing colonies" in the Pacific region (Dunmore in McQueen 1971: 66). Finally, in his popular and influential novel published in 1859, Geoffrey Hamlyn, Henry Kingsley turned to the Old Testament to describe the founding of a "new pasture ground".

Like other colonial writers and public figures, Kingsley was appropriating Judeo- Christian literature in order to make explicit the ideology embedded in all of the aforementioned examples, that of incorporating the cultural emptiness of the common into the hierarchy of Western enclosure, or, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's words, grand recits which enable legitimation (Lyotard 1984). Such strategies signalled the belief that from humble beginnings great things could unfold naturally and coherently. Kingsley’s description of the colonization of East Gippsland is as eloquent as it is to the point:

66 A simple primitive action, the first and simplest act of colonization, yet producing such great results on the history of the world as did the parting of Lot and Abraham in times gone by (Kingsley 1991: 151).

Grotesque and Melancholy in Colonial Writing The tension arising from the enclosure of the antipodean common speaks of the basic tension which shapes the landscape. A consequence of this tension is that from the very start of European settlement, this was a ground significantly defined by paradox as well as conflict. Place occupied the space between different traditions of seeing: between the universal order of the panopticon and the transgression created by the convict escape route. More generally the tension lay between abstraction and specificity.

Re-placing Australian literature emerges from the dialectical tension as a landscape of inherent, even radical openness. Consider the example of Wentworth's Cambridge student poem, "A New Brittannia", which intones with appropriate grandeur the mother country's "glories in another sphere". Wentworth was also drawing attention to the importance of locality and specificity. The poem offers one of the first really detailed poetic descriptions of the local landscape: "Lo! Thickly planted o'er the glassy bay/Where Sydney loves her beauties to survey/And ev'ry morn delighted sees the gleam/Of some fresh pennant dancing in her stream" (Wentworth 1823: 10). Indeed it was the attention to locality, however 'English' the diction, that led Brian Elliott to describe the poem as significantly advancing a view of "the real landscape as actually seen by the eyes of the poet" (Elliott 1967: 56). And yet even if one accepts the poem's empiricism as valid, does it follow that the landscape described is transparently present? One should recall Foxley's rupturing of the ‘text’ Rashleigh gazes over; landscape cannot be extricated from language, particularly when that language signifies the interests of an alien power. Or one should read Russel Ward, who saw in "A New Brittannia" a model of national development that "was the absolute antithesis of the strong lower-class feeling ... that Australia was peculiarly 'the prisoners' country'" (Ward 1958: 60-1). In different ways and from very different times, both figures are challenging the native-born description of environment.

67 Wentworth's description of a specific landscape with fresh eyes is not in-itself innocent, but ideological. The poet is setting out the conditions surrounding the possibility of cultural identity itself in the Antipodes. Art, science and other Western traditions must "descend thou also on my native land" (Wentworth 1823: 21). For Surgeon Browning, this meant internalizing the civilizing mission (see chapter 1); for Wentworth it meant ridding the country of its "early blot": the "outcast convicts' clanking chains" that "deform thy wilds and stigmatize thy plains" (Ibid). But as Ward's comments suggest, Wentworth belonged to a newly emergent gentry and his claims to the lie of the land could be questioned on the grounds of class. When, by the middle of the century, an older William Wentworth envisioned the colonial nobility based on the model of the pastoral elite, a young radical named Daniel Deniehy ridiculed his senior by calling the model a "bunyip aristocracy". Class was not the only issue at stake here; intentionally or otherwise, Deniehy was underlining a vulnerability that haunted the pastoralist dream. The bunyip is a mythical creature peculiar to the southern continent. By invoking it Deniehy exhibited what has been described as "the remarkable contrariety which existed at the Antipodes" (Mcintyre 1999: 93).

Broadly speaking, two contrasting views emerged as the common underwent enclosure. One held that Australia was destined to emerge as a new and great civilisation; the other saw the environment as irrevocably damned, a space beyond redemption and incapable of being called home. Thomas Watling, always attuned to the interplay of power and representation, refuted the idea of seeing the native as noble. Their technology was "rude and ill formed", and both men and women were characterized by "irascibility, ferocity, cunning, treachery, revenge, filth and immodesty" (Watling 1945: 26-7). The chronicler of migrant melancholy, Watling could not discern salvation in a "savage race". For those holding to a more positive view of the country, it must have been hard going when their projections of the future could be just as easily be ridiculed. No matter the eloquence of the rhetorician, the colonies remained a world without songs and architecture. Here could be found no schools, universities, castles or any cultural monument resembling the traditions of Europe and other great civilizations. Edward Gibbon Wakefield observed that "all the early explorers of Australasia were of the

68 melancholy class" because they "told of nothing but horrors – horrid winds, horrid currents, horrid deserts, and more horrid savages" (Wakefield 1829: 121-122). With comments such as this, it is difficult to see how irony could not abound in Australian writing. One wonders when Dutterau addressed his audience in Van Dieman's Land how many people fought against laughter when the artist called the lecture hall the "Temple of Philosophy" after the School of Athens.

Marcus Clarke would find a way of incorporating both the negative and positive views of the land and its new inhabitants. He did so by infusing his observations with humour. By responding to the climate of Social Darwinism, Clarke mischievously transformed evolution into a narrative attuned to the peculiar qualities of the future "currency lad" (native-born). Clarke begins his essay by discussing portraiture in history, which has bestowed upon us physiognomies such as "an Oriental face", "an Italian face" and an "Elizabethan face". What might an "Australian face" look like?” he asks (Clarke 1877: 10). For one thing they will be "autocthones" because they have been shaped by the "food and climate". The "Australasian" is a heavy meat-eater, has a "capacious chest" due to the bountiful oxygen; the children will have "deep-set eyes with over-hanging brows", the diet will "square the jaw and render the hair coarse", the lungs will be good, but the teeth bad and he will also "suffer from liver disease and become prematurely bald". Finally, "in five hundred years – unless recruited from foreign nations – the breed will be wholly extinct; but in five hundred years it will have changed the face of nature, and swallowed up all our contemporary civilisation". He concludes that "it is, however - perhaps fortunately – impossible that we shall live to see this stupendous climax" (17- 22).

Clarke used the grotesque body to parody supremacist assumptions embedded in metropolitan discourse. The word "grotesque" derives from the Italian, grotte meaning caves, the noun being la grottesca. It found its way into English through French by the mid-sixteenth century. After initial permutations it came to apply to paintings depicting the fusion of human, animal and vegetable forms and themes. It was in the eighteenth century that the word denoted the unnatural and bizarre. The term itself found its way

69 into English to imply the aberration of Enlightenment harmony; by the nineteenth century the grotesque was expressed through satire, its images those of parody and caricature. Indeed Clarke follows what Bakhtin saw deeply embedded in medieval parody: the "ambivalence of the material bodily lower stratum, which destroys and generates, swallows and is swallowed"; here "top and bottom, heaven and earth, merge" (Bakhtin 1984: 163). But rather than locate parody at the market-place, as the Russian theorist did, Clarke focuses upon the downward thrust richly signified by the Antipodes.

Clarke found himself naturally caught in the swing of opposites: upper and lower, centre and margin. More than most Australian writers, he recognised how the distinct ways living on the colonial periphery meant occupying an in-between existence. This existence invited a writer of imagination to rethink the way history and environment might be framed. Somewhat paradoxically, Clarke responded to the in-between during a period when the colonies were outgrowing a history in which the uncertainties of occupation in a strange land influenced identity. In an important sense, this puts him at odds with the equally influential perception of colonial Arcadia.

Clarke went on to write that "in Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning to write" (Clarke 1976: 646). He meant that this was a new country with its own particular topography and language not yet realized, and it was destined to be described not just through parody but melancholy. More specifically, Clarke characterized this condition by what he called "weird melancholy". He was writing about the poetry of his friend, Adam Lindsay Gordon, much of whose work describes the experience of the colonial unhomely. In one poem the poet prefaced his own verse,

They are rhymes strung with intent less Of sound than of words, In lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds ‘A Dedication’ (Gordon 1890: 121)

In "The Song of the Surf", the poet's alienated state is woven into the landscape itself in a

70 way that compounds meaning. Thus, when a dead swimmer lies with "his battered face upturned to the frowning sky", the hostility of the land remains unflinching, and yet mystery too is present as the ground emits its "mystical weird-like song" (59-60). Gordon's vision did not entail transcending the proximate, but as his words suggest, the proximate was an environment that did not readily conform to arcadia. Gordon's life as a writer in the new country was, like Lawson's, itself a story of truly melancholic proportions. Burdened by debt, his Bush Ballads received private critical acclaim from his friends Henry Kendall and Clarke, but this failed to prevent him riding into the bush and blowing his head off with his rifle on the day of its publication. Thomas Watling's description of his own work seems the antecedent for Gordon: "melancholy’s sombre shadow louring over my soul ... so that whatever flows from my pen, or is laboured by my pencil, affects, in some degree, the tone of mind that possesses me at the period of its production brutal in its unrepenting harshness" (Watling 1945: 18).

Clarke had spent time with Gordon the day before the poet's suicide and it is not surprising that in paying tribute to his friend, the novelist-critic followed his contemporary in bestowing ambiguous eloquence to the landscape. In the "weird melancholy" of the Antipodes, Clarke argued that the writer could find a legitimate source of inspiration: "There is a poem in every tree or flower", but it remains "a fantastic land of monstrosities". He pondered that if the Australian poet's ultimate task was to humanize the landscape, the more immediate one was to "become familiar with the beauty of loneliness" and "learn the language of the barren and the uncouth". The native poet of whom Clarke speaks is one profoundly attuned to the antipodean contour of the land with its "hieroglyphs of haggard gumtrees", "fierce hot winds", "cloudless sky of icy blue". Finally, he is "the Poet of our desolation", an exile who belongs in the desert rather than arcadia (Gordon 1890: ix-xi).

Clarke's musings cannot be described as simply prophetic. There were good reasons for him to write this way. He was after all holding dialogue with the past, not just in the most immediate and personal sense regarding Adam Lindsay Gordon, but with the more universal story of white settlement. He understood how name-places such as Mount

71 Misery, Mount Dreadful and Mount Despair etched within the noble and heroic tradition of exploration equally signified an absurdity intimately associated with the cultural barrenness of the new country. His great novel about transportation showed that from the perspective of the privileged, convicts had deformed the moral character of the country from the beginning. In this world of exile and suffering, redemption was doubtful given the fact that, in the final analysis, freedom meant repudiating the possibility of a life beyond the very society that had incarcerated its people. As we have seen in chapter 1, the Edenic innocence Cook invested in the noble savage had ended with views such as James Tucker's contemporary, Charles Griffith, who commented that "a state of nature (as it is so called) is not the state natural to man" (see chapter 1: 24). Being Australian meant being condemned to experience the land as an exile and outsider. Irony, the grotesque and melancholy seemed appropriate forms when describing place and identity.

Perhaps most significantly in a post-colonial reading is how Clarke's essay suggests that melancholy rather than triumphalism seemed destined to haunt culture and identity in the Antipodes. It intimates how the growing investment in an Australian cultural identity had grown in proportion to a receding idea of paradise. Before settlement, Paradise had been associated with the country's original inhabitants. But for Clarke and his generation, the native's "dance" was the dance of "skeletons". The view of a declining race was by this time orthodoxy, but it can in fact be readily identified as early as 1825 when, in writing of the "Aborigines of New Holland", Barron Field outlined two possible scenarios. The first saw the native given "the chance of receiving the comforts of civilization and the blessings of religion"; the second was "extermination". Perhaps the latter was preferable; it was at least justifiable when Field cast the scenario in poetic form rather than the bluntness of prose:

As in the eye of Nature he has lived, So in the eye of Nature let him die! (Field 1825: 228-229)

Around this time Augustus Earle depicted the Aborigine as a fringe-dweller in his Natives of New South Wales as seen in the Streets of Sydney (1830). Here intoxicated

72 Aborigines stagger around the boundary of colonial society. There is much sadness in Earle's work, but for others the Aborigine had become an unambiguous object of ridicule, as demonstrated in the popular satirical drawings by T.R. Browne first published in 1829. Browne saw the colony's indigenous subjects as embodiments of the grotesque. Some of his titles express the intention clearly enough: ‘Hump-back’d Maria’, ‘Pussy Cat’ and ‘Long Jack’. Not all people shared the view of Browne and his audience.2 A letter published in the Sydney Gazette in 1824 spoke at length of the need to "consider that the aborigines of this country are our fellow subjects" (Reynolds 1989: 56). But the same writer, "Amicitia", also acknowledged that "the total extermination of the blacks... would, it is true, effectively prevent any future molestation" (55).

The expulsion of Aboriginal life draws any reading to the inescapable reality that has consistently haunted settler projections of landscape. Amicitia was one of many colonists responding to the frontier conflicts occurring with the natives throughout NSW, Australia Felix and Van Dieman's Land. Both ethical justifications and sheer force were being used to usurp the right of Aborigines to New Holland. Frontier violence made the natives seem especially troublesome, but it also exposed the brutal violence of the colonist. For many, stories narrating such violence were a bitter pill to swallow. In the everyday scheme of town-life, the pathology of colonialist violence could be repressed by polite discourse, but when the security and prosperity of colonists were threatened by Aborigines on the frontier, the pattern of tolerance proved no longer viable. Little wonder that comic artists such as T. H. Browne were so popular at this time, for how could dialogue with the Noble Savage be imagined when a people whose hunting and pastoral

2 Not all paintings depict the natives as grotesque objects. Heroism can be found. Consider Benjamin Dutterau’s The Conciliation (1836). The picture shows native subjects surrounding the solitary white figure of George Robinson as conciliation dramatically occurs. Black and white hands meet in a neutral space conveying the painter’s sense of a historically significant moment in European-Aboriginal relations. The picture avoids formally treating the native subject as a colonial stereotype despite how Dutterau was conceiving exchange in terms of the widely held belief that the Tasmanian aboriginal peoples were doomed to extinction as a direct consequence of white settlement (the painting was the result of extensive research of Aboriginal physiognomy). Still Dutterau dramatizes not a living culture, but the benevolent preservation of a doomed one. This explains the absence of the abject in the depiction of the Aborigines; their swarming numbers pose no threat to the solitary Robinson because, far from threatening the colonist, they are acknowledging his heroic disposition as the diplomat of an imaginary conciliation. Far from initiating a differently grounded set of relations, the painting celebrates the European ideal of harmony and proportion. It is another document of just how marginal Aboriginal existence had become after less than half a century of British occupation.

73 economy were in practice so violently deemed the antithesis of settlement? Coexistence was not an option in the new country. Dominance and subjugation had become "a rule of practice" (Stanner 1977: 22).

Today it is possible to see how the preoccupation with colonial melancholy was in part a grappling with the complex, contradictory consequences of the broader realpolitik enveloping settlement. Writers such as Marcus Clarke suggest how at the very time when it was becoming possible to project a confident sense of cultural belonging, Australian society was simultaneously enclosing a more open-ended dialogue with the landscape. In his Boyer lectures, Bernard Smith reflected on this tension when he asked whether Clarke's melancholic bush was symptomatic of the settler's nostalgia for England or the result of guilt and fear. He favoured the latter, suggesting how "guilty colonial hearts" had found ways to project "their fear and guilt upon nature itself" (Smith 1980: 21). Whether one agrees with this interpretation or not, it is certainly a view that positions the anxiety white Australians seemed to have always felt at the forefront of cultural analysis. Given the violent history of the frontier, such anxiety should not seem surprising. As Clarke was among to first to suggest, to be Australian meant belonging to a people whose very identification with the land intimated their residual blindness.

Re-placing the Boundaries of Enclosure: The Contact Zone In his examination of Hans Holbein's Renaissance masterpiece, The Ambassadors (1533), the art critic, John Berger, wrote memorably of the relation between European imperialism and audience perception. Berger tried to make explicit the connection between the rise of oil painting and imperialism. Oil is a medium that celebrates a new conceptual order, which is dynamic and materialist. The pictorial space that Holbein organizes conceives its objects as weighty things of commodity value, so real that the viewer wishes to possess them. The ambassadors look toward us seeing the world outside them as a terrain awaiting their arrival. If their gaze prompts the audience to admire the display of their monetary power, there is also something disturbingly arrogant and narcissistic about their stare:

74 There is in their gaze and their curious lack of expectation of any recognition. It is as though in principle their worth cannot be recognised by others. They look as though they are looking at something of which they are not part. At something which surrounds them but from which they wish to exclude themselves.... The two ambassadors belonged to a class who were convinced that the world was there to furnish their residence in it.... The gaze of the ambassadors is both aloof and wary. They expect no reciprocity (Berger 1972: 94-7).

The gaze that expects no reciprocity signifies the incipient monologism that energised the material and ideological progressivism of European settlement in the New World. The world these men travel through is conceived as something passive, existing because of and for the colonist.

Berger’s thesis on “ways of seeing” remains relevant because it draws attention to how "what is lived and perceived" remains part of "what is conceived" by the dominant society (Lefebvre 1991: 38-9). Colonialist discourse exemplifies a way of seeing, one which encloses human experience in the prison-house of Western power and ideology. But for any discussion to conclude with this statement would itself be reductive. The lessons are there to understand discourse differently, as something manifold and contradictory. For a start discourse is, after all, also productive. Surgeon Browning observed along with many others on the topic of convict reformation how the debased prisoner may inhabit the realm of darkness, but s/he can metamorphose into student and civilian (see chapter 1). Discourse is also multiple. Explorers carried into the supposedly unexplored, undiscovered wilderness a colonising vision that justified invasion, and so their written accounts can be read as narratives displaying the crude arrogance of those whose collective gaze expected no reciprocity. But reality contradicted outlook: Aborigines worked as guides for European explorers all over the continent and thus showed a country not at all empty but full of historical tracks and zones of exchange that told of the history of peoples moving from one place to another. Europeans may have taken possession, but they were also holding dialogue with a tradition that had been active for at least hundreds of years. Finally, the names these people imposed on the land revealed the different ideas, expectations and stories of this dialogue. Names like Five Mile Creek might seem to convey a lack of imagination or the failure to properly

75 individuate a local region; other names like Magnetic Island tell of personal, momentary and deeply-felt engagements with a place. It is likely that in comparison to Aboriginal names, colonial names reveal an impoverished level of understanding of environment and history. However, perhaps more significant lies in how they inscribe in George Seddon's words "a living human response to a place" (Seddon 1997: 25-6).

Therefore, although ways of seeing are always influenced by the structure of a particular discourse, they also imply the manifold transformation of discourse. What lay ahead of explorers, artists and scientists might be unknown. The process of this transformation is richly complex. What lay behind them could be transformed by the convergence of imagination and genre. The landscape was neither given nor unique; it was the product of reflection and reworking. Consider William Westall's magnificent oil, View in Sir Edward Pellew's Group, Gulf of Carpenteria (c. 1812). Westall had accompanied Flinders on The Investigator and his drawings of coastlines, vegetation and figure studies of natives were important for their cartographic and ethnographic detail. The work in question is both wonderfully vibrant and detailed in its panoramic survey of the north's lush vegetation and the native mia-mia. It is also a product of imagining the landscape rather than describing it in any purely factual sense. Work on it was conducted after the artist’s return to England in which he produced several oils based on the earlier drawings made during his time in the colony. Bernard Smith writes that "freed from the need to document geological and botanical facts that pressed upon him during the voyage, Westall was able to bring a greater sense of breadth and unity to his work" (Smith 1989: 197). Westall clearly wanted a more exotic and exciting pictorial arrangement than science could convey. He was showing how representation, be it in the guise of painting, science or literature, meant a process of selection and transformation that effectively transformed rigid conceptions of imperial time and space.

Artists like Westall added something to the persistent influence the Antipodes held over the European imagination. The foregrounding of the native shelter within the wider lush foliage celebrates the sensuous beauty that contact with the New World brought for the roving colonist. It also contains a shadowy dimension. Alongside the

76 painting’s exoticism can be discerned cultural fragility, specifically in the foregrounding of a native mia-mia in an otherwise untouched tropical Arcadia. Within the bark shelter stands some rangga (decorated stones used for ceremonial purposes). Yet despite Westall's attention to ethnographic detail, the mia-mia appears melancholy and isolated as if it symbolizes the fragility of a differently grounded way of living in the face of European exploration and settlement.

Such images suggest that a newly discovered Arcadia could not so much transcend the violence of the frontier, as coexist with it. Sometimes this understanding was explicitly used by the colonist to remake identity. The master of "Claude-like Italian views", John Glover, blended the grandeur of the European sublime with the intricate details of the picturesque gaze when painting his new home in Van Dieman's Land. Like Westall, Glover was living on the edge of things. His property, Patterdale (Mills Plains), in northern Tasmania was named after a favourite painting-spot in England's Lake District. If Glover's Australian paintings record a landscape in some respects like the landscape of England, the antipodal element is never absent. In his paintings of natives this becomes explicit. Whether Glover witnessed first-hand Aboriginal people or imaginatively reconstructed them (his arrival coincided with the imminent destruction of Tasmanian Aborigines), they did provide him with a subject that emphatically inscribed the frontier as a contact zone. His 1835 catalogue reveals his fascination with the native. For example, catalogue number 29 describes "a corrobery of natives in Mills Plains in the evening"; number 46 states that the natives "Danced and Bathed at the request of the artists" and comments that "the Females are very expert in the water; the heels of one Woman are perceptible above the water"; number 56 describes a corrobery by moonlight as exhibiting gaiety seldom seen in "a Ball Room" (Glover 1835: 5-11). Arcadia might be the result of European ways of seeing, but for Glover the condition was inseparable from the new influences found on the frontier.

For some people, living on the frontier brought with it the idea of a new and more prosperous world. Even in the harshest perceptions of colonial Australia, a new kind of subjectivity can be discerned. Russel Ward believes that this was due to the very nature

77 of the frontier. He turned to the American historian, Frederick Turner, in order to argue how the frontier by no means signified an ending, but a beginning:

In so far as the American was not just a transplanted European but a different kind of man, the change could only have been brought about by influences met with in the new land. And, as we have seen in Australian history, these indigenous influences, of necessity, were most potent on the expanding frontier of settlement where they were met by the colonist in their most undiluted form (Ward 1958: 239).

For Ward, the frontier was a significant concept because, in Turner's words, it helped pin down wandering states of existence into a "connected and unified account of the progress of civilization across the continent" (Turner in Ward 1958: 256). But as we have seen expressed by Henry Kingsley, such logic belongs to the imperial myth of a great civilisation unfolding from humble beginnings.

Ward's influential argument shows how the frontier can be used to promulgate an essentialist concept of the nation. Like many writers engaging with concepts of national identity, language and history, Ward fell back on organicist metaphor and so signalled his desire to indigenize British colonization. It would be wrong to single him out for this - The Australian Legend belongs to a long tradition of rhetorical colonialism which resulted in the English language assuming an unusual burden of responsibility in the naming and representation of Australian place. Manning Clark's comment that as early as 1829 there was not so much as an inch of Australia "left for the French, Spaniards, Dutch, Russians, Americans, or the aborigines of New Holland" suggests that the connection between the nation's monolingual culture and the absence of cultural reciprocity comes early in our history. The relationship would certainly intensify as a result of the Gold Rushes during the mid-century. Thousands of Chinese journeyed to the colonies from the poverty-stricken Kwantung province. By 1855 these people were the largest non- European group in Australia, and they were to experience the greatest hostility. Frontier violence turned from the Aborigine and focused on the "Asiatic". The idea of the "Yellow Peril" began to take shape. By the 1880s, labour disputes replayed the Peril as a threat to the ideal of egalitarianism. Writers and politicians, radical and conservative,

78 unhesitatingly advocated a view of "Australia for the White Man". Political debates leading to Federation channelled European racial anxiety into immigration restriction bills that effectively excluded the possibility of non-European labour. By 1901 Australian nationhood became institutionalized, an event that enshrined the ideal of progress under the concept of White Australia. The frontier had become, to appropriate the important phrase of a writer on Australian migration, a "great white wall" (Price 1974).

However, the frontier also located other possibilities. It should not be forgotten that the nation itself is part of the tension-filled discourse of imperial power. The coherence of mythic narratives upholding the nation-state could disclose the actual rhizomic formlessness of daily life in the very act of enclosing it. Writers such as Ward are better approached as figures who aimed to tie down the nomadic trajectories of bushmen and other frontier itinerants into a connected and unified account of the progress of civilisation across the continent. But what if these trajectories were not tied down into any such hierarchy? For Deleuze and Guattari the nomad belongs to a subversive array of "bands, deserts and war machines", which raided and eluded the "territorializing" principle of the State (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 434-437). Suddenly, we are much closer to Ralph Rashleigh's more provisional relation to the land with its unfolding of different relations, each progressively more removed from the panoptic enclosure represented by the colony. As discussed earlier, while Rashleigh kept mobile, the frontier resembled less a line of exclusion as a horizon of subversive possibility. Of course, Rashleigh, not to mention Deleuze and Guattari, could be dismissed on the grounds that they signify extreme rather than representative modes of nomadic resistance. But this would overlook how the frontier is itself a trope falsified with emotive nationalist language. Take away the rhetoric and in all cases one is left with a line, edge or boundary.

Rather than think of identity through essentialist concepts, it is the boundary which provides the "criteria for determining membership and ways of signalling membership and exclusion" (Barth 1969: 15). In all societies, the boundary is central to identity because it provides an elementary strategy of differentiation. Consider Governor

79 Phillip’s first days in Sydney Cove. Following contact with natives in one area, Phillip was impressed by their "confidence and manly behaviour" and so named the area "Manly Cove". Shortly after, the Aboriginal presence became more menacing; Phillip responded by drawing a "a circle round the place where the English were, and without much difficulty made the natives understand that they were not to pass that line; after which they sat down in perfect quietness" (Phillip 1970: 26). There are actually two boundaries at work here. The name Manly signifies a boundary, one investing a specific space with a history of contact. We can term this boundary "intransitive" because it carries no direct significance for the Aborigines. The second boundary is "transitive" because its meaning depends on seeing the native as a direct object. In a nationalist reading, the boundary must operate rigidly and, consequently, those 'inside' become hostile to what lies 'outside'. In this case the line also demarcates, but it is a more provisional historical space that, after the meal, will fade - the groups will move elsewhere and different histories will be made.

This is a history of comparative lightness. It provides a way of rethinking enclosure and common. Here the line between enclosure and common has been transformed into something dialogical, a place of negotiation. It reminds us of what the German philosopher of "Being" thought about space. For Heidegger, society needed to make room (raum) by distinguishing what he termed "dwelling" from empiricist formulations of place. He wrote that "the environment does not arrange itself in a space which has been given in advance, but its specific worldhood in its significance, articulates the context of involvement which belongs to some current totality of circumspectly allotted places" (Heidegger 1973: 138). One can see how this idea inspires the post-colonial writing of Paul Carter. For him Australia did not passively await naming, rather, it only came into existence through multiple strategies of naming linked to British possession. His interpretative strategy of "spatial history" sets about locating the elusive moment when the origins of names and therefore places resonated meaningfully. Often this occurs in the provisional nature of exploration and its hesitant relation to the landscape (see Introduction).

80 To illustrate this process one could do worse than review Carter's essay, "This Other Eden" (Carter 1992b). Beginning with present-day property development schemes in Melbourne, Carter goes back to the site’s original historical ground: a moment of contact between colonists and Aborigines. Before the entrepreneur, John Batman, 'purchased' (a problematic word given that the articles exchanged with the ‘Dutigalla’ people were looking glasses and mirrors) the land upon which Melbourne was founded, colonists camped along one side of the Yarra river. On the other side during this period a string of native mia-mias were erected. Here was briefly lived what Carter terms a "culture of coincidence": peoples culturally separate are brought together by a set of grounded, common interests – in this case partly diplomatic, partly performative. What Carter wants us to ponder is what distinguishes this space from the ground celebrated by imperial or national narratives. Like Phillip’s drawing of the circle, the space between subjects revolves around a boundary, but the line serves to facilitate dialogue.

Carter is neither alone nor the first in suggesting that the colonial boundary is a place where dialogue between colonizer and colonized begins rather than ends. Earlier writers like Kate Challis, W.H. Stanner and, more recently, Jakelin Troy have shown that significant language contact between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people occurred in the early phases of British settlement. From the outset, Phillip promoted the need "to open an intercourse with the natives". The boundary he drew in the initial weeks of settlement belonged to a period in which colonists naively saw themselves permitted by the natives to appropriate the land. Such was not the case and Phillip’s boundary soon became guarded by guns. Nevertheless, despite the shadow of military power shaping relations, Phillip persisted in his attempt to promote exchange. The capture and detaining of natives like Arabanoo, Nanbaree and Bennelong belonged to a violent yet complex contact that signalled the possibility for cross-cultural communication in Australia. Watkin Tench observed this when describing Bennelong:

His powers of mind were certainly far above mediocrity. He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language, faster than his predecessor had done. He willingly communicated information; sang, danced, and capered: told us all the customs of his country, and all the details of his family economy (Tench 1979:

81 160).

Such an exchange was what Tench described "a constant symbol of friendship" between Aborigines and colonists. It can also be seen in the exchange between the First Fleet astronomer, William Dawes and the Eora woman, Patyegarang. In 1790 Dawes set about learning the Eora language through his relationship with Patyegarang. His notebooks record phrases from their dialogue and, as Troy has observed, sought to privilege the open-ended process of language acquisition itself (Troy 1994).

Carter may not have been the first to seize upon contact zones in colonial history to suggest that such places were fundamentally a ground open to paradox and transformation. However, he has pursued the thesis with unwavering consistency. His view of the Australian landscape is superficially very much at odds with the historians Manning Clark, Russel Ward and Geoffrey Blainey, yet it does share with them a profound affiliation with antipodal inversion. His is a country which is strange yet familiar: "anastomosing narratives that fan out inconclusively as they proceed [and] strangely resemble the country they describe (Carter 1996c: 26-7). But there are fundamental differences. Whereas for Clark the alterity of landscape meant seeing Australian history as something epic and tragic, Carter finds redemption in the anti-epic and picturesque. If Clark saw the world as epic theatre, Carter uses European phenomenology to view the world from the ground itself. His comparative optimism stems from the way his rhizomic narratives consistently ask us to consider "what might have happened" in those newly grasped zones of cross-cultural contact (Carter 1992a: 87).

The problem of this argument relates to the way such zones morph into an agenda of redemptory poetics. Contact zones are indeed historically unique spaces because they locate where peoples geographically and historically separated meet and establish relations. But as Mary Louise Pratt stresses in her description of such spaces, these relations usually invoke "conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict" (Pratt 1992: 6-7). Phenomenology and counter-discourse may help challenge the

82 panoptic and retrospective perspective of imperial history, but they need to be balanced with History's more sobering lessons.3 Governor Phillip's circle round the place where the English occupied was a product of hesitant cross-cultural exchange, but it is impossible to interpret the episode accurately without seeing its corresponding overtures of coercion and intractable conflict ("the natives understand that they were not to pass that line; after which they sat down in perfect quietness"). From the earliest days, Aborigines were forced into relations of dependency on the expanding white settlement. By 1790, as their resistance to this state of affairs intensified, Phillip ordered a punitive expedition to be led by a reluctant Watkin Tench. The party would have ten Aborigines shot and their decapitated heads were to be brought back along with two captives. Of the mission's rationale Tench wrote:

That against this tribe he [Phillip] was determined to strike a decisive blow, in order, to convince them of our superiority, and to infuse an [sic] universal terror, which might operate to prevent further mischief (Tench 1979: 208).

The expedition floundered and comically petered out, but the rationale of "universal terror" had exposed the raison d'être of colonization. Aboriginal society would either peacefully accept European development, or it would suffer expulsion. The land had been marked with the civilized belief that terra must be enclosed by terror.

If spatial history fails to teach us to see history beyond the ideology of colonialist discourse, it does restore a much-needed appreciation of the elementary ways space is made into place. The grand drama played out in the theatre of imperial history too often draws attention away from everyday practices that reveal much about environmental behaviour. As Carter reminds us, it is "literature", not "modern positivism", which best exhibits elementary strategies of behaviour. These strategies have much to teach us. To take a tiny example, think of that moment in Moby Dick when Ishmael and Queegueg share their bed at the whaler's inn. Ishmael is delighting in the warmth his partner's body

3 On a more critical level, Carter's narratives demand faith in their constant appeal to "what might have happened". When one steps outside the vogue of post-structuralist 'counter-discourse', it is not difficult to see the writing as sharing the kind of excesses characterizing much post-colonial criticism (see, for example, Hodge and Mishra 1990, McClintock 1992, D. Carter 1992, Parry 1994, McLean 1998).

83 imparts. While the tip of the nose might be "slightly chilled", one's "general consciousness" is "delightfully and unmistakably warm"; no room should be furnished with a fire because the essence of pleasure lies in the contrast between "the cold of the outer air" and "the blanket between you and your snugness" (Melville 1988: 55). This moment is in fact a meditation upon the dialectical interplay of opposites and the way cultural value revolves around boundaries. "Nothing exists in itself" concludes Melville's protagonist. “One can only experience delight in his warmth if some part of his body is cold; by the same token, if one is comfortable all over, it will not be long before one is no longer comfortable” (Ibid). It is doubtful that any reader (or audience) could find a more beautiful passage to demonstrate how boundaries organize human experience through strategies of differentiation.

If understood in terms of boundaries that serve to facilitate dialogue rather than exclusion, the process of re-placing the boundaries of enclosure serves to locate a provisional landscape that speaks not so much about identity as the constitutive performances of everyday life. Australian place occupies the space between different ways of seeing: between the progressivism of the colonialist enclosure of space and the locally contingent practices signifying transformation. On this ground, literature and history begin to speak differently: on at least one level they acknowledge the burden of white history and, in so doing, acknowledge the haunting presence undermining colonialism.

The boundary discloses a ground significantly open to paradox, a zone where history has yet to be calcified by nationalist and imperialist representations. Grand statements about European settlement can thus be subtly reconfigured. Consider the perennial issue concerning the dispossession of Aboriginal-Australians. The determining problem for Henry Reynolds is expressed in the form of a rhetorical question: "Was Australia settled or invaded? Pioneered or conquered? Won by sweat or blood?" (Reynolds 1987: 3). The very framing of this question downplays an in-between history because the rhetorical question acts as a boundary that excludes possibility. But in terms of everyday practices a different set of tensions can sometimes be discerned. I doubt it is

84 at all fortuitous that when an answer arrives, there is a significant blurring in the division between white and black cultures. Citing the recollections of a settler, Abijou Good, Reynolds narrates:

A week later a party of Aboriginal women came into town ‘as naked as they were born’. They treated the wide-eyed spectators to a ‘very rude kind of dance & by signs & gestures tried their very best [to] excite a certain desire in the white males of the settlement’. Good concluded that the women had been sent by their ‘black husbands’ to ‘lessen the breach which they had made by the attempt to rob the settlement’ (Reynolds 1992: 135).

It is a volatile moment conducted in the shadow of settlement’s violent onset. But it is apparent that the town boundary locates a contact zone where the "rude kind of dance" reaches across cultures to "excite a certain desire". Of course, colonialist ideology cannot be escaped: the settler interprets the performance in the form of the grotesque and so sees the dance as an overture to sex and depravity. However, there can be no denying that at this moment Good at least acknowledges a living, contradictory presence outside his world. The episode reveals how possibility and paradox does influence the making of a place.

Contact zones have been relegated by nationalist discourse to dwell beyond the boundary. The advent of the squatter ensured that the boundary moved further into the interior and so was associated with "a gradual descent in the scale of civilization until scarcely a remnant was left" (Clark 1973: 270). By the end of the century, the Bulletin poet, Barcroft Boake, could write that beyond the boundary was "where the dead men lie". The frontier was something that pushed back otherness in the name of progress. The consequences continue to resonate today. As I write, I glimpse an article about a protester combating racism in a Sydney pub who declares after a successful rally that "I’ve always been on the other side... outside the pub. But this time I was on the inside, on the winning side".4 If legal equivalence redresses social wrong, it still perpetuates an ideology addicted to equating value to one side of the boundary only. But as the novelist and poet, David Malouf, has written in his description of the house, the line demarcating between

4 ‘Racist ban defeated at Student Prince Hotel’ in The Australian Sparticist, 2/6/93.

85 home and street can really be better thought of as a "border zone", keeping contact with the house as well as being open to "the street, the night and all the vast, unknown areas beyond it" (Malouf 1985: 20).

Just as the English language assumed the burden of naming the antipodean landscape, so Western ways of seeing more generally have been unwilling to recognize and accept other perspectives. The legacy has become truly burdensome. For modernist and postcolonial writers, History is recognised as a nightmare from which we struggle to awake because of this singularity - in the words of one of James Joyce's characters, it only "moves towards one great goal: the manifestation of God". But as Stephen Dedalus wryly countered, such an attitude also discloses a failure to respond to the different layers of the ground we occupy. God, he rightly reasoned, lives much closer, in the untranslatable noises made by children shouting in the street (Joyce 1997: 35).

86 Chapter 3 From Music to Noise

The more we discover that the noises of the outside world are musical, the more music there is - John Cage For the Birds

A Noisy Protest Some years ago a protest was staged in Sydney to draw attention to the Coalition Government's hardline stance on greenhouse gas emissions.1 Greenpeace activists entered the grounds of the Prime Minister's official residence, Kirribilli House, scaled the roof and proceeded to install six solar panels. The protest succeeded in attracting national attention, but rather than encourage debate on environmental matters, the event was interpreted by the corporate media and policy-makers alike as a breach of national security.2

In a sense the one-dimensional reading of the protest is symptomatic of the insularity characterizing the current political climate - a climate, it seems, equally hardened against such issues as the "stolen children" generation and indigenous land rights generally.3 But it is also indicative of the underlying textual strategies that beset all governmental and institutional discourses. This is to say that the breaching of national security alludes as much to the formative purpose of boundaries and their maintenance of distance, order and, therefore, social stability. The incident at Kirribilli House belongs to a much grander, and seemingly inescapable, drama. While the specific scenario reveals the frozen distance between diplomacy and anarchy, the wider drama depends upon the tacit view of the boundary as the site where dialogue stops.

The following excerpt from the Prime Minister's statement to Parliament usefully

1 Specifically, the Government sought exemption from uniform reduction of emissions as proposed by other developed nations in the Kyoto climate conference in December 1997. 2 See, for example, the title of the article in The Australian: "High anxiety: Greens breach PM security", 21/10/97: 1-2. 3 This chapter was originally drafted in late 1997. I assume that readers will see the present social climate to correspond to my description, however.

87 expresses the high political urge to secure the gulf between order and chaos:

"I want to make it very clear that no matter what demonstrations they may engage in, no matter what devices they may use, legal or illegal, to get their point across, that kind of noisy behaviour will have absolutely no impact at all on the direction of government policy" (The Australian, 21/10/9: 1-2 - emphasis added).

The Prime Minister secures distance by associating protest with noise. The adjective is not random. It typifies neither calculated indifference nor ignorance; rather, the attitude to noise reiterates the way governing interpretative frameworks seem so completely unable to hold dialogue with a presence that is, apart from any other factor, quite simply different from the language of power and privilege. Noise is inchoate, ‘background’, unformed, much like the spatial realities that are regulated by the coherent discourse of place. This is why the association with noise is so effective in distancing the audible proximity of the protest. Noise in itself plays no part in the consensus surrounding reasonable exchange. Perhaps it never has. If the origins of the word remain uncertain, references to noise as "unwanted sound" date back as far as 1225.4 The concept of “unwanted sound” relates to sounds either particularly loud or which disrupt any standardized signalling system (Schafer 1980: 273). Noise is antonymic or disjunctive by definition; musical sounds are not 'noisy' precisely because they belong to a periodic and structured signalling system - hence music's intimate relation to notation. But this basic division (and separation) alludes to much more than just the art of composition. Jacques Attali argued in his analysis of music and Western political economy that if music simulates the dominant ideal of cultural harmony and stability, it plays out the ideology of order under the continual threat of disruption through the bruits of carnivalesque upheaval (Attali 1985).

Whatever the official definition, the disruptive relation of noise upon the transmission of information also refers to the richly volatile nature of language. This understanding has long been the topic of subversive creativity. Luigi Russolo theorized noise in order to insinuate within the hegemony of the bourgeois concert-hall tradition a

4 The etymology of the word can be traced back to Old French (noyse) and to 11th century Provençal (noysa, nosa, nausa), see Schafer 1980: 273

88 performative space brimming with the antithetical sounds of modernity (Russolo 1986). If Russolo's celebratory predilection towards industrialization and mass commodification seems less seductive today (at least for some), what really matters is how he perceives noise to "accompany every manifestation of our life". Here lies the Futurist's subtlety of thought. Russolo heard in noise "familiarity", which, if properly heard, can "bring us back to life" (Russolo in Nyman 1974: 37). Put another way, noise is understood in the guise of repression; its familiarity speaks to us in the form of the conditional. We need to refamiliarise noise because, like the ground of place, it has become unfamiliar, foreign and what has been termed in a different context as the "stranger in ourselves" (Kristeva 1991).

For the Prime Minister noise conveys no such ambiguity; it signals only the cacophony of dissidence. This is the boundary that controls otherness, where symbols of State and monetary power separate the language of legitimacy and illegitimacy. The indebtedness to the colonial frontier should be clear. Yet the noise generated by the protest expresses a compelling need to interpret the division differently. If we refamiliarise that which journalists and politicians hear to be foreign, we can discern in noise a beginning in the act of negotiation, the tenuous place from which a different set of interests might develop. For example, the protest may have breached official coordinates of security, but its wider gesture was in part nothing less than an attempt to offer a gift: the panels attached to the roof were for the Prime Minister and his government. Beyond the noise, but not at odds with its initial interference, the protest offered an ingeniously practical statement about how to reduce greenhouse emissions. Thus, it was also clearing a path for the notoriously bureaucratic State to show the way on urgent environmental issues.

The inability to extract from noise a meaning that might precipitate dialogue appears symptomatic of the deafness of power - not just power in the form of the State Apparatus, but power as it merges with the history of colonialism's repressive yet productive

89 function. Noise is the other of musical sound; it is undesirable, something that interferes and destroys things we want to hear. Noise is analogous to what the philosopher of transgression, Georges Bataille, termed "formlessness": the radical stain of alterity that "amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit" (Bataille 1985: 31). However disturbing Bataille's analogy, the key word remains that of "formlessness". Like noise, formlessness lies in conflict with the enclosure of the common. Symbolic statements such as the raising of a flag or physical and conceptual statements such as the "enclosure" of "property and person" position colonialist experience within the panoptic architecture that will be played out in the theatre of imperial history. Noise, qua formlessness, amplifies something distinctly 'anti-architectural' (again in Bataille's sense)5: a place that cannot be identified in terms of a fixed address, a history resistant to the dominant stories upholding the nation.

In contrast to the negative account of noise, I want to consider the ostensibly antithetical relation between noise and music more positively. The price to be paid for not listening to noise forms a depressingly one-sided narrative in the history of British settlement. The consequences of not listening are important because they articulate the settler's consistent indifference to the essential ambiguity of noise coincident with early occupation and its encounter with the antipodes. Colonialist deafness is analogous with the mimetic linking of stereotypical images whose resultant archetypes circulate in the vocabulary of the colonial fetish: the 'babble' of untamed savagery, the impenetrable, dark murmurs of a timeless land.... More enticing, the symbiotic relation between noise and the textures of the new country exposes the vulnerability that disrupts European attempts to be at home. Consider the following passage from Edward Dyson's story, "The Conquering Bush", in which a colonial woman's disintegration into madness is caused by the harsh Australian bush:

Yes, she was soon quite convinced that the animals and birds, even the insects that surrounded her, were mad, hopelessly mad, all of them. The country was now burnt brown, and the hills ached in the great heat, and the ghostly mirage floated in the hollows. In the day-time the birds and beasts merely chummered and

5 The concept of "anti-architecture" is discussed in Hollier 1974.

90 muttered querulously from the deepest shades, but in the dark of evening they raved and shrieked, and filled the ominous bush with mad laughter and fantastic wailings (Dyson in Cantrell 1977: 270).

The passage can be read in a number of ways: as a statement of the white settler's ontological fragility, as a slice of bushlife memorialized in the writing of the late nineteenth century. Yet however we formulate the woman's experience and its relationship to the wider experience of displacement, it is the painfully limited auditory range of Dyson's folle that is the crux of the matter. The countryside obviously speaks to the settler, but it signals only the undifferentiated threat of encroaching, undesired otherness (mutterings, chummering, raving, wailing and shrieking). The condition suggested here is profoundly significant in the post-colonial reading because it identifies a key factor as to why settlement was so one-sided. When difference was brought close in ways that did not entail the colonist's control, the terror of engulfment was the inevitable conclusion. A text like Dyson's has usually been read to represent the “alienation” specific to late-nineteenth century writing (Cantrell 1977: xx-xxi). I suggest that the moment described here forms part of a different story, one neither unique to the 1890s nor a mere branch of European existential angst. It reiterates the failure of the newly arrived migrant, the displaced settler, the pre-nationalist type and present-day political emissaries to hold dialogue with their surroundings.

The re-placing proposed in this chapter occurs by critically exploring the dialogical relation between music – the colonising language, and noise – the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet revealing the spatial realities of everyday life. Traditionally, narratives of place in Australia have disguised the much more complex way which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of post-colonial Australian identity. Rather than a text or a narrative, the relation between music and noise enables us to understand place as plenitude, a densely intertwined rhizome of performance. Furthermore, the antithetical relation between music and noise helps us to consider more seriously the problematic way the civilizing discourse has repressed a more truly syncretic account of settlement in the interests of imposing cultural order.

As we saw in chapter 2, it is the frontier where the symmetry of civilizing norms is disrupted in the most radical sense. To develop this insight fully, I have focused on the work of one writer. The work is a remarkable short story by the mid-nineteenth century writer, John George Lang, entitled "Music a Terror". Lang's work can be approached as paradigmatic of the progressivism underlying British occupation. However, in its narration of frontier settlement and cross-cultural contact, "Music a Terror" alludes to a potentiality that can only develop from the performative tensions embedded in the antipodes. Apart from its charming narration of the novelties of frontier life in NSW, the story adds yet another example to the depressing realization that European occupation unfolded in ways that repressed the strangeness of difference and heeded only the organized sounds of civilized language. This is the world we have inherited, its legacy played out in such dismissive rhetoric as "noisy protest". Yet noise can be discerned in ways that help reconfigure our relation to a ground not enclosed by the interests of possession. To return to the strangeness of a space outside Western economy is to contemplate a place in which unsanctioned yet entirely grounded exchanges occurred between different kinds of participants. This is a place where the intimacy of spatiality disclosed a potential ground of becoming in conflict with the dominant story of possession and dispossession. The spaces of difference traced in this chapter therefore form an important analogue for being-in-the-world. They resonate in the places we inhabit, the relationships we desire, the histories with which we are saddled. To hear them properly we need not only to be disturbed by noise, but also must listen to it with fascination.

From Music to Noise It was long after eleven o'clock before we retired that night, and even then the children were frantic for 'more noise' as they called it - "Music a Terror"

"Music a Terror" is one of thirteen stories published in 1859 in a single volume, Tales of Botany Bay. The story is straightforward enough. Cast in first-person narrative, one

92 Major Barrington reminisces about his experiences in the colony, specifically, an incident on the frontier property of his former colleague and friend, Captain Romer. Barrington tells how he had purchased a piano at an auction (the instrument is one of only five in the colony at the time) and delivered it to the Romer family. Having arrived at their home, Barrington plays before the astonished family members and elicits varied responses: the children have never heard of a piano, let alone listened to one being played; the adults experience acute nostalgia for the England they have left behind. Following this, the piano is moved outside in order to terrorize a marauding tribe of Aborigines. The novelty of the instrument's sound - its "terror" - evicts the natives. At the story's conclusion, Barrington informs the reader that the piano continues to occupy the central position in the living room, a domestic monument to the odd and exotic events accompanying colonial settlement.6

Lang offers a charming account about British settlement in NSW. However, it is apparent that the story also dramatizes the belief that settlement entailed an essentially seamless imposition of Western cultural norms upon a space comparatively devoid of value. It is important to see in this belief the complicity between the progressivism indicative of European settlement and Major Barrington’s narration of events. Barrington’s voice is the voice of reason, maturity and, of course, civilized value. Clearly, it is necessary to ask not only what the work intends but what it overlooks, negates or takes for granted.

Consider the auctioning of the piano. Here the aesthetic or high cultural value of the piano encodes the commodity. But more importantly, the embryonic society presents

6 The editor of an excellent collection of colonial writing states that Lang provides "illuminating glimpses of customs and regulations during the convict period" (Hadgraft 1986: 6). Such glimpses contribute to the scholarly extension of Australian literature beyond the privileged location of the 1890s. As the title to Hadgraft's own edition implies, Lang (and others) writes "before Lawson". If we consider this approach, one way of seeing Australian identity differently would coalesce around a more positive account of convictism, which one nationalist writer dismissed as an unwanted 'stain' attributable to the "patronising English" (Stephensen 1969: 232-34). Hadgraft is not alone in this respect; if you pay a visit to Sydney Hyde Park Barracks, a recently restored museum devoted to convict paraphernalia, you will find a newly edited Tales of Botany Bay in the bookstore, lavishly packaged for tourists. Apart from the revamped view of the convicts, these attempts offer little in the sense that the story's documentary standing observes, records and represents the event of settlement from the side of white occupation.

93 a way of seeing wholly attuned to the spectacle of colonial wealth, privilege and power:

An auction room - like love and death - levels all ranks, and on that day were seen government officials, merchants who had come out 'free', merchants who had originally come out 'bond' (emancipist), traders, wealthy farmers, Jews, et hoc genus omne, straining and jostling to get a sight of, and close to, this (in the words of the auctioneer) 'eligible opportunity of introducing 'armony in the buzzim of a family circle' (Lang 1986: 100).

Lang takes for granted how the piano symbolizes the accoutrements of cultural and economic dominance. The ranks of civil society are on show here - a social gathering whose diversity comprises the genus of the new country. If the difference of this community parallels the experiences of other colonized societies, it is because cultural difference emerges in terms of the variance with the value systems of colonialism. Nevertheless the piano serves to unify the disparate elements of the colony because it remains the triumphant embodiment of the civilizing mission. It is precisely this belief that the narrative dramatizes.

But what then are we to make of the story's title? Clearly, it is incongruent with any standard definition of Western music, whether one follows the aesthetic of neo- Platonic models or more recent accounts which follow the lead of John Cage, who defined music as "organized sound" (Cage 1966). As a writer of colonial travel in exotic worlds, Lang was certainly open to incongruities presented in the importation of Western goods, especially when a piano was involved. In Wanderings in India (1859), he comments on the strangely inverted domestic interior of the Indian colonial: "... in the dining, or drawing-room, you will find a wash-hand stand, and a chest of drawers and a toilet-table, while in the bed-room you will, perhaps, discover an old piano, an organ, a card table, or cheffonier" (Lang in Gerster 1995: 57-8). In "Music a Terror", incongruity is even more pronounced: the illegal harmonies terrorize both unwanted natives and settler children, both of whom discern not music but noise. Barrington describes his response to the children during his first night on the property:

It was long after eleven o'clock before we retired to rest that night, and even then

94 the children were frantic for 'more noise' as they called it (104).

The piano’s meaning is contingent upon its location. It is antipodean because it signifies the freakish anomalous world where noise is heard rather than music. Importantly, this aberration of harmony is treated with paternalistic contempt. The audible production of noise is immediately distanced by the narrator - the noise as "they called it", that is to say, the voice of the child's illogicality as observed by the rational adult. It is a typical rhetorical strategy of colonialist discourse, played out through endless variations.

However, Barrington cannot silence the production of noise completely. The title recognizes this with its pun on the word "terror". The terror of noise is not as innocent or controllable an entity as Barrington suggests; it characterizes the terra of the New World - its freakish illogicality. The pun is significant; the terror of alterity and the terra of the Antipodes resonate in an ambivalent symbiosis until they can be ordered through colonization’s physical and rhetorical strategies. It is to this tension that a reading must return for the modality of terror-terra locates the transformative potentiality of place. Because a story like "Music a Terror" so clearly intimates this condition, it can be seen to carry not simply (or even primarily) the associations of 'literature' or 'history', but also an array of unsettled practices in which signs and symbols are, as Homi Bhabha writes, "appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew" (Bhabha 1994: 37).

If Lang richly alludes to the inextricable relation between the piano and the problematic ground upholding European occupation, he is not alone in this period. A French traveller, Oscar Comettant, lived in the colony during the 1880s and discussed the status of music. On the subject of pianos, Comettant has been viewed a primary source for historians and musicologists. He writes:

700,000 instruments have been sent from Europe to Australia since the vast territory became a centre for white settlement. Everywhere here the piano is considered to be a necessary piece of furniture. Rather than not have one of these

95 sonorous instruments in the drawing room, as a sign of respectability, they would go without a bed.... It is not just in the cities and villages that custom despotically demands that there be at least one piano in every Australian home; even in the most distant shacks... the humblest farmer will have the inescapable piano (Comettant 1980: 137).

Although Comettant's figures have been questioned (Crisp 1995), a statistically derived reading misses the more salient point that what we have here is essentially a map of European desire. The importation of the piano dissolves the schematic of city and bush into a truly homogenous universe. Space has been enclosed to harbour the goods furnishing the spiritual wellbeing of the colony. Furthermore, the scenario described by Comettant evinces how his projection inscribes not simply the number of goods but the profoundly circumscribed sensory framework that will consistently support the accumulative nature of Western consumption. On the matter of the piano's status in "the remoter parts of the countryside", Comettant writes that however humble the scenario,

... what matter, it is a piano. It has the right sort of shape, with heavily ornate moulding and vulgar, double-breached candlesticks. That it makes a noise when the keyboard is struck is, for the most part, all that matters (Comettant in Covell 1970: 22).

Music has been momentarily impaired by intrusive dissonance. As with the children's demand for more noise, Comettant identifies in it the (ur)sound symbolic of an uncultivated world. At this potential sensory opening noise is repressed. For the author, the piano's solidity remains all-important; the instrument (and the space whose emptiness it fills) has been defined by the copula ("what matter, it is a piano"). This is all that matters.

By hearing music rather than the tension-filled dialectic between noise and music Comettant belongs in a long line of commentators in Australian history who have in a very basic way failed to listen to the sounds of their environment. The attitude continues in such formative musicological surveys of Australian society as Music in Australia (1970), in which instruments such as the piano are primarily registered to measure the

96 extent of colonization’s centripetal authority.7 Significantly, the same attitude can be found in nationalist debates. For example, The Australian Legend downplays the importance of the piano in the construction of an egalitarian bush ethic. This factor demonstrates the fundamental biases inherent throughout nationalist imagery - the piano as overly genteel for the masculine robustness of the bush legend. This bias was something Humphrey McQueen was keen to expose in A New Britannia (1971). His thesis on the racism of Australian nationalism firmly repudiates Ward's bush legend. The piano serves his task. Following Comettant, McQueen challenges the bush ethos with a definition of colonial identity that fuses the traditional "preserve of the middle classes" with the "pinnacle of working-class aspirations". This argument recognizes the piano's formative presence in the literal composition of national mythology. For Ward, a folk song such as "Waltzing Matilda" epitomizes the pioneer's rebellious attitude to authority; for McQueen the composition has been conceptualized, composed and performed around the piano before assessed by the "visiting pianoforte examiner from the Trinity College of Music" (McQueen 1971: 119).

However, if McQueen successfully contests a nationalist account impervious to other sounds, it too perpetuates a one-sided interpretation of European settlement. The piano may profess a more active role in the expression of cultural identity, but it remains affiliated with music rather than noise. The piano is only heard to produce sounds "around a squatter's piano" or in conjunction with "the visit of an English music examiner" - sounds, we might add, always played within the interior space of the settler's house and always relayed between the fixed coordinates of the 'imperial centre'/'colonial margin'. The reading ultimately curiously replays Comettant's musings and, more indirectly, of Lang because the piano remains an immutable cultural artifact, a signifier that transcends the liminal aspect of place.8 And because they cannot hear the terror of noise, both McQueen and Comettant only describe what Attali termed the "stockpiles" of Western capitalism: the accumulative outreach of consumable items. Theirs are histories

7 The author, Roger Covell, associates the rapid growth of the piano with the “notorious fecundity of Australian rabbits”. Its sounds are those of the drawing-room ballad and the 'genteel traditions' of Victorian models (Covell 1970). 8 Another way of putting this: the position invoked here is “ostensive” in meaning: one points to an object and identifies its meaning in terms of the object's customary designation (Wittgenstein 1958).

97 in which everyday life expresses not hybridity, but the rigidity of received artefacts.

Readings of Lang and his position within Australian history clearly affirm a (en)closed tradition. The presence of cultural difference is subsumed within the charming novelties of "those good old times" "before the colony had a legislative assembly or a free press" (Lang 1986: 98). The colony's vulnerability is only dramatized in ways that discern the commensurable symbols of the mother country, that is, the story's normativity, its mimetic dimension. But as suggested, on the boundary of representation an important conflict can be heard, one that brings into circulation cultural syncretism. This is why we can take seriously the children's demand for more noise. Their response to noise exposes the limitations of Barrington’s narration. If noise signals the gaps of discourse, terror marks the border zone occupied by radically different yet convergent practices.

Re-placing the Piano Things familiar to the civilized are estranged by [the] savage, yet by the same token they are re- familiarized - Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

Major Barrington describes the piano he has sent to the frontier property as a gift. It is not the first of its kind:

It was my wont to visit the cattle station once a year, and upon every occasion I used to take with me a variety of presents for my young friends in the bush. Toys, such as tin-barrelled guns, brass watches, Dutch dolls, various wooden animals in deal-boxes, etc (99).

Gifts are an important theme in the story. They show how the colonist’s altruism goes hand in hand with the civilizing function of culture. Barrington describes the children as "all remarkably fine children - strong, healthy and intelligent - but they were uncultivated, of course, like the wilds in the midst of which they had been born and bred". Their decidedly uncultivated existence is analogous with the colony's immaturity. Like all gifts the piano establishes ties. Because the instrument is associated with the

98 market, the gift in this story emanates from the side of enclosure. The piano is, therefore, part of the taming of the antipodes. Lang is careful to enumerate examples of the civilizing process: architecture ("the mud and slab house in which they lived and the bark huts occupied by the servants"), literacy ("old-fashioned spelling books") and music ("a very rude fife discourses when played upon by a hutkeeper"). The question that now needs to be asked is whether the colonial gift contributes to making the boundary into a space where dialogue stops.

As we know from the work of Marcel Mauss, gifts signify nothing less than the density of complex and dynamic social networks (Mauss 1950: vii). There really is no such thing as a pure gift: a giving wholly informed by altruism. The gift obligates the receiver to repay or reciprocate the gesture; following this, a system of exchange widens through circulatory trajectories. At the risk of homogenizing tribal and Western cultural economies, it is at least notable that in both cases the act of offering gifts entails through reciprocity a widening of communal relations. It has been observed that part of the gift's essential meaning resides in the fact that it must always be on the move; if movement ceases, the object loses its "gift properties" (Hyde 1979: 7-24). A similar principle has been noted in communications theory. Anthony Wilden observes in the Kula trade described by Malinowski that "symbolic exchange" resists the capitalist principle of accumulation: emphasis lies with maintaining the "relation between the exchangers" - an object seen in terms of possession or ownership would mean the end of such exchange (Wilden 1972: 20). The gift, therefore, serves to establish relations. Rather than denoting a specific thing, its meaning lies in the way the object circulates and connects with other things throughout the web of social relations.

These accounts are by no means the only or even primary definitions of gifts. However, they intimate a basic and significant tension in the way the gift is caught between its status as a privileged commodity, which both circulates in and is constrained by Western capital, and the more slippery passage that effectively establish new ties while breaking old ones. The ambivalence suggested here is indicative of how gifts travel during the periods of European exploration. Taussig has shown how these objects also

99 disrupted the self-interests of Western economy by becoming "refamiliarized" through cross-cultural histories. Taussig writes: "Things familiar to the civilized are estranged by [the] savage, yet by the same token they are re-familiarized" (Taussig 1993). Refamiliarisation presents an important connection with the notion of displacement. But rather than dwell on its negative and oppressive connotations, I want to propose that the location signifies a ground that makes room for disruption thus enabling an audience to move beyond the ideological constraints of colonialist power.

For Barrington the gift circulates in order to push back the frontier. As with gifts generally, the arrival of the piano establishes new ties, social relations and so on. However, it remains for the narrator an object governed by constraint. This energizes Barrington’s pleasure when he contemplates the piano’s arrival at the Romer household:

I need scarcely say that it was not for myself that I wanted the old piano, although I could play a little; it was for the children of my friend and partner, Romer - whose surprise I longed to witness when they saw me touch the keys and produce a sound - that I craved for the ownership of that antique instrument (100).

The antiquity of the instrument can be understood as something familiar. The drama of the story emerges at the site where the old is re-familiarized by the new. The frontier is inherently transgressive because it locates the moment at which a given thing loses its identity, where music escapes the definitional and is transformed into something else.

One of the most important ways transformation occurs is illustrated by the children’s first contact with the piano. Their antipodean condition foregrounds how the gift will signal the most decisive break with conventional practice. For them the instrument emits sounds that have little to do with music:

Some ran out of the room, shrieking, 'It's alive! It’s alive!' - others stood aghast with their mouths wide open. One of the little boys fancied the keys were a row of huge teeth, which would bite me if I continued to touch them, whilst a little girl of four years of age begged her mama not to let the baby go near it (103)

Prolonged acquaintance with the instrument does not alter matters:

100

Ere long they became both bold and familiar, and approaching the old instrument, they dealt it several blows with their clenched fists, which, had they been repeated, would have silenced it forever (103).

Barrington’s amusement at the sheer novelty of the moment does not disguise his fear for the breaking of a taboo: the piano is no longer synonymous with music. Indeed, the silence anticipated by Barrington is itself deafening in that it expresses how the children and their contact with the gift has momentarily broken all ties with the instrument’s traditional status.

The fact that the blows dealt upon the piano are not repeated is evidence of the constraints put upon the children. However their effective re-familiarizing of the object remains fascinating because it enables the gift to circulate in ways that escape the logic of the market and disclose relations that forge connections with the incommensurable. Jacques Derrida has defined the gift as an event rather than an object; it is the moment when an established boundary constraining exchange has been disrupted. 9 At such a moment experience itself becomes a kind of boundary, demarcating a space between order and transgression itself begins to resonate powerfully. Here received concepts begin to fragment; losing their mimetic efficacy, they instead circulate at the crossroads of experience, language and identity.

9 The gift (‘if there is one’) overlaps with the principle of justice in that it is 'irreducible in its affirmative character' and so lies outside economic circularity, calculation, rules.... But from the moment any gift is offered, it must circulate within the conditions of sociality, for example, the very gratitude expressed by the recipient of the gift 'cancels' the gift's essential meaning in that it has now become defined as an 'object' whose value lies in terms of the rules of 'equivalence' that govern formal exchange (here can be identified the beginnings of reciprocity Mauss and others examined). Thus the true gift, a giving which does not desire any payback, is impossible. However it is in the guise of its impossibility that Derrida argues the gift (‘if there is one’) needs to be cultivated. Unlike the discourse of 'economy' (the quantifiable order of things), this gift circulates as passion, desire. The location of this force emerges in antagonistic or disruptive relation to economy; as a force (in Derridean terms, we might say 'trace') it breaches the boundary of order and insinuates a different movement, one that lies elsewhere (between) to economy and the gift in its transcendental guise. It is this relational principle - the in-between, unhomely space it discloses - that is relevant to my account of the gift in Lang's story. Derrida's account of the gift is partly discussed in his Points. For an excellent account of this, see Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, pp. 17-8 and pp. 140-151.

101 The children’s contact with the piano signifies their affinity with the antipodean boundary. The property fence does not disclose an empty space waiting to be pushed back in the interests of settlement; it locates a place where history resonates with transgressively grounded interests. Here the piano carries very different associations from the civilizing discourse and the children demonstrate this when they approach the object the next morning:

[they] rushed out from their beds to the dining-room and began to dance - or, rather, to 'jump about' in imitation of the gestures of the aborigines in the act of choral exercises (104).

Aside from disrupting any notion of an authentic native identity, the mimicry performed by the children discloses a local history of contact with Aboriginal peoples. It is interesting to note that the piano’s newly acquired associations disclose a place where the homogeneity of enclosure has become "liminal".10 The piano no longer stands for music and reason; it now circulates within a truly gift-defined system of cultural relations.

The dispersal of colonialist power (its economy, its civilising baggage) offers a history that has yet to give way to colonialism. At the frontier exists a condition of becoming, a perpetual crossroads at which tradition dies and is reborn. Thus the piano is moved from one boundary to another, from the transgressive practices of the children to another border zone outside the house where contact with the Aborigines has occurred and must occur again. Consider the following description of one native’s response to the piano:

One of them at last opened the instrument and touched the keys rather heavily and... terrified at the sound he had produced, recoiled backwards, his spear poised, ready to be thrown, and his brilliant black eye firmly fixed on the demon, for as such he regarded the old piano. His companions also poised their long spears and retreated cautiously step by step (105).

10 In the sense Victor Turner describes it: ‘We play roles, occupy statuses, play games with one another, don and doff many, each a ‘typification’. But the performances characteristic of liminal phases and states often are more about the doffing of masks, the stripping of statuses, the renunciation of roles, the demolishing of structures, than their putting on and keeping on’ (Turner 1987: 107).

102

The "brilliant black eye" parallels what Paul Carter terms the "intentional nature of historical activity": the historical subject "ready for any eventuality... at once spontaneous and wholly dominated by the space of his desire" (Carter 1987: 351). The border zone is neither atemporal nor a priori; it is brought into existence through the intensity of the historically grounded, liminal encounter between the subject and his object. The gesturally sculpted dance ("step by step") traces upon the ground the unique intensity of the dancer's outwardly cast, yet never monologic, gaze.

The story, we must acknowledge, does not end here. Barrington interprets contact with the native very differently to the scenario I have just proposed:

Who shall describe their faces and their attitudes? Some of them grasped their boomerangs, others poised their spears ready to repel any sudden attack that the demon might make upon them. It was such a scene such as I would not have missed on any account (105).

As with his description of the children, Barrington translates the difference he perceives as a memoir of the oddities framing the colonial frontier. He sees events only with the intelligence of a spectator; one who witnesses everything yet sees or hears nothing. Instead of exploring the intuition that might celebrate place, Barrington desires only to transform the piano into a weapon of dispossession:

'We may make it an instrument of terror to the blacks. Of late they have become awfully troublesome in the matter of spearing the cattle... I will send for some of the tribe and frighten them - or, rather, you must - by playing on some of the bass keys' (104).

For the adults, the terror of the new country remains physically and rhetorically enclosed. The intention to use the piano as a means for driving back the frontier is a useful example of the inextricable relation between Western property and culture. The bass keys can be seen to encapsulate not only the rise of Western musical notation, but to provide a

103 synecdoche for the architectural forms that will terr(or)torialise the ground.

With the frontier intact, the piano can be restored to its musical function. In contrast to the way the children’s demand for more noise disclosed a living history of contact and border zone negotiation, the adult desire for music signifies only the nostalgia a now comfortable migrant feels for his homeland. Thus Romer’s response to Barrington’s playing of an air:

'Ah, sir!', he replied, 'you have brought to me the morning when I embarked for this country, and when, for the last time, I saw my mother and sisters. That old piano makes it seem as though it were only yesterday that I parted from there (103).

The only mood on display is the nostalgia filtering down the class structure upholding the property:

Romer, who was one of the most kindhearted men the world has ever produced, entered completely into their feelings and invited them to sit down in the verandah, and he sent them out two bottles of rum and several ounces of tobacco wherewith to regale themselves while the music was gladdening their souls and carrying them back to scenes in the land which, in all probability, they would never behold again (104).

Only the sounds of the old country can be heard. The nostalgia for England contracts space into pastoral Arcadia. The scene is tragic because the verandah serves ultimately to reinforce ascribed social positions. On the boundary, dialogue ends.

And beyond migrant nostalgia can be felt another kind of silence. Barrington observes:

... for from that day forward the nuisance abated and the tribe very rarely came near the forest where our cattle used to graze; so the old piano, after all, was by no means dear at the price I paid for it, to say nothing of the amusement which it afforded to Romer's children (105).

This was the legacy of the colonial gift: to initiate a mode of exchange that reinforced the

104 solidity of white boundaries at the expense of a more disruptive yet inclusive form of settlement. The conclusion of "Music a Terror" points then not to a beginning, but to the enduring story of settlement, one symptomatic of ideological deafness, a world attuned only to music. Long after the episode of the instrument’s arrival, the story concludes with the "old piano" proudly standing inside the house:

There are thousands of pianos in the colony now, of all sorts, sizes and prices, from £25 up to £100; but not for any one of them would we exchange our old friend here, which has a place of honour in one of our drawing-rooms, and reposes its tottering legs on a Turkey carpet.

From its fragile beginnings the story ends with the kind of visual and auditory delights described by Comettant. Yet it is a curiously leaden world. No longer inhabiting a zone where edges, openings and untutored sounds and touch signify everyday life, the piano's immutable position speaks on behalf of those who in the most basic sense failed to communicate with their surroundings.

105 Chapter 4 The 1890s: Narcissus and Echo

Approaching the 1890’s: Arcadia and the Bush On the inside cover of Joseph Furphy's ("Tom Collins") classic Such is Life is an illustration of a single tree underlined by a caption "For Australia". The drawing seems innocuous enough. Most likely a eucalyptus, it is an icon of the more independent sensibility we associate with national identity. It contrasts dramatically with the dull monotony of the landscape described by early colonial writers who were unable to see beyond their nostalgia for the old country. It is tempting to see in the image a kind of visual backhand against the blandness of green that so confused and depressed earlier generations of colonists. At any rate, the message seems clear enough: a century after the arrival of the First Fleet the eucalyptus has been transformed from its melancholy associations to an affirmation of settler place.

The colonist's growing affinity for the land in fact can be readily identified long before the fin de siecle. The very first generation of native-born colonists had voiced a more confident sense of their identity, which contrasted with the psychic anxieties of forced exile that so marked earlier colonial experience. The native-borns were "currency lads", people who consciously distinguished themselves from the British-born "sterling". The "currency lad" believed that the Englishman was incapable of adapting to the hardship of the bush. In contrast, the "currency lad" no longer saw the country in terms of anxiety. Charles Harpur, who was acutely conscious of his native-born heritage, once described himself as "a man of the woods and mountains – a wielder of the axe, and mainly conversant with aboriginal nature" (Harpur in Kinross-Smith 1980: 15). Was he referring to the native, or did "aboriginal" signify the native-born's indigenous standing? Whatever the answer, Harpur was not averse to using organicist metaphor to dramatize the founding of an Australian culture:

We’ll plant the tree of Liberty In the centre of the Land;

106 And round it ranged as guardians be A vowed and trusty band; ‘The Tree of Liberty’ (Harpur 1984: 9)

The subtitle of this poem is "song for the future", deepening the poem's function as a proto-nationalist rallying call. The tree’s iconic power results from its difference from European or British representations of the landscape. The poem belongs to the tradition envisaged by Wentworth in “A New Britannia”. "Our Southern tree of Liberty/Should - shall even flourish so", Harpur concludes, thus emphatically celebrating rather than scorning his native environment.

The use of blossoming of native flora and fauna is not of course something unique to Australian writing. Simon Schama observes in Landscape and Memory of the connection between tree-planting by children and "a long, rich and pagan tradition that imagined forests as the primal birth-place of nations" (Schama 1995: 6). White Australia cannot claim so long a chronology, but organic images such as trees still served as pivotal tropes for a more deeply felt sense of identity. The eucalypt was, however, unique to settler society and by the late nineteenth century, a new generation of writers and painters who were coming into prominence seized upon the trope and the rural landscape more generally to articulate not only the freshness of a new age, but the emergence of a locally grounded sense of identity. The period is generally known as the "Nineties", or "1890s". It has served as the key referent for a generation of scholarship for the nation’s emergence in terms marked by confidence, youthful optimism and a sense of something uniquely Australian. Geoffrey Serle describes the 1880s as a time when "naive, confident optimism was reflected by the writers and artists striving to express a new civilization" (Serle 1973: 60). Keith Hancock describes the following decade as a period of "enthusiastic radicalism" that "witnesses the first experiment in a national form" (Hancock 1961: 244). Historicist when enshrining the "legend of the Nineties", Russel Ward collected folk-songs and held them up as examples of an indigenous community that found full maturity during the 1890s. H. M. Green consistently championed the stories of Henry Lawson, finding in them an intrinsic superiority that justified the writer’s status as the most representative of all Australian writers (Green 1985: 578).

107

The view propounded by the above school of thought sees the 1890s as the highpoint of Australian nationalism. The writers and artists of the period are understood to have expressed both a new conceptual vitality and stylistic creativity that revealed Australia in its most authentic form. In this discourse, the cumulative dynamic of the nationalist masternarrative pinpoints the redemptive scenario dreamed by earlier colonials who were stained by convictism. For example, in 1854 the convict, John Mitchel, meditated at length on a prospective Arcadia contained within the Tasmanian wilderness: "some sweet singer shall berhyme thee yet, beautiful lake of the woods" (Mitchel 1913: 276). Lawson can be seen as a positive response to Mitchel (and the equally prophetic lyricism of Harpur) by forging prophecy with the documenting of actual historical achievement. The hazards of bushfire and drought, the task of land- clearing, the loneliness of individuals and families, mortality and grief - all experiences feature prominently in Lawson's national mythology, as demonstrated in the poem "How the Land Was Won": "They toiled and they fought through the shame of it/Through wilderness, flood, and drought/They worked, in the struggles of early days/Their sons’ salvation out" (Lawson 1967: 362).

In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer suggests that not only are myth and history related, but that myth determines history. In his sense, the nationalist use of metaphor describes not so much a story that transparently records experience as it does the influence exerted by myth over history. But what is the kind of myth at work here? As suggested by Mitchel and Harpur, the myth of nation owes much to that of "Arcadia" (or "Arcady"). The term is a product of Greek and Roman cultures. Although drawn from a real place (the Peloponnese), it existed in the imagination as a pastoral paradise for those locked into more crowded, urban environments. French writers of the Enlightenment were obsessed by the idea of Arcadia – Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Noble Savage being the most celebrated example. For the English in the eighteenth century, Arcadia informed landscape design and signified the delights of a pastoral economy. It also provided a solution to social ills, which were increasingly influenced by the rise of cities and industrialization. Coral Lansbury’s thesis is that for English writers in the early

108 to mid nineteenth century, the Australian colony offered a space where a new conception of Arcadia could best be achieved, one that blended the best attributes of the Enlightenment with working labour (Lansbury 1970).

If Lawson and other colonial writers such as Edward Dyson were influenced by the cocky, epigrammatic style of the Bulletin, the Arcadian ideal perhaps found a more far-reaching and fulfilled expression in the landscapes of the Heidelberg school. This rural myth-making tradition involved a small group of artists who documented in plein- air style the landscape of Heidelberg during the 1880s and 1890s, an area just outside Melbourne. As Leigh Astbury has demonstrated, far from suddenly discovering the 'real' Australian bush, the Heidelberg painters were engaged in profound dialogue with French impressionism (Astbury 1985: chapter 2, passim). In the catalogue for the ‘9 by 5’ exhibition, the young artists affirmed this link, as well as other important European and American influences.1 Through the transfusion of light within these landscapes, however, their representation of the landscape became truly distinctive, and forged painterly equivalent for the impressionistic hues found in the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon and the "vision splendid of sunlit plains" celebrated in Patterson’s ballads.

After seeing the work of the Heidelberg first exhibited at Melbourne's Centennial International Exhibition, a reviewer for the Australasian was inspired to declaim that "the unknown wilderness has been made to produce coal and gold, wool and wine… out of the barren earth there has come wealth, out of the handful of settlers a great people" (Quoted in Astbury 1985: 130). Although the verse of Lawson and others seems strained in its attempt to fan the patriotic embers of its audience, such a charge cannot be levelled at the

1 For example, Streeton’s idyllic pastoral landscapes owe much to the Claudean tradition. Furthermore, in the period of their initial exhibitions the Heidelberg artists were appreciated less for their collective plein- air ethic than for their interest in figure painting. This is itself significant given how the latter offers a way of encoding a living national mythology, one profoundly indebted to the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon artists. For Courbet, landscape was not to be divorced from the ordinary people who worked in the fields. Finally, any consideration of the Heidelberg would be limited if it failed to consider its indebtedness to the popular art of the period: the drawings of S.T. Gill and the growing number of magazines and journals which circulated prints and photography of frontier life in the United States. The construction of national culture did not emanate from a single generic or conceptual source that is the ‘essence’ of Australia. If the bush ethos perceived so central to the making of the nation was to some degree unified, it was so in the sense that it was largely a creation of an urban class educated in identifiably European modes of representation (McQueen 1979; White 1981).

109 art of the Heidelberg. It is testimony to the universal appeal of their work that no less a contemporary artist than Arthur Boyd has stated that "all Australian paintings are in some way a homage to Tom Roberts" (Boyd in McQueen 1996: 725). This appreciation relates in part to the way in which the tonality of the Heidelberg perfectly complements the drama played out by the landscape's inhabitants. Like Lawson, the art of the Heidelberg projects a redemptive theme, mythologizing the hard-won triumph of the settler in the most emblematic sense: the precariously tilted bullocky in A Breakaway (1891), the solitude of McCubbin’s bushman aimlessly stirring his fire on the wallaby track. These are images that convey physical hardships daily endured in the bush. Yet such existential dramas are increasingly qualified by an underlying, sometimes transparent, sense of victory. Streeton's famous portrait, The Selector’s Hut: Whelan on the Log celebrates settlement in the poetic guise of the everyday because the drama remains contemplative rather than clothed in public rhetoric. The rugged physicality of Whelan's environment dominates, yet never overwhelms the viewer for the scene is finally picturesque. Whelan sits on the log smoking his pipe; he appears at home in his surroundings, one who struggles daily yet knows that he remains master of his world. The fallen tree is also a key symbol for the encoding of the landscape by "strong masculine labour" that Tom Roberts believed central to the Heidelberg mythologizing of the bush. Perhaps the most memorable expression of this is Frederick McCubbin's triptych, The Pioneer (1904). Here the originally untamed bush gives way to the entrance of the settler, from the fragile first house to the more recent burgeoning city. Like Lawson, McCubbin imbues his story with nostalgia - we are encouraged to identify with the pioneer's accomplishments and the cost on the settler. The painting’s retrospective mood is not simply about memory; it encourages the audience into associating the nation with a tale about the decisive overcoming of hardship.

Clearly one of the most important consequences of the Heidelberg and the 'text' of the 1890s generally, relates to the way it transforms the melancholic accounts of settlement in earlier colonial literature and art. It records an environment undergoing both physical and psychic transformation, which sees original displacement transformed into an aesthetic of belonging. This narrative was what Bernard Smith made explicit in his

110 1980 Boyer lecture when discussing the achievement of the Heidelberg. Their landscapes signified a "radiantly happy mood" that served a strategic function in that it served to "consolidate the pastoralist dream of a sun-kissed Arcadia" (Smith 1980: 22). In short, the 1890s mark the highpoint in the narrative of colonialist progressivism. In this story alienation and psychic dislocation give way to a history that emphatically dramatizes the indigenization of the white settler.

Rather than accept this claim to nationalist authenticity, a re-placing clearly needs to assume a counter-discursive position. In chapter 3 we saw how traditional narratives of landscape and identity in Australia have disguised the much more complex way in which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives. Rather than a text or a narrative, place is a plenitude. To follow on from this awareness: the 1890s might be better approached as a mode of exchange that reinforced the solidity of settler boundaries at the expense of a more fluid yet inclusive form of settlement.

To understand this more fully, we need to ponder the truly ubiquitous influence of the Heidelberg landscape. If Arthur Boyd saw in his art an indirect homage to the landscapes of Tom Roberts, then it is equally true that those who populate Boyd's landscapes also signify a revision of the Heidelberg's pervasive hold on national identity. This is nowhere more forcefully suggested than in Boyd’s Narcissus and Three Clouds. Boyd turned to Greek myth to express the colonist's ambivalent relation to the iconic landscape. Here the Australian type, grotesque yet bound to the landscape, scrutinizes himself while in the distant background bestial sex and convict suffering dot the country.

Boyd's appropriation of Narcissus is not simply fortuitous but conceptually apt. As told by Ovid, Narcissus was enraptured by his own beauty, so much so he turned away from various potential suitors including the nymph, Echo, falling in love with his own reflection as cast in a pool (Graves 1955). Myth is problematic to the extent that it is believed, and in casting Narcissus as the dominant yet pathetically isolated occupant of the land, Boyd was suggesting that the nationalist claim to myth originally projected in the Heidelberg is inherently flawed because the colonist’s world is in actuality little more

111 than a world of his own making. Put another way, any creative and critical engagement with the 1890s is in part recognition of the failure to see beyond the doctrinal enclosures embedded in colonialist nationalism. Narcissus thus offers an important trope today because he articulates White Australia's persistent confusion of culturally determined notions of beauty with truth, of being seduced by a mirror projection of our own making. Narcissus represents the psychic isolation of the colonist, striving to be at home yet condemned to be alone.

And yet the tragedy of Narcissus is that he is never really alone. In Greek mythology the love offered by Echo ends in her being transformed to stone and rock. She is condemned to remain a lingering presence on the periphery of Narcissus’s vision. The metaphor of Narcissus in the reading of place is not in the final analysis about enclosure, but about the ambivalent relation between the dominant myth and its other. Narcissus and Echo can thus help transform the 1890's, from symbolizing the highpoint of nationalism to symbolizing the highpoint of colonialist ambivalence.

Various paintings of the Heidelberg readily serve as a useful template for grasping this more ambivalent ground of the 1890s. Of these, few paintings are more familiar than Shearing the Lambs. The painting depicts the bush worker at home within rural society. This is a landscape that celebrates what the artist described as an ethos of "strong masculine labour". Roberts’ eye was astutely contemporary in the way he depicted the physical movements of the individual workers (influenced in part by Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking photographic sequences of human motion). Roberts also challenged conservative art criticism by foregrounding local pastoral life in so detailed a manner. With this said, interpretations of the painting have almost unanimously responded to the mythic nationalism expressed in the ethos of masculine labour. By depicting the shearers using hand-held blade-shears rather than the shearing machines which were then being introduced throughout the Riverina, Roberts transposed the specificity of his topic into a universal mood of rural nostalgia. In doing so, myth served to fetishise social relations, so much so that in 1994 the labour historian, Geoffrey Blainey, could wholly admire the painting’s success in depicting "that special time in

112 Australian history when so many people found pleasure in hard work (Blainey 1994: 118). But this overlooks the way Roberts ignored how conflict characterized trends in the pastoral industry during the 1880s, most significantly, in the form of falling wool prices and, secondly, how the newly formed Master and Servants Acts accentuated unequal relations by making it a criminal offence to withdraw one's labour from the market.

Such tensions are invisible in the art of the Heidelberg art generally. A reading such as Blainey's responds rather to the mythologizing nostalgia expressed in the 1890s and, more particularly, Heidelberg art. Whether it appears as the collective working class, a struggling bullocky, the solitude of the wandering bushman, the resting settler with his fallen tree, or the grand narrative of the pioneer, the discourse of the 1890s projects an aesthetic of what Smith described as the "radiantly happy mood". But this was in fact an attempt to invent the white settler's sense of belonging. It thus signifies the fully-fledged emergence of Narcissus.

Paradise in the Antipodes was narcissistic because in projecting Arcadia it repressed its real history, one of conflict and difference. Most significantly, it was a land on which an accompanying myth, the Noble Savage, could no longer play a role. The hunting and pastoral economy was consistently regarded as a threat to the advancement of white settlement. Coexistence was simply not a consideration. Since Governor Phillip's 1790 punitive expedition, dominance and subjugation had been unwritten law. The poet of "The Tree of Liberty" was not oblivious to this. As a young man Harpur had written "An Aboriginal Mother's Lament", which described a native woman's horrified response to the massacre of Aborigines by frontier pastoralists at Myall Creek. But that was 1838 and at a time when frontier violence was at a peak. Less than twenty years later the possibility of Arcadia could be contemplated without the Aborigine. In Jail Journal John Mitchel spoke of "some sweet singer shall berhyme thee yet, beautiful lake of the woods" (Mitchel 1913: 276). The future tense of this statement is important, for what prevented dream from becoming reality at the time were the "native devils" who "whistle nigger melodies in the balmy air". But Mitchel entertained no doubts that the land would yield to his desired aesthetic. He thus prophesied that "spirits of the great and good who are yet to

113 be bred in this southern hemisphere shall hover over thy wooded promontories in the years to come – every bay will have its romance… and the glancing of thy sun-lit, moon- beloved ripples shall flash through the dreams of poets yet unborn" (276). By the time the Heidelberg artists were making their incursions into impressionism, Aborigines who had survived the onslaught of European colonization had been banished to reservations. It was, suggests Bernard Smith, their conspicuous absence that informed the mood conveyed by the Heidelberg's plains. In this act of rhetorical emplacement, the art of the 1890s was also the most complete expression of dispossession in the history of the settlement because it so comprehensively effaced the figure of the Aborigine.

Yet it needs to be repeated that Narcissus was never really alone. The relationship between Echo and Narcissus provides an important metaphor for understanding the bush Arcadia in that it encourages a re-placing to seek out the unspoken, the silenced and effaced in the interstices of the authentic. Like the Greek youth, the bush Arcadia is residually haunted by its other, albeit in very disparate ways. As we will see throughout this chapter in different but clearly overlapping areas, the grounded, yet paradoxical practices constitutive of place relate to a more provisional way of reading the country. In doing so, they throw into question the ideology underpinning the colonist's projection - be it masculinist, racially driven, or Arcadian - of Paradise.

To illustrate briefly, it is worth considering Henry Lawson's treatment of the bush Arcadia. Lawson distrusted Arcadia because it failed to describe the harshness of the country and the lot of the small farmer. In reacting against Paradise, Lawson turned to irony and melancholy. But he also went beyond polemical reactionism and sometimes grasped a relation to the ground that inadvertently disclosed the richly paradoxical nature of a ground where meaning was not given. It is paradox which follows the life of his character Mitchell, the itinerant who, in "On the Edge of the Plain", tells the story of returning home after eight years absence only to lose his welcome because of his indigent state (Lawson 1984: 294-5). For Lawson, it seems that redemption in the new land was a concoction of urban dreamers. But it is the conclusion that is of real interest. After the tale, Mitchell and his friend get up from the wood-pile they have been using and simply

114 move on. Their instinctive act intimates how the ground continues to remain fluid and open to change, whatever measures society uses to enclose it. By privileging fluid movement and transgression, Lawson has made us at home with displacement. Enclosure acts make no sense for the edge of the plain simply dramatizes how stasis is in fact inherently in flux. In crossing a line, Mitchell and his friend suggest that the boundary is not only something to be pushed back in the interests of ownership, rather, it is where history can be and is routinely remade – a zone where the difference between here and there is as artificial as it is momentary.

A Man's Country One of the most memorable figures in Shearing the Rams is the barefoot boy carrying the fleece. His cherub face provides a powerful organic link with the adult labour surrounding him. In fact, the boy Roberts painted was a girl dressed up for the part. For the artist, women played no role in the representation of strong masculine work and its contribution to the pastoral economy, even if this meant fundamentally misrepresenting the state of things.

The privileged referent that is ‘the 1890s’ is narcissistic due to a conspicuously masculinist ideology, an outlook which characterized the colonist’s mastery over the country. Arcadia largely repressed or censored the presence of women, and so reinforced a highly one-sided view of history. Feminist readings in the past few decades have unanimously recognised the masculinist character of the Australian Legend. Judith Wright was one of the first to do so when addressing the concept of "mateship" in her important collection of essays, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry:

The mateship ingredient was always and necessarily one-sided; it left out of the account the whole relationship with woman (Wright 1966: 133-34)

As with Norman Mackenzie’s sociological study Women in Australia (1962), a work that recognised Australia as "more a 'man’s country' than other industrial democracies", Wright focused on the absences in our culture as opposed to common sense representations in the canon. In doing so she anticipated the studies that emerged in the

115 following decade: Ann Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975) and Miriam Dixon’s The Real Matilda (1976). These works developed the thesis of exclusion and so further highlighted the profoundly misogynist character in nationalist mythology. Dixon wrote that "there are also no women in the pantheon of Australian gods…. Among the gods of Australia there is [an] animal, this time a horse named Phar Lap. The rest tend to be males under all-male and danger-fraught conditions" (Dixon 1984: 11-12). These studies remain key examples of "second wave" feminism, which emerged during the 1970s. Following this trail, a generation of historians and literary critics interrogated the representative texts and assumptions of Australian history. In works such as the influential essay on Australian masculinism by Marilyn Lake and more recent deconstructive accounts by Kay Schaffer and Susan Sheridan, the bush legend has become as suspicious a concept as Arcadia in Australia.2 It is difficult to consider the mateship legend without first emphasizing its disturbingly singular and alienating chauvinism.

Other interpretations of the Legend during the Seventies also revealed an oppressive masculinism. Consider, for example, a drama that initially appears a fairly transparent celebration of the legend. Ken Hannam’s feature, Sunday Too Far Away (1975), is generally regarded important because of the way it heralded a kind of renaissance for the Australian film industry (the film was a major success at Cannes). It is a highly romantic portrait of an Australian working man, Foley, played by the iconic Jack Thompson. Foley has started his downward slide from top shearer. Yet the film’s modest exploration of larrikin heroism also reveals the depressing consequences of the exclusively male working ethos. Women are conspicuous for their absence - the rare scenes in which one young woman forges some kind of relationship with Foley (she is the daughter of the "cocky", the owner of the sheep station) ends when she is quite brutally excluded from any meaningful communication with him or any other shearer. Following an old mate’s death, Foley cannot share his grief with the girl. The shearer's

2 Important examples include Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (1988) by Kay Schaffer and Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1890s-1930s (1995) by Susan Sheridan and the collection of critical essays by various academics in Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (1993).

116 isolated and sobbing body remains physically separated from the girl who can only helplessly watch on. The moment painfully expresses the incommensurability that distances Australian men and women. In terms of its alienation and hostile barrenness the formal arrangement of the scene is as reminiscent as it is every bit as unsettling as an oil painting by Drysdale.

Although it does not primarily concern women, Sunday Too Far Away shares with Dixon and Summers an elementary need to expose the misogyny that lies at the core of the national landscape. If the legend emerges as a representation now gripped by atrophy and burdened by its exclusionism, it is equally apparent that gender functions as a primary strategy in the problematic construction of national identity. This view is central in Lake’s influential critique of Australia’s "masculinist" culture. She traces this to the literature of the Bulletin in which men were "free of family responsibilities... and playcards". By starting from the view that gender is a pivotal category for historical analysis, Lake interprets the 1890s as a period of profound contestation in which men and women fought for the control of national culture. A magazine such as the Bulletin called for a separatist model of masculinity that informed images of the bushman. Consequently, women in this publication were portrayed as "vain, snobbish, conservative, parson-worshipping killjoys" (Lake 1986: 119).

Lake's highly critical engagement with the masculinist bias of the 1890s reflects in part the revisionist attitude displayed towards the myths that uphold Australian nationalism. However, her thesis has drawn criticism. John Docker summarizes a consequence of this kind of engagement as one that lends a certain inevitability to the story of the period, one of "racism and sexism, oppression and exploitation, endless suffering, joylessness, unrelieved grey" (Docker 1991: xxv). He is critical of readings of the 1890s that operate under the auspices of reductionist models. Historiography, Docker argues, needs to display the sensitivity of a work like Sylvia Lawson's The Archibald Paradox (1983). Archibald, one remembers, was not only editor of the Bulletin, but an ardent Francophile. This kind of paradox is one of many considered by Lawson; it is important because it alludes to what Docker sees as the intertwining narratives that are

117 indicative of the magazine's dynamic approach to events of the time. The writing of the 1890s celebrates excess; it can therefore be appreciated in terms of "anti-cultural imperialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism" (Docker 1991: 67). Its character resembles the idea of "carnival" in its deployment of "low genres" and the corresponding belief that laughter can operate as potent social commentary (28).

The Docker thesis offers a useful corrective to the problematic historicism of Lake. By this I mean that if Lake inadvertently recapitulates the strategies of power, it is because she tends to conceptualize the contest between men and women within the theatre of imperial (patriarchal) history. The story becomes in this context grand drama, or as she puts it, "one of the greatest political struggles in Australian history", "the contest... for the control of the national culture" (Lake 1986: 116). However, by privileging heteroglossia as the alternate method for reading the 1890s, masculinist hegemony tends to be inadvertently elevated once more. To illustrate what I mean, consider how a painting like Shearing the Lambs projects not simply the ethos of strong masculine labour, but also encapsulates the kind of density celebrated by Docker. In this sense, a reading would address the aims and practices of European realism, the influence of colonial photography and the rise of popular literature testified by such magazines as the Australian Sketchbook and the American Harpur’s Magazine. Following this, one could also mention the local and first-hand experiences of the artist’s contact with pastoral labourers. Yet the canvas remains a document in which calculated omissions are utterly essential to the successful idealizing and mythologizing of its themes. In seeking to balance the spirit of the local with the universal, Roberts depended on many hybrid strategies and influences, but his pictorial arrangement still encoded the flux of colonial life within the paradigm of the bush Arcadia. The 1890s is clearly a contradictory and manifold complex, but it remains iconic of a colonialism that was fundamentally masculinist in form. It is surely not coincidence that its narcissistic complex enabled later generations to identify Australia as a rural, essentially British bastion that stood against the chaotic forces of war and modernity.

Feminist challenges to the 1890s are crucial if only because they help expose the

118 singular and broadly oppressive features of nationalist discourse. As with the cultural and territorial effacement of Aborigines, the Legend consistently imprisons women within the realm of its masculinised narcissism. This projection takes many forms, sometimes women appear as killjoys, at other times they are described in presemiotic terms, namely when analogous with Nature: inert and maternal in her strangeness. In "The Bush", written in 1912, Bernard O’Dowd used the female body as the basic trope for reading the now nationalised landscape:

But more we seek your undeflowered expanses Of scrub monotonous, or where, O Bush, The craters of your fiery noon’s romances, Like great firm bosoms, through the bare plains push.

As many, Mother, are your moods and forms As all the sons who love you (O’Dowd 1944: 194-195)

The almost polymorphous way the feminized, virginal space is described constitutes a theme in itself. So too is the association of the word "Bush" with the region Freud was to describe a few years later in his essay "The Uncanny", a region which had been portrayed with an astonishing combination of frankness and symbolic power by the painter Courbet almost fifty years earlier in an oil significantly entitled L’Origine du Monde (1866). It is also worth noting how O'Dowd's bush no longer signifies drabness – homogeneity has become contrast and colour. O’Dowd has transposed melancholy into sublime, although his metaphorical treatment of the bush suggests that the value of the female subject depended upon the extent she helped (s)mother the psychic anxieties of the unhomely for the male subject. If the Heidelberg artists created a home for the colonist by effacing the original inhabitants, the post-Federation poet finds it by his worshipping of a feminized colonial earth. It is an ideology which will persist throughout the new century.

Perhaps the most significant single creative challenge to the dominant presence of Narcissus can be found in the short stories of Barbara Baynton, which were first published in 1902 under the title Bush Studies. Lawson and Patterson understood the Australian bush as an occasionally strained construct, but Baynton saw it as dangerously

119 and relentlessly oppressive to women. In contrast to her male compatriots, Baynton’s projection of the bush assumes unequivocally nightmarish proportions. Women in the rural world are defined through economic forms of exploitation; they are servants of the domestic sphere and continually humiliated by the bushman-husband’s taunting of femininity. In "Squeaker’s Mate", Baynton inverts the status quo of power relations; it is the female mate who performs labour yet she does so in a way that far exceeds the achievements of Squeaker, who is physically and emotionally impoverished. Only when Mary’s back is broken does her partner assume power and she must return to the house humiliated yet by no means defeated. Treachery in this story lies everywhere. Mary’s injury is caused by a fallen tree – an event that signifies the inescapable treachery of landscape.

Baynton remains vivid today because she so clearly disidentifies with the topography of nationalism. As with Echo's haunting and parodying of Narcissus's movements and language, Baynton is adept at appropriating the symbols of the Legend and exposing their masculinist bias. It is difficult not to see "Squeaker's Mate" as a rather horrible parody of Lawson’s more famous portrait of a woman's lonely place in the bush in "The Drover's Wife". Where stoicism provides some comfort for Lawson, there is little hope of redemption for Baynton, although her stories do actively consider the possibility of redefining female subjectivity – the mate, for example, assumes the role of provider. But transgressing the boundaries of the domestic home signals only temporary disruption; more conclusively, it heralds a form of violence that carries devastating consequences for women in the bush generally.

If Baynton refuses any revolutionary notion of change, she does successfully dramatize an elemental violence that makes it difficult for any audience to see the bush innocently. It is Echo rather than Narcissus who attracts our interest - the fallen tree in "Squeaker’s Mate" transforms Streeton’s Arcadian tree into a grotesque Antipodean double. In this landscape one is again condemned to live in an alien world whose foliage forbids fellowship. Even as the nation was being invented, Baynton was exploring in imaginative terms the rottenness of its myths. Her writing refused to be at home in a bush

120 Arcadia, and described instead a world where the unhomely dominated. Although unfashionable at the time of publication, her radical deconstruction of the Legend anticipated the exploration of myth, history and landscape that was to emerge in the decades to come.

White Nation The author of Bush Studies dramatized not only Narcissus’s repression of women, she imagined ways in which one could discern the haunting presence of Echo in the landscape. This tension shapes and pulls at nationalist conceptions of Arcadia and masculinity; it can also be found in the collective racism which so influenced the writing of the bush legend during the turn-of-the-century.

Racialism lay at the very rhetorical and conceptual core of the Legend. However, it belonged to the much broader debates and perceptual models that dominated European culture during the nineteenth century. The mythology of the 1890s revolved around the idea of a specific sense of Australian identity, a particular national type. This idea has its roots in the growing obsession for scientific classification, which had begun with Linnaeus's classifying of plants and animals into "types". The rise of nationalism in Europe saw a growing fascination not simply with a physical type, but a belief that appearance was connected with moral character. Phrenology became an authoritative method to demonstrate the hierarchy of types. The study of heads belonging to Aborigines and criminals revealed the lowest examples of intelligence. In the context of British imperial expansion, colonial Australians could justifiably consider the possibility of an Australian type that at the very least matched the racial superiority of the British type. It was expressed through the term, "The Coming Man" (White 1981: 64-66).

The idea of the Australian nation flourished during a period when the ideology of race, national type and European imperialism was at its most pronounced. The fact that by the time of Federation the colonies had emerged close to 100 per cent British in their population promulgated the belief that the most distinctive feature of Australian identity was its racial purity. This conviction was inscribed in the Australian Constitution of

121 1900, in which the colonies were unified by the "blessing of Almighty God" and the "sovereignty of the United Kingdom". The new federal parliament met in 1901 and almost immediately legislated that all immigrants pass an education test. For this the subject was required to "write out at dictation and sign in the presence of the officer a passage of fifty words in length in a European language directed by the officer".3 Those who failed were prohibited from entering the country and joined the ranks of "idiot or insane" persons, people with "contagious disease of a loathsome or dangerous character", criminals and prostitutes. In their international outlook, Australians played the role of a "willing, often over-anxious partner in the British imperial project" (McQueen 1971: 21). Domestically, they sought to erect policies that would transform their frontier into a "great white wall" (Price 1974).

Political and economic walls might successfully insulate the Australian type, but culturally speaking identity was far more ambivalent. The idea of a New Britannia was always shadowed by the counterpoint describing the antipodean anxiety of living on the fringe of European civilization. This framed the type in ironic terms, which the creative writer could not help but recognize. Thus, when Marcus Clarke turned to the Coming Man, he concluded after his description of the type that it would be a "stupendous climax" he would fortunately not live to see. For him the type was an aberration of Enlightenment harmony, and could only be imagined through the language of parody and caricature. It is also possible to see this ironic projection as being influenced by what Manning Clark later termed “Botany Bay disease”: a tacit pleasure that drove the colonist to mock his fellow-countrymen, a desire to take those more successful "down from their seat" (Clark 1973: 154). Clark attributed the disease to what he termed "the unlovely fruits of colonialism", by which he meant the melancholy mix of convict brutality, frontier violence and cultural cringe.

Whether dressed as crude joke or noble vision, the possibility of Australian culture was always going to be a fragile proposition. The nation could not escape the stain of antipodal inversion. Inversion relates not simply to the geo-political margin, but

3 Immigration Restriction, No. 17 of 1901.

122 the proximity of Asia, and by the 1880s this region was beginning to be a truly visceral presence. Chinese immigration to the gold fields in the 1850s had brought the white colonists into contact with a very different people who actively competed for mineral reserves. The colonists eventually responded emphatically for an absolute monopoly over the land that culminated in drastic immigration restrictions. By the last decades of the century the "mad Chinaman" had been replaced by the Japanese, and awakening fear of them would intensify with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, in which for the first time a European nation was defeated, and decisively so, by a non-European nation.

The geo-political awakening of Asia highlighted nagging questions about the Eurocentric narrative of progress. The old Linnaean idea of a Chain of Being assumed species were fixed and unchangeable. But with the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, and notions such as "the survival of the fittest" – coined by Herbert Spencer – the idea of ruthless competition for survival among species in which only the strongest would survive became ascendant in the form of Social Darwinism. As members of the Anglo-Saxon race, Australians were supportive of British imperialism; they were bound to the metropolitan centre by what Keith Hancock would memorably describe years later as the "crimson thread of kinship" (Hancock 1961). But the New Country lay far from the Old Country, and its short history only deepened the awareness of the race's isolation and vulnerability. Henry Lawson described the colonies as the "Outpost of the White".

If the idea of culture in the Antipodes was fragile, could the racial purity of the Australian type be maintained when surrounded by racial inferiors? The invasion of the land by the British had been accomplished with relative ease, but it was paradoxically the memory of such ease "that kept alive the fear of a further invasion in the minds of Australians" (McQueen 1971: 56). Prior to Federation, policies had led to segregation of non-European peoples: Melanesians put into plantation barracks, Chinese confined to ghettoes, Aborigines to fringe camps. Federation saw the implementation of the White Australia Policy: "Kanaka" labour in Queensland was expelled, naturalization and property rights to non-Europeans denied – a situation that would remain completely intact

123 until 1958. The desire for economic liberty and a free, equal society indissolubly merged with the prevention of miscegenation.

Racial purity forbade the idea of intermarriage between Europeans and non- Europeans. Charles Pearson had written in his influential book, National Life and Character, published in 1893, about the potential decline of the Anglo-Saxon race through miscegenation. Australia's first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, quoted Pearson at length when he observed immutable differences between Chinese and Englishmen. Advertisements and cartoons from around the turn of the century illustrate the correlation between a comfortable sense of place and racial ideology. Homes were not considered Australian unless they were "white homes”: furnished by goods built by European labour. One typical advertisement from a 1912 paper called The Sunrise includes the epigraph: "It is not a question of policy merely, but of deep-rooted principle, one upon which they very foundation of our nationality rests" (Alomes & Jones 1991: 139). A key metaphor of the white nation in the Antipodes, the house was inevitably a fragile space. Thus the most typical image was that of a solitary and innocent white woman fighting off the Chinese mob intent upon invading her home.4 The image equally prevails in the cartoons and illustrations of the Bulletin and the Boomerang. Generically, the images signify high and low culture at work; spatially, the message remains one of emphatic exclusion. Alongside this emerged the genre of "invasion literature": fiction which dramatized the invasion of a defenceless land by cunning Asians. The genre includes memorable contributions by the visionary socialist, William Lane. All in all these images and stories of invading Chinese and Japanese described the hatred and mistrust of ethnic difference that had become the "overwhelming White Australian attitude" (Rolfe 1979: 144).

Historians of white Australia, such as David Walker and Sean Brawley, have demonstrated that, even at its most virulent, Australian racism could not help but draw attention to the fragility of the national Imaginary. But while noting the psychic anxiety of the white nation, they observe events largely by reflecting Australia's changing

4 For a poetic gloss on this image see Lawson’s "How the Land was Won" and the stanza describing "The white girl-wife in the hut alone" (Lawson 1967: 362).

124 position within the world of international politics, which influenced the way business, political and academic entities gradually promoted ties between Australia and the Pacific region.5 In this context, literature and the arts are symptomatic of diplomatic relations played out on the stage of History. This assumption is also conveyed by surveys that simply see the 1890s as replete with Oriental stereotypes which, in Alison Broinowski's view, "generalise fears of Asians and yellow men" (Broinowski 1992: 11). Doubtless this is true, but by ending with such a statement, does not criticism itself perpetuate an outlook that is closed to paradox, blind to practices that lie outside the enclosure of racism and imperialism? While the discourse of White Australia is problematic, I suggest that its view of the Orient signifies the projection of Narcissus rather than a symbolic one we experience as authentic.

Literature is ideally suited to disclosing a more nuanced and ambivalent representation, one in which the presence of Echo can also be more convincingly traced. Even when conforming to the ideology of the white nation, literature can also disclose other dramas and, by extension, other histories. We should take seriously the proposition that the literature describing a white place was, by implication, also describing a coloured space, and this implied a proximity to cultural difference, a contact zone where peoples geographically and historically separated met and established relations. It is worth pondering that the boundary separating them might also have functioned more ambiguously to disclose a different drama that, while inextricable from the terror of racial exclusion, dramatized that zone where history revealed something other than racialist attitudes.

I want to turn to a short story that serves as a kind of parable for understanding the relation between place and the 1890s. The story is a recognised classic: "A Golden Shanty" by Edward Dyson, one of the most prolific and important contributors to the Bulletin. The story has long been considered to be one of the finest accounts of the goldfield culture. From the time of its first publication, the story has carried an iconic

5 For example, in Anxious Nation, Walker concludes by devoting an entire chapter to the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPA), a body that, like the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA) sought to inform the public about the need to promote Australian-Asian relations.

125 authority; for example, J.F. Archibald used the title of the Bulletin's first anthology.6 The story itself describes an encounter between Chinese and white settlers on a now abandoned goldfield outside of Ballarat. The cover of A Golden Shanty is revealing; it features an illustration by William Macleod showing in typical fashion the marauding "heathen" at the door of a white family’s home. The image is an absolutely stock image of the time and genre promoted by the magazine; so too the story. Together they affirm the outlook indicative of the Bulletin: "a conscious racism framed within the nationalist assumptions of white Australia" (McLean 1998: 70).

The story depicts the efforts of Irishman, Michael Doyle, to preserve his shoddy hotel (the Shamrock) from the marauding presence of a local Chinese population. Unknown to Doyle, the Chinese people have discovered gold in the hotel’s brick walls and want to take over the hotel. Doyle is no hero; his ethnicity may something to do with this - its association with clannishness carries over the stigma of the abject that colonial Australia saw the Irish carrying (Dixon: 1984: 165). It also reflects something of the humour displayed by the Bulletin when it ridiculed the notion of civilisation in the Antipodes. Yet however diminished his humanity, Doyle is iconic of the white settler’s inherent right to the land. He represents the colonial smallholder, a subject crudely motivated by greed. Thus he becomes intent upon retaining possession of the property only when he realizes its material value. At the story’s beginning this is far from the case for it is precisely the absence of wealth that characterizes the shanty and its immediate surroundings:

About ten years ago, not a day’s tramp from Ballarat, set well back from a dusty track nowhere in particular and had no destination worth mentioning, stood the Shamrock Hotel (Dyson 1963: 1).

From the outset a strongly inverted set of values is suggested in the description of the landscape. Free-floating and ungrounded, devoid of the symbols responsible for taking the colony towards prosperity, the shanty lies "nowhere in particular".

6 It was published in 1890 as the third volume of ‘The Bulletin Series’. The volume also contained the first prose publication by Henry Lawson.

126

The shanty, existing nowhere in particular, represents a space devoid of cultural value. In this sense Dyson is anticipating a characteristic of invasion literature, which ascribed to the "Empty North" a similar quality and hence vulnerability to invasion by the Japanese or Chinese (Walker 1999: chapter 9, passim). However, the attitude towards ‘nowhere’ also reveals something basic about the ideology of progress in the equation of cultural value. That Dyson ridicules the shanty’s location stems from its unhomely qualities. It signifies what Denis Hollier has termed in his study of Georges Bataille a "nonplace", that is, the philosophical equivalent of formlessness. Bataille identified formlessness as the residual other of the European middle classes. Form, be it architectural, linguistic or generic, constitutes the bedrock of progress. The nonplace is anti-architectural, a "dwelling that lacks an address" (Hollier 1974: xxi). However, it is where the drama occurs in Dyson’s tale. In the ironic absence of gold, at the margins of the colony’s burgeoning national identity, a community of formless qualities does exist. Accordingly, the shanty is described the following way:

It was a low, rambling, disjointed structure, and bore strong evidence of having been designed by an amateur artist in a moment of vinous frenzy. It reached out in several well-defined angles, and had lean-to building stuck on here and there; numerous outhouses were dropped about it promiscuously; its walls were propped up in places with logs… (Ibid).

If considered a topography that might intimate the possibility represented by place, what does the rambling structure of the shanty signify? On one level it discloses a terrain where boundaries are inherently malleable: the "walls propped up" for example, the way the house "reached out in several well-defined angles". There is a promiscuous quality about Dyson’s description: "rambling and disjointed", "numerous outhouses". And there is everywhere the strong suggestion of impermanence and transition. Everything suggests openings and, by association, illicit connections that emerge as a result of such openings.

At this moment the narrative shifts its focus to disclose the occupants sharing the space:

127 The only other dwellings within sight of the Shamrock were a cluster of frail, ramshackle huts, compiled of slabs, scraps of matting, zinc, and gunny-bag. These were the habitations of a colony of squalid, gibbering Chinese fossickers…(2).

The discourse here is that of the Bulletin's white Australian nationalism. So, the Chinese are seen in terms of squalor and are heard in terms of gibbering. But the space is also that of a contact zone and as such reveals a place where a kind of phenomenal exchange occurs. Dyson may have indulged in racist fantasies, but the Antipodes also fascinated him. The "gibbering" of the Chinese offers an obvious analogue of the "chummering" that sends the isolated bush-wife mad in "The Conquering Bush" (see chapter 3). Both examples show that Dyson was responding to the antipodean grotesque – to live here meant living in a country of unhomely associations.

However, there is something more in the proliferation of a foreign sound as we observed by responding to the noise made by the playing of an absurdly dislocated piano in the wilds of Australia. It is easy to skip over this, but it remains undeniable that racial segregation has for a moment been transformed into a contact zone by a more elemental form of contact in the guise of ostensibly unintelligible noise. The Polish anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, believed this kind of noise described a mode of communication that was basic to human societies. He called it "phatic communion", a non-informative language that created a suitable atmosphere for contact. Its most familiar form relates to such exchanges as talk about the weather and even here what really matters is the need to make contact or show friendliness.

Language tends to be thought of in strictly architectural terms. A word, phrase or clause can be understood as bricks, and the finished text the building. Furthermore, elements of speech traditionally belong to what Roman Jakobson described as "the inventory of denotative devices". But as he demonstrated, language is also "emotive" and so contains non-linguistic elements. One of the functions of language relates to what Jakobson called "contact", which he described as a "physical channel and psychological connection between addresser and addressee" (Jakobson 1988: 35). For Jakobson, contact is the equivalent of the phatic – both serve to start and sustain communication. This is the

128 only function of language that humans share with birds, and it is also the first verbal function acquired by infants. It demonstrates that "communication" occurs before "being able to send or receive informative information (37).

Babble, or chatter, might in denotative terms signify noise, but as a mode of contact, it describes a way of coping with loneliness by binding people from disparate groups together. At the very least it marks a territory where presence is being transmitted. Of course, whether the transmission is received is quite another matter. Herman Melville's epic novel about Ahab's "monomaniacal" search for the white whale is, on another level, about loneliness and fellowship in an environment of overt ethnic diversity. When Ishmael and Queequeg befriend one another, their exchange occurs at a place where radically distinct cultures meet. What brings them together? Among other things, it is not difficult to detect the phatic function. Ishmael approaches the "pagan" by making "some friendly signs and hints" and shortly after both men begin "jabbering the best we could" about the sights of the town in which they have both found themselves (Melville 1988: 52-3). Of course, there is much more to this episode than I have indicated, but my point is that in the initial stages of any cross-cultural history, a common ground cannot be made without reference to such elemental modes of interaction.

This is also the territory that binds the two parties in Dyson's tale, but rather than hear such sounds as a prelude to sociability, Doyle understands them to denote an alien, hostile race. Indeed Doyle translates the gibbering of the Mongol camp as sounds that reveal a plot to take over the property for the gold hidden in the Shamrock’s bricks. The story thus takes a different direction, one very much closer to the scenario of invasion literature where conspiracy runs rampant. Clearly metaphoric, the bricks represent the hidden wealth of the country (like the "inland sea") and the white colonist’s intrinsic right to claiming it. The story unfolds with a kind of grim predictability. Doyle discovers the gold, realizes he has been duped and then successfully seizes the gold for himself. Later he is shown to be a man of some public standing. As Landlord Doyle, he ends by residing in Ballarat. He now embodies the national archetype: he transcends his own migrant beginnings, plunders the country’s wealth and rises to social prominence. The story

129 becomes an allegory of the colony’s journey towards nationhood: from its tarnished criminal foundations, the colonist taps into the land’s riches and so redeems his conspicuously unheroic beginnings.

"A Golden Shanty" expresses the desire that sees nationalist discourse firmly enclosed within Anglo-Celtic norms. However, enclosure was never going to be straightforward as different peoples and cultures sought to articulate their own claims to the country. The ostensible drama of "A Golden Shanty" has little to do with the gibbering of the Chinese – their presence, while promiscuous, is noise. And so like the Aborigines before them, the Chinese are never described in any way that challenges the colonial stereotype: the "heathen", the "Mongol". The endgame endorses the humour of the Bulletin, and does not contribute to a society grounded differently to the outlook of the white nation.

It is worth pointing out that Dyson's story describes a more obvious history of contact, which can be traced through the text's use of "english". The Chinese communicate with Doyle through a lingua franca and so exchange with him, whose own language similarly deviates from metropolitan English. The idiolect developed by the Chinese necessarily overlapped with the colonist’s appropriation of the Queen’s English. How else could communication have been possible in the British colony? It displays a language that crudely deviates from Received Pronunciation - another symptom of the Antipodean grotesque. Yet it is known that on the part of the colonist that Chinese english was useful only in so far that it enabled the colonist to communicate to the Chinese their standing as "no good blackfellows".7 In short, cross-cultural and spatial language can play no role in the making of the white nation. Both non-informative (phatic) and informative (english) modes of communication are anathema. That the emerging nation was doubly incarcerating in its attitudes to cultural difference is a serious charge in its comprehensiveness, yet the issue was always recognised as profoundly serious for those busily inventing the nation. There can be little question that

7 This statement follows the research made by Kathryn Cronin in her study of Chinese in colonial Queensland (Bergman & Lee 1988: 172).

130 the humour displayed by the Bulletin and the Boomerang also expressed the belief that at stake was nothing less than control of the land, a control that, as we have seen, was as much bound up with the cultural as it was with the physical. In its treatment of the Chinese migrant, the colonist recapitulates the same hostility towards the other as with the landscape, the Aborigines, and the women who dared to transgress the boundary of the domestic house. In this sense Dyson's drama reveals just how deeply hostile the nation was in its perception of cultural difference.

Doyle moves to Ballarat, the hotel is demolished, the gold extracted and "not a vestige left to mark the spot where once the Shamrock flourished". The story resolves its tensions through a consciously selective commemoration of the road towards nationhood. However, while such nostalgia might initially imply the optimism of the bush Arcadia, it would be more accurate to see the story's aftermath as much more about the unlovely fruits of colonialism. In this sense Dyson was closer to Baynton and Lawson. In describing the melancholy history behind Arcadia's making, he acknowledged how Narcissus cannot truly escape the figure of Echo, whose ghostly presence tells of the white nation’s failure to listen differently.

(Mis)Reading the Country: Such is Life “A Golden Shanty” demonstrates the grotesque humour of the 1890s. I want to conclude this chapter by addressing a far richer and more multilayered account of the period: Joseph Furphy’s classic Such is Life, published in 1903, a novel now generally considered as the greatest single literary achievement of the period. Its encyclopedic character woven into a narrative of mythology-like proportions now elicits comparison with Ulysses and Moby Dick.8 If overlooked for some four decades after its initial publication, the novel became celebrated at the time when nationalist historians and cultural critics were engaging with a nationalist body of writing in Australia. Serle described Lawson and Furphy as writers who "wrote of the people, for the people, and from the people" (Serle 1973: 68). Their importance - Vance Palmer being one of the more notable proponents - related to the way the local dimension of Australian life was

8 Don Anderson has described the novel this way - see Sydney Morning Herald, May 17, 1997.

131 seen to be given a sophisticated literary form that elevated the local into the universal norms of Western culture.

If Such is Life remains one of the most fascinating examples of nationalist attempts to distinguish Australia from Britain, the novel’s self-styled "bush etiquette" remains indebted to the British construct of Arcadia. It describes with loving and nuanced detail the sense of a homely landscape, but alongside this emerges a more disquieting account of the colonist’s tentative hold on the environment he sought to possess both physically and rhetorically. The relationship between Narcissus and Echo is consistently maintained in the distinction between Tom Collins and the author Joseph Furphy. The eccentric nationalism and almost radical obtuseness of Tom Collins is constantly subverted and ridiculed by the ironic way in which the author allows the plot to unfold. The stature and scope of this novel is embodied in the way in which it uncovers, more than any other text of the 1890s, the ambivalent ground on which the nationalist myth is constructed. Tom’s narcissism is focused in his inability to see the real narrative behind the events he recounts, a narrative whose complexity, alienation and ambivalence regularly contests the joyful nationalism of his picaresque and sometimes pompous character. The most telling example of alienation remains with that most iconic of figures, Mary O’Halloran. I want to examine this drama less to recapitulate its relation to the genre of the "lost child" (Pierce 1997) than to extend the argument that the colonist’s dislocation as containing something vitally necessary for understanding place. However crucial (and tragic) Mary’s death appears in the making of the legend, its greater importance lies in the way it discloses where the ground was not given. I suggest that it is this ground, rather than the one the lost child traverses, that is of real significance because it is here that one is alerted in the most manifold sense of the ongoing failure of the colonist to hold dialogue with his surroundings.

a) The Bush Etiquette Let’s start with Furphy’s narrator and pseudonym, Tom Collins, the man who assumes an unusually heightened responsibility for the densely woven narrative comprising his narrative. In the opening pages, Tom summarizes his work:

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... I purpose taking certain entries from my diary, and amplifying these to the minutest detail of occurrence or conversation. This will afford to the observant reader a fair picture of Life, as that engaging problem has presented itself to me (Collins 1991: 2).

Tom then informs the reader of the need to distinguish between the flowery rhetoric belonging to the romance novel and his own form of chronicling which attempts to document a less artificial slice of colonial life. This distinction is affirmed by the seemingly random selection of the diary entries:

Twenty-two consecutive editions of Lett’s Pocket Diary, with one week in each opening, lie on the table before me; all filled up, and in a decent state of preservation. I think I shall undertake the annotation of a week’s record. A man might, if he were of a fearful heart, stagger in this attempt; but I shut my eyes, and take up one of the little volumes. It proves to be the edition of 1883. Again I shut my eyes while I open the book at random. It is the week beginning with Sunday, the 9th of September (2).

Some readings have taken the seemingly random structure of the novel at face value (Croft 1991: 115). However, Tom’s narration is highly ordered; the acutely self-reflexive narrator conveys this. The chronicle may not adhere to a seamless linear flow, but at the very least it conveys a moral sense of order Tom later glosses as ‘determinism’.9 In addition, Tom’s excessively ornate prose partly reveals his awareness of the multilayered texture of his environment. Even the random selection of diary entries is not random but reflects a deliberate strategy responsive to the complexity of existence. Tom seeks to make order out of chaos while remaining faithful to himself.

Random selection introduces the reader to the deceptive complexity of the rural world. More specifically, Tom stands out from the other bullockies. He is an unusually erudite autodidact who is acutely conscious of and faithful to the aesthetic of pastoral nomadism. This can be illustrated by looking at an episode that serves to typify his identification with the relation binding the Australian bush and the picturesque. The

9 The principle in which every event is a result of the way the universe has been originally constructed - Within this world, the individual can only make choices and modify determined consequences.

133 episode revolves around Tom’s decision to spend the night at Rory O’Halloran’s hut. He has already encountered Rory during his own wanderings and is sent ahead to the home. On the property’s outskirts, Tom encounters a swagman who appears to be looking for a place to rest. Tom comments: “My first impulse was to hail him with a friendly greeting, but a scruple of punctilio made me pause” (68). What has made Tom pause and reconsider his position? He answers with typically homespun erudition:

To everything there is a time and season; and the tactical moment for weary approach to a dwelling is just when fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, and all the air a solemn stillness holds. So, after a moment’s hesitation, my instinctive sense of bush etiquette caused me to turn stealthily away (Ibid).

The reference to Ecclesiastes typifies Tom’s erudition, but it also represents the structuring of events in Such is Life - a pattern of consequences rather than consecutive actions emanating from Collins’ nomadism. Note how the description frames the environment with the sun-kissed Arcadia of Heidelberg impressionism. The harmony of the scene typifies the way Furphy transposes the ruggedness of the bush into Paradise through a careful balance of local experience and European intellectual-philosophical traditions. Significantly, this image reigns supreme; even the moment’s hesitation cannot disturb its hold over things.

For all its sophistication, Such is Life celebrates what John Le Gay Brereton described as "the irresistible charm of nomadic idleness" (Astbury 1985: 86). It does so through a series of beautifully narrated scenes when the bullockies gather together. Following one lively exchange among the bullockies in the open air during the opening chapter, Tom reflects on the cultural diversity of the Australian landscape. This environment, he argues, has for too long been ignored by the "Australian novelist" who "finds no inconsistency in placing the bookish student, or the city dandy, many degrees above the bushman, or the digger" (32). Tom does not wish to ignore these factors - his focus on the bush is no simple strategic inversion - but he desires to clear a space so that "the axeman’s muscle" receives more attention than a "gentlemanly deport". In other words, the bush demands a different response from its occupants than the English

134 countryside.10

Having discussed the national landscape, I want now to return to Tom’s decision to let the swagman rest:

The clearing of Rory’s horse-paddock was visible here and there through gaps in the scrub; even the hut was in sight from my own point of view; the sun was still a couple of hours above the horizon; and the repose of the wilga shade was more to be desired than the activity of the wood-heap (80).

The swagman lies on the outskirts of the O’Halloran property. The property is for Tom a beacon signalling comfort and stasis, a punctuation mark in the meandering of the white nomad. This balance reinforces the equilibrium central to the bush etiquette. Indeed the plenitude of the bush life is conveyed by the apparent comfort Tom discerns in the swagman. Faced with the honest labour of chopping wood in order to earn his accommodation, the swagman lies down simply because he has open to him the option to rest. The absence of anxiety refers back to Tom’s opening famous statement "Unemployed at last!". Both utterances identify the balance between honest physical labour and relaxation. As if to confirm this, Tom describes the swagman as a citizen of the bush: a "tall, athletic man, apparently with a billy and water-bag beside him, and nothing more to wish for". At this point, Tom gives the classic description of Mary O’Halloran:

To describe her from after-knowledge - she was a very creature of the phenomena which had environed her own dawning intelligence. She was a child from the wilderness, a dryad among her kindred trees... (73).

If Dyson’s take on the Irish settler follows the conventions of the grotesque, Furphy’s treatment is far more malleable. He makes Rory lovable, addresses the wife as a shrew and, above all, projects Mary as a hybrid of all that is worshipped by the nationalist projection, that is, a product of idealized settler indigenous influences. She is Currency all

10 And we might add: the rigid chauvinism discernible in, say, Rudyard Kipling’s reading of Australian national identity with its emphasis on the ‘Coming Man’ whose ability to ‘shoot and ride’ will be at the service of England (White 1981: 78-83)

135 the way, her identity unblemished. She inherits all that is considered ideal ("To her it was a new world, and she saw that it was good").

Mary embodies the national Imaginary of the 1890s, the desired face of Narcissus on display to the world. This might initially seem to contradict the masculinist conception of the period. However, although white women were privileged on the frontier, it was only in the sense that they were seen as protectors of the civilized home. Mary’s kinship lies less with the home than with the bush. As a "child from the wilderness" she is the cradle of the bush race, an indigenous subject or white Aborigine. Her wildness harmonizes with the picturesque, thus the sense of proportion in her Arcadia. Things such as trees are already in the world; what matters is how Mary’s movement conveys her being at home with these entities. The harmonic proportions of this arrangement are made even more symbolically explicit through the child’s inseparable relationship with her father:

The long-descended poetry of her nature made the bush vocal with pure gladness of life; endowed each tree with sympathy, respondent to her own fellowship.... She knew the dwelling-place of every loved companion; and, by necessity, she had her own names for them all - since her explorations were carried out on Rory’s shoulders, or on his saddle and technicalities never troubled him (73-74).

Seated upon her father’s shoulders, the nomenclature of the bush manifests itself with transparent clarity. We have here an example of what Wittgenstein would call "ostensive" word function, where the meaning of an object derives from its customary designation. In accordance with the picturesque, the bush etiquette involves an eloquent rhetorical organization of colonial space. Names are untroubled in this world and, therefore, so too travel. The eloquence embodied in Mary’s naming of the bush belongs to the cultural taming of the land.

Yet Mary remains, even to Tom, the lost child: a symbol of vulnerability, a subject who in her very identification with the landscape reveals her alienation from it. Crucial to Furphy’s narrative of the homely is a disquieting counterpoint that disturbs the white settler’s kinship with the country. This partly relates to the author’s ironic treatment

136 of the pastoral romance genre as articulated in Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859). The novel is scorned by Tom and is described as "exceedingly trashy and misleading". But, as noted, Tom is also an advocate of its conventions, albeit in a form more suited to the quotidian detail of the Australian bush. Thus he too is open to scorn and this occurs when, following his night with the O’Hallorans, Tom discovers the dead swagman the next morning - he lies in exactly the same position as when last seen by the narrator. Having reached the end of his physical strength after a period of wandering, the swagman was unable to see the property. Tom explains this in a typically verbose manner, yet he is clearly disturbed by the event’s implausibility when using the theme of determinism to gloss the relation between choice and fate. Erudition and metaphysical schemes cannot prevent an undermining of the bush etiquette. After all, the denouement shows that Tom has not so much witnessed the swagman at home in the bush as he has projected upon a man’s dying the aesthetic of a bush Arcadia, which suddenly appears in conflict with reality.

Reality refers to an environment where meaning and value remain incomplete. It is also where the unhomeliness of the Antipodes returns to undermine the colonist's attempts to make a home. Such Is Life resonates with this tension. Its conscious mythologizing of Arcadia cannot entirely repress the sense of exile and estrangement from the land. The novel’s sorties into determinism, its poetic musings on the picturesque, these are attempts to make connections that will confirm the transplanted European order. They are also, therefore, attempts to make the landscape speak in a particular way. Although they aspire to coexist with the natural world, and although somewhat provisional and open-ended, such attempts have in a very basic way failed to accord with the settler’s residually conditional existence. It is this understanding that now begins to loom in Tom’s consciousness. The threatening quality of the bush now feels imminent.

The pastoral Arcadia so characteristic of the bush etiquette has now been subtly altered. Tom reflects upon this at the boundary where the swagman has been found:

137 And it seemed so strange to hear the low voices of Rory and Mary close by; to see through occasional spaces in the scrub the clear expanse of the horsepaddock, with even a glimpse of the house, all homely and peaceful in the silent sunshine. But such is life and such is death (80).

The chiaroscuro effect of the scene beautifully conveys how the writing of the 1890s found ways to domesticate the impenetrable scrub earlier writers found so destabilizing. But if the oscillating effect between light and dark, life and death provides a perfect expression for the novel’s transposition of the local into the universal, it also suggests how the settler’s enclosure of the country has now been ruptured. The obtuseness of Tom Collins is subverted and ridiculed by the ironic way the ambivalent ground echoes against Tom’s nationalist myth. It is this tension that I now want to examine more fully.

b) In the Back Country At its simplest the lost child revealed widespread colonial fascination with the exposure of children to the danger of the bush (Astbury 1985, Pierce 1997). By the 1890s the topic was well established, sometimes fantasized, often drawn from real-life episodes. It is said that Furphy helped in the search for children lost around Daylesford in 1867 (Astbury 1985: 171). Clearly, his treatment of the topic cannot be divorced from his intimate awareness of the genre.

Mary’s ability to endow "each tree with sympathy, respondent to her own fellowship" formulates in the most idealized sense the kinship with the environment sought by the writing of the 1890s. The Arcadian dimension of this relation is, as we have noted, itself part of the deliberate mythologizing of the landscape. It shows the extent to which the nationalist invention of the nation was narcissistic, indeed Narcissus-like. However, Narcissus is never really alone. The swagman’s death cracks the narcissistic projection that is the bush etiquette and transforms the O’Halloran fence into a disquieting border zone. This tension also influences the lost child narrative. If, prior to the swagman’s death, Mary resembles the outlook of Narcissus, she too must now acknowledge the presence of Echo. Thus she confesses the fear she now holds for her father’s safety:

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‘A love you Tammas, becos ye spake aisy till my Daddy. But O!’ - and the little, brown fingers wreather themselves together in the distress of her soul - ‘A don’t want to go to school, an’ lave my Daddy his lone! An’ A don’t want till see that picther iv a horse; an’ A ‘on’t lave me Daddy.’ (81).

Croft notes that although a child, Mary’s fear for her father is far from irrational: "she knows he [Rory] is not a skilled bushman because he is blind to the subtleties of his environment. She knows... that the bush is dangerous for those who cannot see" (Croft 1991: 142). He is absolutely correct, but does not develop this insight apart from musing briefly on the slippery signification of the bush, an interpretation that basically glosses Furphy’s main theme: that the world is not perfect and that mischance is more powerful than simple faith. I would submit that Mary’s anxiety also recirculates the persistent anxiety of colonial writing. Thus, it not only exposes the fallacy of Arcadia but alludes to how nationalist imagery has repressed a more basic relation to the environment.

The complex of Narcissus can be deepened by turning to the concept of the "mirror phase" developed by the French psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan. The mirror phase denotes the subject’s initial emergence into the world, a period lasting about six months. From this the subject is conceived through its relation to the "symbolic". The poles of the "imaginary" (linked to the mirror phase) and the symbolic constitute the set of representations and identifications, which stabilize and modify the ego (Lacan 1977; Smith 1989: 20). The unconscious locates the interstitial terrain between the two poles (rather than beyond them), continually subverting plenitude on the margins of the ego. Paul Smith demonstrates how Lacan does away with transcendental notions of the unconscious; the field can be understood topographically, that is, as a language, one that locates the boundary of the world (Smith 1989: 70-72).

If this formulates the subject in a manner similar to the way colonial writing has been formulated in this thesis, then the theoretical subject clearly occupies an ambivalent ground. How does Lacan then formulate instability? He does so by acknowledging the primordial fear of it. Freud’s famous observation of a little boy’s game with a cotton and

139 reel expresses an elementary anxiety. Freud saw the child throwing away from him a wooden reel attached to a piece of string. When the reel disappeared from view, it was "gone" (fort); when the reel was recovered it became "here" (da). Freud argued that the game allowed the child to compensate for his mother’s absence by "staging the disappearance and return of objects within his reach" (Freud 1955: 13-15). But Freud was less interested in seeing the reel’s absence as a viable domain in itself; instead he focused on overcoming the alienating effects implied in the disappearance of the reel (such as sublimation). Lacan expounded on the divisive consequences created by absence, the "ever-open gap". The child watching his mother depart may or may not satisfactorily compensate for the absence, but he is able to create a new event in the wake of absence. For Lacan,

the game of the cotton-reel is the subject’s answer to what the mother’s absence has created on the frontier of his own domain - the edge of his cradle - namely, a ditch, around which one can only play at jumping (Lacan 1977: 62).

Lacan intuits that the cotton-reel and its thread form a creative rather than imitative event. In short, indeterminacy connotes how one should understand the subject’s being-in-the- world. He termed the space of indeterminacy the objet petit a, a kind of material stand-in for what emerges between the constituted subject and the unconscious. This space shows how the unitary conception of identity is volatile because of the way our everyday practices constitute a conditional dimension that always exceeds the boundaries of given models of identity and language. This dimension does not simply inhabit the theatrically conceived dramas of revisionist histories but also is inscribed in the mundane motion of our footsteps, our gesticulations. Fittingly, Lacan asserted that such topoi can never be completely notated by theory or literature for its existence is contiguous with practice (Lacan 1977: 238-239).

With its interest in the give-and-take of cross-cultural negotiation, post-colonial theory also acknowledges the historical dimension of fort/da, recognizing in it the "symbolic process of political negotiation" (Bhabha 1994). It also enables us to translate into spatial terms the dialogical processes endlessly exceeding the enclosure of Australian

140 nationalism. If the importance of the lost child lies partly in the way it returns an audience to the problematic foundation of national identity, it inherently destabilizes the Legend. This is because it discloses a transformational and strangely everyday continuum whose presence to the nation resembles that of Echo to Narcissus.

Re-placing Australian literature is akin to finding a trace that lingers and speaks to us from the margins of representation. These landscapes linger within the anti-architecture of colonial stories. They can be discerned in the noise made by an old piano in the living- room of a rural home. They also can be found where bullockies gather and discuss daily events and larger political issues currently framing the emerging nation. Although Such Is Life remains consistently hostile to those people who are not native-born, it does reveal the way Australian society was undergoing struggle and division.

This position is best demonstrated in the egalitarianism displayed when the bullockies meet and air their individual and collective views. Consider one of the more familiar episodes, the debate between two bullockies: the rough and ready Mosey (Furphy’s musclebound axeman personified) and Willoughby, the urbane counterpart who upholds the values of the English gentleman. The exchange clearly responds to the issues framing the Legend. The debate centres on the explorers, Burke and Wills, whose inland expedition to the northern coast was much debated at the time. Willoughby celebrates Burke’s gentlemanly fortitude; Mosey dismisses it, arguing that any colonial man familiar with the hazards of the outback could have successfully led such an expedition. Mosey’s critique voices dissatisfaction with colonial history:

An’ you’ll see in Melb’n there, a statue of him, made o’ cast steel, or concrete or somethin’, standin’ as bold as brass in the middle o’ the street! My word! An’ all the thousands o’ pore beggars that’s died o’ thirst an’ hardship in the back country - all o’ then a dash sight better men nor Burke knowed how to be - where’s they’re statues? (27).

If an official explorer like Burke can be made a national hero then History needs to be

141 rewritten. This is an important component of Mosey’s anger. However, it does not necessarily imply the brashness of a colonial. Mosey wants a language capable of translating settler experience - the myriad and personal stories of those who practice frontier culture and its reading the country. In this sense his critique is not necessarily chauvinistic or parochial; it highlights the fatal flaw of the dominant tradition by pointing its audience to a horizon bound to the bush yet also beyond what is known. The sentiment resembles Paterson’s "Clancy of the Overflow", the poem about the white nomad who has "gone to Queensland droving" and "we don’t know where he are". Reading the country involves moving beyond the rhetoric supporting the heroic depiction of Burke. The point is not lost on bullocky, Steve Thompson, (who will narrate the circumstances surrounding Mary’s death) when he elaborates Mosey’s views in his own bush idiolect:

I wish you could talk to some fellows I know - Barefooted Bob, for instance. Now there’s a man that was never known to say a thing that he wasn’t sure of; and he’s been all over the country that Burke was over, and heard all that is to be known of the expedition. And Bob’s a man that goes with his eyes open. I wish you could talk to him. Lots of information in the back country that never gets down here into civilisation (28).

Bob is seen to process information differently because he can transgress the cultural boundary without any real suggestion of the ontological anxiety described by a Barcroft Boake. His nomadism appeals to the bullockies and remains appealing today because it intimates a desire to enter into dialogue with the other, a willingness to listen seriously to the environmental feedback urban-dwellers dismiss as noise.

While Steve Thompson alludes to practices that accompany and ultimately diverge from the bush etiquette, his role in the novel also performs a structural function. Some one hundred and fifty pages later, he will narrate the story of Mary’s death, an event that again brings to the dramatic fore Barefoot Bob. Briefly, the story describes Mary’s search for her father. Fearing for his safety in the untamed wilderness of the bush, Mary goes in search; covering more than twenty miles on foot, the child eventually collapses and dies from exhaustion despite the desperate efforts from both white and black trackers.

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As stated earlier, the theme of the lost child was popular right throughout the century. It was given its first significant literary expression in The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn. During the 1880s and 1890s it attained, like so much else about the bush, mythological proportions. Kingsley and the illustrator, Nicholas Chevalier, were the first to grasp its potent symbolism, one that communicated the contrast between the innocence of white children and the (deceptive) harshness of the country. In Kingsley’s novel the discovered dead child "one hand still grasping the flowers he had gathered on his last happy play-day" (Kingsley 1991: 287). The lost child also found expression in real-life incidents. In 1864 three children of the Duff family went missing for nine days; they were eventually found thanks to the assistance of black trackers. The rescue inspired artists like Chevalier, William Strutt and S.T. Gill. Better known for his heroic portraits of Burke, as well as the epic "Black Thursday" canvas, Strutt restored the Aborigine to the foreground of Australian art in his pencil drawing, The Trackers of Glenferry: Tracking (1876). This is a work that interestingly carries no hint of the grotesque; rather, the composition is neo-classical in form and temperament, idealizing its subject in a manner typical of Strutt. Gill’s drawing was published in the Australian Sketchbook; it retains a middle ground perspective of settlers discovering the children (the natives remain in the distance); the settler, still on horseback, clasps his hands and gazes heavenward. Both artists celebrate the theme of Christian redemption, by which I mean the restoring to the bosom of the emergent white nation the innocent beings that carry with them the future.

The Duff incident symbolized the redemptory aspect of nationalist mythology. The Daylesford incident, which occurred some three years later, conveyed a very different meaning. Here three young boys disappeared and their dismembered bodies were not found until two months later. This was the incident that Marcus Clarke took as his inspiration for the story, "Pretty Dick"(Clarke 1983: 11-22). The anticipation of Furphy’s treatment is striking. Pretty Dick resembles Mary, a child born and raised in the bush, his "skin white as milk", his manliness expressed through his knowledge of farming life (milking, chopping wood). At ease with his neighbours, "everyone loved Pretty

143 Dick"; even the family cockatoo’s refrain is "Pretty Dick! Pretty Dick!" When Pretty Dick gets lost in the bush, the surface beauty of his world horribly changes. Now the bush becomes monotonous, an "awesome scrub, silent and impenetrable, which swallowed up its victims noiselessly". When Pretty Dick drinks from a pool his initial refreshment is subverted by the water’s sudden "thick and slimy" taste. When he cries out for his mother only the cacophony of the now alien bush answers him "with the hideous croaking of the frogs in the marshes and the crackling of the branches under his footsteps". Clarke is brilliantly dramatizing his thesis of the melancholy bush in this story, one that runs counter to Arcadia. The bush now not only haunts the delusory projections of Narcissus; it devours the colonist. More than any other writer of his time, Clarke understood the unhomely ground upon which white settlers sought to repress in the building of national monuments. The story ends with a horribly antipodean twist: "God had taken him home". The prospective national icon finds its home only in death.

Furphy may have been similarly inspired by the Daylesford incident, but the period that separated him from the tragedy perhaps contributed to his different reading. To approach Furphy’s treatment of the lost child it is necessary, as I have already shown, to acknowledge a profoundly constitutive aspect to the anxieties of settler projections. However unhomely its character, the topography of the bush exceeds the associations of trauma and death to forge a significance contiguous with radically different routes. While Clarke inhabits melancholy, Furphy pushes beyond the genre in order to consider how the colonist’s affiliation with the country constitutes a viable history. Consider the way Barefoot Bob is described by Thompson:

Give him his due, he’s a great tracker. I compare tracking to reading a letter written in a good business hand. You mustn’t look at what’s under your eye; you must see a lot at once, and keep a general grasp of what’s on ahead, besides spotting each track you pass.... And you must no more confine yourself to actual tracks than you would expect to in each letter correctly formed. You must just lift the general meaning as you go (189).

This significantly differs from Clarke’s malevolent conception of the bush. It affirms the conditional yet historical negotiation earlier identified in the notion of fort/da. As stated

144 earlier, in the mundane gesture of our footsteps, or our gesticulating body, the performatively grounded subject signals a way of holding communion with the country. Thus conventional oppositions as dramatized by the frontier no longer make sense because in the back country "you must no more confine yourself to actual tracks than you would expect to in each letter correctly formed". Bob does not conform strictly to the bush legend simply because he responds to the phenomenal nature of the land. His subjectivity might be initially best identified in conjunction with the national type, but it cannot be confined to it. His relation to the environment invokes nothing of the colonist’s isolation.

Yet despite his reputation, Bob is the first to state during the search: “'God help us now, if we don’t get a blackfellow quick'... pointing to the ground before him" (190). This awareness can be formulated in three ways, all-important yet distinct. Firstly, Furphy is simply sticking to the data in front of him, drawing from such reportage as the Duff children and recreating the event. Secondly, this recreation transposes the event into its symbolic form: the fragility of the young white Australia embodied by Mary O’Halloran - a fragility that at least carries with it the incipient recognition of the Aboriginal claim to the country. Croft describes Mary’s death: "the tragedy… is that few white people can read its meaning. The only one who can is the one-eyed lubra; the rest are impotent in the face of the challenge of the landscape, or, worse, in the case of George Murdoch and Mary, destroyed by it" (Croft 1991: 142). Although important, this reading tends to diminish a constitutive dimension doubling the ostensible drama, one that carries different consequences to it symbolizing only the deceptiveness of the picturesque, the wandering plight of the colonist and the bad faith undermining his relation to landscape. Furphy’s portrait of the native tracker is telling; the tracker is the antithesis of Strutt’s classical portrait and less demeaning for it - after all, Strutt recasts the noble savage figure in order to highlight the glory he attributes to the discovery of the children. Furphy is indebted to Clarke; he describes the Aborigine in a manner made familiar by the grotesque: the tracker is a woman, old, ostensibly uncommunicative, partially blind, in short "the very unpick of civilization" (186). The abject parodies the image of the noble savage, and yet it is exactly here that white and black cultures

145 coincide. If in Western high cultural symbolism the one-eyed figure has come to mean the deficiency of reason,11 the woman’s one-eye encodes the back country in positive terms.

However, it is the third aspect of the drama that is most fascinating for it is here that the bicultural dimension of the search becomes strikingly apparent. This is a relationship of convergence, one that concerns not simply the restoration of Arcadia but the expression of a living cross-cultural dialectic in the back country. Thompson describes it as it is now played out before him:

Very rarely - hardly ever - we could see what signs the lubra was following; but she was all right. Uncivilised, even for an old lubra. Nobody could yabber with her but Bob; and he kept close to her all the time (191).

Here even the scenario of Echo haunting Narcissus momentarily dissolves. There is no (self)enclosure, only the kind of dialogue we usually find disavowed in colonialist discourse. It is significant that the scene resembles the performative space of migrant communication:

... an anti-architectural zone where metaphorically they... leap from rock to rock, improvising temporary points of reference (sounds and signs) in order to communicate, to make progress (Carter 1992b: 135).

Between two cultures emerges some kind of hesitant yet meaningful dialogue, a momentary balance in which participants choreograph a dance of improvised gesture and sound. We can add that the scene of a one-eyed indigenous woman carefully followed by a barefooted white man expresses the irony which residually attends the notion of culture in the Antipodes. And finally it is also possible to recognize in their gesticulations and "uncivilized yabber" a language of contact that has been grounded in the communication of phatic communion. Between two cultures there momentarily lies a different

11 I am thinking of the classic modern parable, Lord of the Flies (1954) by the British novelist, William Golding. The novel tells of a group of ‘civilised’ schoolboys stranded on an island and their (re)lapse into savagery. During the course of events, the character, Piggy, becomes partially blinded. Piggy symbolizes the voice of scientific reason, one that on the island is poignantly exposed as deficient in its blindness to the essential violence that renders Man irrational.

146 performance, a shadow of possibility flickering beyond both the templates of Arcadia and the melancholy bush.

To summarize, two stories are played out in the lost child drama. The first story foregrounds the threatening alien landscape, the subterranean presence of the Aborigines, the fragility of white notions of innocence, purity and the hopes for a better, more prosperous future in the New World. The second story doubles and subverts the main drama; it proposes a positive account of displacement, locating at the interstices of nationalism a hesitant yet undeniable living historical space. These foreign, yet entirely everyday sounds and gestures occur on the colonial boundary. They fracture the homogenizing tropes and ideology of nationalist discourse to affirm the event of post- colonial hybridity. The result is a place that disturbs the asymmetry between colonizer and colonized.

It seems worthwhile making a final comparison with Marcus Clarke. In "Pretty Dick" the child sees in the distance Mr Gaunt, the overseer. In desperation, the child cooees but the man, thinking he has heard the "scream of a parrot" rides off condemning Pretty Dick to slow death. The irony of misread signs and the failure of white indigenous signs like cooee were lost neither on Clarke nor Furphy. Mary, utterly focused on finding her father, Rory, fails to respond to the signals made by the searchers. In their search for Mary, the men cry "cooee" into the hostile landscape hoping for a reply from the lost girl as well as hoping, of course, to diminish the melancholy distance separating security from vulnerability. Within earshot of the cries, Mary goes her own way: she cries out, "Daddee". This cry does not acknowledge the men - she seems deaf to their presence; it is a cry hurtled into the impenetrable scrub, its trajectory desires only one thing: the finding of the (Imaginary) father. Two searches, two cries: "cooee" and "daddee" wander across an alien country. These cries, however, are less in conflict as they are one and the same in that both articulate the colonist’s desire for home in a world where they do not belong.

147

In the aftermath of Thompson’s narration, Tom asks:

“Would you suppose, Steve, that the finding of George Murdoch’s body was a necessary incitement among the causes that led to the little girl’s getting lost?” (198).

No direct answer is given. We are informed that the men have fallen asleep. But the connection Tom has made here is clearly an important one. It affirms how Mary’s search was a response to the dread she felt for her father’s safety. Still, Tom is content to interpret the event within his doctrine of determinism - faced with choices, we make and follow through decisions and must also live with the consequences; the failure to save the swagman has led to this event, "but such is life". And with the camp at rest one might add that this is the stuff dreams are made of. Tom’s narcissism remains evident in his inability to see the real narrative behind the events he recounts, a narrative whose complexity, alienation and ambivalence regularly contests the joyful nationalism of his picaresque and sometimes pompous character. But the dream no longer goes undisturbed: Narcissus reveals the presence of Echo, Arcadia has revealed at its very centre the convergence of reality and nightmare. At the very moment of its cultural invention, the white nation has collapsed.

However critical readings are now of the 1890s, it is important not to re-enclose its otherness. As I have demonstrated, the homogenizing dimensions of the writing - its racism, its masculinism, its Arcadian aspiration - carry over an anti-architectural dimension, one that needs to be re-placed on the post-colonial map of Australian literature. The discourses of nation and nationalism continue to resonate ambiguously because they have encoded the nation in ways that have repressed and violently excluded myriad peoples and elongated the territorializing movement of Western progressivism. Place too has been repressed and with good reason: as we have witnessed, to talk about this ground means interrogating the ideology of race, patriarchy, individual property and civilized value. Still, for all this it remains ‘there’, a zone where meaning remains in the realm of possibility rather than failure, a space that makes a mockery of the nationalist

148 map, encouraging us to listen instead to the uncivilized yabber that marks contact with an ambivalent ground.

149 Chapter 5 Re-Placing Nation I

The appearance of the country horrified those accustomed to England's green and pleasant land, or the green of the Emerald Isle, or the majestic highlands of Scotland. It was burnt up, barren and brown, the sky, like God, was out of hearing. Manning Clark A History of Australia, Vol 4

A few years before Federation, Henry Lawson wrote an interesting short-story entitled "We Called Him 'Ally' For Short". The story is about a convict ghost who haunts the property of the narrator and his loyal mate, a dog named Alligator-Desolation ("we called him ‘Ally’ for short"). From the moment he makes his presence felt, the ghost proves to be a nuisance. The story ends, however, with Ally successfully chasing the convict-ghost away for good. The story tells a straightforward allegory about the nation's chasing away the ghosts of its shameful convict origins. Lawson could see how a succession of new generations after the era of transportation had resulted in an outlook no longer fearful of punishment. It was, on the face of it, a time when the lingering melancholic rattle of chains were being emphatically exorcised by loyal sentries of a new society marked by prosperity and equality for all white Australians.

Lawson’s story typifies the nationalistic genre of fiction encouraged by the Bulletin under J. F. Archibald: extremely short, crude and radically democratic in temperament. The story also typifies how the genre turned to, among others, the stereotype of the convict to dramatize its ideas – in this case, a kind of cultural exorcism. If the drama is crude, the idea is not, for as we have seen in chapter 4, the writing of the 1890s turned to the idea of Arcadia to transform antipodean experience into a model of settlement which on one level projected settler place as a spiritual belonging. In this sense, Lawson offers a variation on a theme, one belonging to a wide textual canvas: the conscious larrikinism of The Bulletin, the picturesque mysticism of the Heidelberg, and the meditative musings of ‘Tom Roberts’. As I also argued in the previous chapter, the canvas needs to be understood as an ideological one as well in that the creation of a mythical national landscape meant strengthening boundaries at the expense of the

150 plenitude of place. The chasing away of the convict-ghost serves to remind us of how the newly formed nation chased away an unwanted history – hence its narcissism. By removing a living, albeit ambiguous, presence from the national stage, Lawson and his generation advocated a mode of exchange that reinforced the solidity of settler boundaries at the expense of a more fluid and inclusive form of settlement.

Nationalist narratives of place were clearly always going to be a fragile proposition, however powerful their claim. The melancholy of the Antipodes is just one powerfully recurring mood that haunted the master narrative of confident progress forward. For example, in the patriotic poem "Our Land" Lawson could describe the nation as a "new Jerusalem". But his more characteristic outlook was a melancholy that simply cannot be understood in purely personal terms. He advised talented young writers to "stow away, swim, and seek London, Yankeeland, or Timbuctoo" rather than remain condemned by the cultural mediocrity of Australia (Lawson in Alomes and Jones 1991: 99). More profoundly, fictional pieces such as “We Called Him ‘Ally’ For Short” and “The Drover’s Wife" celebrate the dog as a loyal mate, and so underline the white settler's ontological fragility. These stories invoke the residual experience of displacement haunting those colonising the land. Like his contemporary, Joseph Furphy, Lawson could not help but reveal the presence of Echo haunting Narcissus when dramatizing the contemporary landscape and its peoples.

Positioned as they are at the beginning of the new century, I would suggest that at the very moment of its cultural invention these writers reveal the basic tension which will mark Australian literature throughout the next century. Both Lawson and Furphy show in celebrating place, the simultaneous awareness of a residual, inescapable displacement. In turn, such awareness suggested how nationalism failed in its creative endeavour to represent Australian place because its particular drama could not accommodate the peculiar yet everyday dialectical tension which we have seen persistently haunt the narrative of European settlement. For the writers and artists that followed the generation of the 1890s, a basic recognition emerged that it was necessary to occupy a different ground to the one mapped by nationalism and the broader web of colonialist discourse,

151 one that returned to the spatial landscape of earlier colonial culture straddling the space between insider and outsider, history and fantasy, centre and margin, belonging and exile.

The process by which this realignment or “re-placing” of place is mapped energizes the argument and narrative developed in the following chapters. Although the chronology of re-placing can be traced across the century, it would be misleading to suggest it either singular or uniform. Rather, I propose that important commonalities can be traced across the field of writing that emerged in the decades following Federation and woven into a coherent pattern. In chapter 5, the pattern I outline is drawn from the period from Federation to that of the mid-century. It is a period in which Australian modernity would experience the quickening contraction of space and time: the federating of the colonies, the securing of reasonable labour wages and leisure, the industrialization of mass travel and transportation. It is also a period of contrasting and sometimes complementary artistic trends: modernism, the exchange between anthropology and renewed creative interest in Aboriginal culture, renewed modes of nationalism, poetic narratives dramatizing the stories of colonial exploration. Any discussion of Australian place cannot be separated from these movements and social trends. What a re-placing does privilege, however, is a creative tension which is, in a fundamental sense, dissonant to the discourses of colonialist power, cultural or otherwise. This power is always characterized by the way its discourses seek to enclose and regulate place. In the final analysis “re-placing the nation” reinterprets the complex processes whereby the provisionality of Australian place decisively transform the territorializing claims made by the discourses of cultural imperialism.

As we will see, this is above all to do with the interaction between experience, the modality of writing, and colonialist discourse. Throughout the century, this would morph in new ways for different writers and artists. But it would consistently foreground a kind of creative disordering, a privileging of modality that returns history and experience to a position which is inextricable from its poetic creators. In this chapter, I outline three broad areas where such interrogation is significantly demonstrated. The first area explores the frailty characterizing nationalist projections of an indigenous aesthetic. Such

152 projections fail to consider the absence of a proper locus when thinking about identity and cultural value in Australia. However, throughout the period some writers and artists were exploring their environment and colonialist history in ways that conceptualized experience less as a ground of spiritual belonging than as a ground which locates a history in-between. In the second part, a different kind of national projection is examined, that of Australian modernism. This field of expression raised two clearly significant and interrelated questions by the mid-century. One concerns the cultural value of landscape and place in Australia; the second forced people to consider the nation’s position in the broader international climate. I argue that the negotiation with modernism also identifies a third trajectory expressing a different set of interests to traditional suppositions of belonging. Rather than reinvent the colonialist quest for redemption, it involved a return to an antipodean terrain where the subject was condemned to wander anxiously. Finally, the chapter considers the poetic challenge to history as expressed by a number of individual poets influenced by their encounters with modernism. For them, poetry offered the ideal correlative for entering into dialogue with the nation’s narrative foundations: the stories of European exploration, discovery and conquest. But dialogue implied a basic challenge to History, an unavoidable truth given the inherently different outlooks each mode of writing signifies.

The Spirit of Place in an Ambivalent Land Federation saw the realization of Wentworth's New Britannia. Australia was made a nation by the Act of the British parliament. Queen Victoria signed the Bill. The Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, was British and signed an Oath of Allegiance to the Queen. The national anthem was England's. Commonwealth law could be invalidated by British parliament. The nation's defence was in the hands of the British Navy. More binding than any of these constitutional matters was the bond of race. When the idea of federating of the colonies became a major topic of public debate in the 1880s, the Premier of NSW, Henry Parkes, used the threat of Chinese invasion to stir up popular support. Although state referendums failed to mobilize widespread enthusiasm for federation – in no colony did more than 47% of qualified voters vote yes – war in the form of Britain's declaration of war on the Boer Republics did. War was a means for Australians to

153 demonstrate their racial solidarity with the British Empire. The Constitution enshrined White Australia. Immigration restrictions were brutal both in their effectiveness and comprehensiveness, so much so that they drew criticism from British and American media, as well as papers in Japan and India. Australia had emerged as not simply a Working Man's Paradise, it was deemed in racial terms 98% British – arguably more ‘British’ than Britain itself.

By describing the nation this way racial, religious and linguistic ambiguities are obviously very much being set aside. For example, Australians who were Roman Catholic and from a predominantly Irish working-class background formed approximately one-quarter of the nation’s population, and it is not difficult to imagine a large proportion of these people would have been antagonistic to the principle of empire. Nevertheless, when speaking of Federation in Australia, it is paramount to stress how in both legislation and popular rhetoric what mattered was a new-found sense of cultural, economic and political unity. As Richard White puts it, homogeneity rather than diversity mattered, a position “constantly remarked in the speeches and editorials which clogged the occasion” (White 1981: 111-112).

The nation is energized by unifying themes. Its institutions seek to incorporate differences while celebrating an evolutionary movement (Papastergiadis 1998: 39). One important expression of homogeneity in Australian identity occurs in the direct aftermath of Federation: loyalty to empire. The idea of diversity found expression through the channeling of identity in a way which defined Australia through its difference from yet dependence on Britain. White observes just how “defensive” major acts of legislation were by the early parliaments, as if the need to protect industry and culture demanded policies that were highly exclusionist and homogenizing. If this fostered a cultural identity less to do with an entity in its own right than something to be defended against unwanted otherness, it is important to acknowledge its relation to trends that influenced the inventing of the nation. For one thing, protectionist legislation helped ensure increasingly high living standards of workers (the advent of the shorter working day and week, the introduction of old-age and invalid pensions). This has its roots in the

154 standardizing of time during the nineteenth century, which as Graeme Davison has suggested, is itself based in the era of convict labour and which saw the principle of time as “the fundamental measure of labour (Davison in White 05: 56). Standardization of time was accompanied by the contraction of the environment by industrialized technology, thus enabling faster, cheaper and reliable forms of transportation (ship, train).

These social transformations had important consequences for the environment. By the time of Federation, Australia could readily embrace both the principle and practice of holiday-making. ‘Getting away’ was no longer the preserve of the affluent; leisure was increasingly within reach of the ordinary citizen. It was not only a shorter working-week that enabled leisure-time to be appreciated but the spaces outside the city and its industrialized character. The Heidelberg artists had foreshadowed the importance of the rural retreat for city-dwelling audiences and artists. By the turn-of-the-century, Australians generally participated in the city-bush divide to promote contemporary ideals of health and leisure. The mass development of national parks, of health spas, of tourism, and the beginnings of beach-culture all emerge in the early decades of the new century.1

It is within the milieu combining ideals of race, health, youthfulness and leisure that the strongest ideals of Australian identity were articulated in the decades following Federation. In the area of art and literature, the landscape art of the Heidelberg provided the most advanced symbol of an authentic sense of national identity – something already touched on in the previous chapter when I referred to their art as the most fulfilling realization of the Arcadian ideal in the Antipodes. The Heidelberg and its legacy provide the clearest direction for how an identifiably national tradition would be developed, that is to say, the landscape would symbolize national tradition. It would express less a mode of indeterminate poetic exploration as reiterate an aesthetic of settler belonging. The influential essay “The Foundations of Culture in Australia”, written by P. R. Stephensen between 1935-36, argued that landscape artists from the Heidelberg onwards were far more representative than the “larrikin” writing of the Bulletin because landscape artists “have had to face Australia, examine it carefully, and create, or recreate, the land as art”

1 See Richard White On Holidays, chapter 3, passim

155 (Stephensen 1986: 72). And Stephensen goes on to state that through a combining of intuition, necessity and the oil medium’s natural proclivity to meditative and quiet technique, the landscape artist will be most likely to find and reveal to his audience the “Spirit of the Place” (72-73).

Symbiosis between landscape art and the “spirit of the place” need not strictly follow the language of the impressionists. Sydney Long turned to Art Nouveau and Symbolism to converse with an equally self-conscious sense of national spiritualism as suggested in his titles, The Spirit of the Plains (1897) and By Tranquil Waters (1894). In these paintings, Long fused local landscape with Greek myth to portray what one critic describes as "White Aborigines": Europeans who had gone native (Mendelssohn 1988: 131). Although the term is used uncritically, it is perspicacious for The Spirit of the Plains depicts the landscape populated with elegant brolgas gracefully dancing and following a naked, pagan youth. Long did employ Aboriginal figures at times to convey similar scenarios, notably in his 1904 painting, The Music Lesson. However, white or black, the drama is European in the way it consistently appropriates Greek mythology – in this case the Arcadian-dweller, Pan – to represent the national tradition. The essence of Pan lies in his laziness, simplicity and his seductiveness (Graves 1955: 101). And Long, self-consciously nationalist in his calls for a truly Australian art, meditates upon these attributes in the way he gently dramatizes them to decorate his landscapes.

A more overtly masculinised and youthful landscape could also complement the landscape artists’ expression of the spirit of place. For example, the beginnings of the "digger" legend lay in the idea of the bush. The war historian, C. E. W. Bean had already described the digger as a national type in 1907 when he saw the bushman's fight with nature as shaping "the Australian as fine a fighting man exists" (Bean in White 1981: 126). Youth was also an obvious correlative of racial purity and beauty. The Bulletin artist, Norman Lindsay, produced some memorable wartime propaganda to induce enlistment in the war against Germany. After the war, Lindsay would have a magnetic influence on the poets Hugh McCrae and the young Kenneth Slessor, as well as his son, Jack Lindsay. In 1923, these men combined their talents in the form of a short-lived

156 magazine called Vision. Jack Lindsay would summarize his father's credo when he wrote in the Forward that "We prefer to find Youth by responding to the image of beauty, to vitality of emotion" (Lindsay in Dutton 1991: 59).

It was in landscape painting, however, that the national spirit of place was most successfully captured, an opinion, as noted, advanced by Stephensen, and later, quite differently, by Bernard Smith. The success of such art was acknowledged by the highest forms of state authority. Arthur Streeton was knighted during the 1920s, acknowledged as a triumphant symbol of national identity. If this can be dismissed as simply an example of increasing art orthodoxy, newer modes of expression such as the work of Hans Heysen complemented rather than subverted the genre. It was Heysen who focused on the gum- tree by fusing Claudean picturesesque arcadianism with Barbizon naturalism. His art and personality extolled the physical virtues of rural life. Paintings such as Red Gold (1913) were in subject-matter nostalgic essays contrasting the simplicities of Australian pastoral life with increasingly industrialized city existence. In Heysen, both Stephensen and Smith discern an advance on Streeton’s impressionism. For the former, however, it is the work of Elioth Gruner that stands as the “greatest Australian landscape painter” (Stephensen 1986: 76). Gruner’s art was the product of a sophisticated nationalism in that he had traveled to Europe and absorbed from European traditions only what “he needed”. In doing so, Gruner demonstrated the “indigenous Australian culture is possible, the Spirit of the Place will find its own expression” (77).

If for writers such as Stephensen the subtleties of Australian landscape art represented national identity, the literature associated with Archibald’s Bulletin had a more dubious influence, specifically its crude larrikinism and sketch prose form. This meant that an enormously gifted writer such as Lawson was prohibited from developing his materials into an “indigenous” writing which matched the Heidelberg and its successors (Stephensen 1986: 66-67). Whether one agrees with this judgement or not, I think that the distinction itself perpetuates an unfortunate division which prevents us from seeing uniformity rather than conflict in the relation between Lawson and national landscape art. The story typifying the Bulletin’s style and temperament, "We Called Him

157 'Ally' For Short", clearly advocates a mode of exchange that reinforced white Australian boundaries at the expense of a tainted and unwanted history. Rather than explore its contact with otherness, the expulsion of the ghost represents the broader way narratives of place in Australia have disguised the much more complex way alterity noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of Australian identity.

So too the landscape art extolled by Stephensen. Its ‘indigenous’ qualities are culturally the product of a kind of purified transplantation. Stephensen’s metaphor is a classic one: he describes the model of influence as an “imported English culture” akin to “the English plant fertilized by phosphates from all countries (24). It is only by stimulating these phosphates that an indigenous plant will grow. At the same time, Stephensen states that if this plant is to develop indigenously, it “begins not from Aborigines, who have been suppressed and exterminated” (12). Australians are Antipodean to the extent we are different from Britain, and yet in this model Antipodeans are granted no opportunity to enter into contact with a highly marginal, yet nonetheless historically present Aboriginal culture. Stephensen also had little interest in the kind of ghosts which brought dissonance to the ideal of national identity. But what landscape artists, Bulletin story-tellers and nationalist critics did have interest in was the need to project the spirit of place in a way which deepened the racial or ethnic grounding of identity. In doing so, such a discourse inadvertently deepened the psychic isolation of the colonist.

In the work of all three examples, we see Narcissus striving to be at home, yet condemned to be alone because he has gained purity at the exclusion of difference. But like the conspicuous absence that informed the mood conveyed by the Heidelberg's plains, the post-Heidelberg landscape revealed yet again that Narcissus is never really alone. The making of a national place could not easily escape the ambiguous presence of Echo. This can be found in contemporary perceptions which influenced Stephensen but differed in the way they foregrounded the experiences of isolation and estrangement. Perhaps the most celebrated example is D. H. Lawrence, who visited the country and

158 wrote a novel, Kangaroo (1923) inspired by his short stay. Rex Ingamells wrote in 1938 that however much Lawrence responded to an indigenous sense of place (“spirit of the place”), he was always an outsider. This is made quite powerfully in the early part of the novel when the main character, Somers, reflects on his relationship to the bush:

The vast, uninhabited land… so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting – the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he could not penetrate its secret. He couldn’t get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for? (Lawrence 1976: 18-19)

It is difficult not to be forcefully reminded of the melancholy described by Marcus Clarke more than fifty years earlier. In the post-Federation landscape, occupants of the landscape, however fleeting, deepened the dialogue with what Clarke described as "the beauty of loneliness". They also found themselves just as puzzled by the "hieroglyphs of haggard gumtrees” Clarke had surmised would confront a creative writer more attuned to the condition of exile rather than Arcadian belonging (see chapter 2: 73).

Lawrence’s alienation brings to surface the sense of psychic dread of the unheimlich, thereby also exposing the frailty of nationalist projections characterizing contemporary formulations of the spirit of place. This embedded frailty of the national ideal is ignored in the work of the landscape artists by critics such as Stephensen. The need to advocate an indigenous aesthetic overrides the demonstrably residual experience of cultural ambivalence in Australia. It is precisely the absence of this ambivalence, an ambivalence grounded in the encounter with Echo, which subverts the claims of nationalist autochthony. Lawrence’s dislocation returns us to an understanding of place as a zone characterized by the absence of a proper locus. Rather than see the ground in terms of spiritual belonging, the modern reinscription of unheimlich returns us to a history between insider and outsider, history and fantasy, centre and margin, belonging and exile.

Lawrence’s alienation was outside a progressive and unified national culture as

159 narrowly formulated by early twentieth century literary nationalism, but it too was more preoccupied about the concept of a white indigenous culture. Indeed in the same passage, Lawrence describes the tree-trunks bathed by a full moon “like naked pale aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage” (19). As with Stephensen, the Aboriginal presence is invoked as a ghostly entity rather than a living presence. In both cases what matters is the manner of settlement, the strategy to be deployed in encountering and inhabiting the land. At the risk of oversimplification, where the Australian advocates the national picturesque, the Englishman reasserts the grotesque. One asserts progress, the other dislocation and estrangement. Neither dwells on the original impact on Aboriginal society nor its place within contemporary formulations of identity.

This strategy of cultural marginalization of Aboriginal society is indicative of the ‘ethnocidal’ story of Australian society.2 We have encountered this with reference to the Heidelberg’s painterly effacement of Aborigines in the closing decades of the nineteenth century (see chapter 4). Their art affirmed the ideology of progress, of the subordination of land to European dominance. It was a time when the national ideology informing the image of the Common Man was used to dispel the notion of a living Aboriginal culture which could rival in complexity modern European society. This was founded on nineteenth century European outlooks. Phrenology was one authoritative discourse linked to the Chain of Being that irrefutably demonstrated the hierarchy of types - Aborigines belonging to the lowest level of this model. Social Darwinism later reinforced the hierarchy as it enabled Aborigines to be perceived as a dying race doomed to extinction (Reynolds 1974: 44-53).

Histories of Australia implicitly legitimated these outlooks when narrating the expansion of European society and the subsequent decline of Aboriginal society. Significantly, it is this very marginalization, this belief in impending extinction which energizes the rapid emergence of modern anthropology during the second half of the nineteenth century. The availability of worlds radically ‘other’ to civilized Europe was

2 Pierre Clastres defined ethnocide as “the systematic destruction of ways of living and thinking of people different from those who lead this venture of destruction” (Clastres 1994: 44).

160 embodied in the objects collected by museums, all of which served to provide empirical data for the story of evolution from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilisation’. In 1899 Baldwin Spencer would write of “Australian native tribes” that many “would die out without our gaining knowledge of the details of their organization, or of their sacred customs and beliefs” (Batty et al 2005: xii). Spencer and his colleague, Frank Gillen, greatly extended the work of amateur anthropology transforming it into a theoretical and practical discipline. Photography was one of the principal means they employed to document the detail of Australian Aboriginal tribal life, particularly its complex ritualistic dimension.

The work of Spencer and Gillen in Australia greatly influenced Emile Durkheim, who a decade later would formulate his sociology of religion. If the idea of community as comprised of anxious, scattered individuals had been theorized during the nineteenth century by Marx in his critique of capitalism, the French anthropologist, and founder of sociology, turned to tribal and traditional societies in order examine how people were held together in moral communities. For Durkheim, the essential difference between these societies and modern societies was that in the former the individual was absorbed into the community, while in the latter the individual emerged as a result of society having done away with community. Durkheim travelled to Australia and embarked on exhaustive studies of Aboriginal people. These studies influenced his landmark The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published in 1915. In this book the author argued that Aboriginal religion is intimately related with an idea of the scared and it is this relationship which unites people and their institutions "into one single moral community" (Durkheim in Gelder and Jacobs 1998: 4).

Although these writers were motivated by the common belief in decline of Aboriginal society, they also revealed its living complexity and richness. During the 1920s and 1930s, this sympathetic and far more nuanced viewpoint would be extended in the work of A. P. Elkin, R. and C. Berndt and C. P. Mountford. The establishment of the ethnographic journal Oceania in 1930 consolidated the increasing interest in Aboriginal art and customs and provided a forum for important scholars. This discovery suggests something of the "ironic dialectic" Mudrooroo Narogin sees born out of "the opposition

161 between primitivism and civilisation" (Mudrooroo in Herbert 1990: xiii). The ironic dialectic, we will recall, tells how the nation is at almost every turn haunted by its abject other. In the anthropological genre, the enclosure of the land only highlighted white society’s boundary, bringing into focus an otherness deemed invisible by the nationalist optic.

For all this it is probably fair to surmise that while anthropologists finally recognised the complex ritualistic aspects of Aboriginal art, they did not recognize the art for its poetic dimension (Catalano 1985: 40-1). However, by the 1920s artists were beginning to respond to Aboriginal culture in ways that exceeded the purely ritualistic. The seniority inherent in Aboriginal culture was recognised by Margaret Preston, who would integrate indigenous motifs in the development of national design over the coming decades. By the mid-century, Aboriginal artifacts began influencing how urban artists conceptualized the relation between abstractionism and bodily expression. For example, Tony Tuckson saw an important formal and conceptual link between his own art and indigenous art. Tuckson could well have been describing his own "gestural" canvasses when he commented that the "action of painting" was far more important to the Aborigines than the actual finished product (Symes and Lingard 1988: 203). In literature, the growing authority of Aboriginal culture was demonstrated in 1940 with the founding of the literary journal Meanjin, which adopted an Aboriginal name to promote the emergence of a national (albeit non-Aboriginal) literature. The name is a composite taken from the Aboriginal words migan (spike) and chagun (earth, place, land); "meanjin" (mianjin) refers to the site where Brisbane was first established, and where the journal was founded.

The displacement of Aboriginal peoples throughout European colonization, however, permeated, subverted and ultimately transformed any straightforward appropriation (decorative, aesthetic, formalist) by white artists and writers. What became apparent in the writing of the first decades of the century was the growing sense of the enormous injustice associated with indigenous society, even when conceived in imaginative, indeed romantic, terms. Kathryn Prichard’s novel, Coonardoo (1929),

162 explicitly frames its drama with the romantic promise of reconciliation between enclosure and common. The outback does not originally convey the desolation of Drysdale, but instead conveys "the setting for a pastoral idyll" (Indyk 1988: 357). Prichard uses this trope to explore the complex infrastructure of settler colonialism: Mrs Bessie’s tough yet maternal control over the property of Wytabilla, the brutal frontier masculinism of Sam Geary, confusions that plague Hugh. Interpenetrating these characters is the Aboriginal woman, Coonardoo, whose name ("the well in the shadow") symbolizes her function in the novel: the sensual repository of a projected communal prosperity. It is the rejection of Coonardoo that leads to the failure of Wytabilla. The tragic consequences of this narrative are crystallized when her pitiful death is made synonymous with the atrophied state of Arcadia. Significantly, there remains the sense that Coonardoo, even in death, belongs to the land. Her body merges back into the earth so as to convey profound spiritual affiliation. But no such redemption exists for the colonist, who at the end is conspicuously absent from the land: Mrs Bessie is dead, Hugh condemned to the shame of exile.

Prichard has been criticized for her primitivist symbolism, but she remains one of the first writers to look into the heart of white Australia's spiritual craving for reconciliation and emerge with the firm understanding that such craving is doomed to end in collective entropy. For future writers this might be deemed a horrible portent, but at the very least the monstrous reality of genocide now haunted some attempts to realign Australian literature towards the presence of Echo. Miles Franklin thus described Xavier Herbert's epic novel, Capricornia, as a conscious attempt to confront "the Aboriginal skeleton in the colonization closet" (Franklin 1956: 187). Ghosts had the effect of unsettling the comforting image of the possessed land and turning it into something grotesque and monstrous. And Herbert’s novel confronted it on a consciously epic level.

Capricornia was written and revised during the 1930s. It was partly intended as a passionate, sustained protest against the repressed history of Australian-Aboriginal relations, although Herbert shared the same mythologizing outlook as other figures of the period. Capricornia denotes the fictional geography of northern Australia, a frontier land

163 hardened by the sun-scorched elements and generations of contact between Chinese, Anglo-Celts and Aborigines. The novel describes the landscape in terms of racial hybridity: "a people of all the primary colours of humanity and of most of the tints obtainable by miscegenation" (Herbert 1992: 58). Given the cultural, political and economic history of white Australia, it was impossible for Herbert to dramatize miscegenation as something wholesome and noble. It was part of the brutal life on the frontier and so could be dismissed as an aberration to the ideal of purity so cherished by politicians and writers in the cities. For Herbert, the frontier also transformed the colonist’s craving for prosperity into a desire conspicuously shadowed by violence. In this region, enclosure of the land was dramatized so that it was transparently analogous with the possession of "black velvet", the native woman who, like the timeless and treacherous landscape, haunts frontiersmen such as Ned Krater in their quest for material prosperity.

This violent cross-cultural world richly inscribes an ironic dialectical history that tears at the fabric of Arcadia. To recognize this we need to turn to the novel's protagonist, the bastard Norman, whose phonetic name, "naw-nim" (no-name), speaks of abject associations signified by being in-between two cultures. Norman embodies the extremities wrought by frontier violence upon the Aborigines and their land, and yet his subjectivity is also universal in the way it articulates the irrepressible ambivalence of the border zone. He has been brought up within the ideology of assimilation, and so initially is ignorant of his Aboriginal identity – he behaves as a southern educated man with a Eurasian background. However, even as he dons the mask of an exotic national, the people of Capricornia recognize Norman as a dupe who remains unaware of his true origins. Norman’s name is also an aptronym for one perpetually condemned to the shameful margins of white society. As a child, he finds "a deserted house a delightful playground but an occupied house a place to be avoided like a reputed lair of debil- debils" (55). There are moments signalling respite and even genuine possibility. For example, when Norman discovers his Aboriginal identity he goes walkabout. In a genuinely funny scene that both refers back to Ralph Rashleigh and anticipates the laconic humour of Crocodile Dundee, Norman passes through the landscape at first

164 terrified by its alien sounds. Gradually, he merges into the land, his body moving in accordance with primordial rhythms: "eeyung-eyong-eyong-eeyah – voice of the spirit of Terra Australia – eeyah-eeyah-eeyah – and Norman, wrapt, with eyes on the Southern Cross, took the stick and beat upon a log" (293-294). The scene climaxes with his encountering a native "painted hideously", but whose grotesque appearance becomes transformed when he welcomes Norman "by saying mildly, 'Goodday' " (306). At such moments, the novel succeeds in subverting the genre of the grotesque and its traditional hold of the representation of the Aborigine. It demonstrates how hybridity subverts and transforms received, purified ideas of identity. However, if the moment is a revelation for Norman, it cannot be expressed within the polite norms of society – "D’you want people to regard you a nigger?" asks his incredulous and horrified stepfather, Oscar Shillingsworth, when told of the episode.

Norman’s alienation from community, family and place signifies tragedy within the narrative of Capricornia, but it also powerfully reveals the limitations of the spirit of place as formulated by nationalist discourse of the early to mid-twentieth century. Australia remains a conflicted space, oscillating anxiously between place and displacement, between Europe and Antipodal inversion, between civilizing fantasy and frontier brutality. Story-telling here inhabits an "ironic dialectic" born out of unresolved oppositions. As the nation approached the mid-century, it was becoming clear that any postulation of modern Australia was now at almost every turn haunted by its other.

Norman’s existence is paradigmatic of post-colonial ambivalence because it describes a way of seeing caught between possibility and failure. Herbert’s treatment of Aboriginal marginality signifies a significant advance on Prichard in that it postulates identity outside the romanticizing of indigenous alterity. Norman does not belong in a world that sees the Aborigine within the Darwinian-influenced values of assimilation; nor does he belong in a landscape dominated by the pastoral idea. But in his bastardized name (“naw-nim”) he challenges purity by embodying a doubled identity; like the convict, he represents a history of duality predicated on sameness and difference.

165 During the same decade the fictional Norman traversed the landscape, a parallel assertion of doubled identity emerged in central Australia: the Hermannsberg artist, Albert Namatjira. Namatjira’s work was profoundly isolated in his lifetime, as it was rarely included in surveys of Australian art; it was also excluded from traditional Aboriginal art. Although greatly admired in his own lifetime as a ‘State artist’, Namatjira's art was interpreted as imitative and mannered - the work of a primitive savant rather than a truly original talent. This is perhaps why as progressive an artist as Margaret Preston could completely ignore him - colonial mimicry did not rest easily with the modernist injunction to makes things new.3 Post-colonial readings have recently contested the assimilationist view of Namatjira. Their approach can be divided into two positions. The first approaches him as the artist who responded most decisively to T. G. H. Strehlow's belief that Aranda watercolours signified an ancestral connection to the land, which could be reworked in modern forms. The second position stresses Namatjira as a pragmatic individual whose appropriated medium "desacralises" totemic systems while advocating in its place a bicultural conception of the country. These positions have been analyzed at great length in the groundbreaking collection of essays entitled The Heritage of Namatjira (1992).

Whatever position one finally takes, it is crucial to recognize in Namatjira a man who responded to the turbulence permeating early to mid-century Australia. A town outside Alice Springs, Hermannsberg was founded as a Lutheran mission in the late nineteenth century that sympathized with the native Aranda people, yet inevitably sought to alienate them by the introduction of Christianity. By the 1930s the Australian interior was opened up further - in 1929, for example, the first railway reached Alice Springs. The arrival of tourism, anthropology and European-trained artists compounded the impact upon the community. To meet the changes a store was created; it encouraged local manufacturing of Aboriginal artifacts, something Namatjira took a keen interest in by willingly desacralising ceremonial motifs and emphasizing instead the decorative function of the objects. Namatjira was responding, in both creative and pragmatic terms,

3 This sentence could be challenged when thinking of Preston's own skill in the practice. A recent essay by Terry Smith demonstrates the parallel forms of mimicry between Preston and Namatjira. However, it is the socio-political gulf between the two to which I am primarily alluding here.

166 to the radical transformation Aboriginal society was undergoing. When the watercolourists, Rex Battarbee and John Gardner, exhibited to the community in 1934, Namatjira again discerned the signs of wider societal changes. By becoming a student of Battarbee, Namatjira acknowledged how economic autonomy coincided with a fundamental change in power relations. Like Strehlow, he understood how Aranda traditions must change in the face of a violent or benevolent colonization. In this sense, he consciously appropriated Western art in order to meet the changes confronting his people. Namatjira’s creative legacy has been analyzed by Ian Burn and Ann Stephen, who argue that he successfully displaced European perspective through an art that adopted Western representation without conforming to strictly mimetic arrangements of the Hermannsberg area (Burn and Stephen in Hardy et al 1992: 278). For them, Namatjira’s landscapes document a form of mimicry which ceaselessly ruptures the original and brings into play a third space richly expressing the ambivalence of colonialist discourse.

Namatjira's legacy will in the coming years perhaps offer the single most fascinating and poetic achievement of a postcolonial nation. His art provides an indispensable way of understanding a tapestry of creative relations: from Strehlow to the followers of Namatjira and, beyond them, the Papunya Tula movement, which emerged in the early 1970s. Obviously, it is sobering to remember that Namatjira’s later life and death are profoundly emblematic of the violent reality overshadowing a post-colonial (and any other) revisionist reading. Public success brought him many rewards, including citizenship in 1957, but it was not extended to his family or community. The laws of white Australia reinforced the gulf between white and black peoples, and almost certainly contributed to Namatjira's early death. His death thus reminds us that his watercolours remain as much a document of the wider failure of a bicultural history in Australia. If the Hermannsburg mission provided protection from indiscriminate killing of natives along the frontier during the nineteenth century, it also made clear that the Aborigine was faced with two scenarios: genocide or a more benevolent form of European domination.

Namatijira's can be seen as a highly complex strategic response to the latter. The

167 Hermannsburg artist and Australian citizen did not simply lie down before the advance of colonialism, nor did he passively reproduce its discourse. And we have seen, he offers an audience the opportunity to consider how his art negotiates between death and assimilation to reveal the full ambivalence of place and identity. Beginning with the shifting topography of incarceration and enclosure, Namatjira is a colonial subject contesting power by mimicking the language of oppression. In so doing, he inscribes a significant history of comparative lightness, occupying a line between white and black boundaries and shifting history away from the drama of white progress into something dialogical, a place of negotiation. This foregrounds what was earlier described as a "culture of coincidence" (see chapter 2: 84): peoples culturally separate are brought together by a set of grounded, common interests under the shadow of imperial history – partly diplomatic, partly performative. In a re-placing of nation, this act of negotiation demonstrates how by the mid-century, a new way of knowing had emerged, one where the decentring of history and language now defined national culture and where place marked a ground open to a continual process of reinterpretation.

Modernist Trajectories I have already suggested that it was within the milieu combining ideals of race, health, youthfulness and leisure that the strongest ideals of Australian identity were articulated in the decades following Federation. Historically, this is partly related to the cultivation of hedonism in the writing and art of the late nineteenth century, an outlook which reflected the French influence of bohemianism with its cultivated rejection of conventional values. Sylvia Lawson's The Archibald Paradox (1983) has examined this culture in the work and influence of the ardent Francophile, J. F. Archibald, editor of The Bulletin.

One of the most notable figures to both shape and emerge from this period is Norman Lindsay, an artist and novelist in his own right, but also perhaps the most single influential figure on a coterie of writers, artists and intellectuals in Australia during the first half of the twentieth century. Lindsay’s art complements Sydney Long in its subject- matter, but his fauns, satyrs and nude women invoked exuberant bacchanalia thus consistently eliciting public shock in his lifetime. His treatment of sex kept him in the

168 public spotlight, and he wrote in the 1920s that “sex is not only the basis of life, it is the reason for life” (Lindsay in Hetherington 1973: 141). Sexuality was part of a credo for Lindsay, which alongside youth, vitality and singularly uncompromising artistic talent, helped foster an aesthetic for the artist to transcend the mediocrity of mass culture and pursue a path which was life-affirming, not vulgar and despondent.

Although Lindsay can be dismissed as an extreme iconoclast, his position can be seen to represent an era when Australian bohemianism was firmly linked to a number of icons which affirmed the narcissism of the sun-kissed Arcadia invented during the late- nineteenth century. The bush with its pastoral ethos is profoundly important for Lindsay and it is not surprising that he commences his autobiography in a way which links the Australian pastoral with a typically personal affirmation of vitality:

Each era has its special risks in going about the earth, and I’m glad to think I took my share of them when horses were the major motive-power of transport as well as pleasure. There is some dignity in taking a toss from a horse, but none in getting smashed up in a motor car or aeroplane. Moreover, the horse links one with a tradition of human action going beyond the dawn of recorded history. Mechanized mankind must reorient itself… The word “horseplay” is in itself an image of gusto inspired by the horse and has gone out of life with it… (Lindsay 1970: 2).

One sees here an important example among many of the writer’s preoccupations, that is, vitality or “gusto” associated with a pre-industrial era. Lindsay hated the idea of a mechanized society, something greatly intensified by the First World War. He saw humanity’s innate savagery as increasing due to exposure to it.

If Lindsay’s position reveals a particularly extreme reactionary temperament shaping his energetic bohemianism – spreading to include his attitude towards art, the artist and the rise of mass culture – it also highlights the complexity of antipodean influence in Australian culture. In the early decades of the new century, the nation could stand as a bulwark against modern civilization: the violent materialism of mechanized Europe, the rise of popular culture. Australia offered itself as a bastion of pastoral innocence and racial purity. But rather than explore the spatiality inherent in antipodal

169 difference, figures such as Lindsay sought to enclose it, to tie down the difference of the frontier with a connected and unified account of the progress of civilisation across the continent. Such a construct was flawed by its own inherent irony. Far from being secure in its isolation, the nation was itself part of a narrative which saw its original founding as part of Europe’s, and more specifically Britain’s, attempt to facilitate trade with the East. The nation was correspondingly grounded in the era of European modernity, thus clock- time was pioneered in the penal colony (Davison 1993). The protection of Australian cultural purity in the guise of isolation, although a key feature of intellectual and political life, was always riddled with contradiction.

So too was Lindsay’s celebration of youth. When Lindsay formed Vision he was already forty-four, Hugh McCrae forty-seven. In the Social Darwinian spirit of being wholesome and white, Lindsay could only see old age as a symptom of degeneracy and something foreign to the nation: "Physical tiredness, jaded nerves and a complex superficiality are the stigmata of Modernism" wrote his son and follower, Jack. Not surprisingly then, Vision was fanatically anti-modernist. Norman described the new and foreign art as a "relapse into primitivism and moral imbecility" (Haese 1981: 9). Yet less than a decade after its inception, one of its own, Kenneth Slessor, would begin to write what is recognised as one of world literature's great modernist poems: "Five Bells", a poem in which a friend's death is intoned in a universe where "Time" is not "moved by little fidget wheels", but gives way to chaotic randomness where human life survives in "the memory of some bones/Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud" (Slessor 1994: 120-121).

Similar cracks in the face of Narcissus were also becoming evident in the official art world. By the 1920s, Arthur Streeton had been knighted and acknowledged as a triumphant symbol of national identity, but he too had lost his youth and was increasingly recognised for propagating a pastoralism suited to the art academies. Richard Haese identifies the initial stirring of Australian modernism during the 1920s as a result of a fundamental division between the conservative orthodoxy embodied in the Menzies- funded Australian Academy of Art and a younger "rebellious generation" "struggling to

170 come to terms with the modern world and its history" (Haese 1981: 6). Menzies, who took interest in disseminating art among the people, also publicly distrusted modernism. In his opening speech for the Annual Exhibition of the Victorian Artists’ Society, he stated that "Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today talk a different language" (Allen 1997: 111). Such societies sought to institutionalize the pastoralism epitomized by the Heidelberg, above all in the work of Streeton. Artists such as Elioth Gruner and Lloyd Rees were also appreciated because they developed iconic pastoral landscapes.

This is the context in which the most successful challenges to the pastoral landscape emerged, the best known still being the desert landscapes of Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan, both of whom became the first widely known Australian artists of a new era of painting and literature generally termed "Modernism". Modernism in Australia remains a complex and uncertain term, as it has in other parts of the world. Humphrey McQueen, Richard Haese, Geoffrey Dutton, Anne Marie-Willis, Bernard Smith, Terry Smith and Ian Burn have been important individual contributors to the definition. Perhaps the most significant reason for uncertainty lies with the term's implicit privileging of high European cultural experimentation around the early decades of the twentieth century. Quite differently, Bernard Smith understood modernism to be an elongation of Romanticism, which turns to primitivist tropes to express a new mode of subjectivity while downplaying the geo-political history of European colonialism (Beilharz 1997). The primary attributes of modernism – focus on interior states, alienation, fragmentation of tradition, assertion of radical formal experimentation in preference to old-fashioned provincialism, a privileging and creative exploration of urban rather than rural consciousness – certainly energize the identifiably modernist trends that clearly emerged in Australia from the 1920s onwards. However, as all the above critics stress, the term cannot be used in a way that suggests straightforward importation.

The influence of Norman Lindsay and his followers alone ensured that modernism could never simply signify simple importation. Jack Lindsay’s journal, Vision, valued the Renaissance over modernism and, indeed, anything to do with what the

171 Lindsays saw as the destructiveness of the new century. This carried some justification – after all, Norman Lindsay saw the First World War as not just a technological nightmare, but a menace to the isolation of Australia. In other forms of expression, Australia simply lagged behind modernist experimentation in Europe and the United States. For example, Australian feature film pre-dates that of the United States or Britain, but by the First World War, Australian cinema largely dramatized films as propaganda: romanticizing bushrangers, soldiers, and the bush. None of the radical cinematic techniques explored by French (surrealism), or German (expressionism) or Soviet (montage) cinemas during the twenties or thirties influenced Australian film production until the 1960s. Geographical isolation prevented contact with exhibitions disseminating modernist art, while the very absence of both literary and art histories prevented sustained progressive critical discussion of these fields until the 1930s and 40s.

Historians of Australian modernism observe that the visual arts most clearly displayed European modernistic influences. The influences ranged widely. In the early 1940s, Noel Counihan and Yosl Bergner shifted human drama away from the rural world with its natural, organic rhythms and dramatized the plight of the urban unemployed – in Bergner’s case, the subjects included refugees and urban Aborigines. Urbanism and industrialism as progressive phenomena were brilliantly documented in Grace Cossington-Smith’s rendering of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Surrealism became an important movement shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. It was firmly linked to the work of James Gleeson, who saw in the exploration of the unconscious not degeneracy but the “roots of evil” which inhabit “our own minds” (Gleeson in McQueen 1979: 83). It also influenced artists such as Albert Tucker and the poet-literary critic, Max Harris. Modernism greatly influenced the work of Margaret Preston. Preston incorporated key aspects of Aboriginal art into her designs of native flowers, especially by asserting that representation lies in line and mass rather than colour. This effectively meant that her art and its aesthetic paralleled the Cubist appropriation of African art. However, it is also possible to see in her ongoing interest in Aboriginal art as belonging to the interest discussed earlier in this chapter: anthropology, the writing of Prichard, Herbert and, of course, Rex Ingamells, founder of the literary

172 movement named the Jindyworobaks.

Ingamells wrote an important and influential essay entitled “On Environmental Values” in 1937. This was partly in response to Stephensen’s essay, and he shared Stephensen’s enthusiasm for national landscape: “the massive gum trees along the banks of the Murray, the gums and the mallee and the tea-tree that straggle about this vast continent; the empty spaces of our deserts; and the atonal music of the magpie and the good-natured mockery of the kookaburra – these are things that must remain” (Ingamells in Barnes 1969: 250). He acknowledged Lawrence’s deeply intuitive response to the “spirit of the place”, but recognized that the Englishman “did not feel at home in the bush”. To speak of place meant responding to a “childlike devotion” to the Australian environment. “Jindyworobak” meant “to annex, to join”, that is, to create a bridge to Aboriginal culture in order to represent through metaphor “the Australian place spirit”. English words, Ingamells felt, were too “strongly coloured by European associations”. For a short time he incorporated Aboriginal vocabulary, but this led to dismal literary results. It was, rather, “an assimilation of much of the spirit” of Aboriginal culture that Ingamells desired.

Like Preston then, Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks fused modernism with Aboriginal culture to the extent they could legitimate nationalist discourse. Ingamells reasoned that for Europeans to belong here it was necessary to become like the country’s original inhabitants. An indigenous dreaming (alcheringa) was thus framed firmly within European forms, even when the need for true cultural exchange was being affirmed. When annexation occurs, the natives are seen as a "dying people"; "Spirits shall haunt this land", as Ingamells put the matter in his poem "From a Dying People". Ian Mudie elaborated a similar outlook in his poem, "Benarra’s Farewell", when the voice of the original inhabitants passes on to the colonist the responsibility of caring for the land:

And so we vanish with the shadows, Passing on to you the heritage of place That yet shall breed a new Australian race, Welded to its soil as we once were, Earth of its earth, stone of its every stone,

173 Responding to its every undertone. (Mudie in Catalano 1985: 44)

The widely-held perception of a dying people was blind to the more complex syncretism defining the history of contact between white and black cultures, one we have seen suggested in the post-colonial mimicry of Namatjira.

Australian modernism raised two significant, interrelated questions by the mid- century. One concerned the cultural value of landscape and place in Australia; the second forced people to consider the nation’s place in the broader international climate. These questions signified how the margin sought to resist incorporation into the metropolitan centre. More specifically, this was being achieved through the appropriation and abrogation of a set of discursive practices traditionally tied to colonialist ideologies and forms. But as the work of artists such as Preston or the writing of Ingamells suggest, its influence on a different, more modern popular view of the nation could also legitimate rather than resist incorporation. By the mid-century, the pastoral landscape of the Heidelberg had been transformed into a harsh, even hostile desert landscape which was barely populated. Yet like the landscapes of the 1890s, this was also a land that showed little signs of modernization. It was timeless, and yet conveyed for the nation clear spiritual value.

Perhaps the tension between modernism and nationalism is best conveyed in the work of Russell Drysdale. In sharp contrast to the pastoral orthodoxy and the general hostility towards the modernist aesthetic during the 20s and 30s, younger artists like Drysdale certainly seemed to express a hostile conception of the Australian environment. At the very least, a very different set of formal influences enabled him to bring into play the influence of European modernist styles: the pencil-thin geometry of Giacometti’s walking figures, the African masks of Modigliani, the desolate war-torn landscapes of Paul Nash.... Like the Heidelberg painters, Drysdale adapted metropolitan styles, but he did away with their impressionistic hues. Arcadia had become scorched desert where human and non-human inhabitants expressed the disquieting sense of physical and psychological dislocation of Giorgio de Chrico's conception of space – another major

174 influence on Drysdale. At first, Australian audiences responded harshly to the artist's grotesque figures. James MacDonald, one-time director of the National Gallery of Victoria, savaged Drysdale’s pictorial conceptions and compared the landscape’s inhabitants to "troglodytes or half-wit members of the Jukes family impressed from the pages of the New Yorker" (Catalano 1985: 15). The Bulletin of the early 1940s was no kinder, finding the landscapes to be "disenchanting" and "lurid" (Ibid).

By the mid-century Drysdale’s work had undergone reevaluation and soon had become canonized as an iconographic body of national art in the modern world. Critics such as Ian Burn and Gary Catalano have noted Drysdale’s ability to capture that sense of the white settler’s love of the harsh landscape and his disjunction from it – something which derives from the artist’s skill in dislocating naturalistic space. But however inhospitable the world of the modern Outback appears, Drysdale themes address a deeply embedded relationship with the Antipodal landscape. His concern is the universal story of place and home. As he stated in an interview with Geoffrey Dutton: “man is a species which has arisen like every other species on this earth and he is not alien to the landscape, otherwise he would have to live somewhere in outer space” (Catalano 1985: 29). He was thus affirming a real history of people and place. Skeletal figures, dried river-beds, fallen trees, dead cattle reveal people who endure hardship and embody their experience in their features and postures. The Rabbiters (1947) shows two men dwarfed by barren and parched cliffs and an uprooted, completely inverted dead tree. Man Reading a Paper (1941) employs caricature to depict European-Australians engaged in everyday actions in a waste land they nonetheless experience as home.

While this challenged the national iconography of the pastoral tradition, it did not in any final sense question traditional ideas about place and belonging. However, this modernised Outback did clearly reflect a counter-discursive element to the centripetal force of enclosure which succeeded in raising deeper questions about the nature of redemptive prosperity in the Antipodes. During the first decades after Federation, concern was expressed about the colonist’s ability to settle and develop arid parts of the country. This was no minor issue, given the increasing recognition that Australia’s

175 sparsely populated landscape implied that it could generally be described as a desert country. The desert seemed antithetical to the notion of national prosperity, economic and spiritual. For this reason Randolph Bedford wanted "desert" barred from the Australian lexicon (Walker 1999: 156). He believed the country in toto could be developed and cultivated. The desert was regarded as the abject signifier quashing the residual dream of an inland sea. Alfred Deakin’s establishment of irrigation trusts in the first years of the century reflected a wider faith that the discovery of water would lead to unlimited growth. Debate over possibilities of inland irrigation dominated state politics throughout the twenties and thirties. The most optimistic projections – Australia’s population as over 60 million – were beginning to lost favour by the mid-century and a more pessimistic outlook emerged (Young 1996: 11).

Like the novelists Prichard and Herbert, Drysdale was thus inadvertently exposing the cruel farce of the colonial dream for redemption. Skeletal figures, dried river-beds, fallen trees, dead cattle reveal people who endure hardship and embody their experience in their features and postures. This grotesque visual language is even more dramatically expressed in the paintings of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan, both of whom moved some degree away from Drysdale’s naturalism and represented instead interior states. During the Second World War, Tucker fused expressionism and cubism to produce terrifyingly ugly Heads that embodied fragmented, tortured psychological states inhabiting a lapsarian world. He coined the term "psycho-expressionism" for these works as well as his Images of Modern Evil. Nolan, who is most closely associated with the radical end of Australian modernism, also turned to the Australian desert as a metaphor of the modern psyche. He immersed himself in French Symbolist poetry as well as contemporary psychoanalytic theories that addressed the relation between creativity, schizophrenia and the world of children, specifically The Nature of Creative Activity by Victor Lowenfeld. His subjects are framed in absurd, often grotesque poses. For example, Mrs Fraser (1947) inverts piety and portrays the conspicuously white-skinned woman in the posture of bestiality. In Convict and Mrs Fraser (1957), self and other are brought together in the most transgressive sense, that is, on the colonial frontier where they become one. The result is an androgynous, grotesque hybrid. In Burke and Wills

176 Expedition, Gray Sick (1949), the doomed explorer conveys bathos as he is ludicrously strapped to his camel, a man condemned to die helplessly in exile. Much later in the work Miner (1972), the creature appears from underground to reveal someone who is grotesquely wedded to a country where scolding torments signify the fantastic and freakish.

In contrast to the formal sophistication of Drysdale and Tucker, Nolan was indebted to naive art. Herbert Read celebrated Nolan’s “deliberate attempt to reach back to the naivety and fresh simplicity of the childlike outlook” (Clark 1987: 64-5). Haese sees in the artist’s earliest paintings such as Bather (At Morning) or Bather and Sandcastle, both painted in 1945, influenced by a stream of modernism described as “symbolist-expressionist-surrealist” which valued primitive and naïve art (Haese 1981: 185). He worked alla prima and his medium was a Masonite composition board; he cited le douanier Rousseau as one of his primary "ingredients". He was also influenced by the theory of "hapticity": an anti-naturalist method in which the painter distorts and juxtaposes traditionally conceived pictorial relations. The need to stifle or repress the realm of the cognitive informs the broadly modernist attempt to re-new our way of seeing. Nolan’s experimentation with visualization can also be situated with the mid- century re-placing of national or traditional landscape. It transforms this space to accommodate psychic dislocation, and in doing so introduces an important kind of feedback to the iconographic standing of a timeless land celebrated by Drysdale. Ian Burn has attempted to describe this elusive disjuncture in relation to the early Wimmera landscapes: “the primary identification is not with the landscape, more a self- consciousness of being in a vast landscape and of having to travel across it to get from one place to another (Burn 1990: 220).

This complex and elusive relationship to landscape imbues Nolan’s later and more famous Kelly series and the Burke and Wills paintings. In these works, Nolan demonstrates his ability to invest mythological significance to landscape. But at the same time, the inherent flaw of his subjects prevents his dramatic landscapes from conveying the timeless sense of place achieved by other modern figures. The Kelly paintings may in

177 part have just been a case of putting something "in front of the landscape", as Nolan once disingenuously put it, but they also welded landscape with the richly conceived ambiguity of the colonial past. The raw violence portrayed by Kelly’s black Malevich- like shape symbolized deeper ambiguities that ate at the heart of white history. Convicts and bushrangers for heroes could not help but strike an uneasy chord for a society with foundations stained by convictism. Nolan thus realizes in terms profoundly indebted to Australian experience a powerful counter-discourse. At the same time, he shows just as emphatically that his tropes of rebellion were as much about returning to a way of seeing in which displacement, inversion and alienation were experiences that readily permeated the colonist’s psyche. In this sense, Nolan anticipates Gordon Bennett’s postmodern appropriation of the black square and, more broadly, the critique of formalist abstraction’s quest for purity. The European high artistic quest for transcendence is displaced in the ambivalent colonial sign-world: square becomes iron mask, which in turn signifies the prison-house of colonialism.

Like Namatjira, Nolan’s re-placing of modernism identifies a trajectory expressing a different set of interests to traditional suppositions of place and belonging. Here the abstract purity sought by a Malevich or a Rothko could never dominate for the formalist void did not signify eternity, but the return to a terrain in which one seemed condemned to wander anxiously. This kind of myth transgressed the idea propagated by adherents of the Legend. "Myth making", wrote Vance Palmer in Legend of the Nineties, enables people to feel "really at home in any environment". True, the figure in Ned Kelly (1946) rides towards the horizon and merges into his horse thus symbolizing the emergence of a new Australian-type. However, it is equally significant that this type does not go on to merge into the landscape. Even when he is being mythologized, it is not at all certain whether Kelly ever truly belongs to the country. The very icon of settler cultural possession, Ned is also the most profoundly dispossessed of subjects. He represents a new yet hauntingly old mode of nomadic being. He is a national subject who wanders without a fixed home; he exists without the ontological security promised by enclosure. His being-in-the-world is inextricably linked to the history of violence inscribed on the colonial periphery.

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The Poetic Challenge to History Re-placing the nation interprets the renewal of creative dialogue with the Antipodes. The importance of this dialogue relates to the different ways it describes a basic tension which consistently generates the ambivalence of Australian place. It was A. D. Hope who, in his 1939 poem, "Australia", most clearly invoked how this new yet old tension might develop in the modern era. Hope recognised the most basic of conflicts in the story of European colonialism in Australia. He saw in the landscape spiritual barrenness resulting from colonialism's singular imposition upon an alien land. To be Australian meant living with the melancholy consequences of this imposition. Our nation, wrote Hope, consists of five cities that outwardly subjugate the land, yet remain inwardly estranged from "her":

… like five teeming sores, Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state Where second-hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores. (Hope 1992: 13)

For Hope, Australians live in a kind of perpetual bad faith. Our culture is one of "immense stupidity". In the middle of such malaise, there emerges a counterpoint, another "home" springing from a different environment and escaping the "lush jungle of modern thought". It is the “Arabian desert”:

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes Which is called civilization over there.

Drysdale and Nolan saw how the sun-kissed landscape of the earlier generation had truly given way to the sun-blasted void of the desert, with the national imaginary now radiating an array of melancholy, grotesque associations. But it is not clear that Hope is making the same point. Rather, he distinguishes the desert from “the lush jungle of modern thought”. This might be interpreted to describe, broadly speaking, modernity; more specifically, the modernism Hope viewed – like the classicist he was – with dislike. Yet “home” is never

179 clearly identified. It is described as “the Arabian desert”, a metaphor signifying difference rather than familiarity, of exotic otherness rather than mind-numbing familiarity. More significantly, this alternate space emerges in the excess of our language, it “escapes the learned doubt” (my italics), it “springs in that waste” we call “civilization”.

By privileging the modality of experience, Hope asserted the presence of a living dialectic between the more traditional symbols of Australian identity. But how might this intuition undergo development when addressing a broader narrative of national culture? On one level, the intuition was by no means at odds with a visionary belief other Australians expressed throughout the century, namely, that this is a land awaiting invention. Such a view was expressed by C. E. W. Bean, at the beginning of the century when he described the nation as a country whose meaning was there "still to make" (Bean 1975). For Bean, the key source of inspiration could be found in the nationalist trope of the "noble bushman". A half-century later, the poet and critic James McAuley turned to the history of European exploration and their quest for prosperity in the Southern Land. His 1964 narrative, Captain Quiros, describes his subject's vision of the continent as something energised by the colonist's ideal of growth and prosperity:

… southward his vision went Where like a kite of stars with blazing streamer The Cross hung over the last continent, Still waiting for the impress of the dreamer (McAuley 1964: 25)

Like other writers of the Cold War period, McAuley turned to Christian symbolism to dramatize the landscape. Bit it remains a redemptive discourse. One can see McCauley’s desire for “the impress of the dreamer” as belonging to those narratives of foundation that demonstrate the imperial shaping of Australian mythology. Old images resonate in new ways: the Legend is extended and the Christian icon is resacralised by the local environment symbolized in the Southern Cross.

In my view, Hope is clearly not charting the national landscape in order the

180 legitimate the ideology of imperial conquest. Rather than displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative, the counter-discursive argument in “Australia” addresses the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. Like some of his contemporaries, Hope was intimating how the provisionality of language and experience displaced the narrative of nation to uncover our open, unresolved relation to the ground. In parallel fashion to Nolan’s nomadic modernist trajectories and Namatjira’s cross-cultural mimicry, he was ridiculing the pretensions of national culture, while mapping a place where the ground was open to a continual process of creative reinterpretation.

Mapping a place between enclosure and common, between the gaze of Narcissus and Echo is essentially a revisionist process. And Hope, Bean and McCauley are one in their understanding that the kind of mapping needed signifies a performative, or poetic, recuperation of what has been occluded in normative representations of culture and experience, a dialogue with what has been left out of our stories and why. European settlement involved the importation of an authoritative culture expressed in various forms: literature, art, law, education, and the military. The codification of this imposition is demonstrated most powerfully in the way historians present history. This is revealed in the teleological bias embedded in the story of the country’s progress from modest beginnings to the creation of the nation. As discussed earlier, this falsifies the process of place-making. When historians tell the story, they depend on the assumption that the drama in question is two hundred-odd years in the making. But this reveals little or nothing about the way history is itself a process of ordering, selecting, dramatizing and interpreting information (see Introduction: 26-7).

A poetic narrative account of exploration and discovery reveals something different about history; more importantly, it reveals something about its way of knowing. For example, in 1931 Slessor wrote "Five Visions of Captain Cook", a poem in epic form about the explorer's relation to the creation of the nation. Slessor describes Cook as someone embodying a fusion of military, economic and magical properties, all of which invest the explorer with mesmerizing authority:

181

Cook sailed at night, Let there be reefs a fathom from the keel And empty charts. The sailors didn't ask, Nor Joseph Banks. Who cared? It was the spell Of Cook that lulled them, bade them turn below (Slessor 1994: 89)

This portrait does not simply position Cook within the era of European discovery; it describes the original auratic power Cook held over others. Slessor sees Cook as an amalgam of fact and mythology, secular and magical power. When he describes Cook as one who "chose a passage into the dark", Slessor displaces the notion of history as a stage where causality reigns. He instead asserts the randomness of experience and the almost comic attempts men deploy to impose order. This may explain Slessor’s somewhat laconic attitude to epic discovery, especially in the first poem of the sequence, where Cook is subject to the whim of winds that pummel his ship in the Coral Sea. Only by making some kind of choice in this literal and metaphorical vortex does he forge the passage imperial history will memorialize: "So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout/So men write poems in Australia" (88).

It is not surprising that poetry and European exploration came together in this way. Like many writers versed in the European literary tradition, Slessor believed that poetry had the capacity to exceed accepted perimeters of meaning in ways that the rest of literature can only intimate. Poetry offered the ideal correlative for entering into dialogue with the explorer's own uncharted movements. But dialogue implied a basic challenge to History, an unavoidable truth given the inherently different outlooks each mode of writing signifies. Of course this is an ancient understanding. In his Poetics, Aristotle saw in the writing of history a valuing of what happened, while in a "poetics" it was what might have happened that ultimately counts. The implications of a poetics in the creative revision of history are nothing short of profound. Australian historiography proceeds from the assumption that the land was there is advance, a culturally empty space passively awaiting discovery by men destined to achieve immortality. Thus, history always works by telling a story about events that have already happened (Carter 1987: xv). The poet, however, does not operate under such an assumption. The place is not

182 there in advance, it comes into existence through a language which privileges metaphor, thus diminishing the authority of chronology and empirical fact.

Douglas Stewart, the poet and critic who in 1960 anthologized Slessor's poem along with works by himself, Robert Fitzgerald, William Hart-Smith and Francis Webb, recognised the tension raised by these poets when he wrote that their creative dialogue in his Introduction to the Voyager Poems. Stewart was in no doubt as to the important purposes of the poets he was anthologizing – not simply dramatizing a story important to the nation, the poets in question cross over into philosophy, politics and spiritual endeavour (Stewart 1960: 8). He concludes by contrasting poetry and history, observing that the former “should sing the nation into shape”: “The peculiar value of historical poetry, supplementing or leading the historian, is that poetry makes things memorable” (11-12). The positive sense of history relegates poetry to at best a supplementary role, but Stewart clearly insinuates that the poetic process in its very transformational power can assume the leading role in the broader examination of human experience.

Slessor was the first poet to respond to the poetic challenge to history Douglas Stewart would later describe. As noted, he recognised Cook as an amalgam of fact and mythology, secular and magical power. Cook's relation to the founding of a continent serves to invest the land with a blending of fact and fiction. Australia was in Slessor's telling of the story, a fantastic place, and an antipodean space where conquest and possibility jostled for position. Slessor perhaps recognised the conceptual problem underling the rhetoric of national history; it may also refer to the poet's bemused appraisal of his own limitations in the quest for perfection, a quest compounded by being an Australian poet condemned to occupy the periphery of metropolitan culture. But Slessor was also a writer who believed that human action was destined to become enveloped not by the theatre of history, but by the flow of Time. "So Time, the wave, enfolds me in its bed,/Or Time, the bony knife, it runs me through", he wrote in "Out of Time". In the fifth and final poem of "Five Visions", Slessor pictured the explorer as witnessed by the midshipman, Alexander Home, who had kept a journal of his voyage with Cook. Home is now an old man back in Scotland, blind and married to a faithful

183 wife skilled at cooking. The puns of home, blindness and cooking enhance the craftsmanship and themes of the poem, but they also show that however diminished in strictly factual terms Home's vision seems, in poetic terms they identify the very ground where a new national history lies for Slessor. Immersed within the flow of memory and blind in conventional discourse, Home has fashioned out a radically different kind of "home". His body might seem atrophied and his mind slightly dotty as he sits "drinking rum in Berwickshire",

But not his eyes – they were left floating there Half-round the earth, blinking at beaches milked By such-mouth tides foaming with ropes of bubbles And huge-moons of surf

At this moment it is possible to see Slessor’s configuration as an example of how poetry no longer supplements History, but leads it. Imperial notions of time and space are transformed by the interiorized state of dwelling which memorializes the man’s open- ended mode of contact with the Antipodes. As with Nolan’s re-placing of modernism, Slessor’s treatment of history expresses a different set of interests to traditional suppositions of place and belonging.

The poetic challenge to history was just as readily grasped by the young Francis Webb. His narratives, A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948) and Leichhardt in Theatre (1952), also end by locating his subjects in the lacuna of colonialist discourse. This was in part greatly assisted by the subject-matter itself. Both Leichhardt and Boyd led controversial careers in the colony. Boyd had arrived in his late thirties, hoping to build a Pacific empire from a combination of whaling, pastoral land acquisitions, trade and a mixture of convict-slave labour. After both success and failure, he eventually turned to the Pacific islands where he landed at Guadalcanal in 1851 and was never seen again. Leichhardt, who came from Prussia, saw in Australia a land which could help him fulfill his dream of achieving a higher destiny. He wrote in a letter of the country: "The interior, the heart of this dark continent, is my goal, and I will never relinquish the quest for it until I get there" (Leichhardt in Clark 1973: 339). His first expedition into the Australian interior in

184 1844 led to the discovery of arable land to the north, thus promising an expansion of Australia Felix from the south. A second expedition ended in disappointment hampered as it was by rain, resistant expedition members and no significant discoveries. A third and final expedition set off to cross to the west coast of the continent in 1848, but was never heard of again. Their lives are like faltering narratives: movements on an ambiguous map that show where presence becomes absence and where failure and frustration dominate rather than the triumph of progress. Webb responds not by using his linguistic virtuosity to restore their presence, but to celebrate the inconclusiveness caused by their absence. Boyd’s "final appearance" in the sequence is perceived:

… not as the half-corpse In tangible bedclothes with an odour of crepe and tears, But as a shadow at the distant end Of a tunnel of sunlight (Webb 1991: 50)

While Leichhardt's unsolved disappearance yields a legacy not of defeat, but an emphatic statement of the understanding that it is the journey itself, not the destination, that matters. In this sense, the lacuna of History locates where the nation may be re-placed - the "field pitched beyond world and words":

In such clean space the man and his shadow ride. See them upon the hills, life-sized and breathing, Where they will go, how perish – this is nothing (71))

The half rhymes that equate "breathing" with "nothing" commemorate a strange land where History is necessarily relegated to a supplementary role, because its logic of cause and effect has been demonstrably proven to be obsolete in the altered definition of national drama.

As the very title of his poem about Leichhardt suggests, Webb recognised the theatrical hold over public imagination History maintains. His explorer poems can therefore be interpreted as a sustained counter-discourse to its hegemony. Yet given the melancholy attributes of Australian epic history, it should also be noted that national

185 history was an inherently fragile discourse. The likes of Ben Boyd and Leichhardt make this clear. Could one celebrate the folly of such men sustained by transparent illusions of redemption in a timeless land of opportunity? The ambiguity, moral as much as factual, attending these figures forced Webb to be circumspect in his answer. Boyd is described from the perspective of outsiders, but his opportunistic character is always apparent, no more so than in "A Whaler", which describes Boyd as "a dressed-up ape with a patronising stick". With Leichhardt, the comic dualism suggested by the explorer's ambiguous standing in the theatre of Australian history is employed to dramatize the explorer’s public quest for the inland sea. Leichhardt alternates between two antithetical personae: the heroic ("Southward the new, the visionary!/This is a land where man becomes myth") and the clown ("He’s long and lanky as a pair of skis/His stuffed coat- pockets bounce on his knees").

Australia, Marcus Clarke wrote in the period leading to Federation, had yet to escape from being a "fantastic land of monstrosities", and both Slessor and Webb understood this. Clarke foresaw that to write serious poetry in Australia meant entering into dialogue with the "desolation" which arose from being condemned to the periphery. In "Crow Country" Slessor would write with a sardonic outlook which was characteristically 'Australian': "over the huge abraded rind/Crow-countries graped with dung, we go/Past gullies that no longer flow/And wells that nobody can find". The barrenness of the land was a metaphor of the idea of creative inspiration in this country. The factual elusiveness of Boyd is also described in typically sardonic terms when the "roving reporter" states that "after a very trying fortnight/You may quote us as saying that Browning and/Shakespeare/Would have committed suicide in this country". Even in its newness, Webb's landscape is never far from a familiar melancholy tenor. It is a landscape stained by the criminality and paranoia of bushrangers, as dramatized in "Morgan's Country", where "this country looks grey, hunted and murderous". And it is a landscape where picturesque beauty can suddenly turn treacherous, as revealed in "Bush Fire" in which the landscape is shredded by a "blade of hatred".

As with the nationalist failure to inscribe the spirit of place and the modernist

186 transformation of landscape, the poetic challenge to history alluded to the residual presence of Echo haunting colonialist discourse throughout the early to mid-century. If Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings stand ambivalently between exile and belonging, the textual and epistemological absence revealed by mid-century writers uncovers a place that also oscillates between national belonging and exile. The consequence of this condition is rich in its creative implications. It adds to the density of reading ambivalence because it makes possible for us to see how the colonising process, while dominant and inescapable, remains open to dissonance and resistance.

What was also asserted was the imperative to see beyond the doctrinal enclosures of European colonialism. As the creative figures of the period showed, re-placing the nation confronted our own blindness. Webb was particularly adept at a creative level in expressing this imperative, partly through his skill at reconciling conceptual opposites. The poem "Light" ends by recognizing that "Darkness is the ballad, colour, at the root of all memory", while "Ballerina: Coppelia" describes the "metamorphosis within our mirror". This latter poem offers an especially significant insight in Australian literature, because it suggests at last that the mirror could perhaps offers something other than the reflection of Narcissus's gaze. In fact in "Leichhardt in Theatre", the very duality of Leichhardt pointed the way for describing what can be described as Narcissus's turning towards Echo in mid-century writing. After the humiliating failure dramatized in the comic and grotesque "The Second Expedition", in which the "Doctor" is forever being "kicked by a bullock", and in which the national imaginary so conspicuously flounders, the poem "The Room" positions the explorer before a mirror where he must confront his mask far from the accolades of public theatre. Now Leichhardt,

Peers long into the glass and sees himself As for the first time, stained and vulnerable, Branded with whispers. Steeply he rebels, Curses Mann, Perry, and the merciless rain: Till something laughs behind him, and he breaks (69)

The laughter comes from a clown, a figure who has continually jostled for position in the

187 presentation of Leichhardt's persona on stage. It is an extraordinary moment in that the clown can be understood to adopt the role of Echo to Narcissus; only here the former is actually heard. The result is radically transformational. Leichhardt becomes an absurd and pathetic mask for the illusory myths which drive the colonist "time after time" to explore "this death-head's continent/Probe the eye-sockets, skinless cavities/Till the brain sweats from his skull, his hands/contract/And bone probes bone at length". But at this moment of the interrogation, the mask is stripped to reveal the inherently grotesque nature of the colonist's dream – grotesque not simply for its narcissistic pretensions, but its excesses. It is a moment which brings Leichhardt, that otherwise ossified nationalist figure, an ironic experiencing of freedom as "The walls slope out/Space bunts at the doorway". Like Alexander Home's "home", Webb puns the word "room" to transform confinement into freedom. Such a strategy pinpoints the beginnings of a conceptual turn in which Narcissus finds himself "stripped and bound" before Echo. The event marks a turning point that will be considered more fully in the final chapter, one where the melancholy of colonialism begins to metamorphose into something other than a discourse of inherent cultural solipsism. Writers were transforming history from a positivist conception of place (or a falsely mythologized one) into something more radically open- ended and poetic, a form of Heideggerean "dwelling".

By confronting our problematic ways of seeing, the re-placing of nation asserts the persistently provisional and antipodean nature of place rather than a traditional sense of belonging. By the mid-century, artists and writers had returned to the grotesque and melancholy vision of the historical landscape. Paradise had become Hell, the bushman and other iconic settlers clownish, bestial and insect-like. A century earlier it was the Aborigine who had been changed from a figure of Arcadian gracefulness into a trope of ridicule. Now the object of satire was no longer the Aborigine, it was the colonist. Sun- kissed Arcadia had given way to the sun-blasted void of the desert, and the national imaginary radiated an array of melancholy, grotesque associations. Over four decades, the painter, Arthur Boyd, was to trace this shifting awareness with great conceptual

188 clarity, beginning with the extraordinary series dramatizing the Old Testament theme of expulsion. In these paintings, Australian identity was portrayed through figures that also dramatized the conflicting opposites of national discourse: exile and belonging, gentleness and violence, compassion and cruelty. From here on Boyd's subjects emerged as tainted icons: bastards, murderers and exiles. Myth was often pictorially juxtaposed by contrasting (or blending) the grotesque with Arcadia. The effect was one of sharp and ironic counterpoint: Paradise discloses Paradise Lost, possibility failure. This by no means had the effect of redeeming the colonialist dream of redemption; rather, it exposed in essence redemption’s impossibility.

It was perhaps inevitable given these influences, as well as the artist's sensibility, that Narcissus would also provide an important metaphor for Boyd's understanding of an ambivalent ground. By the 1970s the metaphor was itself another familiar icon of Boyd's internationally acclaimed art. In Narcissus and Three Clouds Boyd turned to the Greek myth to express in uncanny terms the colonist's alienation. Here the Australian type, grotesque yet bound to the landscape, scrutinizes himself while in the distant background bestial sex and convict suffering dot the desert. Above the characters of this drama float three clouds. It is not far-fetched to see in these cirri the violent past of dispossession to which settler Australians are destined to return for they resemble cicatrices used to mark tribal people. But Boyd's wispy lines can equally be seen as trope for the cruelty of flogging once experienced in the penal colony and still very much part of our cultural baggage. In short, the painting squarely diagnoses the ambivalence particular to modern Australian landscape, history and language. It reveals how by the mid-century and beyond, the nation had become a place where the familiar and unfamiliar, the living and dead, Narcissus and Echo now held uneasy yet perpetual dialogue.

189 Chapter 6 Re-Placing Nation II

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T. S. Eliot ‘Little Gidding’

In the previous chapter we explored an important shift throughout Australian culture during the decades following federation. By the “re-placing of nation”, I sought to investigate a process which uncovered and, in a sense rediscovered, the provisionality of Australian place. The result was one which decisively transformed the territorializing claims made by the nation-state. Beginning with the nationalist failure to inscribe the ‘spirit of place’ and the modernist transformation of landscape, the re-placing process was pervasive because it was deeply embedded in the discourses of landscape, creativity and history. Rather than conform to the linearity of progress or enclosure, re-placing asserted the residual ambivalence haunting our being in the world. Nolan’s Ned Kelly is an important example of this ambivalence as it articulates with iconographic power how nationhood did not bring with it a secure sense of home. Rather, postcolonial Australians increasingly found themselves inhabiting a ground between exile and belonging.

If, at least in creative terms, the provisionality of colonialist experience came to challenge and transform the master-narratives of nation, then the process explored in this concluding chapter concerns the deepening of this challenge which developed in the decades following the Second World War. This process develops preoccupations examined earlier: the modality of postcolonial Australian experience augments creative resistance to the way history with its imperial genealogy organizes experience into a linear narrative. There can be found in all the texts examined in this chapter a basic tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual rhizomic formlessness of everyday life. Place is the “ambivalent ground” of that life: a transformed, provisionally inhabited cultural space richly signifying a history between possibility and failure, between home and exile, between Europe and other, between the tension of

190 migratory passages and the settler desire to mythologies a sense of belonging.

This tension-filled ground is also a language of ‘return’: echoing the colonist’s ambiguous sense of belonging in the newly emergent histories of postwar migration, the increasing recognition of Aboriginal dispossession, and the further decentering of the nation-state’s dominant narratives. But in contrast with the silence that followed the enclosure of difference in colonial literature, the writing reveals an increasing attitude of openness to the suspicion that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. By the end of the century it was possible to map in extended form the nomadic movements of hybrid subjects who rejected the fetishisation of place, appropriated the language of empire without reiterating the cultural cringe, and postulated modes of being in the world which incorporated the residual unheimlich of colonialist history and identity.

Black Swans of Trespass When Sidney Nolan made a series of paintings and drawings for display at the Adelaide Festival of 1974, he produced among them a portrait of Ern Malley. Although now a very senior figure in Australian and international art (he would be knighted in 1981), Nolan was clearly returning in both subject and form to a period of experimentation with visualization that had earlier transformed national or traditional landscape. The Malley portrait may have been produced at an advanced stage of the artist’s career, but it was modeled on a painting he had produced at the time of the Malley hoax, namely, Head of a Soldier (1942). As with its precursor, Ern Malley embodies the quality of psychic dislocation characterizing so much of Nolan’s early modernist paintings. As a contemporary text, the Malley painting shared with Nolan’s contemporary, Arthur Boyd, a sensibility which located the Australian antipodean subject in the sun-blasted void of the desert where s/he embodies an array of melancholy, grotesque associations.

Chronologically, the Malley portrait emerges well after the Ned Kelly paintings. It is not simply a creative engagement with a strange yet powerful national icon; it is a deeply personal reflection on the artist’s own relation to the episode and the socio-

191 political period from which the hoax, and Nolan’s own style, emerged. Head of a Soldier was used on the cover of a study by Reg Ellery, published in 1945 and entitled The Psychiatric Aspects of Warfare. Ellery openly declared his study as an attempt to link insanity with warfare because both “are almost exclusively human phenomena, and both are rooted in irrationality” (Ellery in Heyward 1993: 176). Nolan deeply identified with this argument, but he was not merely illustrating a thesis, rather, his painting is a kind of self-portrait. A soldier in the army, Nolan deserted his camp in Melbourne in 1944 and soon adopted a fake identity. This experience radically questioned the authenticity of his national identity as well as his identity as an Australian soldier. It expressed in the most embodied sense the psychic identity of an outcast, an inhabitant of the margins and a rebel. It is not difficult to see how so profoundly a transgressive position in Australian society formed the conceptual and formal ground for the Ned Kelly paintings

Transgression and illegitimacy transparently also play out at all levels of the ‘Ern Malley’ affair. The creators of the hoax, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, produced a series of poems which they attributed to ‘Ern Malley’, a recently deceased working-class poet. Ern’s sister, ‘Ethel’ sent the poems to the Adelaide-based poet-critic, Max Harris, who then edited an experimental modernist magazine, Angry Penguins. Harris took the bait, organized a special commemorative edition of Malley’s work adorned with an original work by Nolan on the cover directly inspired by one of Malley’s poems. Shortly after, the hoax was exposed.1

Like Nolan, McAuley and Stewart were also soldiers based in Victoria. All three carried overlapping masks to their ostensible roles as defenders of the nation: as poets- artists at the onset of their respective careers. Their masks also reflected conflicting interests: Nolan saw in Malley an Australian’s realization of Arthur Rimbaud’s belief that the poet's special insight into human experience was as a tortured visionary. Rimbaud wrote of this condition in a letter stating that "the poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses" (Rimbaud 1957: xxx).

1 The story is, of course, well known. The most comprehensive study is Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair (1993)

192 Although at least equally conversant with French Symbolism, McAuley and Stewart struggled with a love-hate relationship with its legacy, especially as developed by the likes of Harris - vocal advocate of what he described as an "Australian surrealism" and his literary magazine, Angry Penguins, which noisily championed Modernism as well as French Symbolism. By creating Malley, McAuley and Stewart were immersing themselves in an elaborate game of literary pantomime – ‘Ern’, whose name itself puns the ashes of a writer who never existed, the language of Ern’s poems, so full of disorder and the intoxication of creative anarchy. But it is Malley himself who is finally the most elaborate and certainly famous of masks, not simply in this episode but in Australian literature. As commentators have observed, it is largely the very seductiveness of the Malley persona that appealed to Harris, rather than a flesh-and-blood person. In commemorating Malley as “the Australian poet” in his magazine, Harris was expressing his, and perhaps every Australian editor’s, quest for that literary inland sea: the Great Australian Writer.

In returning to the subject of Malley three decades after the affair, Nolan confronted the palpably ironic essence of Malley – his non-existence – in the very fact that he had no model to portray. By portraying Malley through quotation, the quality of psychic dislocation affirmed what was earlier an emerging, perhaps still largely intuitive, insight: that any icon of Australian poetic creativity was laced with fraudulence, failings and absurdity. That this is so is confirmed by what originally generated the creation of Malley, not so much the perceived fad of modernism (although clearly this motivated the authors of the hoax), rather, the obsession with identity in Australia and the continual need to paper over the deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and more broadly cultural claims to the land. By responding to the hoaxer’s invitation with such enthusiasm, Harris was responding to the ontological lack associated with antipodal experience, and the opportunism this brought with it for the self-proclaimed visionary. His illusory desire exposed the folly of a colonialist Narcissus in that it specifically tried to adopt criteria of cultural assumptions and impose them in order to assert a modernist vision of the nation. More generally, the quest reiterated the white settler dream for redemption in a place far distant from the metropolitan centre.

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It would be one dimensional, however, to interpret Malley as merely a reiteration of colonialist folly. As almost all commentators have noted, Harris discerned in the poetry a presence that countered any charge of being merely narcissistic. In Malley, especially in the opening poem of his “Darkening Ecliptic” sequence, “Durer, 1495 – the first poem that Harris received from ‘Ethel’ – there is not only a powerful linguistic performance, but a subtle conceptual dimension which signifies a message of profound insight to the question of Australian identity and language. The subject of this poem is the writer’s ambiguous identification with the European master. Malley reminds his audience that to write in the modern world means not dealing with essences, but reproductions of essences; it means living with the time-lag of historical events. Perpetually alert to the transcendental beauty of the German master, the poet must acknowledge his distance from the original. As an inhabitant of the other side of the world, he sees only through reproductions. The image of Innsbruck is itself an image on the lake, yet is again one step removed due to its existence as a postcard – the objet the poem is perhaps really describing. In this textual realm doubles proliferate and the origin becomes transformed by its copies.2 The concluding line is "I remain the black swan of trespass on alien waters" - a compelling trope, despite the somewhat tautological phrasing, because it expresses in its juxtaposition of indigenization and estrangement the eternal paradox of the colonist, who in describing his ties to the land, imposes upon it the language of the colonizer.

Rather than interpret Malley as simply a crude declaration of naïve support for the linearity of progress, we should embrace the insights displayed in Nolan’s portrait. Nolan’s Malley pinpoints in the poetry and persona pinpoint a moment of becoming in which postcolonial Australians were responding to the presence of Echo as much as that of Narcissus. It is significant that this in-between condition is for Malley less a symptom of anxiety as it is simply a mode of being in the world. Harold Stewart intimated this

2 Heyward (1993) sees in the image of Innsbruck reflected by the lake a statement of the hoaxers’ intentions: “Ern Malley’s ‘real’ evocation of a “real” painting by the ‘realist’ Durer was a brilliant feint, a way of distancing the reader from what the poem was actually saying – that its author was a chimera” (92).

194 understanding when he saw in Malley’s creative intelligence "a symbolism that explores rather than knows" (Stewart in McLaren 1996: 20). And the exploratory condition which asserts the primacy of movement rather than stasis, openness rather than closure explicitly characterizes many of the twenty five poems which comprise Malley's The Darkening Ecliptic. Perhaps the most famous examples arrive in the final poem, "Petit Testament":

I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre, Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick, Stumbled often, stammered, But in time the fading voice grows wise And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence Traces the inevitable graph And in conclusion: There is a moment when the pelvis Explodes like a grenade (Malley 1993: 46)

The poem concludes with the lines "I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything". However much the language is steeped in parody, the true authors' intentions - their cutting and pasting technique - did at least show how the decorum of conventional English poetic diction could be appropriated and transformed into something more robust. These were poems which made their home in the excess of parody and metaphor. This was the paradox of Malley: that the disordering process had the effect of not just ridiculing Max Harris and his coterie, but of thawing a frozen, forbidding imperial language which had stifled generations of writers. As the poem "Sweet William" states: "I have avoided your wide English eyes/But now I am whirled in their vortex". To whirl in the vortex did not signify subservience; it paid attention to the dynamic history produced in the performative act of writing.

Nolan’s return to Malley is laced with irony, but it offers perhaps one of the few truly counter-discursive affirmations of postcolonial ambivalence in Australian writing. Nolan suggests to us that Malley’s contemporary importance lies in the way he rejected the nationalist fetishisation of the ‘spirit of place’ and openly appropriated modernist

195 techniques without reiterating the cultural cringe. Furthermore, Malley was an outlaw, whose primary identification is not with landscape but with the residual unheimlich of colonialist history and identity. He thus embodies what it is to be antipodean: invented, fictional, the antithesis of European refinement. Rather than be constrained by the prison- house of colonialism, he affirms through the poetry itself a way of knowing which transgresses binarisms, which embraces the primacy of indeterminacy. In Malley things are never settled; rather “the co-ordinates of all existence” assume dynamism of meaning. His work may seem heretical in normative critical discourse, but it also offers a founding statement for a new, hybrid way of knowing. Rather than deepen the illusion of moving forward, Nolan recognized that Malley offered a realignment of possibility, away from national progressivism to an indeterminate zone marking where the writer inscribes his local, ironic presence thereby revealing a different country.

A Different Country Soon after the Ern Malley affair had been played out, another poet, Francis Webb, published the narrative, A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948). We have observed how Webb recognised how the power of History stemmed from the way its panoptic gaze was retrospectively cast over events and people. The poet, especially when taking as his subject a figure encased in "theatre", could not avoid this discourse any more than he could the diachronic patterning of language. He could, however, restore to language its synchronic force by identifying meaning to be contiguous with the writing process itself. It is this kind of principle which is emphatically described in ‘Author’s Prologue’, the second poem of A Drum for Ben Boyd:

I follow charts of guesswork, shape a cloud Formless, unplotted, rotten with endless change And the sky’s blue mockery plummeting through its heart

Yet truth itself is a mass of stops and gaps. (43)

The "charts of guesswork" offer an important parallel to Malley’s privileging of modality. Both writers show that history occurs in language. Rather than primarily describe the dynamic of exploration, the poet produces it. He does so because he can

196 escape the perspective afforded by critical detachment and immerse himself in the performative dimension of language, as opposed to the representational, or mimetic, aspect.

Like other Australian poets who emerged during the mid-century, Webb would have been influenced by the aesthetic and form of French nineteenth century Symbolist poetry. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud had taken as their topic words rather than referents firmly locatable in the world. Writing had become the event or, as Roland Barthes put it, an "intransitive" act (Eagleton 1991: 140). Formally, the influences were profound. In "Palace of Dreams" the poet ascends in an environment "remote in dreams/Thick musk, fuming censer-streams" - a description of poetic experience which evokes Baudelaire's "Correspondances" where "perfumes, colours, and sounds conmingle". These influences would endure in Webb's work although they would become absorbed into the metaphor of the desert centre. "Poet", first published in 1959, and recognised as a definitive statement of Webb's creative aesthetic, begins with the line "I'm from the desert country – O, it's a holy land", thus bearing striking familiarity with the way Rimbaud commenced his poem "Lives": "O the enormous avenues of the Holy Land".

The privileging of the creative writer's ego was also central to the Symbolist attitude. The young Webb who wrote "Palace of Dreams" ascends "these stairs – and none but I" was reiterating the view of Rimbaud who alone could decipher the grotesque perambulations of the Parisian underworld ("I alone have the key to this savage side show"). Webb's creative trajectory was Romantic in the extreme insofar that it reinscribed the belief that the poet's special insight into human experience elevated him above the seething disorder of the quotidian. It should be remembered that A Drum for Ben Boyd was illustrated by Norman Lindsay, who had praised the young poet’s work. Lindsay’s essay on the artistic effort, Creative Effort, was published in 1920, and strongly expressed an elitist view of the artist as well as disdain for the mob condemned to a “system of slavery”.

197 Webb’s creative position may have been grounded in the romantic notion of privileged expression, but rather than follow Lindsay and deepen differences between artist and mob, he developed a process of composition which associated the dynamic of writing qua ‘intransitive act’ with the instability of meaning that residually undermined the mythic projections of nationalism. The subject of colonial explorers such as Boyd and Leichhardt exposed in the narrative of History (and the popular consumption of this discourse) textual lacuna that enabled a re-placing of representation and experience. The concluding perceptions of Boyd (“a shadow at the distant end/Of a tunnel of sunlight”) and Leichhardt’s final expedition (“Where they go, how perish – this is nothing”) merge end with beginning, re-ground the journey so that it is the process of hesitant movement and transformation rather than linear organization and conquest that governs the narrative form. As an example of counter-discourse, Webb asserts the need for writers to return and deepen the ambiguities that attend the nation’s masternarrative.

The explorer poems traverse across the ideological territory of redemption to reveal a different country. Boyd and Leichhardt exemplified the Eurocentric perspective of how a strange and fantastic space on the boundary of Europe could be transformed by the civilizing light cast southwards by the Enlightenment. But the folly of this assumption also exposed the contrarieties signified by the Antipodes. The Great Southern Land was, as Webb wrote, a “land where man becomes myth”. It was also a melancholy land inhabited by crazed bushrangers like Daniel Morgan, a void at the edge of the civilized realm and a continual reminder of the inherent limitations of the civilizing mission. One of A.D. Hope’s earliest poems, “The Wandering Islands”, frames its meditation on modern alienation through recourse to the dislocating geography of the Antipodes. The islands, we are told, calmly resist “Cook or De Quiros” and are “unafraid of the empire- builders”. Beyond annexation, the islands provide “a refuge for shipwrecked sailor” who “sits on the shore and sullenly masturbates”, not unlike the “second-hand Europeans” who “pullulate timidly on the edge of alien shores” in “Australia”. In the hands of such poets, the ambivalence of Australian culture results in part from the way its genealogy allowed it to be continually experienced as a non-place. For this reason the dream of home seems condemned to be perpetually deferred. In this account, the Antipodes

198 signifies a country rich in connotations of both failure and possibility.

If contrariety lies at the heart of postwar antipodal experience, placial ambivalence is compounded by the unresolved legacy of dispossession. For example, Webb favoured interiorized landscapes, but as we have seen, his dramas readily absorbed the injustices of his nation’s past. His narrative of Edward John Eyre in Eyre All Alone vividly demonstrates this. This poem is made up of fourteen interrelated parts, and written in the late 1950's when the author was exiled and living in a psychiatric hospital in England. Rather than approach Eyre as a figure condemned to the theatre of history or the hazy view of outsiders, Webb dramatizes Eyre by the continual anthropomorphizing of the desert landscape. Throughout the sequence Eyre’s psyche is prodded and probed by a relentless terrain that will not conform to his incipient colonialism. Western projections of space and time announced in the opening poem are quickly and radically rendered sterile as the explorer's psyche becomes a "blank deserted tableland". The second poem, "Water", describes Eyre's almost unbearable proximity to an abject landscape. Eyre craves replenishment, yet only "bluff sunburst", the "mercenary hundred degrees" and "legless vortices of sand" answer him. "April 29th" intensifies instability. This is the moment when two Aborigines murder his colleague, Baxter, and the authority of the expedition rendered almost meaningless:

Moon-levee. This dame’s weighty yellow-jowl And precipitous brows invite a wild dog’s howling. For hours under her flag I must set course, Take countless soundings of the giant horses, While Ocean coughs her noncommittal oath. (174)

The poem inverts authority and exposes the explorer to the most abject of scenarios, complete dependency on the Aborigine, Wylie: "I must go to a rare country with this stranger". The haunting, melancholic and grotesque presence of Wylie counters Eyre. In the eighth poem, "Aboriginals", the explorer is firmly subjected to the destabilizing gaze of the natives: "All my days and nights/ You haunt me.../You are everywhere at once". Wylie hovers between archetype and actual presence: "You are beyond me – and so often/Dangerously close". Clearly, Eyre has been paralyzed by the look Echo has cast

199 back to him – a look which refuses to submit to the explorer's unifying vision.

That post war notions of identity and landscape were moving from a signifier for Narcissus to that of Echo is made even more dramatically in the hands of Webb’s contemporary, the poet, William Hart-Smith. His view of history was informed by a spatial dimension which blended phenomenological immediacy with the expressionism characterizing Webb’s psychic landscapes. The poem "Avenger" begins with the lines: "It is he who had a name but yesterday/This presence in the night that fills with so much dread" (97). His poetry appears richer and more authentic for this. In the poem, "Nullabor", published in the same year as Eyre All Alone, this skill enabled him to transform the national imaginary in an equally radical way.

"Nullabor" describes an encounter between the poet travelling by train through the interior and an Aboriginal boy. In some ways typically Jindyworobak, it breaks with the movement’s quasi-diplomatic air through the intensity of its dramatic monologue. The poem situates its drama in the desert country, the archetypal space of mid-century projections of the nation, seeing an environment where "earth and sky are reduced to an ultimate simplicity" (112). Hart-Smith conceives the desert in antipodean terms: the "leaves" are "leathery tongues" and the sky "an inverted glass cover upon a table". He also conveys the intuition of phenomenally grasped essences in his invocation of the landscape - thus the desert's horizon is perceived as a "rim out there/Not abruptly ending, but broken/An undercutting and a flowing into/The sky running into the earth and the earth running into the sky". This is not a static landscape; it oscillates between the archetypal and the phenomenological and so more exactly notates a living response to place.

At this point the poet comes into contact with the Aborigine:

And then you appeared. There you were, suddenly out there in the desert Beyond the train, beyond the line of waiting trucks Behind you, sticking out like a tail (112-113)

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On one level, Hart-Smith gives great importance to contact. Its momentousness recalls Heidegger's idea of making room (raum), which the philosopher of Being employed to distinguish "dwelling" from empiricist formulations of place. The poem makes room by describing the destabilizing implications in a manner suggestive of early German expressionist cinema - coming at the scene from strange angles and tilted sides:

You were walking away from us when you appeared, Walking away in a queer loping fashion Going off at an angle with your back to us

At this point it seems as if the moment of coincidence will lapse into a more familiar estrangement, but then:

You stopped then, turned back and ran a little distance, Then turned again and walked straight toward me, Closer and closer, till I could see into your eyes

The philosopher of the corporeal abject, Alphonso Lingis, writes that the presence of the Other weaves into the dominant discourse a subterranean history that is culturally binding: "To understand the Other is to understand these laws and these codes as imperative for one's own understanding" (Lingis 1994: 24-5). In "Nullabor", the Australian poet resembles Narcissus at last gazing into a mirror which no longer reflects the national imaginary.

I changed. Slowly I changed. I became a grotesque thing. I became white-skinned, a human being with a white skin... Grotesque!

Like the modernist painters, like the poets who both led and supplemented History, Hart- Smith’s uncovering of the grotesque radically differs from the nineteenth century. Rather than look outward at the native as a closed object of ridicule, the encounter triggers a shock that leads the writer to examine himself. The focus of the national drama becomes the colonist's white mask. The mask ("a white skin") here serves as a supreme metaphor

201 for the experiencing of psychic dislocation. Like Nolan’s Malley, or Webb’s Leichhardt, the colonist embodies the markings of absurdity in his grotesque pose. In this newly conceived (yet hauntingly old) contact zone, the themes possession and dispossession, security and insecurity, the nation and the foreign, dramatically converge.

The moment seems short-lived. The poet is jolted by the sound of the train restarting its journey ("Then my own world broke in"). It is obviously significant that the sound of the train is heard as an aberration rather than what normally might be the sound of progress. Trains also remind us of the way the interior was becoming enclosed by modernization. There can be no question of the poet ignoring this world; as the train picks up speed, the native's presence inevitably recedes and the more typical kind of cultural remoteness that haunts white society concludes the poem: "I looked back but you had gone". The concluding stanza shifts back to that most normative of genres, the picturesque. The desert country passing by might be the literary equivalent of the flowing environmental calligraphy one sometimes finds in Roslyn Gascoigne's more recent Monaro landscapes. Hart-Smith writes, "And the stones and low bushes were flowing away, faster and faster/Faster". However, if Gascoigne’s painting seems to lull the reader into a sense of belonging, Hart-Smith fills his verse with feelings of regret, lack and uncertainty. Something has not only traumatized the colonist's way of seeing, but the shock of this trauma has not been subsequently repressed. "Nullabor" concludes by returning us to the familiar, but one is only aware of strangeness. The image of progress, that is, the "grind and clatter of wheels", may finally suggest enclosure of the land, but it simultaneously conveys the awareness that dispossession could no longer be defined an experience exclusively belonging to the nation's indigenous peoples. Dispossession was enveloping the physical and psychic reality of the nation.

However interior the drama, poems like “Nullabor” and Eyre All Alone clearly responded to the externalized way Aborigines assumed greater control of their lives. Consider some scattered examples in the period which saw the publication of the aforementioned texts.

202 In the sixties, these measures were initially marginal – walking off cattle stations, setting up legal and health services. By 1967 almost 90 per cent of Australian voters chose to amend the Constitution that enabled the Commonwealth Government to include Aboriginal people in the census. Shortly after, a new ministerial position was created: Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. And in the following year, the Commonwealth was empowered to force States to remove laws that discriminated against Aborigines.

The horizon of postwar settler perceptions absorbed and reflected the changing consciousness of white Australia. The idea that to be Australian revolved around addressing the sense of not belonging assumed renewed significance for writers who emerged after the war. Judith Wright critiqued her privileged status in White Australia. Wright, whose family’s rural connections go back to the 1830s, gradually asserted the asymmetry between settler projections of the country and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. By the end of her life, she had developed this position in polemically oriented essays on the environment and Aboriginal land-rights, for example, her collection Going on Talking (1992). But it is her poetry that encapsulates most concisely how a sense of injustice increasingly shaped perceptions of environment and history: "We stepped on sure and conceded ground/A whole society extended a comforting cover of legality" (Wright 1990: 226). It is the dubious authority of this legality that energizes the tension of her voice, which she describes as a "doubtful song that has a dying fall" (Ibid). Wright is a poet who firmly understood white history in terms of dispossession and if at times it makes her verse seem overly doctrinal, it also has enabled her to articulate with impressive clarity the exchange between Echo and Narcissus:

Day has another side. Night has its time to live, a depth that rhymes our pride with its alternative. 'The Dark Ones' (194)

Wright's unveiling of the postcolonial dialectic was anticipated by Randolph Stow, whose family history also goes back to early colonial settlement. To the Islands (1958) deals with the conflict between missionaries and Aborigines, dramatizing through

203 Heriot's quest for self-redemption the understanding of the settler's spiritual alienation from the country he outwardly controlled. Stow's moral vision, a fusion of Judaic- Christianity and Taoism, breathtakingly explores the possibility of cross-cultural reconciliation. Contemporaneous to Stow, Patrick White, also a member of the landowning gentry in Australia, charted in his novels and plays the erratic journeying of misfits and dislocated visionaries and so gave new legitimacy to the themes of exile and perpetual wandering. Rather than deepening the claims of the settler or migrant to the country, White lacerates colonial culture and identifies with the abject of White Australia, as perhaps most memorably expressed in the 1961 novel, Riders in the Chariot, which through the figure of the indigenous artist, Alf Dubbo, addresses not just the anxiety of alienation, but the channeling of this condition within the vortex of creative expression – a painting no one will ever see. Rather than seeing the land through the gaze of the possessor, writers who emerged in the decades following the war discerned a correlation between their psychic estrangement from the land and the legacy of dispossession.

Of course, Stow, White and Webb perpetuate the more generic ontological haziness characterizing the representation of the Aborigine in settler Australian writing. In Voss and Eyre All Alone, Aborigines exist on the boundary of the explorer’s consciousness, aloof and alien. They appear as autochthonous elements, either arising out of or merging back into the earth. It is possible to see this as having been influenced by the Jindyworobaks who, in their art of annexation, sought to bring to the indifference of white Australia the presence of Aboriginal culture. In doing so they drew attention to the problem of national place. Rex Ingamells develops this position in "Unknown Land":

Australia is a land that has no people, For those that were hers we have torn away, We who are not hers nor can be till love Shall make us so and fill our hearts with her (Ingamells in Elliott 1979: 22)

The position reflects the ontological haziness of the Aborigine. In this writing, Aborigines exist as an Other while being unable to represent themselves. Such a problematic continues. For example, Werner Herzog’s film Where the Green Ants Dream

204 (1984) dramatizes Aboriginal claims to sacred land in the form of a legal dispute with corporate mining interests. Aborigines speak in a language no-one seems to understand – a tactic that, while signifying difference, denies Aborigines agency in the struggle for rights. A similar criticism can be made in the case of Streten Bozic, a Yugoslav immigrant who adopted the Aboriginal pseudonym, “Wongar” and produced several novels in the late seventies and early eighties to international acclaim. Bozic’s identity was revealed by Robert Drewe in 1981 and since has generally been dismissed as a fraud. For those who have read his work closely, such as Paul Sharrad, there is also skepticism: “No self-respecting civil-rights subject would write novels like Wongar” (Sharrad 1982: 43). That is to say, this is a literature not of authenticity but one resembling museum culture.

These problems notwithstanding, it remains the contention of this thesis that the focus on identity and its corresponding imputation of authenticity is itself problematic in that it mythologizes identity within the same doctrinal assumptions conforming to the nation-state. As we have seen, the tensions inherent in the writing surveyed thus far lie not with identity but a difference which is incommensurable with the measurable perimeters governing the concept of nation and its peoples. This writing forms a matrix which articulates a basic and residual estrangement from the colonialist idea of home. That dispossession was enveloping the physical and psychic reality of various settler writers reflects a meeting-ground of intersecting trajectories. The trajectories should be understood to emphasize an ontological lack of fit, a dissonance with the masternarratives of modernity and the nation-state and their privileging of progress and liberalism and cultural supremacy.

Understood this way, it is not so much how the colonialist subject is embedded in society that is of concern; rather, it is how they describe a different way of inhabiting the space of the nation-state, one which exposes the incommensurability of difference within the nation. In the geo-political map of the contemporary world such modes of habitation or “counter-habitation” are most readily created by migrants. As Edward Said observes, our age has “produced more refugees, migrant, displaced persons, and exiles than ever

205 before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts” (Said 1993: 402). Postwar migration offers significant clues to interpreting another mode of return: the nomadic practice of transgression and evasion. Consider the writing of Wongar; rather than gauge his dramas by measuring the legitimacy of his authorial persona, it is possible to interpret them as a series of movements, each escaping the panoptic enclosure represented by the nation. These movements do not position the author as ‘Aboriginal’, but they do disclose a space of affiliation in which the trauma of dispossession and persecution forge a common ground. The autobiographical background is clearly significant: Bozic’s acute alienation in postwar Australia stemmed from his status as a Serbian-Croatian migrant fleeing from war, famine and imprisonment in Europe. Livio Dobrez suggests that the intensity of his personal marginality positioned Bozic in a “in a privileged position actually to see what was going on in Australia pertaining to the plight of Aboriginal peoples” (Dobrez 1988: 132). But if this is the case, Bozic uses a highly imaginative use of autobiography, one that draws on the notion of metamorphosis and the playing of roles.

Wongar’s first novel, The Trackers, remains the most important example of his art. Published in 1975, it is an account of Dao Ba Khang, an Asian man who has ostensibly assimilated into Australian society. In a scenario resembling Gregora Samson’s metamorphosis into a hideous cockroach, Khang wakes up to find he is turning inexplicably “dark”. This transformation invites Khang to flee his society and disrupt White Australian assimilationist expectations. The further he moves away, the more extreme his horizon of marginality. It culminates in a nightmarish subterranean space in which Khang comes into contact with Aboriginal subjects who share the Asian man’s precarious existence. This ground of convergence describes ontological distance between different peoples, but it also asserts commonality. In doing so, Khang, the embodiment of ontological homelessness, begins to belong:

He would search for other members of the family and become acquainted with them, and once he had become known to the entire family it would be hard for anyone to pick on him and say he was not a native. People would no longer stare

206 at his face or question him about the colour of his skin… now for the first time since he had seen his change of colour Dao knew there was a way to survive (Wongar 1975: 67).

In the rhizome of becoming, Wongar’s novel of transgression diagnoses a society whose genealogy is that of the penal colony. It returns us to Ralph Rashleigh’s departures from his ambiguous home to travel on roads that mean his getting lost. As I suggested, Rashleigh belongs to those white nomads transgressing the panoptic rationale of stasis and order and revealing in their intensity of movement (and alienation) a dimension of spatial experience elsewhere to the order of civil society, a place where fact and fiction are continually interwoven. But in contrast to Rashleigh’s fear of further attack from the natives, Khang finds common ground with them – not in the modern sense of reconciliation, but with the commonality of dispossession itself.

Rather than see Wongar as a cultural dead-end in the evolution of Australian- Aboriginal land-rights activism, positioning him with other migratory voices who echo that grounding sense of dispossession returns a reading to the insight which consistently energizes the re-placing of Australian place. In this context, place reveals the commonality of dispossession; it grounds a proliferating array of liminal spaces that oscillate between home and alienation. This insight is what distinguishes the anxiety of Wongar from that of Ralph Rashleigh for, as I have observed, they form otherwise parallel trajectories across the archive of Australian literature. But where the convict- settler’s possession of the land deepens his fear of further attack from the outsider, the migrant postcolonial subject inhabits where settlement is most unsettled. Far from being an aberrant noise in need of silencing, the expressive displacing of place has increasingly come to be recognized as the creative and conceptual point of departure.

To displace place in the act of dialogically transforming the landscape of the nation signifies the intersection between the post-colonial ambivalence of the ground and what Papastergiadis terms “ontological homelessness”, a theme he correctly identifies

207 belonging to the history of modernity (Papastergiadis 1998: 35). Here dislocated histories of migrant, indigene and stranger come into constant contact. In the narratives of nation and colonialism, these histories are repressed or rigidly translated within the doctrinal assumptions of identity discourse. But it is possible to interpret this zone of contact as the production of a different experience, one neither unique nor new: the hybrid.

This mode of interpretation informs a re-placing of Australian cultural difference as well as the relation between difference and the political coordinates of the nation-state. Re-placing describes a language of ceaseless transformation as well as of ‘return’: both echo the colonist’s residually ambiguous sense of belonging. But in contrast with the silence that followed the enclosure of difference in colonial literature, the re-placing of nation intimates an attitude of openness to the suspicion that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. To paraphrase the modernist poet, T. S. Eliot, it is at this end that there can be found a beginning. Nolan’s portrait of Ern Malley represented a truly postcolonial hybrid subject; it signalled a coming to terms with a subject who emphatically rejects the nationalist fetishisation of the ‘spirit of place’ – the rhetorical endgame of enclosing the landscape - , who openly appropriates the language of empire without reiterating the cultural cringe, and whose essential strangeness enables him to identify with the unheimlich of colonialist history and identity.

Randolph Stow belonged to an important generation of writers which emerged after the war. Stow exemplifies how dialogical transformation intersects with the increasing sense of “ontological homelessness” influencing Australian writing. If To the Islands (1958) dealt examined the settler's spiritual alienation from the country he officially controlled, The Merry Go Round in the Sea (1967), exposed the incipient blindness of the settler’s narcissistic way of seeing, while asserting homelessness as a literal and metaphorical point of departure from the burden of nationhood.

The Merry Go Round in the Sea moves from the rather heavy-handed symbolism of the early novels to a harder-edged realism. The notion of cultural difference relates not

208 to the Aborigine but to the Second World War and the threat of Japanese invasion. Japan has generally existed in the realm of fantasy – the other of White Australia’s preoccupations. The onset of the war potentially challenged this, if only because the presence of Asia, albeit still conceived in terms of invasion, never seemed more proximate. Ironically however, the war returns Rick to the nation’s inherently antipodean condition. Australia wins the war, but there remains the mood of anxiety and alienation. Rick Maplestead, the young narrator's older cousin, comes home bearing the physical and psychic scars of Changi - an experience that for both will permanently retard heroic formulations of national and individual identity. Rick becomes set apart from his family and their basically shallow ties to the country. When he recovers from the war, he seeks to preserve this estrangement in his ostensible refusal to "grow up". As he confides to his cousin, Rob, when the boy ponders why his cousin spends so much time with him: "You're the only person of my age I've got to play with" (Stow 1967: 162).

The world inhabited by Rick is anathema to the comforting amnesia characterizing the postwar nation. His experience as a POW reveals the detritus of official representations. Rick has inhabited a different landscape during the war. His diary speculates that "war is a different country, it doesn't matter which side you were on, or if you won or lost, if you fought a war you become a citizen of another, extra nation, not on the map" (Stow 1967: 165). The drawings of emaciated allied soldiers - the “dark skeleton in enormous boots, a grinning skull in a slouch hat” (166) - privately documents home as an unhomely place. It is the new yet old landscape of the grotesque, the world of Tucker's antipodean head, Nolan's schizophrenic soldiers, Boyd's caged artist incarcerated in the desert country, and further back, Barcroft Boake (one of Stow's favourite poets), whose death-filled frontier country symbolized the fragile settler psyche of the nineteenth century. There can be no escaping the melancholy of the Antipodes. To be Australian now meant acknowledging that one is condemned to inhabit a world where masculine heroism is illusory. Rick quotes the poetry of Donne to convey this sense of return: "Thy firmness makes my circle just/ And makes me end where I begun" (150).

Stow positioned his family drama within the larger history of colonialism, and so

209 questioned in new and varied forms the legitimacy of settler history. The nation now provided only the most fragile of surfaces with which to identify, a conclusion ironically shown when Rick gazes at himself projected by the mirror: "I'll live forever" he almost mockingly tells his cousin. The pose is part of a fragile game, and when the game wears thin he will attempt to leave behind the rhetoric of a society that pretends nothing will ever change or threaten its comfort. "What do you dream of?" asks a bewildered Rob at one point, "the past and future", Rick replies. He means a past where innocence is shattered by contact with the violence of war and a future that, for all its incipient danger, must move elsewhere to the prison-house of family and nation. Through Rick’s internalized homelessness, Stow showed how Australian subject could no longer afford to see merely ‘himself’ when talking about history and identity; a different kind of history was needed. And so Rick abandons his cousin, "I don't want a family, I don't want a country. Families and countries are biological accidents. I've grown up, and I'm on my own" (273). Escaping Australia on the postwar margins entailed accepting that the old stories insulating the nation no longer worked.

Stow did not attempt to dramatize Rick’s quest beyond the nation. The novel ends by leaving Rick’s escape from Australia open-ended. This strategy enables Stow to celebrate ambiguous relativity. Rather than endorse an attitude that legitimates the national imaginary, the novel ends by seeing history and identity provisionally. Or does it? Externally, Rick belongs to the mid-century expatriates like Germaine Greer and Clive James frustrated by the cultural homogeneity of Australia. And yet internally the transgression of the nation’s borders does not in-itself signify escape from White Australia. Like Herbert Badgery, it remains likely that Rick Maplestead will remain imprisoned by the ideological prison-house of the nation-state. Rick, whose nightmares see him twist and turn between future and past, is a man trapped by his past and his projected future. As evidenced in his Acknowledgement to Merry-Go-Round, Stow had a good role model for his character: the soldier and later novelist-memoirist, Russell Braddon who, having survived Changi, gained international recognition in the best-seller, The Naked Island (1952), an autobiography of his war-time experiences. When in 1958 he published his sequel, End of a Hate, Braddon showed his hand in trying to come to

210 terms with the past and, more importantly, the future. It is an anxiety-ridden work because Braddon’s projections still carry the burden of unremitting hate for all things 'Japanese'.3

Claiming to be "devoid of all bitterness", Braddon recognizes that Australia can no longer retreat to the bosom of the British Empire. War and post-war contact with Japan meant a future in which "their culture and our future" merge. However, recognition itself does not enable the author to escape nostalgia for White Australia. Japan will forever be linked to the "war that will last a hundred years", as he put it in The Naked Island.4 The sentiment is reiterated in almost every line of the sequel; the Japanese are depicted as culturally distant from the civilized norms of Braddon; they are condemned to stand behind the banner of the hundred-year war because "this is what they said and felt" (Braddon 1958: 160). The homogenous alien mass is "a proud nation of people whose tradition is war-like and whose instinct is to look backwards to death and the example of ancestors rather than look forwards to peace and the benefit of prosperity" (167). For one whose stated position is progressive, Braddon’s stereotype of a timeless Japanese culture is itself indicative of an utterly singular way of seeing that has always energised the nation’s fear of Asia. The book’s central tension is this: although the Pacific War transposes the context, the ideology of White Australia remains dominant. Consider the author’s take on the invasion scenario:

Japan sowed the seed of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’. That seed has grown. That seed has grown. Japan does not forget that she planted it. She is the world’s greatest shipbuilder and one of the nations of the world which is poorest in raw materials and food. Her instinct, unless the shortage of food and raw materials and profitable markets are relieved, will be to go in her ships and take them (167).

Caught between past and present and between distance and proximity, End of a Hate nervously struggles with a shifting ground. In the very act of diagnosing possibility, the text remains hateful of the consequences:

3 As if engaged in a symbiotic relation with Braddon, Rick gives all the signs that he is similarly condemned to the pathology of hate when he confesses that if given the chance he would "have wiped Japan off the map" (Stow 1967: 161). 4 Braddon attributes this phrase to a Japanese soldier made to the author at the ostensible end of the war.

211

Once I hated anyone who was Japanese simply because he came from Japan. Now I can no longer hate individuals. But I can still hate their culture, which makes them what they are... (169).

Of course, this imagery belongs to the repertoire of stereotypical imagery one might associate with orientalism is its crudest sense. It is also profoundly indicative of White Australia in that it returns to the future drawn by the great Bulletin cartoonist, Livingstone Hopkins, namely Piebald Possibilities (1902). Braddon’s future is grimly and self-knowingly myopic because he cannot see Asia beyond the abject. So loathsome is the prospect of hybridity that his audience cannot help but recoil in horror. Braddon cannot break from the pathology of settler nationalism even when he acknowledges the racism imprisoning its history.

In this context neither hybridity nor the transgression of borders as a point of departure is very meaningful unless its ambivalence is, in Julia Kristeva’s sense, internalized. The lesson drawn from a Russell Braddon is that it is not enough to map homelessness in empirical terms; it needs to be something more, something which is as ontological as geographical, as interiorized as exteriorized.

Francis Webb’s narrative of Edward John Eyre in Eyre All Alone exemplifies how interiorized homelessness constitutes an authentic and significant mode of social being. The poem was written when the author was exiled and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in England. But Webb had not internalized the perspective of the hospital; instead, his imagination returned to the subject of the Australian interior and the ambivalence haunting the colonist’s relation to the landscape. As we have observed, Webb’s landscapes do not finally conform to the discourse of history and, we might add, geography. Leichhardt’s and Boyd’s respective disappearances offer no representation but in the haziest sense – their narratives fall apart and end by going, in empirical terms, nowhere. They are stories which dwell in the realm of ontological homelessness. In the case of Eyre, homelessness is ironically contrasted with the firm sense of purpose and direction driving his mission: to map a stock-route to the west by route of the Great

212 Australian Bight. Yet by the time Baxter is murdered and Eyre is left alone with Wylie and the marauding “Aboriginals”, the imperial ideology energizing the explorer’s quest is all too apparent. He is “alone” because his view of terra incognita condemns him to cultural solipsism. But this signifies no cultural dead-end; the very fragility of Eyre’s isolation reveals a different, far more provisional, inhabiting of the landscape.

Far from the picturesque, the explorer’s hesitant and stuttering occupancy of the sun-blasted void of the desert dramatizes the process of creativity. Webb's poetry projects onto the landscape a dialogical process that reconstitutes his (Eyre's) self. On another level, this process merges with the national myth-making discourse of the mid-century. The poem "Banksia" most clearly illustrates this complex. In accordance with the tenor and vehicle of the larger narrative, the poem begins by foregrounding Eyre's paralyzed condition. He and Wylie are ridiculed by "large agnostic ribaldries of an ocean", a phrase echoing the bathos of the sixth poem, "From the Centre", where Eyre's alienation reaches its nadir as expressed in the lines: "The Centre has rolled me as a dice/Into hot air above tableland". In this poem, the "pride" that is Eyre's "gross family tree" contracts into "some narrow pride". The anthropomorphism is carried over in "Banksia", again to make explicit the withering of a symbol central to Eyre's narcissism. But now it is History, not pride, which forms the subject:

History, wasted and decadent pack horse Munching a handful of chaff, dry old national motives, Shambles skinny and bony into the final push

Wylie responds to Eyre's questioning by stating that "I see a flower" and the poem and narrative is revitalized. There follows an outpouring of joyous energy:

Turn the horses loose. Out of earth a power. Banksia, honeysuckle, forked-lightning fruit of pain. Motive pierces the cloud-scrub once again.

The poem concludes:

213 Stolid emotion of a single star, Banksia, carry fire, like the thurifer Over my sandy tongue-tied barren ground

Wylie what do you hear? I hear the Sound (180)

Eyre's sighting of the flower offers a moment of epiphany that restores spiritual meaning to the quest. The mood of these lines closely follows Eyre's Journals in which the sighting of the flower "cheered" the explorer "greatly" shortly leading him "to expect some important and decisive change in the character and formation of the country". Eyre had not expected to see a banksia westward of Spencer's Gulf. In itself the sighting was an isolated one and the flower proved to be "stunted" and "insignificant". However, it added "to the interest and expectation with which every mile of our route had now become invested" (Eyre 1845: 14).

It is important to situate a poem like “Banksia” not just in relation to mid-century Australian modernism, or the continual antipodean tension which interprets place as a provisional zone oscillating between national belonging and exile, but to the Catholic intellectual tradition. In his study of Webb, The Gimbals of Unease, Bill Ashcroft argues that two strands of Catholic philosophy can be seen to operate in Webb’s poetry. The first is Thomism, derived from the writing of Aquinas, which sees Divine Being in terms of specificity of matter (“thisness”). The second stems from the writing of Ignatius, who argued that full apprehension of the Divine can only occur through a number of stages. As the stages unfold, the subject immerses himself in minutiae accompanying the successive acts in the life and death of Christ (Ashcroft 1996: 32-4). In this context, the tension informing Webb’s poetry becomes clearer: the journey motif offers an overarching, universal structure while the idea of material specificity grounds the transcendental. In this sense, Eyre’s sighting of the flower asserts the connection between the incommensurable and the commensurate, the sacred and the profane.

It is not so much a fixed, irreducible object which is celebrated in “Banksia”, but the experiencing of cultural difference as it emerges in the oscillation between two poles

214 of signification. This is why, despite its obvious mythologizing logic, the poem does not finally conform to the equivalent of a pictorial national or traditional landscape. To interpret this way would entail strengthening a boundary to contain identity. Instead, “Banksia” dramatizes the complex, irreducible process of continual, grounded transformation.

In this zone of provisionality, the transcendental nature of the quest is increasingly subsumed by the discontinuity of grounded transformation. The refrain of the poem intones the words of Exodus: "Walk, walk. From dubious footfall one/At Fowler’s Bay the chosen must push on". The desert remains symbolic of exile, where, like the Israelites, Antipodeans are condemned to wander perpetually. But while this is anxiety-laden, the hesitant “footfall” asserts the primacy of continuously being in the middle, of occupying the interstices of language and environment. Throughout the sequence, each narrative ends reveals a beginning. By the twelfth poem of the sequence, “The Whaler”, Eyre and Wylie’s respite from their movement on board the security offered by the French whaling craft is completely transformed by this understanding. Eyre gazes from his room:

… at creation’s very edge I quench the lantern with my own two hands And stare out gingerly into the storm

Rather than interpret experience through the prison-house of identity, Eyre perceives it as a continual process of becoming. His being is now inextricable from the “thisness” of place. He embodies a border zone.

Finally, in Eyre All Alone the boundary discloses a ground significantly open to paradox, a zone where history has yet to be calcified by nationalist and imperialist representations. Occupying the boundary serves to facilitate dialogue because they locate and dramatize where contact is made. The poem sequence concludes in a way which powerfully demonstrates this awareness. Eyre’s heroic entry at King George’s Sound is subverted by the visible bathos of the explorer's appearance. The prospective triumph of

215 the journey is entirely imagined through the trope of the grotesque:

My torn stinking shirt, my boots, And hair a tangle of scrub; the long knotted absurd beard That is my conscience grown in the desert country (184).

Never quite a part of the land even when he appears its master, Eyre stands "truly alone". Still craving redemption at the end of the journey, he resembles Leichhardt "stripped and bound" questioning the significance of his relentless quest: "How shall I face their golden faces, pure voices?/O my expedition: Baxter, Wylie!". Suddenly,

But the rain has stopped. On the main road Someone moves.

‘Who’ the Someone is has generated much discussion. Some critics see here a figure of Christ-like significance, even Christ; some see the moment within the tradition of the Sartrean encounter with the Other. Ashcroft interprets the presence as exemplifying Webb's wider creative strategy of returning to the realm of the everyday. I would add that this moment is a supreme example of the European sublime recast in antipodean terms. But what most requires emphasis at this point in our argument is how the ambiguity of identity is balanced with the heightened moment of disruption itself. The moment of contact has all the impact Heidegger famously ascribed to the "lightening bolt" that marks the "presencing" of Being. But there is no joyous outpouring of lyricism. Eyre's subjectivity no longer looks outward, but, like the speaker in "Nullabor", is firmly held in check by the gaze which counters and immobilizes his previously conclusive motion. The moment is dramatically new, but thematically old. Eyre is a battered Narcissus, again paralyzed by the look Echo has cast back to him. One thing is very clear in this performatively constituted zone, the country refuses to submit to the explorer's unifying vision.

Yet just as importantly, and something which goes beyond even the anxiety-laden contact described in Hart-Smith’s poem, the encounter described in “The Sound” grapples with that primordial moment explored in earlier chapters: where the border zone

216 is neither atemporal nor a priori but is brought into existence through the intensity of the historically grounded, liminal encounter between the subject and his object. It is a precognitive space where unsettled differences meet and are allowed to resonate in all their ambiguity. And rather than settle differences, rather than translate them into the discourse of identity; the very unresolved nature of postcolonial identity defines the place. It is a moment of affirmation, of breakthrough in the wasteland of colonialist solipsism.

Webb’s creative trajectory is extreme in its difficulty and, often seeming singularity, but it can be interpreted to represent a decisive break from the traditional discourses of Euro-Australian value – privileged poetic insight, the iconic national landscape calcified in the theatre of History – towards a provisional zone richly signifying a history between possibility and failure, between home and exile, between Europe and other, between the tension of dislocated, nomadic passages and the settler need to legitimate a sense of belonging. It is this movement, accumulated in the multiple dislocations across postcolonial experience, which has been traced in such examples as the contact zone (Hart-Smith), the forging of escape modes (Wongar, Stow), and the commonality of dispossession. It is possible to witness in this movement an outlook which rejects the nationalist fetishisation of the ‘spirit of place’ and which appropriates the language of empire without reiterating the cultural cringe. What unifies these disparate texts is a mode of being-open to the knowledge that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being.

Roads & No Roads In the years following World War 2, Australian society changed from being an extension of the British Type to being part of a lifestyle which originated in the "American Way of Life". Home ownership would rapidly increase during the 1950s and 1960s and household appliances, cars and popular culture would characterize postwar affluence revolving around suburban family life. There were other decisive shifts. In 1930 Keith Hancock could confidently identify the White Australia Policy as "the indispensable condition of every other Australian policy" (Hancock 1961: 59). This condition entailed

217 seeing the country populated by the British Type, or what Hancock termed "independent Australian Britons". However, in less than two decades Australians were forced to rethink their allegiance. The threat of Japanese invasion had made clear the need to boost the economic and military strength of the nation and migrants in large numbers would help address this.5 Between 1945 and 1975 Australia’s population was almost to double. At least half of this increase was the consequence of the immigration program instigated by Prime Minister Chifley and the first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell. Postwar immigration went through various stages: "assimilation", in which "New Australians" were expected to conform to monocultural norms, "integration", where cultural differences were tolerated for a short period before the migrant merged into the English-speaking community, and most recently "multiculturalism", in which ethnic pluralism replaced racial homogeneity. Although a problematic term for critics from the Left and Right, by the last decade of the century it was possible to describe multiculturalism as part of a positive movement towards "transnational" identity.

Postwar migration illustrates most dramatically how the social map of the nation in the past half-century has undergone profound transformation. Different movements, people and languages have flowed within, without and across the nation-state’s borders bringing into question traditional perceptions of cultural identity. Yet, as Paul Foss showed in his important essay “Theatrum Nondum Cognitorum”, transformation also deepens the continuum of inversion. Prior to, say, 1770, it is possible to see Australia as an invention of Europe. After 1770 British settlement entailed a mapping which grounded and, in some ways, dispelled European projections – many of which were imaginative rather than factual – transforming the country in Australian terms. However, as Foss writes, the “Antipodes is never entirely forgotten”. It “continues to play the role of an alter orbis (another world) and to reflect a contrario” (Foss 1981: 27). Where notions of opportunity and the promise of redemption lie, so too does alterity. The road of progress discloses the no road of the antipodal void. In Voss, Patrick White would write: "In

5 Here I am oversimplifying the story. For example, Australian perceptions of the Asia-Pacific were undergoing significant shifts during the two decades previous to the 40s. These changes occurred mainly in the area of building trade relations, but they encouraged serious reassessment of anglocentrism in Australian culture. For an account of these shifts see David Walker’s Anxious Nation (1999), especially chapters 15 and 16, passim, and Sean Brawley's The White Peril (1995).

218 Australia, one can more easily discard the inessential and attempt the infinite" (White 1957: 37). An explorer of the interior like Voss "will be burnt up and rendered grotesque", but only through grounding his suffering in this different country can self- discovery emerge.

Migrant writing in postwar Australia offers another important form of return. Although ostensibly associated with nostalgia, some writers who explore migration as their principle theme recognize the uncanny way the new country oscillates between the associations of home and homelessness. Rather than respond to cultural provisionality with anxiety, the poet, Anna Couani, is interested in the elementary ways space is made into place. In “Boundary”, she observes:

Marking a boundary to define a space. A space to live in; Space for an idea. Marking the boundaries of it. Creating the space, making it empty so something can appear. Squares of blue sky framed by the window. An object moves across it. A clear shape in the blue. Clearing a space, marking out a territory. Defining a city (Couani & Lyssiotis 1989).

The act of clearing a space returns a reading to the elementary process of transforming and inhabiting environment. Opportunity resides in the discontinuous fragments which signify cultural hybridity (“A clear shape in the blue”). But as Couani inadvertently suggests, even so primordial a practice of making a place cannot escape something profoundly colonialist in temperament, that is, in the act of clearing one is compelled to make space “empty so something can appear” – a kind of rhetorical tabula rasa.

If space is never passive, if it can be made and remade, the act of clearing it carries with it problematical consequences. The most dramatic illustration of this tension emerges from our relation to Aboriginal history. As the nation’s earliest inhabitants, the injustice of their dispossession serves to measure the relation between contemporary white Australians and the country. Les Murray demonstrates a complex merging of quotidian richness, settler nativism and Aboriginal culture. By exploring the settler’s

219 spiritual relation with the rural environment, Murray, who has described himself as the "last of the Jindyworobaks", has skillfully developed the nativist position.6 The most extensive expression is the celebrated sequence, "The Budelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle" (1977), which revises the modernist expression of settler alienation by narrating a rural family's pilgrimage to their many ancestral sites. The scope of the poem reflects its ambition to reconcile geography, generations, new and old Australians. Here is the first stanza:

The people are eating dinner in that country of Legge’s Lake; behind flywire and venetians, in the dimmed cool, town people eat lunch. Plying knives and forks with a peek-in sound, with a tuck-in sound they are thinking about relatives and inventory, they are talking about customers and visitors. In that country of memorial iron, on the creek-facing hills there, they are thinking about bean plants, and rings of tank water, of growing a pumpkin by Christmas; rolling a cigarette, they say thoughtfully Yes, and their companion nods, considering. Fresh sheets have been spread and tucked tight, childhood rooms have been seen to, For this is the season when children return with their children To the place of Bingham’s Ghost, of the Old Timber Wharf, of the Big Flood That Time, the country of the rationalized farms, of the day-and-night farms, and of the Pitt Street farms, of the Shire Engineer and many other rumours, of the tractor crankcase furred with chaff, the places of sitting down near ferns, the snake-fear places, the cattle- crossing-long-ago-places. (Murray 2002: 137-138)

The Jindyworobaks reasoned that for Europeans to belong here it was necessary to become like the country’s original inhabitants. In his poem cycle, Murray has pursued

6 In doing so he castigates the elite discourse of the metropolis (‘Athens’), as his celebrated debate on the Boetian/Athenian traditions with the London-based poet, Peter Porter, demonstrates. Although the model does not strictly conform to separating rural and urban worlds, Murray's siding with Boetia correlated with his belief that the nation was overly subservient to metropolitan prejudices - a condition that resulted not only in the view of the bush as an anachronism but a diminished appreciation on both the family and the individual. Another consequence of metropolitan exclusivism can be seen in the way it denigrates indigenous traditions, both settler and Aboriginal. The English language carries with it this prejudice and so therefore our history.

220 this idea audaciously. He stylistically and conceptually draws upon R.M. Berndt's 1948 translation of Arnhem Land cycles to fashion his idea of a national vernacular that could parallel the Aboriginal conception of place in a way as much linguistic as conceptual.

The convergence of cultures operates temporally and spatially; the "cattle- crossing-long-ago places" and the "place of Bingham’s Ghost" combine to invoke the landscape as a palimpsest carrying forward the traces of its past. As with spatial history, Murray privileges the palimpsest as a way of understanding the bicultural composition of the land. In doing so, he also anticipates the problem such a strategy raises, that is, how this essentially 'creative', rather than 'political', aesthetic has the effect of sublimating psychic displacement into a sense of home. However, it remains all too possible to see this as an art of reinscription. It identifies with Aboriginal culture in order to acknowledge the importance of the latter’s seniority, but while this successfully portrays the landscape as a densely conceived text, the value of indigenous culture is finally measured by the way it deepens the European’s engagement with the land. The clue lies in how the Aboriginal presence conclusively operates in aesthetic rather than quotidian terms, a shadowy figure – always rural, or outback, - whose importance lies in the way it teaches the white settler to settle more peacefully:

The stars of the holiday step out all over the sky. People look up at them, out of their caravan doors and their campsites; people look out from the farms, before going back; they gaze at their year’s worth of stars. The Cross hangs head-downward, out there over Markwell; it turns upon the Still Place, the pivot of the Seasons, with one shoulder rising (145)

Despite the ingenious invocation of Aboriginal culture, the poem ends by converging not at all with the Aborigine but with Murray’s individualist Catholicism. The image of the cross that "hangs head downward" is beautifully responsive to the pastoral rhythms of the land, but the ethos finally invoked remains firmly Christian.

Whether migrant, Christian, individualist or quotidian, recent Australian writing

221 continues to perpetuate the belief that the Antipodes signifies a land of opportunity. The cultural narratives remain roads familiar to earlier generations. The late-twentieth century is by no means at odds with the assumptions underlying the outlook offered by the official historian of the First World War, C. E. W. Bean, at the beginning of the century when he described the nation as a country whose meaning was there "still to make" (Bean 1975). The key source of inspiration has changed – for Bean it could be found in the "noble bushman" – but the basic idea of redemption has not. The problem with this principle is that it remains a road too well travelled.

If the provisionality of experience can be incorporated by colonialist discourse to enclose the land, this should not diminish how the re-placing process has also challenged the master-narrative of nation. The modality of postcolonial Australian experience has persistently augmented creative resistance to dramatize the basic tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the formlessness of everyday life. Place is the ‘ground’ of that life, one which emerges dialogically within the tension of the imposed discourse of colonialism: between possibility and failure, between home and exile, between Europe and other. In the development of Australian writing, this language of ceaseless transformation has increasingly permeated subjectivity, language and history. It is also a language of ‘return’: both echoing the colonist’s residually ambiguous sense of belonging, and returning to what we saw characterizing the spatial contracts with cultural difference in earlier chapters.

However, in contrast with the silence that followed the enclosure of difference in colonial literature, the writing which emerged in the decades that followed from the mid- century displays increasing openness to the risky proposition that unresolved modes of hybridity are constitutive features of Australian social being. Today, colonialist discourse can be understood as an ever-changing, yet persistent boundary zone, one where founding monuments of conquest also disclose a place where unsanctioned yet entirely grounded experiences occur. And rather than settle differences, rather than translate them into the

222 discourse of identity; the very performance of identity itself defines the place.

One of the most significant examples of this shift can be found in the arguably non-European topography of contemporary Aboriginal art. This body of work is as diverse as it is conceptually and stylistically rich. Its emergence can be traced to the Papunya art which developed in 1971 through the encouragement of local schoolteacher, Geoffrey Bardon in an Aboriginal settlement near Alice Springs. The Papunya Tula movement was the result of contact between Australian colonial systems and Aboriginal artists divorced from the rituals of tribal existence. The Papunya paintings are multilayered iconographic maps of the landscape that rework traditional motifs, designs and sites within the commodified art-work destined to circulate on the Western market. Many Papunya artists worked together, thereby maintaining kinship relationships in the creation of canvasses and murals. Important internationally recognized solo artists have also emerged in the eighties and nineties such as Turkey Tolsen Tjupurrula, Michael Nelson Tjakamarra and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Alongside this achievement the work of Emily Kngwarreye, revealed retrospectively at the close of the century, broke with the domination of Aboriginal male artists revealing a different form of environmental abstraction.

This mode of abstractionism, grounded as it is in the performative and liminal aspects of bodily expression, articulates a natural parallel with the development of such important white Australian abstract artists such as Tony Tuckson, Fred Williams, and John Olsen. The gestural canvases of Tony Tuckson share with Papunya dot painting a fundamental resistance to mimetic translation; they embody a uniquely local relation between artist and canvas; they can be approached by the viewer from various perspectives and thus resist the confines of the traditional art-viewing space. Yet Paul Carter warns against failing to recognize important differences. The seeming environmental abstraction of Fred Williams disguises a representational logic: scattered dots stand in for trees on a Victorian plain. In contrast, Rover Thomas does not map the landscape; he documents how the country “comes into being”. Here Western perspective makes no sense because the canvas offers no point of view – its patterns “evoke certain

223 tonal relationships in the history of the locality” (Carter 1996a: 362).

Whether one agrees with this perceived distinction, it neatly demonstrates how, when reflecting on a truly non-European topography, cultural and national unity remains an unattainable concept. The moment when conceptual convergence between two alienated cultures seems possible, irreducible difference (ascribed to either Aboriginality or Eurocentrism) returns to rupture the claim for a unitary Australian identity. This state of affairs reflects the inescapable historical relation with Australia's antipodean narratives of identity. Any discussion of the spaces so delicately transformed into places can never escape the prison-house that is the colonist's residually ambiguous sense of belonging.

At the close of the century, it was increasingly difficult not to see that any mode of postcolonial writing was inherently a form of return. One was condemned to return to the process of settlement – a tension informing different and sometimes conflicting modes of territorial occupancy speculated by poets, novelists and critics. This derives from the peculiar consensus which has always influenced historical, tacit, literary, artistic and, most recently in the form of Mabo, legalistic discourses. The dialogical imagination in postcolonial Australia is inextricable from the belief that white claims to the land, while constitutional in power, have also failed to hold dialogue with the land and its inhabitants. In spite of its picaresque wanderings, Illywhacker devotes considerable space to dwell long and hard on the fact that Australians can no longer claim innocence in their desire to enclose the environment. Instead, Herbert Badgery and Leah Goldstein must confront their problematical cultural baggage: unthinking material acquisitiveness, the correlation between property and patriarchy, the way nationalist jargon colludes with British (and Western) imperialism. And beyond all such matters lies the disavowed history of dispossession and genocide invoked by the ghostly presence of the Aboriginal landscape.

In this world even the act of mythologizing is not an expression of belonging but a deepening of our ambiguous relation to the country. As postcolonial subjects we today wander without a fixed home; we exist without the ontological security provided by

224 enclosure. Our being-in-the-world is inextricably linked to the history of violence inscribed on the colonial periphery. The process of writing is always-already one of revising, returning, and reasserting the intuition that the ground is not given.

The critic and academic, Stephen Muecke, has more recently emphatically responded to the ambivalent nature of our history by stating: “If Australia is to be changed, for example by becoming a republic, then the kinds of stories we tell about Australia will have to change” (Muecke 1997: 220). This statement drives the conclusion of No Road (bitumen all the way), a loose collection of traveling stories written by Muecke. It typifies, among other things, an expansiveness characteristic of this reflexive, some would say postmodern, mode of writing which merges criticism, theory, autobiography and fiction in the process of rethinking perceptions of Australian identity. No Road represents a new genre of Australian writing which attempts to notate the sense of a ground not given, a genre where the work of Paul Carter, Michael Taussig, Ross Gibson and Meaghan Morris can also be situated.

No Road straddles generic boundaries in its particular attempt to inhabit the country differently. Muecke is all too aware that white claims to the land, while constitutional in power, have failed to hold dialogue with the land and its inhabitants. The boundaries his writing traverses express then not a unique sense of newness; rather, it invokes the uncanny quality of travelling, writing and creativity in postcolonial Australia. At this juncture of our history, landscape appears as familiar as it does strange, old as new, sacred and profane. The writer is a nomad, travelling the colonialist archive as s/he does the roads which map and organize movement across the country. In doing so one reinterprets, opens up new perspectives. But one is just as much re-visiting, holding dialogue with ghosts of the past. Their presence insinuates itself within any contemporary statement – through “the respectful gesture of allusion, or the leap, capture and cut of quotation” (Muecke 1997: 173). The book’s cover demonstrates the complex interface of the uncanny. It is a polished photo of the archetypal outback space asserting the landscape’s expansiveness. Its familiarity is an example of what Roland Barthes terms studium: the generic, formal property of a photographic text. However, the laminated

225 sheen of the image creates a certain excess in the signification, a quality Barthes termed punctum: a “punctuating” effect which distorts an otherwise familiar icon. The audience thus oscillates in its response to an image both familiar and strange. Traditionally distanced signifiers merge to mark a place where transformation and hybridity continually energize meaning.

Photos, some archival, others personal, play an important role in No Road. Each of the text’s nine sections is preceded with a photo describing the specific place or concept explored in that section. The photo preceding the third section, entitled “Separation”, is as harrowing as it is fascinating (76). Taken in 1939, it shows three North West Aboriginal women, turned away from the viewer, their backs horribly lacerated by tribal scarification. The generic quality of the image seems at first geographically and temporally archaic. However, when grounded through the author’s meditation on textual practices, it serves to trigger or punctuate a thread of commonality that binds cross-cultural modes of subject-formation. For these women, skin is a parchment upon which is inscribed the signatory author/ity of tribal identity. For the postmodern writer, language is also a surface, one devoid of inner meaning or depth. In each case, the relationship between moving body and sign is blurred. The body embodies the sign; carrying forward in its everyday practices the memory of inscription, but also transforming this history through its nomadic movements.

It is the principle of excess that locates the creative space of expression in No Road. The excess of bodily inscription parallels the intensity of movement linking “travel writing, nomadic theory”. Muecke’s own trajectory is one of return to the influential collaborative work, Reading the Country, which he coauthored in 1983. This work helped introduce the continental nomadism of Deleuze and Guattari into Australian studies. No Road extends the principle of nomadism, but is stylistically more flexible: dialogical voices permeate the storyteller’s movement rather than three distinct positions. This creates a less stratified grid and asserts instead the fluid of “smooth” event of becoming. Becoming, rather than identity, transforms the anxiety of homelessness into something positive. From its opening pages, No Road invokes the proposition that the commonality

226 of dispossession might better direct the meeting between black and white cultures. It is certainly the tenuousness of home which informs Muecke’s reading of Aboriginality. The title acknowledges the influence of friend and activist, Gloria Brennan, whose own attempts at affiliation with Aboriginal society left her with the belief that any representation seems condemned to occur on thoroughly territorialized ground (“bitumen all the way”). The “no road” signifies a realignment of possibility, away from bitumen to those provisional zones that mark where the performing subject moves across territories, inscribing its presence, constituting a history, making a place.

Muecke’s interest in decentred narratives envelops and transforms traditional landscape. When describing an iconic space, he writes: “images of hotels sketched against the other landscapes, layered, no real Nature, only palimpsests and impositions” (29). Hotels offer an important trope for Muecke’s notion of his authorial voice. He is “an accidental intellectual”, whose overlapping with the tourist derives from their shared relation to the panopticism of Western perspectivism. Yet rather than accept entities such as the nation as given, No Road reworks them through the sheer intensity of its own logic. The value of the nomadic history is that its meaning lies in-between coordinates; it is the intensity of the movement itself –always-already a process of transformation – which defines the event. Not surprisingly, many of the work’s key images concern movement: the kinetic language of tribal walking patterns (196-7), Crusoe’s monologic reflection on the single footprint on the beach (198-203). However, it is the movement that traverses borders and brings the storyteller into contact with others in his meandering motion from his Sydney home to the outback and to Europe which most memorably holds the text’s disparate narrative strands together. For example, there is Patience, whose dissertation has led her to live in Paris and to communicate with Muecke through intimate, sometimes inflammatory correspondence. There is Herve, a Parisian traveller who arrives in the outback with a copy of Chatwin’s The Songlines (104); Abdelkarim, who shares with Muecke volatile sorties in the Central Australia desert (28-30); Butcher Joe, an Aboriginal painter originally appearing in Reading the Country, but now revisited and amplified in significance. These figures emerge in the horizon of the author’s nomadic experiences and reveal how such seemingly disconnected encounters produce a distinct

227 multidirectional map of the landscape.

All maps signify a return to the past in that they are palimpsests. Muecke’s stories are inextricably part of the archetypal narratives of nation: the journey of men in the Australian desert, the journey of the father with his family, the colonial subject’s return to the metropolitan centre. But in No Road, these movements also signify antipodal counter- discourse: Europe is inverted into a province, the family troupe is confronted with the academic deconstruction of the nuclear model and thus moves from a position of centrality to the margin (153); most memorably, the desert journey goes nowhere, petering out amid bickering and a jeep submerged by the rising tide of a flooded lake (74). Going nowhere is, of course, precisely the point, for by failing to reach a destination the “no road” offers a realignment of possibility, away from bitumen to those provisional zones that mark where the performing subject inscribes its presence and constitutes a history.

In the Antipodes, the colonialist subject must learn to move with the swing of opposites: upper and lower, centre and margin. If this means an in-between existence, it is also a place of opportunity as nothing is ever quite settled. Muecke recognizes that a performatively defined map of going nowhere offers “decanonising possibilities”. This issue becomes explicit in the fascinating section “Coonardoo 1993”, in which Muecke narrates an attempted filming of Prichard’s novel, and E.L. Grant’s lesser known version which kills the white woman and describes a white man’s complete crossing over to Aboriginal society. “Coonardoo 1993” thus writes back to the Aboriginality defining Prichard’s drama of failed reconciliation. The film, which would have been directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha, is less concerned with identity as it is with clearing space for the emergence of a postcolonial hybrid subject. But the film, or at least the sketched script for the proposed film, is not really the point of the episode. Indeed, Muecke focuses on the debacle of the pre-production trip. This concludes with the film remaining at the juncture of speculation, outline and possibility. Yet digression and going nowhere somehow becomes the event. The failed trip has now become “a part of the film” (113). “Coonardoo 1993” belongs to the realm of speculation and failure, but it nonetheless

228 concerns the constitutive dimension of getting lost. By crossing boundaries, by inhabiting the edges of bitumen routes, the road can suddenly give way to newness. Muecke concludes with this thought as something not just positive, but a beginning: “to leave the bitumen, to leave the roads and finally to get lost and maybe find a way again” (133).

However we may re-place Australia’s future stories, the nomadically marked space will need to play a defining role. No Road offers an invaluable example of how this can be done. By not equating experience with signs which signify the classification of objects of knowledge, a travelling writing maintains contact with cultural difference through a constant crossing of borders that lightly inscribes a contextual, dialogical and liminal becoming. Writing, in the Western sense of the book, inscribes a movement among other movements. The result is a brimming surface of “parallel lines”, which will at times converge, separate, but will always be in motion. Such modes of contact keep alive difference; they preserve alterity rather than assimilate difference, but contact also means a mutual process of self-transformation. What remains important is that difference cannot finally reside as an object of knowledge. Writing about things needs to be open to the “becoming of writing”: “its preparedness to allow for a completely different medium to infuse the text” (230). Thus, in the ceaseless traversing of the archive, in the return to the ghosts haunting Narcissus, many detours will occur, so much so that as lines of flight they will themselves inaugurate the need for an architecture that can accommodate a lighter, more ephemeral way of knowing. In such a place, the living and dead produce a peculiarly active history of copresence.

229 Conclusion

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker (1979), three men undertake a dangerous, unmapped expedition into "the Zone". The Zone is clearly allegorical; on a general level, it represents an unspecified area outside the imprisoning reality of the Soviet Union. The meaning of the Zone resists any easy interpretation that might regard it a space transcending the dominant and dreary reality. However, the Zone decisively subverts genre as much as reason; its picturesque connotations dissolve when we realize that countryside flowers yield no scent; rusted machinery lies strewn throughout staining the verdant landscape. Furthermore, the history of the area is that of an apocalyptic wasteland forbidding common entry. The Zone lies not in the West; it always speaks of a historically grounded relationship with the Soviet Union, yet it clearly exceeds the borders of the State’s official map.

"Stalker" is the guide who traverses this border world, leading his companions around hidden (and never revealed) booby-traps. The ostensible aim of his expedition is to reach "the Room" in which one’s wishes might be mysteriously fulfilled. Stalker responds to his task by creating a bizarre route towards the room, whose location appears to be only a hundred or so metres away from the men. He ties white bandages to iron bolts which litter the landscape and throws them, one at a time, ahead of him (or behind or to his side). The journey thus does not chart any factual environment, but instead lightly inscribes a passage of continual deviation. It affirms the poetic logic behind the ostensible act of going nowhere. In this kind of map, unproductive, yet potent, creative desires merge with political lack to displace the precepts of socialist realism (and any other State-sanctioned programme).

Despite self-evident differences that separate Tarkovsky’s landscape and that of the Australian landscape, it is not difficult to see in Stalker an analogue for the critical practice performed throughout this thesis. The place Stalker inhabits is not given; rather, it emerges in the tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual

230 rhizomic formlessness of daily life. Furthermore, it is precisely through his tentative negotiation with these constructs that there emerges the meaning of his resistance. This negotiation, transgressive rather than representative, shares something in common with the dialogical terrain that should energize a critical inquiry of post-colonial identity and difference. The force that binds and compels writers to resist the precepts of colonialist discourse has led to a sustained and often crucially important meditation on the nation’s suspect foundations, as well as to a significant exploration of more universal themes pertaining to language and creativity. Rather than disavow the tensions such an engagement raises, I have sought to affirm their place on the map of Australian literature. This has been the ambition of An Ambivalent Ground: to trace a different map across the surface of the dominant model and so help challenge the hegemony of imperial narrativity.

A movement resembling Stalker’s affirms that inhabiting the margins of power, while anxiety-laden, carries with it a creative trajectory. An Ambivalent Ground interprets the margin in the guise of historical and geographical exile. However, rather than accept its more usual negative connotations, exile can be appropriated and transformed into an activating principle, one that helps better appreciate the essentially heterogeneous nature of the colonist's relation with the land. Far from being anachronistic, ambivalence is better grasped as residual in significance. In postulating the margin as a densely-woven space of ambivalence, a post-colonial reading can better understand Australia to encompass the irresolvable paradox of home and unhomely, dominance and estrangement. Rather than reinscribe the European idea of opportunity in an ahistorical land, this paradox encourages us to think differently about the colonist’s claims to the country.

Of course by thinking differently, I do not wish to imply that a reading can ever transcend the history and ideology it critiques. One of the key tropes of this thesis has been the prison because, in historical and discursive terms, it seems the metaphor most

231 accurately representing the nation and its settler identity. Throughout this thesis, I have argued that Australia should be regarded as a country whose incarcerating features remain pervasive and inescapable. Just how pervasive can be illustrated by reference to another film, this one directly influenced by the antipodean landscape. When Nicolas Roeg’s influential feature, Walkabout (1971), was re-released shortly after the Howard government was first elected, it struck a chord with audiences at that point coming to grips with a very different political and cultural milieu. Walkabout originally appeared suspiciously naive in its view of the Antipodes. The story of two white children lost in the Australian desert and guided by a young Aboriginal man on "walkabout" never sat comfortably with some because it too obviously dramatized the Australian landscape in Arcadian terms. But in a different climate the film’s romanticism appeared prescient because it seemed to express with heightened poignancy an understanding of the ideological prison-house enclosing white Australia. The urban wall which segregates European settlement from the desert in the film’s opening and closing frames symbolizes a failure to recognize the common set of interests raised by the contact between colonist and Aborigine. Today more than ever that wall resonates as a powerfully melancholy metaphor because it intimates just how difficult is an escape from the solipsism that colonialism engenders.

If the wall in Walkabout functions metaphorically, the historical foundations of the nation carry a more complicated meaning. As demonstrated in chapter 1, the penal colony revealed how the land was, from the very start, enclosed by a system that sought to confine its subjects and subjugate cultural difference. It is tempting to see the wall enclosing convicts and officers to symbolize the most basic contribution to come with European settlement. But whatever its significance, the wall literally inscribed the founding moment of colonialist ambivalence because it transfigured the landscape in a way that promised both confinement and possibility. The wall served to divide space; it created an ‘outside’, a ‘beyond’ – it thus helped give the horizon special meaning. The wall enables us to see the correlation between transgression and transformation in the most dramatic sense possible - the escaping convict and his metamorphosis into bushranger and eventually "white blackfellow" begins with breaching the wall that

232 imposes upon the landscape the Enlightenment principle of stasis and order. It clears the way for the basic proposition introduced in chapter 1 and developed throughout An Ambivalent Ground: that power is not monolithic, that it is paradoxical and rich in contradiction. The penal colony may have been brutal and anachronistic in its dispensation of justice, but it also embodied the formative, regulatory characteristics familiar to post-structuralist theories of subjectivity. From the literal elevation of the prisoner on the ship to the welt marks that bind white history with the diaspora of contemporary Aboriginal-Australian culture, the prison offers an indispensable way of understanding colonialist interpellation.

In short, the penal colony foregrounds the first place where new and interesting relations will develop in Australia. For this reason it marks the first act in the “re-placing” of place. Re-placing signifies the critical process that maps a new historical space where subjects are brought out of darkness to metamorphose into other identities. This is dramatically conveyed in convict escape-routes. What convicts were accentuating in their deviant routes was the profound uncertainty attending the question of place and belonging in Australia. The ground supporting Ralph Rashleigh is always one significantly open to paradox. Rashleigh traverses various landscapes; he continually leaves the settlement to travel on roads that lead to his getting lost. These are roads that signify journeying beyond the prison-house; they give direction to the convict desire to escape the panoptic rationale of stasis and order. The routes they set off on are by no means original; their importance relates more to the way they simply refuse the territorializing principle of colonialist enclosure. At best, escape speaks of the convict's intensity of movement (and alienation); it reveals a dimension of spatial experience elsewhere to civil society.

However, freedom in the final analysis does not mean escaping the very discourse spatiality transgresses. If anything, it means returning to it, legitimating it. As Rashleigh’s originally errant trajectories demonstrate, the idea of freedom beyond the walls of the prison-house, even in a textual space open to the interweaving of fact and fiction, could not include the world of the Aborigine. Freedom did not mean living beyond

233 'civilization'. The freedom Rashleigh had been granted on the frontier only revealed the colonial margin as a place inextricable from unspeakable violence, dispossession and, finally, death. In any final analysis, the frontier marks a place which deepens the psychic anxiety of the colonist, whose tenuous hold of the land finds expression in residual fear of alterity.

So the margins of colonialist power cannot be understood in either strictly negative terms or strictly positive ones. From the start of white Australian history, they express profound uncertainty. This history begins prior to the physical arrival of the British. Long before the First Fleet, the Australia existed on the European periphery of consciousness. This has meant that it has always existed as a fantastic and grotesque space, a world in which experience doubles the original and feels itself continually opposite to the norm. This is what it means to be "antipodean". The Antipodes energizes all Australian literature in that it informs both the condition of exile and belonging at the ends of the earth. In the early years of settlement, being antipodean meant nakedly experiencing exile - “such an inversion in nature as is hitherto unknown” wrote Thomas Watling, one of the first to grapple with the distress caused by living in a country so far from home.

Few have equalled the intensity of Watling’s temperament, yet many have shared it to some degree. In chapter 2 we saw how Marcus Clarke would interpret the experience of displacement in his essay on Adam Lindsay Gordon. For Clarke, the "weird melancholy" of the bush suggested that the European settler was not one with the land. Chapter 5 surveyed how the preoccupation was to be continued in modern writing, from earlier figures like Henry Lawson to those who emerged after the Second World War, Patrick White and Randolph Stow to name only two. When Sidney Nolan invested the iconic national landscape with modernist primitivism, he also found himself returning to the colonist’s sense of dislocation, or what I have described as the “unhomely”. From the start, the unhomely had little to do with a factual landscape; rather, it was bound up with the residual sense of psychic alienation from the land. Bernard Smith's description of this condition remains invaluable; when noting Clarke’s association of "black gorges" with a

234 "story of sullen despair", Smith wrote: "we might ask ourselves whether it is the black gorges or guilty colonial hearts that sought to stifle the story of despair, projecting their fear and guilt upon nature itself" (Smith 1980: 21). This fear and guilt has always been grounded in the stigma of being condemned to live on the margin. But as Smith suggested, if such experiences contribute to the melancholy sense of enduring failure, our estrangement has been compounded by the equally longstanding awareness of the bitter, largely subterranean, history of dispossession.

Today these complex tensions remain as vibrant and melancholy as ever. One need only think of the contemporary art of Gordon Bennett, or the Chilean-born, Juan Davila. Both of these artists appropriate national iconography in order to imagine the story of conquest so that civilizing tropes appear almost irredeemably repulsive and grotesque. More subtly, even those representations that seem to favour a quieter urbanity can be seen to express an elongation of the unhomely. Consider the Melbourne-based artist, Rick Amor, who has in recent decades charted this continuum in the guise of what the late critic Gary Catalano describes as "the steady contraction and diminution of the public world that has accompanied the triumph of economic rationalism" (Catalano 2001: 166). In paintings like Watcher on the Pier (1986) and The Gate (1990), Amor shows an urban world of solitude, a place haunted rather than peopled. But it is the remarkable The Quiet Sea (1995-96) that most fascinates. Here the most dislocated of worlds seems accepted with eerie tranquility. Water engulfs the car, the vehicle's owner walks towards it, his body language nonplussed by the scene.

Whatever one is to make of the scene, its immediate subject has clearly accepted the situation. The Quiet Sea resonates with post-impressionist symbolism. However, I suggest the dreamscape has antecedents to the onset of economic rationalism. To observe this landscape is to return to that deeply embedded anxiety haunting our collective identity. Amor’s image may represent the specific experience of psychic engulfment, but the very mundaneness of scene suggests a wider condition, that is, how being Australian itself means having a tenuous psychic hold on the country. Thus, while the meditative intensity of The Quiet Sea may cast a contemporary spell, this should not blind us to the

235 fact that its poetic tenor, the problematic that attends any sense of belonging, is a truly uncanny expression deeply indebted to the shifting field of Australian literature and art.

To more common-sense accounts of the nation, the idea of residual dislocation seems anomalous. There are good reasons for this. The dominant ideology that so influenced how the colonizer saw and settled the country has also proven very deeply embedded in Australian literature and art. Early artists in the colony carried with them an agenda to represent progress on the borders of the British Empire. Their drawings and watercolours of Sydney Cove strategically regulated colonial space so that the colony dramatized the balanced and organic evolution of European occupation. Evolution meant gradually removing the landscape of its original occupants; as Joseph Lycett wrote, "the hiding places of yet more savage men have become transformed into peaceful villages or cheerful towns". Wentworth’s proclamation of a "new Britannia in another world" offers a slightly later, notably more triumphant, legitimation of this master narrative. In chapter 2 we saw how anxieties present in early colonial literature and art were repressed; colonial occupation was projected in Arcadian terms. Australia is imagined as a space of redemption, a Promised Land made possible partly by the genres of the pastoral and the picturesque. Chapter 4 showed how, by the end of the nineteenth century, Heidelberg impressionism had emerged as an emphatically progressive statement of this ethos: contemporary metropolitan forms were appropriated to suit an emerging national sensibility and consolidate the European dream of Arcadia in another world. However, what subverts Arcadia and its more robust equivalent, the bush ethos, is the awareness that the settler failed in a very basic sense to hold dialogue with the land. It is for this reason that key tropes like the frontier radiate contradictory meanings, from the natural unfolding of civilization to the emergence of a hybrid national type and, always underscoring these projections, the world where the most violent atrocities occur against the Aborigines.

And yet within the tension of conquest and displacement another history emerges. While someone like Ralph Rashleigh remained mobile, the frontier resembled less a line of violent exclusion as a horizon of subversive possibility. This is a history of

236 comparative lightness. The line between enclosure and common was indeed transformed into something dialogical, and so placed a history of negotiation on the cultural map. Such movements do not easily conform to empiricist formulations of place. They show that frontiers are boundaries, and as such, perform in a way that facilitates, rather than excludes, dialogue. The contribution of the re-placing process is to identify a ground significantly open to paradox, a zone where history has yet to be calcified by nationalist and imperialist representations. The importance of this contribution is the way it enables grand statements about European settlement to be subtly reconfigured. Thus, like the prison walls, the colonial frontier in chapter 3 is transformed to locate a world of continual becoming, a perpetual crossroads at which tradition dies and is reborn. A piano is moved from one boundary to another, from the transgressive practices of untutored children to another border zone outside the house where contact with the Aborigines occurs again and again with radical implications for the meaning of identity and cultural value.

Re-placing Australian literature, therefore, means not only critically acknowledging the inescapably melancholy history of the antipodean margin; it also refers to the strategy of locating a different, more hesitant, mode of contact made between the colonist and the environment. These places disclose a ground where meaning is neither given nor inevitable, where incommensurable yet uniquely local exchanges can be heard to proliferate. The imperative that has driven my argument comes from the simple wish to commemorate modes of exchange that refuse to conform to the more traditional story of conquest and subjugation. The conclusion of this kind of reading always means foregrounding the ambivalence of colonialist discourse. One case in point, as demonstrated in chapter 4: even the virulent racism endemic in nationalist literature can be discussed in such a way that makes a reading pause and consider how the discourse also carries within it untranslatably foreign sounds and spaces.

How might those incommensurable, yet tangible, sounds and practices be best

237 represented on a postcolonial map of Australian literature? If A. D. Hope recognised through his poetry the most basic of conflicts in the story of European occupation, he was in part responding to the way colonialism had been so singularly imposed upon an alien land. To be Australian meant living with the consequences of this imposition. Most of the time Australians seem more than comfortable with this:

… like five teeming sores, Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state Where second-hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

Hope perceived the possibility of redemption in a place from where "prophets come". As with many writers and artists in the era of Australian modernism examined in chapters 5 and 6, the desert stood as the other of Arcadia. For many of these people, the desert was not empty; it located an elsewhere that demanded a different kind of representation to the chatter we have come to associate with the cultural cringe.

Hope’s analysis is complex and elusive. It remains astute in its analysis of the colonial temperament of Australians. However, on one important level it perpetuates this temperament. In "Australia", possibility is distinguished from the "chatter of cultured apes", which is to say that it lies outside the covert importation of European discourse. Now although such an importation undoubtedly contributes to our "immense stupidity", in so far that it seduces us to ignore the continent’s older, more senior, history ("the last of lands"), the imported culture is, as we have seen, living and contradictory. The "second-hand Europeans" inhabiting "alien shores" are timid beings because they are living out their roles as mimics. But rather than follow Hope and simply reinscribe the cultural cringe factor to describe this phenomenon, it seems necessary to grasp in this condition a mode of being-in-the-world. As I see it, the chatter that Hope derides offers the very starting-point for any revision. After all, no entity, colonial or other, is an epistemological given. Cultural difference emerges through process, place specifies where tradition is appropriated and transformed through the living intensity of the colonialist subject’s engagement.

238

In this rather different sense, Hope’s image of second-hand Europeans "pullulating" seems highly apt, the aptness heightened by the present participle form. It describes the strange way the dominant discourse is consumed by a different kind of writing, one that noisily proliferates, breeds and swarms to transform the imperial map. To be a cultured ape may not be so pejorative a thing after all. Indeed, once there is recognised a commonality with the chattering ape, it is possible to develop the connection and appreciate just how profoundly apt the analogy is today. Here one must turn to the captured beast Kafka wrote about with great comic zeal in his story "A Report to an Academy". The story tells of an ape’s attempt to mimic the master’s language and, by doing so, escape from his incarceration:

No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! Only to not stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall (Kafka 1999: 253-254).

As the ape pointedly states, getting out has nothing to do with freedom; it means simply moving beyond the walls of the cage. To do so might enable the creature to live and speak differently to the master. Of course, it might not – perhaps the ape is finally a dupe. But this would be to misread the scene for here there is not hinted a beginning or end (it doesn’t really matter why the ape has ended up here nor are we shown where he will end). The creature finds himself in the middle of something and is seeking to move on, to become something else. If this invokes the short-term energy of the "rhizome", which Deleuze and Guattari see as being "always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25), then it also shares something with the creative practice of the poet, Ern Malley. One of the great mimics in Australian poetry, Malley spoke eloquently of his incarcerated yet rebellious subjectivity. But he too understood that what lay beyond tradition was not freedom; writing had little to do with finality, it meant dramatizing the movement that transgresses order and stasis: "I have split the infinitive/Beyond is anything" he declared in his final poem with its intermezzo title, "Petit Testament". Backwards, forwards, between here and there – the nomadism

239 impelling everyday practice similarly transforms our own cage, that is, the nation in a world which increasingly needs to be understood under the new imperial rubric we know as "globalization".

The relation between nomadic rhizome and colonialist mimicry everywhere transforms the ground. It is ambivalent because it describes a mode of territorial occupation which transgresses the ideological progressivism upholding colonialist enclosure, while on another level paradoxically reinscribing it. Transgression belongs to a counter-discourse inhabiting the boundaries of State institutional power. Today this border zone lies where postmodernism and postcolonialism meet. The convergence has fashioned a complex aesthetic of transformation, and reinscription. Thus the Canadian post-colonial critic, Diana Brydon, refutes essentialism, and yet in doing so, inadvertently privileges the primitivist trope of the Canadian Innuit in order to describe most accurately the concept of hybridity (Brydon 1991). Stephen Muecke recognized a similar paradox in his attempt to bring into play the strange yet familiar spaces of postcolonial difference. For this reason his narrative sought to distinguish itself with what might be termed the "discourse of commentary" indicative of normative academic writing. As we saw in chapter 6, the central proposition of No Road asks that the critic himself notate his "becoming". To do this he needs to write differently to his profession and its ritually defined settings. Muecke’s solution is one shared by Deleuze: he writes as an odd kind of traveller ("accidental intellectual") whose very engagement with the field – replete with deviance and inexactitude - constitutes the history in question. In spatial terms this means traversing and leaving the road in order to "get lost" (133). Clearly, as Muecke himself recognizes in his very title, this means invoking archetypes profoundly indebted to the antipodean landscape. But such an act, when grounded in the rhizome of becoming, suggests unsanctioned alternatives. More generally, it affirms that at the boundaries there can be found a real desire to talk less about ‘progress’ than about the colonist’s fragile relation to the land in constitutive terms.

An Ambivalent Ground inhabits this paradigm. It has sought to present a viable mode of critical resistance that has important lessons to offer in the areas of language, history and place. It has aspired to something of the autodidactic element that makes

240 possible the true practice of nomadic transgression. By travelling across the archive and by taking seriously exchanges that signal radical provisionality, my intention has been to identify and commemorate key tensions residually present in the nation’s most basic preoccupations. To identify these tensions neither redeems nor distances the nation from its imperial history. Rather, it signifies a basic desire to talk about a form of difference in terms suitably attuned to the density of our past. In the final analysis, this has meant discovering where the text of power has been ruptured to disclose those moments in which Narcissus and Echo hold dialogue.

241 Bibliography

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