The Corner Of Your Eye and Beyond the Bush: Mythology of place in Australian literature Kate Lyons Doctor of Creative Arts 2008 Kate Lyons ii Certificate of authorship/originality I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as fully acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. Signature of Student Kate Lyons iii ‘Knowledge was never a matter of geography. Quite the reverse, it overflows all maps that exist.’ (White 1994, p. 446). Kate Lyons iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank Annette Barlow and Christa Munns of Allen & Unwin for their patience and encouragement during the drafting and editing of my novel. My thanks also go to Sara Lyons and Margo Daly for their reading of early novel drafts. Dr. Debra Adelaide provided much support and insight during the writing and editing of the exegesis and Dr. John Dale provided valuable final supervision. Sara Lyons provided the germ of this idea, and Dr. André van Schaik has offered enduring financial and emotional support. Kate Lyons v Contents Certificate of authorship/originality .................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Contents .............................................................................................................................. v Chapter one ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter two ......................................................................................................................... 8 Chapter three ..................................................................................................................... 25 Chapter four ...................................................................................................................... 31 Abstract ........................................................................................................................... 253 Introduction: The place of the past ................................................................................. 255 Memory and place ........................................................................................................... 268 Mythology and place ....................................................................................................... 273 The mythology of wilderness .......................................................................................... 279 The romantic self ............................................................................................................ 290 The self as other .............................................................................................................. 298 The marginal self............................................................................................................. 307 The geography of self...................................................................................................... 320 The geography of self...................................................................................................... 320 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 329 Kate Lyons The Corner Of Your Eye vi The Corner Of Your Eye Kate Lyons Copyright © Kate Lyons 2006 Kate Lyons The Corner Of Your Eye vii For André Kate Lyons The Corner Of Your Eye viii Send me out into another life Lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way —W.S. Merwin, Words From a Totem Animal Extract ‘Words From a Totem Animal’ © 1970 by W.S. Merwin, reprinted with the permission of the Wylie Agency. Kate Lyons The Corner Of Your Eye 1 Chapter one FLORENCE HAS LONG blonde hair. It corkscrews down the stiff rope of her back. Around her ears it forms stubbornly tender whorls. At five, she used to flatten these with hair gel or tap water, or some spit if she was desperate. At eight, she spent hours locked in the bathroom. I spent hours battering at the door. Flo just turned the tape recorder up, The Cure or The Clash or Joy Division. Someone sang of love gone wrong while Flo plastered murderously, banging small palms against the sides of her head. When she was finished, there’d be this flamboyant curly verandah hedged with sideburns stiff as boards. She looked like a bovver boy or a small matinee idol. Red lips. Black scowl. Luxuriant quiff. At ten, Flo’s hair reached her bottom. It tended to fall into dinners, get snarled with chewing gum, clog plugholes. In summer it turned lime green from the chlorine at the baths. It wound itself around banisters and fingers and hair brushes, flew flag-like when she ran. Flo racing up stairs or through a hallway was all tail, no comet. A gangle- kneed blur. At night, though, that hair was quietly opulent on a pillow. It caught the glow of moonlight, the summer haze of trees. In the mornings it was all I could find of her. A fragrant and sulky disguise. At eleven, she cut it all off. With a serrated knife from the kitchen block and my nail scissors. Dyed it Ripe Blood Plum, or that’s what it said on the Clairol box. Hanks of hair everywhere, the bathroom like an autopsy, and Flo glaring at me in the mirror. Crisis-coloured, jaggedly defiant. Who will win? I don’t know how she wears it now. But I still think of her with all that hair. The school-morning brushing, the stretched forehead plaiting. The yelps and the screams. Her face brutal with it. Brows tight as my mother’s purl plain stitch. Flo’s eyes are wide and blue and innocent. She’s not, though. Neither am I. Five in the morning. Tomorrow’s Flo’s birthday. She was born at 5.03, almost twelve years ago. Kate Lyons The Corner Of Your Eye 2 There are windows in all directions here, in Leo’s house on the hill. A slice of ocean in every one. Pre-dawn, it’s bruise blue between a white sandwich of beach and cloud. In summer fog or low-brow cumulus, we seem to hang suspended. A glass egg in a fragile palm. It’s winter now though. Season of gales. I’m looking hard for Leo’s little boat. For his special mast light, pumpkin-shaped, with bulgy bits. There’s nothing out there, nothing except the morose blinking of the five-mile buoy. And the lighthouse beam, a yellow knife through curdled fog. At three a.m., as it does with stunning regularity, it hit our bedroom windows full bore. On bad nights of king tides and storm warnings, it does this every few minutes. I feel I should check for Germans, make a break for the fence. I’m glad of it though. It will look after Leo when I’m gone. Through his binoculars, everything is claustrophobic, seasick green. Can’t get my bearings, can’t see Leo’s special rock, shaped like one of Mattie’s double-cone Mr Whippies. The one Leo fondly hopes I will keep in my eyeline, on nights like this. I think he imagines me in the rocking chair, with a shawl or something, listening in on the CB. I do it sometimes. But not all that often. Not as often as Leo thinks. When a big gust hits, muscular, slab-sided, our verandah bellies sideways, windows wobble like rotten teeth. Leo’s bolts and stilts and braces hold us, but only tenuously, only one to the other, like fanatics holding hands. This house Leo cobbled from demolition pickings and old bits of beach flotsam, it’s as tall and unwieldy as one of his yarns. The bottom floor’s just a holiday fibro, small and dour. The top’s a sort of elaborate gothic subplot, all gable-led climaxes, portentous with eaves. Leo’s never satisfied. He keeps adding to it; a balcony here, a storey there. He hauls stuff up the hill in his old wheelbarrow like a demented ant. Rotten dock lumber, bits of stained glass, old anchors, wormy chunks of pier. Now there are too few foundations, too much roof. Too many adjectives, not enough nouns. We cling to an idea Leo had, not to the earth. Tides are eroding the cliff face, too. They’ve tried to shore it up with old bits of concrete, raw with graffiti, spiky with rust, but the sand keeps desiccating, in long runnels and yawning holes. One day, by degrees of water torture, we’ll all end up in the drink. Kate Lyons The Corner Of Your Eye 3 Secretly I like it, the sense of danger. On a night like this, in a house like this, bones of old disasters steer us in all directions, anchors weigh us to wild thin air. The past feels close somehow. It’s not my past; it’s not even Leo’s. He stole it from somewhere or someone else. It’s the remnants of other people’s misfortunes, reinvented as his own. My dad would have liked this house. He was a magpie like Leo; ‘waste not, want not,’ he used to say. He liked things that showed the marks of pain and age and fate upon them, the laugh lines and the wounds. Dad would run his palms over the salty bolts and hull lichen, the barnacle scars from some long demolished pier. He’d find the beauty in all the mistakes and holes and curvatures, in Leo’s newel posts like woody onions, carved from a single bit of drift. Dad would have known where these things came from, how to fix them and exactly what they were for. Below the bathroom