The Ocean Last Night - an Exegesis & Creative Artefact
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The Ocean Last Night - an Exegesis & Creative Artefact by Gregory Day Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University December 2017 The Ocean Last Night an Exegesis & Creative Artefact Gregory Day Table of Contents The Ocean Last Night - an exegesis ......................................................... 1 Introduction ............................................................................. 2 Chapter 1 - My Psychologically Ultimate Seashore ......................... 12 Chapter 2 - One True Note? ....................................................... 38 Chapter 3 – Otway Taenarum .................................................... 58 Conclusion .............................................................................. 81 References .............................................................................. 86 The Ocean Last Night – Creative Artefact ............................................ 93 The Patron Saint of Eels ........................................................... 95 Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds ................................................. 140 The Grand Hotel …………………………………………………………199 Archipelago Of Souls .............................................................. 240 Coda - ampliphone XI - thaark thurr boonea…………………………... 289 The Ocean Last Night - an exegesis 1 Introduction I Running through the body of this exegetic augmentation of my published novels is the narrative of how my family came to dwell in the specific southwest Victorian coastal landscape of Australia which serves as the geographical setting of those novels. The family story forms the spine of a layered rendition of how I as a writer came to experience this littoral landscape as emotional geography requiring a creative response. As Bondi, Davidson and Smith make clear, ‘the difficulties in communicating the affective elements at play beneath the topographies of everyday life’ [2005, p. 1] has historically resulted in a view of geography which denied or did not even consider the powerful lens which our emotions provide us when considering place, nature and cultural landscape. Intrinsic to this in my case is the convergence of inherited memory and mythological elements implied by the initiatory seeding components of the family story which I re-enact in Chapter 1. These components have, I believed, served in some respects to counter a possible lack of any foundational creative myth in European Australian culture due to the expropriative nature of the colonial invasion and the relatively short duration time for subsequent European cultural incubation here. As Edmund O. Wilson tells us, ‘For more than ninety-nine percent of human history people have lived in hunter-gatherer bands, totally and intimately involved with other organisms’ [1993, p. 32]. This form of cultural continuity, or withness, is a crucial factor in what Wilson has postulated in his biophilia theory as the co- evolution of human genetic and cultural structures [p. 33]. My novels imply that without consciousness of the unique and varied attenuations of this long co- evolution within what Michael Farrell, in his detailed alternative history of poetic invention in the Australian colonial period, terms the ‘unsettlement’ mode [2016, p. 2] of European Australia, we risk becoming trapped in a shrillness caused by continuing ultra-materialist tropes of viewing the land as a finite item and 2 commodity rather than as an inspirited, sociobiotic, and teeming entity. Similarly we risk misunderstanding some profound and fundamental requirements of human cultural activity through our preference for looking at landscape through a lens of profit-privileging capitalism. The practical consequences and interior tensions of this situation are looked at by my novels from various angles, and in a deliberated range of stylistic tones. I would hope this exegesis can act as a useful augmentation of that body of work. In the case of my three Mangowak novels, The Patron Saint of Eels [2005], Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds [2007] and The Grand Hotel [2010], all of which are set in a small coastal town undergoing demographic and environmental change, the stresses of the social microcosm, or small regional community, are viewed using three different literary methods. Firstly, The Patron Saint of Eels attempts, through the mode of a magic realist fable, to speculate upon the possibilities for a metaphysical relationship with a cultural landscape largely misread or even unread by first European settlers whose ignorance almost entirely stripped it of its aboriginal cosmologies [Pascoe 2007, p. 63]. In doing this the novel combines specifically Mediterranean and Franciscan ideas and voices, imported to Australia in the post-World War II migrations. It creates a ‘mirror-earth’, through which the combination of the picaresque and fable-like qualities of the novel seeks to dramatise possible consolations to the layerings of pain the characters are experiencing as a result of the threats to their way of life from tourism and the anthropocenic damage to the environment around them. The novel attempts to ignite compassion and wonder for the local natural world, specifically in regards to the life cycle of the local eels (anguilla australis), through combining the cultural tropes of a migrant culture which forms part of my own bloodline and the 21st century rural coastal Australian setting of Mangowak. Although it is peopled by some of the same characters, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds shifts the fabulist and speculative tone of The Patron Saint of Eels, eschewing magic realism in favour of the social realist novel to express the tragic aspect of community change on the southwest Victorian coast. This novel is written within the regional realist tradition of novelists such as Thomas Hardy, Sarah Orne Jewett and John McGahern. In keeping with George Steiner’s ideas 3 about the primacy of an implied conversation between works of fiction themselves rather than the commentaries upon them [Steiner, 1989], the novel implies a response to those authors and others. It narrates a generational tale of gentrification and ecological change within a demotic, local setting. It does not set out to console but is built to convey the tangible intimate reality of traumas caused by materialist perceptions of the landscape as economic currency or commodity. The main character of the novel finds both solace and husbandry in the landscape and also in the nightly playing of a harmonium, whose reedy notes mingle with the sound of the ocean in his clifftop star-canopied home. Grief sings at the forefront here in a work of fiction attempting to embody Diane O’Donoghue’s notion that art ‘is both the still life as memento mori and reminder of what is alive, what still remains’ [2016, p. 189]. I agree with O’Donoghue when she writes in ‘Image, Loss, Delay’, her study of the ways in which art’s delaying power assists in our transcendence of grief, that ‘losses and deaths can often open as well as close one’s life story, along with threading through it’ [p. 190]. As such the explications of emotional geography which form the throughline of this essay go some part of the way to detailing the sources of art’s reconstituted trauma as experienced by the characters of this novel. The Grand Hotel completes the three-faceted approach of the Mangowak novels through approaching the turbulence of cultural change and weak attachments to place by re-employing techniques of magic realism. In this instance, however, the magic realism plays out in the mode of farce. Its deliberately idiosyncratic yet logical convergence of dry bush humour and Antipodean neo-Dadaism is a dramatisation of cultural forms of collective irony and social protest. The ignition of this novel owes a considerable degree to the perennially subversive ideas of Hugo Ball and the Dadaists of the early twentieth century who foresaw how, through the capitalist appropriations of cultural tourism, art could come to be used against artists [Ball 1996, p. 98]. The novel also plays with landscape historian John R Stilgoe’s contention that ‘theoretical concepts and advertising and marketing ploys work best on people who fail to explore landscape first hand’ [Stilgoe 2015, p. 14]. The novel’s plot is triggered by the loss of the community’s hotel due to a real estate development which attempts to colonise environmentalist and Indigenous values as a sales pitch. The proposed development appropriates 4 one spelling of the name of the local aboriginal people – Wathaurong – in combination with the title of Emily Bronte’s romance novel, – Wuthering Heights – for a proposed block of culturally touristic eco-apartments bearing the name ‘Wathaurong Heights’. In this context the novel is composed in the spirit of Jed Rasula’s pithy contention that ‘the natty plaid of the necropolitan real estate developer constellates the modern image of eternal repose’ [2002, p. 66]. It dramatises, within the fictional lifeworld and cultural landscape of Mangowak, John Berger’s assertion that ‘words, terms, phrases can be separated from the creature of their language and used as mere labels. They then become inert and empty.’ [Berger 2016, p. 6] Berger’s ‘creature of language’ seems an appropriate term in the context of the grounded and geographical sense, or habitat, of language, explored in this exegesis. The Grand Hotel completes the emotive spectrum the three Mangowak novels cover: eco-spiritual consolation, grief associated with gentrification, commodification