Under British and Dutch rules respectively, the ancient lands of India and South Africa were forced to conform to the newly dominant cultures and languages even though, within their multiple ethnic groups, some peoples managed to preserve their native tongues and social identities. It was more complicated with Australia and English-speaking Canada: their immense territories of forests, deserts of sand, and expanses of ice being more sparsely populated, they attracted waves of settlers from Great Britain and other European countries.
Naturally, the development of these two seemingly inhospitable territories did not take place overnight. The clearing of the land and exploitation of its peoples and resources required more than a century to yield prosperity for a growing ruling class, which gradually became powerful enough to impose its own economic and social norms. Mostly emanating from similar English roots, both countries advanced their own literatures with their distinct singularities, maintaining British English as a common linguistic base.
On May 18, 1990, and for the first time in France, the Ministry of Culture invited eleven Australian writers to present their works in several cities under the umbrella program of Les Belles Etrangères. Only one writer was of Aboriginal origin: Colin Johnson, or Mudrooroo Nyoongah by his native name. This absence of Indigenous Australian literature was all the more surprising as Native American literatures were flourishing in North America, and Bruce Chatwin’s travel essay The Songlines was enjoying great popularity in the Anglophone world.
In The Songlines, the author investigates the millennial and mysterious ritual “walkabout” consisting of a network of “lines” or paths opened tens of thousands of years ago by its Aboriginal ancestors. These tracks were marked by direction signs invisible to the eyes of strangers, but inscribed in the sacred songs that accompanied the Indigenous peoples in their nomadic journeys across the continent. As Chatwin’s work had aroused immense curiosity, in turn, we had expected native Australian writers to further explore this ancestral vein.
However, even after the continent’s independence in 1901, British literary traditions continued their hold on all Australian literature, and Aborigines were obliquely portrayed as unformed shadows and/or ominous presences. Nonetheless, their integration into the historical process of the nation was becoming increasingly noticeable in the writings of the arising younger generation. For example, in Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet (1991), a ghost-haunted house in Perth is a former orphanage, an unmistakable reference to the stolen generation of children forcefully removed from their Aboriginal families in the name of assimilation. Sadly, no Aboriginal Australian writer read at the Village Voice, but, fortunately, their literatures were starting to fill the literary corpus of their land.
The night of the “Belles Etrangères” three Australian authors were programmed to speak of their works: Peter Carey, Rodney Hall, and Tim Winton. Their narratives were different in content and style, but each one of them summoned the foreboding power of nature, revered for its splendor, but just as endangering in its very essence.
Peter Carey
Among these three Australian writers, we chose to bring to life Peter Carey’s narrative through a performance that combined the three excerpts he read from his recent work Oscar and Lucinda, an engrossing and subtly ironical novel set in the mid-nineteenth century. Given the circumstances, there was no time left for discussion or exchanges with the audience.
The work unfolds between Great Britain at the peak of its industrial boom, symbolized by the Crystal Palace (Hyde Park Great Exhibition, 1851), and Australia, the new and immense, unmapped continent, a promising arena for an expanding empire. The story depicts Oscar, who breaks away from his father, a fundamentalist Anglican preacher, and Lucinda, a young Australian heiress and great admirer of the aforementioned Palace. The rebellious Oscar and ambitious Lucinda meet on the ship taking them to her homeland. He is determined to found his own Anglican mission in the hinterland, while Lucinda is bent on enlarging the glass factory she had bought on a previous trip. Their journey at sea is spent gambling, a passion the two adventurers share, creating a complicity between them that includes a strange, mutual attachment.
Peter Carey at the Village Voice Bookshop, May 13, 1993. Village Voice archive.
Upon their arrival, they collaborate on the building of the glass church, combining Lucinda’s search for commercial success and Oscar’s spiritual aspirations, two fundamental values of their estranged country. He is soon in charge of transporting this architectural miracle from Sydney to the backcountry. Sitting inside the church that is balanced on a barge floating down the river, Oscar begins to reflect on the extravagance and sheer vanity of an endeavor that his fantasy of a romance with Lucinda has rendered imaginable.
All of a sudden, under the pressure of extreme heat, this church explodes into thousands of glass shards, bringing on an apocalyptical sinking of the long boat that takes the nascent wonder and Oscar along with it.
Symbolically, the founding principles of the mother country are gone too, buried deep in these waters by the force of this continent’s natural elements.
Tim Winton
Known as the “wunderkind of Australian letters,” Tim Winton looked like an easygoing young man in jeans and turtleneck sweater, his long black hair pulled back into a braided ponytail. Born on the wild West Coast of Australia, “the conservative wrong side of Australia,” he said, Winton grew up in the sixties and was influenced by American youth culture, its music, and the taut language of Hemingway. He confirmed that this generation “resists the language inherited from Britain and feels closer to Americans who write as they talk, an easy language which people can understand,” comparing “the surge of energy” in contemporary Australian literature to American letters in the mid-nineteenth century “when authors, such as Melville, discovered that they were Americans, becoming aware that their works were rooted in their national experience.”
His own literary playground embraces big lands, the vast ocean, and the Outback with its immense desert of red sand that stretches to the very edge of the ocean. When he presented his recent novel Dirt Music1 at our bookshop on March 30, 2004, we learned that it was his ninth work, hailed by some as the quintessential Australian fiction of the early twenty-first century.
The story starts in the invented White Point, once a shanty harbor on the West Coast, but over the years becoming a fashionable resort due to a fast-growing lobster industry. The basic action revolves around three of its characters. First, there is Jim, the successful fisherman, the all-powerful “uncrowned prince” of this place. Then comes his partner Georgie, a former nurse who has roamed the world and left her children to live with him in this promising community. However, dreaming of yet another life, she soon starts to feel out of place. The real outsider is Cambridge-educated Lu Fox, who is trying to deal with the loss of his family in a freak car crash. A loner seeking to break with this trauma, he survives by poaching lobster traps, considered “the worst crime in this community.” In time, Georgie and Lu begin to seek solace in each other’s embrace, but their secret is soon discovered and only points to trouble coming their way. When his dog is murdered, Lu decides that it’s time for him to pull up stakes and leave.
His disappearance is the driving force of Winton’s story, turning two failed romances and a Robinson Crusoe adventure into a road novel with a chase across land and sea. Fleeing White Point, Lu drives two thousand miles up north where “red-blood sand meets the Ocean.” He has reached a place where no one will find him, in a mangrove on an island, two hours off the coast by local plane, where only Indigenous people can survive.
Struggling to make his way in this stunning but indomitable wilderness, he lives precariously, seemingly forgetting that “Aborigines always move in groups and with food supplies and that living alone turns into a death in paradise.”2 These words foreshadow the dramatic end of the novel during which the three characters are reunited in a cataclysmic crash, plunging them into a desperate underwater race for survival.
Someone in the audience wondered about the author’s involvement in environmental issues in Australia.
Winton: “I joined a defense committee for the protection of the northern West Coast and its coral barrier against the implantation of a kind of Club Med project. I reluctantly got my neck into the fight against it. My involvement prevented me from writing—my daily routine, but the defense committee needed a celebrity, a prominent personality to stop the plan. There were huge demonstrations, and against all odds, we won, and to such an extent that the internet messages and social networks crashed my computer.”
Another person asked about the title Dirt Music and what he meant by it.
Winton: “I wrote this book as a tribute to music. We had gathered musicians together from all over and produced a record. Alone on his island, Lu stretches fishing lines between two trees, creating a primitive instrument, but there is also the music in the landscape, the multiple sounds of nature. Dirt Music is about Lu, the musician who used to play on his guitar all kinds of music, anything you could play on the verandah, you know, with no electricity for the guitar. It evokes trash, which is also the earth, the home country.”
Julia Leigh
To conclude this reenactment of our Australian readings, I would be remiss to omit another major author, Julia Leigh, also a film director and screenwriter. In Paris on a short visit, Leigh heard about a reading at our bookshop with the American writer Claire Messud.3 Having already met the author, she offered to introduce her. At the close of the evening, the audience pressed Julia Leigh to say a few words about her own critically acclaimed novel The Hunter.4
While in Oscar and Lucinda and Dirt Music implacable natural forces vanquish man, in Leigh’s original and powerful work of fiction, the natural world is transmuted into the victim. In this case, it is a female tiger of a rare species that is killed by a hunter, an anonymous M, a man without a home or any emotional attachment for that matter. A biotech multinational has commissioned him to acquire the DNA of a tiger believed to be extinct, last spotted in 1936 on the Haut Plateau of Tasmania, an island state of Australia. The reader closely follows in the footsteps of the hunter tracking for days and nights the elusive animal which, both smart and insolent, initially thwarts numerous traps and failed gunshots.
Phantasmagorical Tasmanian nature is revealed close up through the sharp eye of this predator on the outlook for rock hollows, nooks, and bushes where the tiger may be hiding. At the same time, Leigh’s own camera eye closely observes the hunter stalking this majestic animal. He finally manages to locate and kill her in cold blood, then meticulously skins her, now prepared to bring his precious booty back to the lab.
Never moralistic, Leigh intuits in this male hunter a faint sign of reverence for the dead body of his victim, the sacred female tiger: “She is more than an animal to him and observes her body as he would the body of a friend laid out in the morgue.” Yet the quiver of emotion he may feel is suddenly reduced to the comment that “she looks nothing like the creature he knew before. . . . Now, her stillness is obscene.”
With this chilling metaphor of the solitary tiger and its obsessive predator, Julia Leigh provides a doomed vision of contemporary man’s blind obstinacy in targeting and gradually eradicating the resplendence of the natural world in one of its last sanctuaries.