'Ways of Seeing': the Tasmanian Landscape in Literature
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THE TERRITORY OF TRUTH and ‘WAYS OF SEEING’: THE TASMANIAN LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE ANNA DONALD (19449666) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Humanities (English and Cultural Studies) 2013 ii iii ABSTRACT The Territory of Truth examines the ‘need for place’ in humans and the roads by which people travel to find or construct that place, suggesting also what may happen to those who do not find a ‘place’. The novel shares a concern with the function of landscape and place in relation to concepts of identity and belonging: it considers the forces at work upon an individual when they move through differing landscapes and what it might be about those landscapes which attracts or repels. The novel explores interior feelings such as loss, loneliness, and fulfilment, and the ways in which identity is derived from personal, especially familial, relationships Set in Tasmania and Britain, the novel is narrated as a ‘voice play’ in which each character speaks from their ‘way of seeing’, their ‘truth’. This form of narrative was chosen because of the way stories, often those told to us, find a place in our memory: being part of the oral narrative of family, they affect our sense of self and our identity. The Territory of Truth suggests that identity is linked to a sense of self- worth and a belief that one ‘fits’ in to society. The characters demonstrate the ‘four ways of seeing’ as discussed in the exegesis. ‘“Ways of Seeing”: The Tasmanian Landscape in Literature’ considers the way humans identify with ‘place’, drawing on the ideas and theories of critics and commentators such as Edward Relph, Yi-fu Tuan, Roslynn Haynes, Richard Rossiter, Bruce Bennett, and Graham Huggan. It asks what conclusions may be drawn from the differences in attitude toward nature and human settlement in Tasmania across the considerable time period represented by selected writings from 1870-1999: Marcus Clarke’s For The Term of his Natural Life (1870-1872), Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1978), James McQueen’s Hook’s Mountain (1982), Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994), and selected work by Christopher Koch (1958-1999). The study explores the notion of ‘ways of seeing’ and concludes that Richard Rossiter’s concept of three phases of ‘the relationship between nature and identity within Australian narrative’ can be applied to the examined texts. Also, it appears that a fourth phase is apparent in this staging of a literary consciousness: one which can be contextualised within Huggan’s discussion of the ‘transnational’. iv v DECLARATION This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication. vi vii CONTENTS THE TERRITORY OF TRUTH 1 HOBART 2 1. The Territory 3 2. Mapping ‘Home’ 32 3. A Last Migration 62 ACROSS THE SEA WALL 69 4. The Northern Lights 70 5. Expected Time of Arrival 87 HOBART – TWENTY YEARS LATER 108 6. The Territory of Truth 109 7. The Long Fetch 128 8. The Road Not Taken 148 ‘WAYS OF SEEING’: THE TASMANIAN LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE 160 1. Introduction 161 2. ‘Ways of Seeing’ 164 3. Why Landscape? Why Tasmania? 171 4. The Texts – Three ways of seeing 178 5. A Fourth ‘Way of Seeing’ 195 6. Creative Response 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY 208 viii 1 THE TERRITORY OF TRUTH Anna Donald 2 HOBART 3 1. The Territory Maeve Be mindful I tell myself, sitting beside the harbour, painting, making a picture of this lovely town of golden and grey stone set at the foot of a mountain. Hobart is landscape: all about us the hillsides, the sky, the clouds, the roiling of grey shapes over the blue, and the water driven around the globe, the forty two degrees and further of south, and slapping now against the sea wall before me in lapping waves, replete, the last victorious gasps after a great run, after a long fetch. The water licks the stone, brimming with the current of history, of ships, other lands, travellers: mesmerising, insistent, teasing the eye with patterns, the ear with whispers. Soon a world of stories rises and begins to hum. It is difficult to be on guard, to stop myself drifting into different territory: a boat, wet boards, a plank biting into my calves, a blister filling as I rush to bring my oar around, to dig it into the blue that kicks just a little too soon. The oar crabs and misses the surface. I lurch forwards, out of rhythm. The lash cracks on my back. *** The painting is a gift for someone who’s coming from England for a visit. I’m hoping she’ll have happy memories of the place and like the picture enough to take it home. Maybe she’ll decide to stay on, as people do, though she might be disappointed in some aspect of The Hobart Experience. We often are... disappointed in life, whether in the wider world of friendships or of kin. I too have been disappointed but I’ve always found a new reason for a future. Anticipation is a drug. I painted this same view a long time ago, to put beside my father’s bed as he lay there, day after day, life after life. Sadly, the memory of him is haunted by slithering images of withered flesh, clawed hands, old bone in a jar. My father is long dead, my mother too, but just recently. Once I was enmeshed in their memories, now I’m making my own, striking out as it were. Of course some people cling to the idea of family, like my brother with his little brood. Me, not so much, though that could change, I’m open to it. 4 People love to come to Australia for a visit, to see first-hand all those touristy images, then if they move on to Tasmania, (not all do) they apparently find an unexpected hominess in the island, a sort of familiarity. Oh it’s like England, they coo, or if they go further west or south, Like Scotland. I have painted Scotland, in another life, more than twenty years ago. I was on the run then. And although this view before me is touted on a hundred tourist cards and websites, I am still painting my own view, what I want to see. I’m trying to get it just right: applying The Rule of Thirds, the placing of compositional elements upon intersections... showing the relationships of each of the separate parts: the sky, the water, and the detail. I have to make decisions about what to include and what to leave out because I don’t like clutter in a landscape. There is an ugliness always on view where people have been. Not out in nature of course, but where humans go ugliness will follow in some form or another, as in the blight of telephone poles, and coloured signs or television antennas. The one on the top of the mountain here seems such a desecration: the stick, it’s called, but what an excrescence. I always leave it out when I paint the mountain. Detail can be the devil as some say. The painting is a study of the old bond stores down here in Sullivan’s Cove, where it all began for the British, where the life of Hobart began. I’m inspired by the honeyed sandstone, the shapes and shadows of the windows, the huge wooden doors: I’m drawn to the history of it, the signposts back to the past when Hobart offered a new life to some, and the end of life for others. My brush hovers over the painting, stilled by images of bloodied shards of bones spiking through stripped flesh. I will myself to work but my focus is wavering. Each time I look up and out to the view I’m distracted. There is so much to think of in life. A dreamer, as my brother says. And sometimes he still says, morbid, or weird. It doesn’t bother me. I’m an adult and no longer the little girl he used to tease. I have always chosen to leave much about him out of my life but now... in the coming weeks I see that I will need his help. With the visitor. For I would like to present an image of family to her, show her the place that I have. Of course it will be a deceit but that has become my way. I will be crossing into new territory, over the threshold, into his family life, into unfamiliar domestic terrain, into his normal but ordinary life. A bird swoops overhead and I turn to watch its path as it flies to the west, toward the mountain: the Mother. Sun shines on the peak in the breaks between the rushing clouds which snatch the colour from trees and rocks. History intrudes. 5 Unwillingly I hear the rattle of chains; of the aborigines and the convicts plunging through the bush; the slavering dogs barking and racing, soldiers shouting, gunshots. The hunted are running hopelessly free. I feel their breath tightening in my lungs, my head pounded by the noise. It will happen of course, and it does, I am running with them, desperate for escape, branches slapping at my face and the ground trying to trip me. I shut my eyes. Fearful memory is all about. Some years ago a lunatic drove south with a gun to the Port Arthur convict prison, now a tidily sign-posted museum where people wander about in the sunshine listening to the guides and unsuccessfully trying to imagine the hell enacted there.