AN AUSTRALIAN COMPASS Essays on Place and Direction in Australian L~erature BRUCE BENNETT "Bruce Bennett's scholarship is superb ... he ranges wide and free through Australian writing, his impressive fund of information allowing him to make new and challenging connections between unlikely elements of our culture ... No other literary critic now at work has made us more aware of the value of the local in interpreting ourselves to ourselves." HP Heseltine rrp $24.95 FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS WESTERLY a quarterly review ISSN 0043-342x EDITORS: Bruce Bennett, Peter Cowan, Dennis Haskell EDITORIAL ADVISORS: Margot Luke (prose),DelysBird(poetry),B rendaWalker(reviews) EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS: Diana Brydon (University of Guelph), John Hay (Monash University ),Dorothy Hewett (Sydney ),Brian Matthews (Flinders University), VincentO' Sullivan (Victoria University, Wellington), Peter Porter (London), Anna Ruthelford (University of Aarhus), Edwin Thumboo (National University of Singapore), Albert Wertheim (University of Indiana) ADMINISTRATOR: Caroline Horohin Westerly is published quarterly at the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature in the English Department, University of Western Australia with assistance from The Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council, the Federal government's arts funding and advisory body, and the State Government of W.A. through the Department for the Arts. 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Three Westerly Indexes, 1956-77, 1978-83 and 1984-88, are available at $5.00 each from the above address. Department for theArts --Government of Western Australia WESTERLY, No.3, SEPTEMBER, 1991 2 WESTERLY, No.3, SEPTEMBER, 1991 CONTENTS WESTERLY VOLUME 36, No.3, SEPTEMBER 1991 STORIES Sketches from a Journey Shirley Blake 5 To Journey's End Archimede Fusillo 43 Urgent English Gail Bell 51 The Web P.M. Marsh 56 Muriel's Decline Catherine Conzaro 77 And Then The Lights Come Up Lesley Stern 82 Call You Falling L. G. Perera 84 A Comic Treatment Steven Conte 88 Broken Slats Margaret Betts 104 Prose Suite Yve Louis 110 POEMS Rita Tognini 19 Jill Jones 58 Jena Woodhouse 20 Andrew Leggett 60 Vera Newsom 21 Vera Newsom 72 Jan Owen 22 Anthony Lawrence 73 David P. Reiter 23 Law'is Edmond 74 Lawrence Bourke 25 Rod Moran 76 David McCooey 26 Chris Wallace-Crabbe 102 Philip Salom 40 Debbie Robson 103 ARTICLES "My rather tedious hero": A Portrait of Kenneth Siessor Dennis Haskell 27 Kenneth Siessor - A view from knee-high, 1955-1959 Frank Palmos 37 Hybrids and Gothic Discourses in Louis Nowra's Novels Gerry Turcotte 61 Autobiography or Fiction? Patrick White's 'Memoirs of Many in One' Antonella Riem 95 REVIEWS Elizabeth Jolley, 'Cabin Fever' Amanda Nettelbeck 114 John Barnes, 'The Order of Things: A Life of Joseph Furphy' Veronica Brady 116 Satendra Nandan, 'The Wounded Sea' Dennis Haskell 118 Shane McCauley, 'The Butterfly Man' Diane Fahey 120 Robert Tonkinson and Michael Howard, Eds., 'Going it Alone? Prospects for Aboriginal Autonomy' Sandy Toussaint 122 Fay Zwicky, 'Ask Me' John Kinsella 124 Michael Wilding, 'Great Climate' Igor Mal'er 125 CONTRIBUTORS 127 Cover design by Susan Ellvey of Designpoint using a sketch by Shirley Blake whose story, 'Sketches from a Journey', appears in this issue. Printed by Lamb Printers Pty Ltd. WESTERLY. No.3, SEPTEMBER, 1991 4 WESTERLY, No.3, SEPTEMBER, 1991 SHIRLEY BLAKE Sketches from a Journey For Geofji-ey Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. T.S. Eliot. East Coker I sit again on a park bench by the River Kennett, close to the Marlborough High Street, at my own risk. The last time I sat here an imperious duck pecked my leg, demanding something in the way of immediate, edible attention. Now the only ducks I see (suddenly the swans process again one adult, two cygnets, one adult, four cygnets, in balletic single file) are waddling, preening, skid-landing and squabbling as proper ducks should. There's food about. A lady of indeterminate but older years delivers lunchtime rations with a practised fling of the arm. So have things ever been between ducks and aging ladies, and every day is a deeply entered ritual that things should so remain, while tomorrow becomes more and more a probability that we don't want to think about. * * * Is most of time waiting, or is it just, while waiting, that it seems so? "Better late than never," says the proverb, but "better early than late" is the lore of the lone traveller. Can I speak of waiting, whose longest sit ~o far is only six hours at Digbeth, followed by five in Marlborough, four in Oban, three at Victoria? My most intense sit, however, was not in a bus station or High Street, and of so extreme a boredom that I could only guess at its duration, maybe forty minutes: in the back of a Post Office van, somewhere in the west of Lewis, on a September day of cutting wind and driving rain, when sheep and rocks could barely be distinguished from each other. Our driver suddenly announced that the little stone house he had pulled up by was his own and that he was off to have a cup of tea, leaving the three WESTERLY. No.3, SEPTEMBER. 1991 5 of us, a Bulgarian girl and I to wonder wordlessly at it all, and an elderly bescarfed woman from Stornoway to break into English to declare for our benefit that she didn't know how people could live "in such a horrible place". * * * On a nameless, cloudless evening, mist settling on the land, sky still pale blue, only the sheep moving, an evening that could have been anyone of millions, except that it happened to be this one, I walked up to the Uffington White Horse and stopped by signs that said: This ancient White Horse is being damaged by visitors' feet. Please help to protect it by not going beyond this point. Through the long, defending grass I made out the various curves of this lovely template, identifying the eye last of all. The sun behind me seemed to be exactly the same size, and as watchful. The birds flocked west. Only anxiety at the gathering mist, not respect for the courteous sign, halted me, and knowing that the image would be no clearer for getting closer. Resolution needs distance. I turned to go and could hardly believe it, when a white horse with a grey-coated rider suddenly cantered across the hill, slowed to a walk past its ancestor's portrait and slipped, just as suddenly, out of sight. The sun was magenta, blood-shot; and by the time I reached the car, it had utterly disappeared in the mist. * * * The tourist information in the carpark said that Wayland's Smithy was nearby. An old fragment of poetry whirled in my head: WeIand him be Wurman wraeces cunnade. (WeIand amongst his weapons suffered misery.) DEOR Hopeless at map-reading, I couldn't make out the directions to the Smithy, a neolithic chambered tomb, but came upon signposts to it anyway, as I drove on along the main road, and reached it at last on foot, none too bravely in the growing darkness, at the end of a short lane a few hundred yards along a little section of the Ridgeway. Only the gutteral drone of a tractor and the far-off lights of Swindon spangling the north-west tethered me in time. The huge circling yews kept vigil. A crunch of footsteps startled me back to my hire car like a rabbit, scattering all my precious notions. I had come to Britain seeking old stones, especially old stones in Sutherland; but my time in Scotland had turned out differently and instead I had stood at Blake's grave and Milton's grave and Shakespeare's grave and at so many other graves. I had walked among standing stones on Lewis and standing stones at Avebury.