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The power of place
It was comically presumptuous of me, but while I was still in high school I’d begun to think of myself as a writer. At seventeen I’d never met an author. My acquaintance with the world of letters was even narrower than my experience of life, and I wish I could say I went to university to quench a raging intellectual thirst, but in truth I enrolled for the sole purpose of writing stories. In fact I approached higher education in a spirit hardly different to that of my mates who signed up at tech to learn the plumbing game, or to train as sparkies. In my mind time was too precious to spend it waffling on about Literature. I intended to make the stuff – with my bare hands if necessary.
So my years at university were just an excuse to hole up in a shed in my parents’ backyard and write. Because the way I looked at it you learnt to write on the job, by writing. Which wasn’t the most nuanced way to approach the craft of fiction, but not far wide of the mark, as things turned out. What I didn’t know is that you also learn to write by watching and listening and remembering and wondering. And perhaps most importantly, by reading. As a result of four years’ intensive reading I got a sort of education despite myself.
[ . . . ]
Generous study breaks between semesters gave me the chance to head south and recharge in a physical environment I loved. I dived, fished and surfed, slept in my van and read the next term’s set texts under dripping canvas in a fug of wood smoke – Faulkner, Twain, Hardy, Conrad.
And in one six-week binge I tore through every Patrick White book in print, mostly on an iron bed-frame slung up in the boughs of a moort. What I responded to in these writers was the way they embraced the particulars of their place and the music of their own vernacular. I wanted to do something like that on the southern coast, which felt as if it harboured secrets and stories in every hidden cove and estuary. For all their melancholy shabbiness there was an antic spirit around some abandoned shacks and salmon lookouts. Whimsical furnishings, dunnies with sea views, hand-fashioned letterboxes where no postie had ever been. Sometimes there was nothing left but a midden of longnecks and cans, a sauce bottle, a teapot. I stumbled on the rusted trypots and remnant hearths of whalers. In deep gullies and matted clearings where the shells of a thousand feasts crunched and clattered underfoot, I sensed a profusion of resonances I didn’t understand. It was like stepping into a room vacated only moments before. Everywhere unresolved events and unfinished conversations seemed to waft like the spider webs I could feel but rarely see. There were sorrows I didn’t yet connect with – the absences articulated by so many Noongar names for places, creatures and plants – for the moment I was caught up with trying to find a vocabulary and a diction to match the strangeness of the places I loved and the taciturn people who inhabited them.
I was interested in spiritual retreat and contemplation in nature, and susceptible to romanticized notions of solitude, so I was curious about hermits like Frank Cooper and fascinated by the enclaves of squatters that still clung on in those days beside remote creeks and inlets. These blokes were odd-bods (for some reason they were always men). Holding out in flat-tyred caravans or tin humpies, they were not seekers or idealists so much as refugees from consequence and responsibility. Where the sand tracks petered out there were cabals of alkies, petty crims and cheapskates. Many were on the lam from the law, the tax department, their wives and their children.
But it was the real recluses who stirred my imagination, the scowling misfits in barely accessible hollows, those who retreated to the shadows until you gave up and moved on. Enchanted by Blake and Wordsworth and steeped in the eremitic characters of religious history like Simeon Stylites and Julian of Norwich, I found their stubborn isolation irresistible. Now and then one might show himself, trade a few litres of tank water for a rare carton of milk, or let slip a secret campsite for the price of a few shucked abalone or a bit of rump steak. Some consented to a few minutes of stilted conversation. They must have wondered what my game was, why I wouldn’t just piss off and leave them be. They looked as if they’d sprung from the lonely places I found them in. The bowers of peppermint and tea-tree through which they stalked and hid seemed to have shaped their language and their personalities. Their roo-dog leanness, their cragginess and their brooding silences captivated me. I noticed the residual hints of the nineteenth century in their vocabulary, the austerity of their expressions. These men weren’t quite modern. Some of them had a peculiar shifting gaze, a tendency to look over my shoulder into the damp, dark thickets pressing in from the ridges above. They had secrets, stories they could or would not share with a gormless kid. To me they were haunted figures in a brooding landscape, their pasts as impenetrable, as eerily palpable as those louring thickets that hid them.
To the apprentice novelist, men like these were irresistible characters. They gave off such a storied air. Their evasiveness invited invention, elaboration. I was young enough to be startled by the living force of the past upon them. The few I got to know were damaged men who seemed to have reached an accommodation with themselves and their surroundings. Some knew the poetry of Browning and Longfellow. They spoke about French mapmakers, English navigators and American whalers as if their ships had only minutes before cleared the headland. They alluded to ancient Aboriginal middens, springs and footpads. Their knowledge of local species was supreme. At times all these strands interwove and snagged, as if memory and lore became too dense; their train of thought broke up and skated away; they ranted or glowered or simply got up and went indoors, and in later years, reading John Clare, I associated them less with the milk-eyed seers and eccentrics of romantic poetry and thought instead of that poet’s great torment in trying to hold the beloved world together in his fractured mind. For that was the thing – many of those poor old buggers were mad as meat axes, shattered by war or undone by events I was too young to comprehend. Under the brothy spell of the sublime, I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rainsodden greatcoats and lived like cripples.
Teachers of creative writing used to urge their students to write about what they know – perhaps they still do. But when you’re eighteen or nineteen and keenly aware of how thin your experience really is, it’s hard to put a directive like that into action. The truth is, a family and a hometown will afford you material to last a lifetime, but when you’re a youth neither seems important enough to address. It’s as if only distant places and other families are worth writing about. Even young New Yorkers and Londoners must feel this. For somebody writing from the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere – which is more or less what it felt like when I was first writing and publishing – the feeling is acute. When you’re starting out, it takes nerve to write about home and to do it in a language that’s unapologetically local. Some voice in your head is telling you to moderate the demotic and the specific, to accommodate the ‘cosmopolitan reader’. You waste a lot of time second-guessing this abstract stranger from somewhere far more important, and sadly, in time, you’ll get to meet him or her and realize they weren’t entirely imaginary. For writers at the margin there will always be an imperial pressure to relinquish particularity and conform to something more familiar, and what is most familiar to the world of publishing is an urban and largely denatured life. Whether they acknowledge it or not, many editors like to see their own lives reflected. Readers in New York and London often prefer a friction-free reading experience, so when you stubbornly write about regional lives in local vernacular you test the cosmopolitan reader’s patience. These were lessons I had to learn at home before I began to be published abroad.
In the late seventies and early eighties, when I first sent stories to magazines in Melbourne and Sydney, I encountered a cultural headwind I naively assumed had puffed itself out a decade before, but despite the confidence evident in the new wave of Australian cinema, the bubbling ferment in local publishing, and a fresh swagger in the arts in general, the old colonial mindset lingered on in the form of an unspoken aversion to regional settings and colloquial expression. If you were a writer or painter and you showed more than a passing interest in place, you risked being labelled second-rate, provincial or reactionary. Having understandably had their fill of bushrangers, hardy pioneers and Hans Heysen gumtrees, the guardians of culture were leery of anything countrified. There was a palpable anxiety about presenting a clean face abroad. Idiomatic language and settings a little alien to the inner-city milieu of publishing and cultural power bore a shaming whiff of redneck armpit. Whether you’re from far north Queensland, the Territory or Western Australia, there are times when you feel as if you’re living on an island within an island.
Tasmanian writers and artists live it quite literally, on an island beside an island and half the time their bit of Australia is absent from the map. And with every cultural and geographical current against you, it’s hard to resist the impulse to obey the tidal logic and set sail for somewhere downwind.
As Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro have shown, it’s one thing to teach yourself to write and another to train your editors to read you. Both these regional writers – each stubbornly invested in particularity – educated their publishers and their readers with sheer persistence, by holding their nerve. Every Australian reader is forced to accommodate the strangeness of overseas – usually American or British – fictional settings. To keep up you need to adapt to new and weird idioms and soon these become normative. This provincial form of cosmopolitanism isn’t optional. Similarly, a reader from some no-account place like Perth is expected to adjust their senses eastward with no reciprocity. At nineteen and twenty it was a nasty surprise to realize just how resistant a Sydney or Melbourne editor could be to the appearance on the page of Australian places and species with which they were unfamiliar. It may be hard to believe at this distance, but in my early days it wasn’t just the foreign publishers suggesting I append a glossary to the end of a novel. As I recall, the pesky dugite (Pseudonaja affinis) caused the most editorial grief at home and abroad, and I was tempted to follow St Patrick’s lead and ban elapid snakes entirely. But I kept coming back to Flannery O’Connor. Not only was she misunderstood in New York, she was a problem for folks at home in Georgia, too. I loved her craft and the singularity of her world. But I also admired O’Connor’s cussedness, her refusal to come to heel. She was an important influence.
I don’t know if, in the end, I held my nerve as a writer or just painted myself into a corner, but I persisted with place as a starting point for all my stories. For me a story proceeded from the logic of an ecosystem. When I began a piece I never knew where I was headed, but I followed the contours of the country my characters were in and found my way to the nub of things, and over time I grew more passionate and emboldened about using the vernacular language of the people I knew best. In a way I wanted to draw a reader into a fictional setting that was unmistakably distinct, just as I was swept into the foreign worlds of Hardy’s Wessex and Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Taranaki. I began to write about Albany and the people and places along the south coast. This was as much a matter of making do with what I knew as it was an ongoing act of homage to somewhere I loved. But in retrospect I see I was trying to find a language for the presence of the past. I was coming instinctively to an understanding of the way geography shapes us, but also tacitly giving credit to the weight of time. When they move in and across a landscape humans are wading through a shared past, surrounded at every turn by events and processes that will never be over. And I don’t just mean human events, but matters of geology and biology, too. The past is inescapable. Every extruded stone we brush by, every flattened vowel and awkwardly idiomatic expression we use as we stumble past it betrays the weight of time. For someone brought up with a modernist outlook, it’s hard to swallow the idea that we belong to nature, tougher still to be owned by time. . . .
