Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction 9781527506978, 1527506975

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Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction

Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction By

Salhia Ben-Messahel

Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction By Salhia Ben-Messahel This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Salhia Ben-Messahel All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0285-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0285-7

This book is for Bruce Bennett (1941-2012), a much-respected tutor and scholar in the field of Australian literary studies, and a valuable friend.

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... ix Stephen Muecke Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I ............................................................................................................ 7 Postcolonial Dilemma 1. Excavating Darkness ........................................................................ 15 2. Country Revisited ............................................................................ 57 3. Seeking Dream Territories ............................................................... 82 Part II ....................................................................................................... 117 The Devolution of Literature 1. Post-hybridity................................................................................. 125 2. Historical Reincarnations ............................................................... 138 3. Textual Politics .............................................................................. 151 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 191 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 195

PREFACE STEPHEN MUECKE

French readers are among the best when it comes to Australian fiction, and with this book Salhia Ben-Messahel has gone a step further with the introduction of new theoretical perspectives. What is it about Australia for the French, or perhaps Europeans generally? For the English, Australia was merely a “colonial boy”; their wayward child caught stealing bread and transported “for the term of his natural life”. As the original settlercolonists, the British were able to impose an imperial perspective that left the new nation (federated only in 1901) in a perpetual state of immaturity, always one step behind the “mother country”, still with the Union Jack in one corner of the flag. This situation, shared somewhat by other secondworld nations like Canada, New Zealand and Brazil, was a fertile one for a form of national psychosis to take root. The Australian psychic counter-reaction to colonial repression tended to be a desperate and virile destruction of the environment in the name of agricultural “improvement”, as well as a justification for ignorance and the dismissal of Indigenous resource-management that continues to this day. Fortunes were nonetheless made by the richer squatters, raising sheep and shearing wool, putting off the debt to be paid to the degraded land, putting off (again, to this day) any real political treaty with the traditional owners of the land. It is in the context that the European reader comes in, unblinkered by colonial and imperial dismissive hauteur, at least towards Australia. Europeans, who came first as lone pioneering adventurers and then en masse as “new Australians” in the mid-20th century, came with enthusiasm, a Rousseauian fascination for a set of surviving ancient cultures and a thirst for the kind of innovation that “new” or “young” countries made possible. In some ways, the talking cure that Australian writers have been working through for 200 years is making progress, as charted by BenMessahel. Of course, the Indigenous writers she deals with, like Kim Scott, are curing themselves of another kind of psychic damage that has reverberated down the generations ever since invasion. Most Australian writers are yet to acknowledge the great traditions which are the real

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foundations of Australian culture.1 But many others, especially those of European heritage, have the necessary stereoscopic vision that enables a break from the psychotic dialogue the settler-colonials have been locked in with Indigenous Australia. I now want to be more precise about the author’s intellectual contributions to the fields of Australian literary studies, postcolonial literature and, more recently, eco-criticism. The concepts peopling her work (I will not cover them all) include regionality, altermodernity, the radicant and spatiality. Her reading of Tim Winton in terms of his regionality is absolutely correct; most of his fiction is devoted to imaginative extensions of Western Australian coastal life, including the Indian Ocean. He is like Robert Drewe in this regard. But Winton is the better writer, and Salhia Ben-Messahel has identified his genius for bringing out the organic unity of “ordinary” Australians, with their places and their often-marginalised status (child, outcast, working class, mad). Ben-Messahel captures Winton’s ability to write from observation and inhabitation of his places and characters as well as his capacity to extend his relevance to more universal themes. Borrowing altermodernity from aesthetic theorist Nicholas Bourriaud, Ben-Messahel turns it into a specific literary-critical tool to analyse trajectories of becoming rather than identities as essences. Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction will thus considerably update scholarship in the field of Australian literature, with important analysis of Richard Flanagan, Christos Tsiolkas, Beth Yahp, Eva Sallis, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Nam Le, Gail Jones and others. Altermodernity, an alternative to postmodernity and anti-modernity, embraces alternative modernities as new political-aesthetic strategies rather than the oppositional or revolutionary ones of the past, as Ghassan Hage does in his recent work of political theory, Alter-Politics.2 Similarly, radicant, also a Bourriaud term for a being that puts down roots as it goes, seems derived from a synthesis of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and nomadology. In this book, it is put to use in literary analysis in an Australia where the famous multiculturalism has been dropped in favour of border protection, and the writers Ben-Messahel is analysing are also grappling imaginatively with a new set of problems about being in place when a knowable climate-changed future is crashing back onto the 1

Stephen Muecke, “The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya’s Songs,” in Beate Neumeier and Kay Schaffer, eds. Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia, Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam) Cross-culture Studies Series, 2013, pp. 23–36. 2 Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015.

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present with the argument that we must imagine new ways of being (Judith Wright, Val Plumwood and other eco-critics). Spatiality is another conceptual character walking this literary Australian continent. It is configured here in relation to the legal doctrine of terra nullius, to the older ideas of the empty centre, to the historical theorisations of Paul Carter and thence to a multiplicité de natures, a very important phrase that Ben-Messahel uses elsewhere. Thus, without being underpinned by a singular nature, Australia’s postcolonial imaginary could be fragmented across almost as many “countries” the Aboriginal people identify as their own sovereign territories. In this complex scene, the author has to deploy a multiplicity of post-structuralist concepts in conjunction with the postcolonial ones forged by Said, Chakrabarty and others. This particular conjunction is a practice that is perhaps more common in Australian academic life than in the French, and in this respect the author is both showing her international connections at their best and demonstrating that in order to describe the (deracinated and enracinating) Australian imaginary, a unique theoretical architecture has to be composed. This is her substantial project represented by this book. I’m sure it will lead to important future work, and I would like to thank the author on behalf of my compatriots for the substantial and helpful interest she has taken in the literature of our distant, increasingly troubled, land. Stephen Muecke Jury Chair of English Language and Literature University of Adelaide

INTRODUCTION

Current debates around the sense of belonging in former settler countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand invariably bring to the fore issues of identity, culture and history. The multicultural tenet, which has illustrated Australian politics since the end of the 1980s, advocates shared values and cultural traditions that give Australia a competitive edge in a globalised environment. In her foreword to the new framework to the multicultural policy, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard refers to her arrival in Australia as a migrant and depicts Australia as the land of opportunities, insisting on the country’s multicultural identity and community spirit but seeming to hint at the settler heritage rather than the inclusion of all other ethnic groups. Implemented in 2011, the new multicultural scheme encompasses the public anxiety about the former policies of multiculturalism and whether they were constraining social cohesion and integration at a time the nation was being confronted by global conflicts, issues of identity and the refugee question. Yet, the Labour Government’s decision, beginning with the appointment of Kevin Rudd in October 2007, to move away from the term “multiculturalism” in favour of “diversity” ironically extends from the previous Liberal Government’s approach to migration and the sense of belonging. Indeed, further to the removal of the term “multicultural affairs” from the title of the Immigration Department by the Howard Government in 2007, the Gillard Government also removed the term from the title of the new Parliamentary Secretary assisting the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship. Julia Gillard’s decision met with criticism from the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA) on the grounds that it affected the definition of being Australian in the 21st century. This political approach extends the former policies and approach of cultural otherness secured by four terms of neoconservative liberal policies under the government of John Howard, from 1996 to 2007, and interrogates the nature of belonging and cultural identity in Australia, especially for those Australians whose forebears did not originate from Britain or Ireland, or even Europe. The next governments, led by liberal prime ministers, ironically, if not tragically, sustained Julia Gillard’s stance, emphasising the British heritage and maintaining multiculturalism within the perimeter of non- Anglo Australia.

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Introduction

Thus, the debates about multiculturalism that still animate Australian life evoke conceptual tensions and challenges, and bring to the fore the interaction of cultures, human rights discourses, inequalities faced by minority groups, the rise of religious extremism and nationalist discourse, the creation of the Border Force, the treatment of refugees and public scepticism. Taking into account these current and sensitive issues, this book seeks to examine the construction of narratives of nationhood and belonging in the works of a diverse range of authors, Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians, whose exploration of space and place subverts the postcolonial nature of Australia in a post-Mabo era. It seeks to show this by taking into account Nicolas Bourriaud’s Radicant (2009), his specific approach and claims about the emergence of a new modernity called the “altermodern”, which is neither modern nor postmodern but configured in response to an age of globalisation: What I am calling altermodernity thus designates a construction plan that would allow new intercultural connections, the construction of a space of negotiation going beyond postmodern multiculturalism, which is attached to the origin of discourses and forms rather than to their dynamics. It is a matter of replacing the question of origin with that of destination. “Where should we go?” That is the modern question par excellence. The emergence of this new entity implies the invention of a new conceptual persona (in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari gave this term) that would bring about the conjunction of modernism and globalization. (40)

Thus, the ways in which the Australian authors examined in this book depict the nation as the “space of the immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer – the dominant figures of contemporary culture” (Bourriaud: 58) show that cultural identity is reconceptualised around movement and nomadism, or radicant forms, in opposition to ethnic and other roots. Issues dealing with multiculturalism, postmodernism and cultural globalisation are the main elements that surface through their writings – even though they invariably refer to unresolved questions – and the depiction of Australia in a global perspective is discussed not from the usual sociological, political and economic points of view but rather “from an aesthetic perspective that affects the life of form” (Bourriaud: 58). To begin with, it is essential to note that the intimate and variegated relationship with place, locality and history since the end of the 20th century has led to substantial debates and a redefinition of what terms like “Australian”, “multicultural” and “postcolonial” mean. In her very first critical essays and works, Sneja Gunew explains that multiculturalism in Australia is defined in relation to a hegemonic and homogenised AngloCeltic centre rather than as a celebration of ethnic diversity. In her critical

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work, she argues that the history of Australian immigration, while diverse from the very beginning of settlement, is hardly ever foregrounded when characterising the nation; she rightly questions the incorporation of the migrant and the cultural other, including Indigenous Australians, in the nation’s history, highlighting their marginal position and status as intruders to the mainstream (Gunew, 1993). This book takes Gunew’s assertions and questionings through an examination of some recent Australian fiction, including the work of a variety of writers such as Richard Flanagan, Christos Tsiolkas, Beth Yahp, Eva Sallis and Kim Scott among others, to suggest that the past idea that the British settlement of the Australian continent was a worthy enterprise is still perceptible in society. The book, in fact, contends that the depiction of immigrant groups and Indigenous peoples often relies on an AngloCeltic approach to otherness, and even if postcolonialism presumes that Australians have resolved the colonial condition, stories published in the late 20th century and early 21st century suggest that Australia is somehow still a colony with the non-Anglo-Celtic subject cast away on the margins of the mainstream. As a matter of fact, Richard Flanagan and Christos Tsiolkas often voice their concerns that Australia does not entirely incorporate non-European migrants or the Indigenous Australians, and that the tenet of multiculturalism is a fake. Beth Yahp, Nam Le and Eva Sallis focus on the subjectivity of the cultural other to explore the cracks in the multicultural canvas, and include otherness from the perspective of the migrant rather than suggesting, like Helen Tiffin, that Indigenous literature stands in a counter-discursive relationship to white Australia like settler/invader discourses do in European narratives (Tiffin, 1995). The book then argues that recent Indigenous and non-Indigenous writing emerge as counter-discourse to the postcolonial nature of Australia and mainstream culture. It purports the idea that such discourse can be the resisting postcolonial voice of Australia, subverting Bill Ashcroft’s idea that the use of the term “postcolonial” rather than “postcolonial” in the Australian context refers to post-invasion rather than post-independence, and it identifies neither a chronology nor a specific ontology. Bill Ashcroft in fact insists that the use of a dash to separate the terms “post” and “colonialism” is a way of reading the continuing engagement with colonial and neo-colonial power and does not signify “after colonialism” nor a way of being (Ashcroft 2012). His assertion that Australia is still in “a postinvasion phase” is a valid argument but it also interrogates the extent and effects of Australia’s engagement with the colonial power or neo-colonial power considering that such engagement does not fully incorporate the

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Introduction

perception and interrogations of artists and writers from non-European backgrounds or non-Anglophone nations. The book’s examination of space and culture in the post-invasion phase, a phase which is best signified by the constitutional link with the British Monarch, who maintains the nominal title of Head of State and Queen of Australia, consequently interrogates the development of a discourse that, rather than stemming from an extension of imperial history, operates as a counter-discourse to postcolonialism. Of particular concerns are the ways in which fictional characters are enmeshed in and positioned by discourses of nationalism with a range of contradictions, tensions and exclusions, and how such individuals negotiate their place in a mechanism where postcolonialism and multiculturalism are in fact structured by colonialism. Therefore, the book argues that both multiculturalism and postcolonialism are floating signifiers, that they interact and mutually exclude one another not only in an Australian environment but also in a global perspective. The narrative address of the nation which, to quote Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, shows “a tension between the performative and the pedagogical, turns the reference to a “people” into a problem of knowledge that haunts the symbolic formation of social authority” (297). The book’s focus on geographical, physical and narrative space brings to the fore issues and discourses of identity and history, suggesting that while Australia is no longer terra nullius, the meaning of “country” remains critical, and belonging is either a complex or an impossible process. Attention is given to the critical work of Paul Gilroy, Sneja Gunew, Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs when discussing postcolonialism, nationalism and the definition of “home” so the distinctiveness of an Australia where the nation is experienced as homely and unhomely surfaces as a counter-discourse to official and postcolonial discourse. Nicolas Bourriaud’s depiction of the individual of those early days of the 21st century as “a radicant”, that is, “a plant that does not depend on a single root for its growth but advances in all directions on whatever surfaces it encounters by attaching multiple hooks to them, as ivy does”, can be observed in the fictional construction of the character. Such “radicant” characters evolve and “develop their roots as they advance, unlike the radicals, whose development is determined by their being anchored in a particular soil” (Bourriaud: 51). Part I of the book interrogates the multicultural ideal by first looking at the way fiction addresses the place of Indigenous people and how they fit into the Australian nation, the extent of their voice within it, and what power authors can exercise to discuss such central and unresolved issues in

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Australian politics and nationhood. A special emphasis is laid on the use of the environment and how different authors relate to geographic space, how the Indigenous perception of time, place and space does (or does not) interact with non-Indigenous perceptions of the land and ownership, and how and why these authors incorporate such concerns and perceptions in their writings. Indeed, Australian writing often interrogates the different forms of belonging, of relating to space and culture, with a critical view on the past and the present, especially at a time when Australia’s rhetoric is steering further towards Anglo-centric nations, for instance, Britain or the United States, to confront what the multicultural nation sees as new challenges from neighbouring Asia with the migrant and refugee issues. The meaning of “Europe” and its supposed counter-term “Asia” and the “Asia-Pacific” with “Australia” is examined in the work of Christos Tsiolkas, Nikki Gemmell, Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan, Nicholas Jose and Gail Jones, drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s much-quoted postcolonial injunction to “provincialise Europe”, which means deconstructing the universalist claims of European modernity (Chakrabarty, 2000). Part II takes an interest in literary texts that illustrate popular and subversive cultural formations within the nation-state in order to retell the migrant/diasporic experience as versions not of the official history of the nation, which is hegemonic and exclusionary, but of the dynamic and multidirectional histories of individuals who are part of the nation but belong in displacement. The reconfiguration of hybridity and identity as the result of multiple enrootings in the space of the nation tends to exceed the concept of the rhizome and design radicant forms. Critical engagements on issues ranging from racism, ethnicity and fundamentalism to cultural dislocation in a global environment investigate the complex (inter) cultural exchanges and diasporic geographies – spaces that supersede the configured nation-state and generate counter-discourse. The analysis of discourse dealing with land, identity and belonging suggests that the territorialisation of identity and the racialisation of geography are dismissed in favour of a diverse cultural cartography so that the nation is decolonised and Australian culture is postcolonial, no longer a hyphenated space or an extension from the colonial past. While critics, like Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, argue that the term “postcolonial” should be reserved for the struggles of the Indigenous peoples, who continue internal battles against the descendants of the settler colonisers in those countries, the book looks at how some recent Australian fiction interrogates the extension of Australia from Britain and Europe, subverting form, genre, culture and nationhood. In its examination

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Introduction

of forms of telling, writing and representing the multicultural nation, this volume suggests that Australian authors are, in fact, “radicant artists” who construct “their paths in history as well as geography” (Bourriaud: 125).

PART I POSTCOLONIAL DILEMMA

In his introduction to Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy notes that the “imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries” (2). This part examines various approaches to space and place, and seeks to question the unfinished business of the Empire that may surface in the shaky foundations of the nation. Such “unfinished business” may in fact pose a dilemma to postcolonial authors and seems to encourage some of them to dismiss a postcolonial space where cultural diversity surfaces as both a nexus and an extension from the United Kingdom or from any other European country. The focus on the environment is thus often envisaged from various perspectives, ranging from an Indigenous and spiritual attachment to place to an ecological perspective that binds Indigenous and non-Indigenous sensibilities to the land. Yet, while recent fiction relies either on Indigenous perceptions or ecological thoughts, it nonetheless shows an attempt to get rid of European discourse by integrating “other marginal others” so that intercultural exchanges initiating debates about Australian culture and the relationship to European history take place. A number of intellectuals and critics, among whom Sneja Gunew, Marcia Langton, Henry Reynolds and Germaine Greer feature, have raised concerns that Australia was not only Eurocentric but also that it failed to embrace its cultural diversity, clinging to its British ethnicity. In her celebrated and daring essay, “Whitefella Jump Up!”, Greer calls on Australians to embrace Indigenous culture as their own, to abandon the British heritage and go native. Commenting on Greer’s essay, Marcia Langton (2003) makes a valid statement by insisting that non-Indigenous voices have already begun to express an interest in Indigenous issues in an attempt to deal with the past and restore Indigenous history at the heart of national culture: What about David Malouf (The Conversations at Curlow Creek), Richard Flanagan (Death of a River Guide), Tim Winton (Dirt Music), Rodney Hall (The Island in the Mind trilogy), Murray Bail (Eucalyptus)? Apparently, Greer has not noticed that a distinctive Australian settler voice that speaks

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Part I of a deepening attachment to place and locality as the core of identity has emerged in Australian literature. While Greer boasts of her adoption by people of the Kulin nation, other Australians are trying hard to adopt their own backyards and take responsibility for their history, their environment and the inheritance of their own racism.

Langton refers to authors whose stories show an interaction between the individual and the environment and construct a space where a dialogue with history is made possible. A highly symbolic natural environment, on the margins of urban Australia, often operates as the signifier to reality while reflecting the dilemma of the postcolonial nation caught between the desire to expel the traumatic events of its history and embrace the multicultural dream. The interest in landscape and space, as instruments of control and/or liberation, harks back to the perceptions of explorers and settlers. Indeed, when Australia became a federation of states in 1901, the Indigenous population was not part of the nation-building process, nor were the Asian migrants, particularly from China, who had settled in Australia from very early days. The sense of unity and independence that illustrated the federation celebrations extended to the appropriation of space echoed in the speech delivered by the first Australian federal PM, Edmund Barton, who said: “For the first time in history we have a continent for a nation and a nation for a continent” (Rutledge, 1979). Barton’s statement, which associates exterior space with intimate space to spatialise Australian history, territorialises identity and belonging in terra nullius and reflects common features of Australian writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a matter of fact, Australia’s early literature focused on the uniqueness and vastness of the landscape and the settlers’ integration in the colonies, responding to a readership in Great Britain and supporting the nationalist claims that the antipodean colony was a nation in its own right; despite the non-integration into the cultural landscape of Indigenous people and migrants from outside the United Kingdom and other AngloCeltic countries. Leading authors such as Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin and Vance and Nettie Palmer were influential in the development of an Australian literature that would celebrate essential Australian values and support a national identity forged on settler culture yet retain the ties with the United Kingdom. The ideal of a shared national identity, along with the consistent politics of exclusion of those “other migrants” who were “outsiders” or “trespassers”, thus clearly affected social and cultural relations within the national borders and restricted culture to an AngloAustralian perspective. In his celebrated book, The Road to Botany Bay (2007), Paul Carter notes that the development of Australian literature in

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the 19th century supported nationalistic claims and encouraged the emergence of an Australian literary canon – a canon that in effect excluded so-called “cosmopolitan” authors and even modernist writers thought to be international and at odds with Australian issues. Patrick White’s exploration of the frontier as the epitome of identity in the 1970s marked a turning point in Australian literature and discourse as it encouraged authors to confront the reality of the wilderness and embrace the land as a feature of identity. In his essay “The Prodigal Son” (1958), White’s attack on mainstream Australian writing as being the “dreary duncoloured offspring of journalism” was meant to express his rejection of bush realism against modernism and paved the way for a new writing that would construct the nation and its social history. His social critique of the nation maintained a form of realism but rested on an interest in the spiritual nature of the land and the environment. Yet, by depicting Australia as a world untouched and a space of recovery and new beginning, especially in the aftermath of war, White somehow did not entirely jettison the Eurocentric approach he so much decried. He, among other writers, depicted Australia not as terra nullius but as a terra incognita to be discovered and experienced. Margaret Henderson and Leigh Dale argue that the contemporary binary approach to space and place by non-Indigenous people is nonetheless colonial: Since first contact and invasion, Europeans have imagined Australia in two related ways: as terra nullius, and as terra incognita. While Indigenous Australians have always known the fictiveness of these two modes of imagining this country, it took until the 1992 Mabo decision and legislation in 1993 for there to be legal recognition that Australia was not terra nullius; arguably, the allure of Australia as a mystery, as an unknown, still has a place in the white imagination. Foucault’s analysis of the power/knowledge nexus makes explicit the connections between these two conceptions of Australia, and their role in justifying what could be done to Indigenous peoples. The land’s supposed emptiness signals its mystery, which in turn allows free rei(g)n in the ways in which it may be known, and in the types of knowledges that can become authoritative. Thus, the way in which ‘Australia’ was known by the colonisers, and the ways in which this set of knowledges became dominant, have been crucial in securing control of the land and its people. (Henderson & Dale, 2005: 1–6)

Referring to the work of Michel Foucault, to his examination of disciplinary power as a regulation of space, time and individual behaviour, Henderson and Dale argue that Australia’s uncanny and mysterious nature is still an object of fantasy and imagination. Their ideas surface in the writings that deal with the confrontation of an Anglo-Australian character

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Part I

with the land – a character that is often depicted as a drifter. For instance, Tim Winton in Dirt Music, Nikki Gemmell in Cleave and Andrew McGahan in White Earth tackle land ownership and cultural belonging in an attempt to design their own “country”. Writing in the years between the Mabo case and the reconciliation debates, these three novelists confront Indigenous and non-Indigenous perceptions of the land and the consequences of colonisation on Australian society. The effects of colonisation on Indigenous people and the way Anglo-Australians may virtually “go native” in the search for roots and identity in marginal places – places set in rural and isolated areas – bring to the fore the definition of history as writing back alternative but discomforting stories of invasion, dispossession, exploitation, institutionalisation and acculturation (and attempted genocide) of the Indigenous population. Winton’s, Gemmell’s and McGahan’s stories clearly delve into the “great Australian silence” that anthropologist W.E.H Stanner dared denounce in 1968, and clearly show a difficulty for characters to come to terms with the past. Published a few years before or after Germaine Greer’s injunction that Australia should “go native”, Winton’s and Gemmell’s novels depict the nomadic lifestyle of an Anglo-Australian character in deserted areas, intertwining Indigenous perceptions of the land with Anglo-centric approaches to place. The desperate attempts to escape from the mainstream and modernity place characters in limbo between Indigenous and non-Indigenous territories. McGahan’s story, however, with the double entendre of its title “The White Earth”, examines the sense of belonging to the land felt by a racist and guilty farmer, John McIvor, depicting the sordid use that the character makes of an Indigenous gathering space and his (horrid) sense of belonging to place: The old man nodded, sombre again. ‘There are folks out there who believe that the Aborigines are the only ones who understand the land, that only the blacks could have found a place like this and appreciated what it was. They think that the blacks have some magical connection that whites can never have, that we’re just stumbling around here without any idea, that we don’t understand the country, that we just want to exploit it. But that’s not true. We can have connections with the land too, our own kind of magic. The land talks to me. It doesn’t care what colour I am, all that matters is that I’m here. And I understand what it says, just as well as anyone before me, black or white. I found this ring, didn’t I? So I deserve respect too.’ (181)

This passage echoes the way territory and space were appropriated and embraced by white settlers, and is a reminder of Kim Scott’s novel Benang (1999), in which the new country and the discovered “new” spaces encapsulate the opportunity for the white western settler to gain a new

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identity, social recognition and the natural right to possess and rule. In McGahan’s novel, the territorialisation and possession of geographic space are justified by a spiritual connection that McIvor claims to have, and by his suggestion that the national territory is not the state’s subdivided political territory but a personal space that encapsulates the signs and traces of a people throughout its history, meaning his own. Moreover, McIvor resents land rights and expresses the settler experience of lost property – an experience that cynically mirrors (and even depends upon) the Indigenous experience of dispossession. In Why Weren’t We Told?, Henry Reynolds examines colonial crimes and frontier conflicts and refers to a “mental block” that, according to him, prevents all Australians from coming to terms with the past and moving forward (Reynolds, 1999: 114). Reynolds’s arguments and view on Australian history could explain the complexity Anglo-Australian authors may be faced with when dealing with history. Indeed, in the attempt to reinstate what has been deliberately erased from the white pages of history, fiction often tends to iterate, even unconsciously, the ruthless binary logic of imperialism whereby Indigenous and settler cultures are separated spatially but bound to each other, being both at home and distinct. However, the Indigenous issue, often examined with a focus on the specificity of space and the environment, addresses the place of racism and multiculturalism in contemporary Australia, showing how literary and cultural (and political) dynamics can respond to a process of inevitable change. Thus, contemporary fiction not only openly dismisses the idea that “Australian culture” and “Australians” are presumed to be of British descent but also tends not to place otherness, non-Anglo-Australian voices, in alterity. The discovery (or revisiting) of the country addresses its uncanny nature and highlights the distinctiveness of postcolonial Australia – a state where the nation is simultaneously a homely and unhomely space. In their study of sacredness and identity in the postcolonial nation, Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs (1994: 23) note that “in a new environment of determining rights over land, what is “ours” is also potentially, or even always already, “theirs”, and a previously ‘private’ Aboriginal sacred enters the public realm in diverse ways”. Richie Howitt extends Gelder and Jacobs’s ideas in his examination of social and cultural geographical spaces, dismissing the terms “frontier” and “boundary” in favour of “edges” that, to him, epitomise the relations between unbounded socio-physical and intellectual spaces and initiate a geographical and postcolonial knowledge that would take precedence over colonial understandings of land and people (Howitt, 2001: 233–245).

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Part I

Howitt’s views are interesting in the analysis of Australian writing considering that the reconfiguration of space designs new approaches to the environment and society based on intercultural exchanges and experiences. Indeed, when Richard Flanagan received the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he used the terms “edge” and “periphery” to insist that his writing stood furthest from a centre: […] novels are made in a republic of letters. It is a foolish and a crooked and a stupid republic, but it is still a republic and I would rather live here than in a tyranny. The novel is a much more subversive and free medium, and you can do more radical things in it. In movies, that isn't possible, as you have the monster of money seeking to destroy all the creative possibilities. Another thing about novels is that by nature they are the most powerful when coming from the edges of the society. Unlike other art forms, like theatre or painting, which come from the centres of power. The novel is the revenge of the periphery. (Gill, 2012)

Flanagan’s writing designs an aesthetic of displacement and an ethics of exile, a space that Nicolas Bourriaud (2009: 185) describes as the place where: The random comes together with precariousness, understood as a principle of non-membership: that which is constantly moving from place to place, which weakens origins or destroys them, which viatorizes itself and proceeds by performing successive translations, does not belong to the continental world but to this new altermodern archipelago, this garden of wandering.

In his critical book, Bourriaud refers to Victor Segalen’s plea for the diverse and the exote, rather than for national, ethnic or cultural identities. He thus argues for a reconstruction of the “modern” space, which he insists is a western concept, and argues in favour of another kind of modernity suited for a global world, which he defines as “altermodern”. The art critic focuses on “the present experimentation, the relative (questioning the solidity of things) and the fluid (the struggle against reification)” (Elms, 2016), and thus considers that “cultural identity needs to reconceptualise around movement and nomadism, or radicantcy, in opposition to ethnic and other roots” (Bourriaud: 13). While many Indigenous stories and knowledge have been deliberately erased from the national history of the country, a significant process from the second part of the 20th century onward has focused on bringing them back, challenging common views on the “colonised other” and decolonising the appropriation of space (physical, spiritual and imaginary) by mainstream

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culture and politics. Writings by Kim Scott and Alexis Wright tend to push further the debate on history, belonging and place, and depict space as the subversive place of reality and history. Scott, for instance, uses writing as a space where an unofficial history is told and the Indigenous truth and memory restored. Kim Scott’s work designs a liminal but IndigenousAustralianness, an inclusive space for transcultural identity. In an interview following the publication of Benang, the author refers to the purpose of writing but also space, discourse and identity: I work a bit in Aboriginal adult education, and when I say who I am, without many family connections, they can’t click it in like normally happens. People respond to that by talking about the damage that’s been done, and all the families that have been lost to us. I feel like if my role is to enable that sort of talk, and to still affirm a strong Aboriginal identity from that starting point—you know, from being of Aboriginal descent and not really knowing it all and building it up from that small thing—then it feels like good work to be doing. […] I want to inform or help people understand our shared history, and expose the psychosis in non-Aboriginal society that insists on being in power. I want to encourage diverse ways of being Aboriginal. Ways that are not just to do with social indicators, and not just the past ways. (Scott, 2000)

Scott wishes to reconceptualise Indigenous history and colonial history by means of reaching out to history beyond cultural boundaries. His stories combine Indigenous and European perceptions of landscape with a focus on pre-colonial and first-contact interactions, redefining discourses on otherness. Alexis Wright also deals with the reconceptualisation of Australia’s histories but probably with a less positive or idealistic strain. As a matter of fact, Wright addresses the idealised cultural history of mining in rural Australia to conceive a counter-space to excavate a sense of darkness within Australian communities in her novel Carpentaria (2006). She depicts a cultural and social darkness which, when exposed, tends to thrust the idea of whiteness and postcolonial identity into another dark realm, or rather a blank space, where non-Indigenous subjects tend to become the shadows of colonial history. Thus, Scott’s and Wright’s penchant for history and remembering restores, albeit in a different way, Australia’s hidden histories, concealed in myth/legend and that invariably address the dilemma of postcolonial identity and belonging. Even though the colonial project’s overlapping episteme is still visible through hegemonic practices in postcolonial Australia, Australian writers often use fiction as a device to decolonise the mind and subvert social and political structures. The postcolonial paradigm surfaces not as an extension but as the unfinished business of the Empire – it initiates a debate about

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form and genre, identity and nationhood, place and the definition of “belonging” in mainstream Australia. Novels and essays by nonIndigenous authors show, in fact, an interest in the environment and a connection with the landscape. In his most recent work, A First Place, a collection of essays and writings, David Malouf deals with current themes such as multiculturalism, national history and events, geography and topography, showing a keen interest in the way cultures are time or spaceoriented and the extent to which histories and geographies can influence the way individuals live and think. Malouf (2014: 9) discusses the topography of Brisbane and highlights the complexity of the urban space: Space, in this city, is unreadable. Geography and its features offer no help in the making of a mental map. What you have to do here is create a conceptual one. I ask myself again what habits of mind such a city may encourage in its citizens, and how, though taken for granted in this place, they may differ from the habits of places where geography declares itself at every point as helpful, reliable, being itself a map.

For Malouf, the idea of home and being in place consequently implies that geographic space is never static, forming culture and history, operating as an open physical and psychological landscape. Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan and, more recently, Cate Kennedy and Favel Parrett go further than Malouf as they tend to use geographic space as a narrative space incorporating a spiritual attachment to the land, and stories that involve non-Indigenous characters’ experience of the bush and rural areas often hint at the Dreamtime and Indigenous culture. In her novel The World Beneath, Cate Kennedy, for instance, resorts to a recurrent theme in Australian fiction, which is the quest for and voyage to the heart of the country, the Tasmanian wilderness, to illustrate the ordeal of a father and daughter as they attempt to reconnect. In the novel, a harsh and wild geography takes hold of the characters’ minds in such a way that geographical boundaries operate as invisible forms of internal otherness. Questionings and debates on culture and personal history also often recur in stories that bring to the fore colonial heritage in order to reassess the migration and cultural heritage. Christos Tsiolkas often voices his concern for the way liberal nationalism, through an ideal of shared national identity and a politics of exclusion of “outsiders”, impacts on bodies and social relations within national borders, fostering violence, fear and/or indifference to difference. His stories enter the Anglo-Australian space through the figures of Greek migrants and their offspring to expose the cracks in the multicultural framework and reinscribe the history of Greek migration and diasporas. Like Tsiolkas, Nicholas Jose also

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addresses the meanings of “Europe” and “Australia” but by exploring their counter-terms “Asia” or the “Asia-Pacific” in an attempt to “decolonize” the postcolonial nation. When introducing art in Chinatown, Sydney, Nicholas Jose refers to the Chinese journalist, Sang Ye, using botanical metaphors to remind the public that Asia is part of Australia as much as Australia is part of Asia, just like Europe is: The Chinese-Australian writer Sang Ye calls Chinatown ‘a flowerpot simply placed here’, where no one puts down roots, because ‘the soil in the flowerpot is segregated from the soil here’ (The Finish Line, 1995). But that’s only part of the story. That flowerpot has been in Australia as long as any European garden. (Jose, 2011)

Jose’s claim thus echoes Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of “the radicant and the erasing of the origin in favour of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings”. It is then in the diversity of the Australian landscape and geography that writers design the space of “the radicant” and the “altermodern”, exploring a world and contemporary culture that are no longer dependent on a single root or extensions of a root but “move in accord with their host-soil, adapt to new surfaces” and define subjectivity as an object of “negotiation” (Bourriaud: 51–52).

1. Excavating Darkness The place and position of Indigenous people in both the physical geography and social landscape of the country is a major concern for Australia as a postcolonial nation. Moreover, central and unresolved issues in politics and national discourse, such as the legitimate appropriation of land and the integration of the first Australians in the mainstream, still affect the tenets of egalitarianism and multiculturalism. From the early days of federation, Indigenous people were not part of a policy and discourse that advocated the right for all citizens to fair treatment, most commonly known as the “fair go”, and the Liberal Government’s decision to reaffirm the significance of mateship and egalitarianism in the revised Preamble to the Australian Constitution, in 2003, did not bring any changes: Australians value tolerance, perseverance and mateship. These values form our spirit as a nation … We value the individual worth of every man and woman in our society. This is the essence of our egalitarian society and our identity as Australia and Australians. (DAFT, 2003)

The revised definition, with its desire to unite all Australians, clearly harks back to the construction of the nation and the ideology of the settler-

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society. Despite the still common representations of Australia and Australians as egalitarian not only in social commentaries and political analyses but also in the Arts (films, television programmes, literature), Indigenous people or individuals from other cultural groups, AsianAustralians or migrants from the new diaspora (the Middle-East and Africa) are still rarely incorporated in such an ideal and national destiny. The unequal position of Indigenous Australians is certainly the most critical challenge to Australia’s social and political ideals, even more so since the reconciliation years and the debates on land rights. In his Boyer Lecture, Manning Clark echoed Russel Ward’s ideas when he said that “the most difficult thing of all for a historian is to learn how to tell his story so that something is added to the facts, something about the mystery at the heart of things” (Clark, 1976). Clark’s interest in the rural nature and identity of the country inferred that history stemmed from the Australian outback and from it emerged the true-blue Australian character, despite recognition of course that the imposition of Western culture on Australia was tragic. Criticised for his “black armband view” of history, Clark was nonetheless supported by other intellectuals and artists in their commitment for the truth and the rewriting of history. Henry Reynolds, a leading authority on Indigenous history and the issue of land rights since his seminal book The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), still argues that the reconciliation process will only be complete when there is full acknowledgement of Australia’s wars between the settlers and the original inhabitants, and in fact that Australia’s history is not a history of settlement but colonisation.

A. Intersubjectivities and Divergent Histories The new strand of Australian historiography and fictional writing that emerged from the late 1970s onward paid greater attention to the violence inflicted on Indigenous Australians by the British settlement of Australia, and the subsequent consequences on postcolonial Australia. It encouraged Indigenous artists to speak out to a large audience. Jack Davis, Archie Weller and Oodgeroo Noonuccal (also known as Kath Walker), for instance, played a significant role in writing back to an Anglo-Australian mainstream, interrogating the consequences of colonisation and celebrating Indigenous culture and its bond with the environment. In his writing, Jack Davis explores issues such as the identity problems faced by young Indigenous people in contemporary society, the sense of loss experienced in Indigenous cultures and the clash of Indigenous law with the law of non-Indigenous Australia. His work reflects a commitment to

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the Indigenous cause and the denunciation of the trauma and violence brought about by colonisation. Davis subverts what is clearly understood as “white discourse” to replace the absent other in time and space, using language and the vernacular as power against authority. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who was also involved in human rights and the recognition of Indigenous ownership of the land, joined the ecological movement prominent in the 1960s and became a key -figure in the writing of the land and the environment that confronts Indigenous spirituality with the dark reality of postcolonial Australia. Her work alongside artists and authors belonging to the ecological movement transcends political boundaries and encourages interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to the examination of Australian society. In her poem dedicated to her relative Grannie Coolwell, “We are Going” (1964) – the title poem of the first book of poetry published by an Indigenous Australian – Noonuccal dwells on both the physical and spiritual geography of rural Australia as well as the political and cultural spaces of the nation: They came in to the little town A semi-naked band subdued and silent All that remained of their tribe. They came here to the place of their old bora ground Where now the many white men hurry about like ants. Notice of the estate agent reads: ‘Rubbish May Be Tipped Here’. Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring. They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts: ‘We are as strangers here now, but the white tribes are strangers. We belong here, we are the old ways. We are the corroboree and the bora ground, We are the old sacred ceremonies, the laws of the elders. We are the wonder tales of Dream Time, the tribal legends told. We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games, the wandering camp fires. […] We are nature and the past, all the old ways Gone now and scattered. …’

The poem insists that Indigenous people embody the true history of Australia and that the settler’s perception of the land and history have negated not only Indigenous identity but also their presence as first Australians. The “white tribes” are clearly criticised for trampling upon sacred sites for the sake of progress and technology; they “hurry about like ants” and cannot read or see the land like Indigenous people, clearly disrespecting and destroying all traces of Indigenous presence, culture and beliefs: “Notice of the estate agent reads: ‘Rubbish May Be Tipped Here’. Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring.”

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The poem illustrates the effects of terra nullius, with the imposition of white perception on Indigenous reality, on Indigenous culture and identity. The direct reference to “the bora ground”, the meeting place joined by a sacred walkway, where stories were handed down and initiations performed, suggests that the deterritorialisation of Indigenous space under the scope of colonialism silences what remains of a tribe and an ancient civilisation. The colonised are thus not only objectified but also thrust into nothingness: “They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts … Gone now and scattered”, and their silence is taken for granted. Much of Noonuccal’s work was dedicated to the reclaiming of the old ways and places, and encouraged young writers to embrace their Indigeneity so they would no longer be “silent others” on the social and cultural landscape. Recent fiction often tackles the issue of land rights and the Indigenous perception of the environment within an Anglo-centric environment from a quite different perspective. Indeed, since the Reconciliation years, stories dealing with cultural encounters, Australian history and Australia’s identity and place in an Asia-Pacific environment either convey a feeling of shame or guilt for the past injustices or call for absolution on the part of the settler-society. The anxiety and trauma generated by territorial loss or the inability to entirely connect with the environment – natural, rural or urban – surface to excavate the darkness at the heart of Australian history (the oppression of Indigenous people) and geography (the appropriation of land and space). Yet, questions about where Indigenous people “fit” into the Australian nation, what role they have and what power they can exercise are indeed still central unresolved issues in Australian politics. In a critical essay, Sneja Gunew points out that Indigenous people are refused their share not only in lands but also in literature, raising questions not only about Australia’s egalitarianism but also, and mostly, about the failure of the multicultural scheme to incorporate Indigeneity (Bhabha 2006: 99–120). In his novels, Kim Scott uses fictional space to explore significant social concerns for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in contemporary Australia. Born in Western Australia, Scott often refers to his mixed heritage – English on his mother’s side and belonging to the Noongar community on his father’s side – to explore the space of a country that is simultaneously destroyed and reconstructed by the colonising process. His first novel, True Country, is a semi-autobiographic story told from the perspective of an English teacher who attempts to connect with the true country he rather feels estranged from as a partIndigenous Australian. The character’s interest in the long-hidden cultural geography of the country is told from the perspective of an omniscient

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narrator, who welcomes both character and reader into Indigenous country so they can enter the dark pages of colonial history: You might stay that way, maybe forever, with no world to belong to and belong to you. You in your many high places, looking over, looking over waiting for a sign. You’re nearly ready, nearly there. You’re trying to read a flat pattern, like the sea, the land from high above. Or you might see your shadow falling upon this page. And maybe that’s all you’ll see and understand. Or you might drift, rain fall, river rush. The air, the sea all round. And the storming. You alight on higher ground, gather, sing. It may be. You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this. And it is a beautiful place, this place. Call it our country, our country all’round here. (13)

The opening of the novel is told from the position of a narrator who, like an Indigenous elder, addresses an audience, inscribes the story into the country in the form of Indigenous songlines encompassing the interconnection between the land, spirituality, law, social life and care for the environment. The narrator clearly dismisses the European perception of geography in favour of a reading of space and place that encapsulates the true story of people and virtually “reads back” to the colonial vision of place and people. Thus, the spatial organisation of the passage on the page, with a first and condensed paragraph followed by blank spaces and shorter statements to be read as guidance, subtly reflects the divergent views on the topography of place – from non-Indigenous perception to Indigenous beliefs, from a land enclosed in boundaries to a geography marked by diversity. In this first novel, Scott intertwines Indigenous and nonIndigenous sensibilities to provide a map that records details of the social, cultural and physical landscape, and in so doing, designs a relationship between the land, the sea and the postcolonial nation. Reflecting on his own writing, the novelist refers to his historical and cultural position as such: As a writer … it seems to me that my identity is about articulating a position I inhabit at an intersection of histories and peoples, and it is an obligation to speak for those people in my family whose history has been silenced, and by attempting this to step forward with a heritage largely denied me. (“Disputed Territories”: 171)

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Scott’s approach is to show that despite colonial dislocation and the imposition of Western approaches, – most noticeable in urban areas – he, like a number of Indigenous Australians, maintains a connection with his country and tradition. His writing is clearly a means to delve into place and culture, more specifically in Noongar country, in the South-West of Western Australia, to reconnect with his own country, his Noongar cultural heritage, to reconfigure his own space at the intersection of white and black Australia and then suggest that the only choice for Australians is to move between cultures. The relationship between colonialism and contemporary culture is thus central to an aesthetic that recalls the way in which both the Indigenous people and the colonisers patterned the Australian space, with their travelling, language and demarcation of territories: I think we need to talk about Australian identity and neurosis, about the insecurity, uncertainty and doubt behind all the tough talk and ticker. I think the image an indigenous person sees reflected back from mainstream Australian society can be a very dispiriting one. The people who created a society in Australia were its indigenous people. The well-being of that society—or societies—is the measure of our collective Australian identity. Our place, our community. (Pascal, 2011)

Scott is at ease moving between two divergent but intrinsically bound nations and he constructs a writing space for intercultural dialogue and the claiming of an alterity based on a mixed heritage. His commitment to advocate belonging to two different geographies relies on the refusal of a single form of authority and on the exploration of cultural encounters from first contact to the end of the colonising process. In his most recent novel, That Deadman Dance, published in 2010 and the winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Scott again intertwines Indigenous and colonial cultures to make cultural reconnections at a time when the country is still a “disputed territory” and the narrative of the nation still a disputed timespace (“Disputed Territory”: 171). In the postscript to the novel, he underlines that his novel is inspired by the history of early contact between Aboriginal people – the Noongar – and Europeans in the area of his hometown of Albany, Western Australia, a place he says is known by some historians as the “friendly frontier”. Set in the first half of the 19th century, the story partly uses the recorded encounter of Captain Matthew Flinders, who stopped in Albany for a few weeks and had a friendly relationship with the Noongar people, moving back in time to rewrite an episode in Western Australia’s history from the expedition journals and historical accounts of colonial experience. The narrative takes an interest in the approach to and understanding of the land and the environment not

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as part of a polemical discourse on cultural identity and the validity of official history but rather as an understanding of divergent views on landscape and otherness. For instance, the arrival of the first voyagers to Australia highlights their desire to relate to the new land in ways they do back home in Britain and their sense of disappointment as soon as they touch ground: “The passengers looked around nervously, wanting to recognise the scent of land, of soil and earth. Smelled only salt and eucalyptus oil” (11). Divided into four parts and harking back to different phases of Australia’s history from first contact to British settlement and the emerging conflict, the novel develops from three different perspectives, from place, teller and listener, to construct an ethnographic account of colonisation and create a space of interaction and debate on colonialism. The intertwining of narrative voices through an achronological time frame not only suggests that the novel’s main purpose is to allow Indigenous characters to be expressive and tell their own story but also to integrate the point of view of non-Indigenous people at a time the colony was in the making. Scott retrieves the Noongar language, weaving it with English to design a space for understanding and confrontation; a space to recall the time the Noongar people of Western Australia first encountered the “pale horizon people” (151) – meaning British settlers, European adventurers and whalers from America – all of them viewed as ghostly figures intent upon establishing a settlement on a land that was already occupied and delineated by songlines and the Dreamtime. The main character is Bobby Wabalanginy, whose surname’s meaning: “all of us playing together” (350), signifies the colonised and colonisers’ mutual involvement in the development of the plot and history. Bobby is the main teller of the tale and the bearer of the truth. He is the authoritative voice describing at great length a fascinating encounter between two worlds based on cultural interests. His position as a “hybrid” subject allows him to move between two different worlds, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, shifting from the spiritual space of his own people to the material space of the colonists so time is never chronological and never really exists. In fact, the novel’s perception of time further recalls what Paul Ricoeur defines in his Time and Narrative as “narrative identity”, the narrative identity of a person or of a community being the place (locus) where one might expect to locate the intersection of history and fiction (1985: 356). Beginning in a style that at first recalls the fairy-tale mode, the narration soon connects the idyllic aspect of the tale to the impending horror: “Once upon a time there was a captain on a wide sea, a rough and windswept sea, and his good barque was pitched and tossed something

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cruel” (9). Hence, the narrator’s account of the arrival of the colonists, obviously Captain Arthur Philip and his crew, is told through a dialectic that associates both language and reality with the unleashing of natural elements. The sea as the body of water ironically portends the arrival and biblical renewal for the settlers as well as the subsequent destruction for the Indigenous people – a tale of destruction that culminates as soon as convictism enters the space of colonial society, adding another history to the nation’s colonial one: “Once-was-a-convict William Skelly limped still, and did so for the rest of his life” (281). The narrator’s description of William Skelly ironically suggests that intercultural exchanges are literally limping, that national history is clearly flawed, that harsh colonial realities gradually clash with the original optimism of first contact, shaping borderland cultures. In this chapter, titled “Within and under the sea”, history and space become indivisible so that the meaning and understanding of time is never universal and always subversive. Hence, the characters’ fate is landscapified, marked by the movements and separation of water somewhat through a rhizomatic process: Manit, Bobby and Binyan had wandered off somewhere near the soak. Skelly, Tar, Killam and Chaine had their heads together over one of the whaleboats, and the two Chaine children were playing in the tiny stream which ran from the dunes, across the sand and into the waves. Only a few flowed deep, it flowed surprisingly fast and as it reached the sea seemed to lift itself clear of the damp sand, cords of water woven together, and cast some spell upon the ocean. No waves broke, and sand was stirred up in the water. Someone should have noticed that, especially when the Chaine children began playing in the shallows there. (283)

The tragic drowning and disappearance of Chaine’s son in the depths of the earth and the water mark the breaking of the “(un) natural” cycle of life in the colony, and more importantly signifies the end of Bobby’s close relationship with the Chaines, his foster parents. Bobby’s life, developing from when he is a nine-year-old boy to when he has become an old man performing tricks with boomerangs for tourists, unfolds alongside the expansion of white settlement and the restriction of territory to Indigenous people, along with their subsequent erasure from the political map. Scott’s wish to avoid the current political imperative of identity and belonging is perceptible in the novel form, which uses both the point of view of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and thus compels the reader to observe the many ways in which cultural interaction took place. His involvement then seems to be restricted to the exploration of the layers, ambivalences and intricacies that form Australian history and fiction. The novel incorporates Dreamtime stories to illustrate the plight of

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Indigenous characters but also to depict the colonialists and naturalists’ desire to capture and study a “cultural other” – an “other” who is unwillingly drawn into colonial ethnographic accounts and embodies some kind of “essence” of western culture, and the obsession with “the other” as a noble savage. Indeed, the paternalistic language used by Dr Cross clearly encapsulates the cold and clinical scientific desire to position and define otherness in terms of a western enlightenment understanding of the world, and which relies on the Foucauldian disciplinary techniques whereby the imperial power envisages a situation in which its own colonies would be self-regulating and self-policing. In fact, Dr Cross’s insistence on the purpose of his mission to “aid and assist each other” (36) is reminiscent of the idea of the white man’s burden, showing good intentions towards the Indigenous people but being nonetheless supportive of the colonising enterprise and the scientific exploration of otherness: The first recipient of land at King George Town, he was a man endowed with curiosity, compassion and – as was now being displayed, albeit so late in life – considerable ambition. He had written to his old ship’s commander, the newly appointed, inaugural governor of the infant Cygnet River Colony […] he had outlined the benefits of the place and in particular, his relation with its people: They refer to themselves as Noongar … are very friendly and often assist the settlers, several of them preferring European frock and trousers to the scant kangaroo skin and a good house to the cold bush … the person who arrogates to himself the title of King of the tribe, Menak by name, and his brother, Wunyeran, who served more especially as interpreter before his unfortunate death, have often lived with me. This, his most recent letter, offered advice on the transition from military garrison to colony, and factors crucial to his success. (34–35)

Dr Cross is ambivalent in his understanding of otherness, Indigenous culture and place (60); he wishes to develop friendly relationships and learn from Indigenous culture but he is unable to understand the social needs of the Indigenous population, whether in terms of habitation or food sustenance. He delineates a space to establish a vegetable garden, being rather focused on the “agricultural possibilities” of the colony (115). His botanical approach to the fauna and flora translates as personal appropriation as his construction of a sense of home is derived from his own cultural representation. Thus, his contradictory nature surfaces when the issue of legitimacy and ownership is at stake, for instance when the absence of the natives soothes his conscience about the legitimacy of his

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presence. His anthropological approach invariably extends to the settlers’ perception of otherness and their sense of western superiority: Cross was relieved the natives had left on one of their journeys, their regular migrations. Feeding them proved a drain on the stores and Wunyeran and the rest often took up a great part of his day, distracting him from other things he could be doing collecting specimens, recording, instilling in the men the importance of diet. And then – Cross was an honest man – with the natives absent, the awkward issue of his own presence was not always bothering his conscience… Certainly, their absence pleased the rest of the settlement’s population. […] The prisoners were glad not to be every day reminded of their servitude while inferior beings were free and feted. […] The way they flitted in and out of the strange trees you never knew if you were safe or not. (122–123)

As the passage shows, imperial designs and the development of the colony take over Dr Cross’s initial anthropological interest in the Indigenous communities and even take over his strong friendship with Wunyeran. Cross and Wunyeran’s mutual friendship is at first rooted in the earth as both characters are buried together, but it is then dramatically unearthed when Cross’s remains are moved to a new cemetery while Wunyeran’s bones are smashed about by builders and left exposed to the ravages of scavenging dogs. Land and territory are then no longer subject to the dynamics of Indigenous power but rather to western supremacy and appropriation. Scott’s novel is however not restricted to a binary between colonial authority and the marginalised colonised other since it also takes into account a third space, which is the world of the convicts. The space of the convict holds an intermediate position between the ultimate power of “the English” and the inferior position of “the blacks” (253) so that the development of the colony, which simultaneously marks the end of Indigenous ownership of the country, relies on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The placing of diverse characters and personal stories on the land and in geography shows that social agents develop unconscious strategies that are adapted to the needs of the social worlds they inhabit. Australia’s social system thus not only becomes more complex for some and autonomous for others but also encourages individuals to develop a certain habitus typical of their position in the social space. By doing so, the settlers (and then the ex-convicts) as social agents acknowledge, legitimise and reproduce the social forms of domination, including prejudices.

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The novel covers an eleven-year timespan along the Western Australian coast, 1833–1844, as ships carrying white men and women (sailors, soldiers, convicts, settlers) arrive and their passengers lay claim to the land by building shelters then houses – constructing fences, occupying the landscape with stock, clearing the land and destroying natural habitats. The Indigenous geography soon becomes the sociological place of idealists, opportunists and misfits, and is stamped under the doctrine of terra nullius – a terra nullius that encapsulates the cultural, social and symbolic forms of capital. Dr Cross, whose name seems to embody his Christian mission, is nonetheless unable to protect Indigenous people, like Geordie Chaine – the settler – he controls and punishes Indigenous people and also takes part in the colony of exploitation by importing cheap labour from India and China and using ex-convicts and soldiers (337). Chaine’s approach to the land illustrates the colonial reality and the many forms colonisation took, ranging from colonies of exploitation in which the ruling colonial elite concentrated on the extraction of economic value from the natural and human resources of the country to colonies of settlement where the colonisers seized the land, introduced their own labour force and destroyed the economic and cultural basis of the pre-existing Indigenous societies. Chaine’s perception of space and place is Eurocentric, understanding the term “landscape” as a portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view, looking towards the exterior but being unable to connect with that visible (conquered) other: Whenever they stopped near the ocean Chaine looked to his book. He’d look from book to land, sky, back to the book, and then lift his head again and look all around him as if for his old friend, Mr Flinders. Flinders. Vancouver. Names and words from over the ocean’s horizon. (236)

Characters, like narrative voices, erupt from the environment and topography, either through an Indigenous or colonial perception of space, appropriation and belonging, triggering interrogations about the scope of colonisation. Chaine examines the horizon in an attempt to decipher the language and historicity of geographic space and thus anticipate the future. In the novel, the land, rather than being simply dual and definite, is constantly shifting and open to interpretation, just like Dreaming tracks lead to the many stories, composing the historical canvas of people and nation and not having a single root. The description of landscape and wildlife uncovers the presence of an ancient and mysterious place that surfaces as subaltern geographic and personal spaces set outside time and challenging the settler’s perception:

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Part I All day they worked to escape the confinement of scraggly, twisted, pressing scrub. It was as if a great many limbs restrained them, disinterestedly; as if thousands of fingers plucked at their hair and clothing. Tree roots tripped them. They climbed trees to get a vantage point, […] They had no clear sight of anything but the scrub which trapped them until, as daylight was fading, they stepped into open space. […], but across a small, grassy plain scattered with a few clumps of trees, the earth rose rocky and gnarled, a heavy mass against the sky. An Eagle circled. They had hardly wandered off course at all! (49–50)

Chaine, Killam and Skelly are trapped in a pristine and rough natural environment in the same way Indigenous people are trapped in the mechanised world of the colony. Thus, the characters’ experiences seem to suggest the idea, put forward by David Tacey in his critical study Edge of the Sacred, that “in Australia landscape carries people’s experience of the sacred other… no matter how they attempt to package or construct it, the land will always break out of whatever fancy dress Australians foist upon it.” (6–7). Space and geography unravel as the dance in the title of the novel and in the course of the plot suggests. That Deadman Dance inscribes history on the land and designs an interspace for exchange – a passage between a place “here” where one is positioned and a place “there” that is apprehended as a whole so that both places reflect and become one another. The dance ordered by Dr Cross as a welcome to the country for the new Indigenous comers, who will be enclosed in the boundaries of settlement (56–59), is also performed by the Indigenous people standing at the edge of the huts on the border of the settlement (57). It is both a reminder and a remaking of the true historical dance that signified the friendship between Captain Flinders and the Indigenous people yet it also operates as the pantomimic representation of a spiritual tradition, fusing the dancer’s soul with the natural body of earth. As a semi-assimilated subject, Bobby performs his own version of the dance and thus rewrites the story of the arrival of armed white men and reclaims his Indigeneity from western discourse and identification. The Deadman Dance first perceived by Bobby from the ocean when he was a child is associated with the movement of the whales, a time when colonisation had not yet affected Indigenous life and customs (70), and is reinterpreted, rendering motionless (as an expression of death) the dancers, who are wielding their symbolic rifles. For Bobby, the merriment among dancers and spectators is a means of reasserting the power of the old order and history to the new

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world, i.e. colonial Australia, and expressing his hope for amity in this new order despite the impending colonial violence and trauma. As a supposedly assimilated other of the British Empire, Bobby is animated by the Dreaming and his spiritual attachment to the land (274), a sense of belonging that on his part incorporates a common history with the settlers but which is dismissed by colonialists. Bobby’s performance and attitude throughout the course of events harks back to Kim Scott’s message on the release of his novel Benang, that it is “in part about reclamation from the printed page, reclaiming Indigeneity from the confines of colonial writing and Western discourse” (Slater 2005: 38). Thus, the characters’ performances unfold like writing to create a space where, to borrow from Benedict Anderson’s words in Imagined Communities, the nation-state is indeed conceded to be “new” and “historical” but the nation to which it gives political expression always looms out of an immemorial past (Anderson: 11). While immersed in the totalising lexicon of colonial discourse, with its propagation of adamantine racial binary oppositions, Bobby is aware that his identity and discourse are constructed by the cultural and colonial other, compelling him to enact the roles attributed to him by his foster (and fake) parents, the Chaines, and the imperial authorities. The character’s mimicry of the white man draws on Homi K. Bhabha’s assertion that “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed recognisable other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 1994: 91). In fact, while mimicry allows Bobby to enter western identity, it leaves him in alternate states of gain and loss so that learning the foundations of English is like inscribing another’s story onto the Indigenous Dreaming tracks, thus no longer reading solely from the geographical landscape but also from the social and political environments. Bobby learns to read and write and in so doing appropriates the coloniser’s language and customs through subversion, understanding the mechanism of English through his reading of the ancestral land and the convolutions of the songlines, so that the printed English terms on the page become a singular root in the colonial landscape – not a geographic and spiritual space but a place of enclosure justified by the settlers’ civilising mission: B for Bobby. The name given him. Bobby had taken to his letters easily with Dr Cross, like the feel of chalk on a slate and made patterns, drew small footprints of animals and birds and the shape of different skeletons. Some sounds had a shape on the page, too, he learned. The alphabet might be tracks, trails and traces of what we said. He copied things from books, from Dr Cross’s journals and letters,

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even. That helped him improve his spelling, though not words of his first language. Mrs Chaine took over as Bobby’s tutor. It is our moral duty to do so, her husband suggested, to help him move toward civilisation, and our friend Dr Cross established it as a priority, to help and save him. (165)

Such a scene shows that what initially seems to be a “friendly mission” soon becomes entrapment and the reification of otherness. Bobby is enclosed in colonial life, belonging in an invented “here” despite a real kinship that extends “everywhere” (166). Scott’s focus on cultural encounters is not solely restricted to the examination of Indigenous and nonIndigenous relations since the story suggests that the colonised others need to reclaim a lost or unknown heritage by incorporating their stories into a postcolonial reality and on the edge of mainstream culture. In an interview, Scott indicates that his interest lies mainly in finding new and different ways of writing about Indigeneity since the Indigenous world has been narrowed down for Indigenous people and confined in a small space: “there is all this other Indigenous reality around us but we’ve got to work with what’s in the little box” (Barker, 2000). The claim that the Indigenous world is restricted to a fraction of Australian history is prevalent in the way that the performance of the Deadman Dance allows Indigenous characters to come out of the “little box” and express their true nature, free of the yoke imposed upon them by colonial administration. Thus, the entering of Bobby into western culture first occurs through his own meandering through space and deathly hallows, at the intersection of the real and the unreal. Bobby is depicted as a visionary and is thus able to transcend the boundaries of time from a very young age: Bobby looked into future graves, and into some people’s hearts and minds, went into the hollows within them, into the very sounds they made. All his friends and their goodness kept him alive. And he never learned fear, because he was not just one self. He was bigger than that, he was all of them. And no little boy died in the soldiers’ barracks, not ever. No, they brought him alive. No little boy died when the soldiers and sailors and Noongar lived together, not ever. No no. Never never never. (128)

Yet it is only by going back to benang, the term meaning in Noongar language “the heart”, that Bobby is able to see things with new eyes and travel through topography to die and come back to life again, to shake off

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the colonial paradigm and embrace his new born-again identity being at one with the fauna and flora (301) – and at odds with colonial society. Landscape and setting encapsulate the characters’ respective Indigenous Dreaming and non-Indigenous dreams so that an interstitial space becomes the fundamental vector for reality. Scott’s writing shows that both the belonging to place and the appropriation of territory shape history and narrative, making meaningful connections in the infinite text of world culture. In fact, Scott’s aesthetics trace itineraries in the landscape of signs by depicting characters that take on the role of “semionauts, inventors of pathways within the cultural landscape, nomadic sign gatherers” (Bourriaud: 39). When discussing the ambivalence a reader might perceive on reading his novel, Scott indicates that he used a Noongar story as a starting point, which he indeed refers to in the opening pages; a story about a Noongar man entering a whale and making it, through song and controlled violence, from the place east of Albany to somewhere in Albany. The story is, he says, all in the language, talking about an affiliation, a spiritual affiliation with the ocean, pre-ice age, and creatures in the water with whom the Noongar are strongly affiliated spiritually (Brewster, 2011). Scott insists on the value of language and the fact that Indigenous creation stories make up the fictional story and re-enact spiritual beliefs extending from the symbolic imagery from Dreamtime stories to Bible stories. Indeed, the episode where Noongar people seem to emerge from a stranded whale (260) is part of the character’s own Dreaming but also extends to western myths and stories, especially the biblical story of Jonah cast forth by the whale. The fusing of reality, fiction and spirituality not only brings to the fore frequent debates on the nation and identity but also insists on the cultural continuity and future aspirations of Indigenous people who remain closely linked to land, whether they live in the urban areas or on the outskirts of town and city, and have also become part of western history. Moreover, such a passage is reminiscent of a scene from Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984) where characters ponder their place and perspective in a fishing town, in Albany, ruled by the whaling industry and the destruction of a pristine environment. With the same perspective as Winton’s, Scott binds the destiny of Indigenous people to the sea mammal, which operates as the natural guardian of the universe and holder of reality and story. The totemic relationship that Bobby seems to have with whales and the ocean, and even the earth, creates a space of discourse on the edge of the settlers’ own imagined community: He [Bobby] has a language for the real story inside him, but it is as if a strong wind whips those words away as soon as they leave his mouth.

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Part I People say he twists words, but really it is the wind twisting and taking his words away to who knows who will hear them. …Too many people in this camp and this town should not be here. Once he was a whale and men from all points of the ocean horizon lured him close and chased and speared and would not let him rest until (blood clotting his heart) Bobby led them to the ones he loved, and soon he was the only one swimming. …After a time of darkness with only heartbeat and humming in his ears, there came light and bubbles, and then he walked across beach sand and among wattle and peppermint trees. Barefoot, he breathed the air and opened his eyes properly. There were no more of his people and no more kangaroo and emu and no more vegetable. After the white man’s big fires and guns and greed there was nothing. (160)

Bobby is at one with the natural elements as he is voyaging through memory lane. The narrative incorporates ecological manifestations as the expression of the character’s body and soul but also, and above all, the idea that landscape and seascape forge the story of the individual and the history of the nation. Bobby’s thoughts point to a reality revolving around fulfilment and nothingness, deprivation and darkness. The sense of nothingness seems to allude to the character’s sense of freedom and of being at one with a harmonious environment rather than to the terra nullius concept, while the sense of darkness refers to antagonistic forces, tribal clashes and colonial conflict. In his work, Scott (2011) indeed provides “a framework for ethical practice through processes of corporate responsibility, institutional capacity building, negotiation and sustainability”. That Deadman Dance, with its stress on the demonstrative “that” suggesting both distance and central focus, engages with history and the institutions of the colonial power as the only way to reappropriate what has been lost and negated. In entering colonial discourse, Scott’s fictional story invariably shakes the foundations of the postcolonial nation but, rather than dismissing for once and for all the imposition of western culture and history, dis-alienates both Indigenous and mainstream culture. At the end of the story, when the colonising process is about to be completed and the first inhabitants trapped and erased from the cultural and political landscape, Bobby does not reclaim but endorses his Indigeneity. His acting out of the Indigenous subject to a non-Indigenous audience highlights the violence of white settlement – the institutionalisation of opposed and intrinsically multifarious worlds, new and dominant, ancient and non-existent, stamped by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (353) and the conceptualisation of a country relying on colonial imagination and historical lies.

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Homi Bhabha noted that when the civilising light is refracted through the prism of actual lived experience, new and subversive forms of resistance can be enacted using the very weapons intended to repress and mould, that the abyssal gaze is thus imposed upon the coloniser. In his essay “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse”, Bhabha notes that the mechanisms that illustrate the acts of domination and imperial discourse actually expose their inherent weaknesses from within so that “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha, 1994: 86). Thus, Old Bobby Wabalanginy’s statements to a crowd of tourists display and increase the irony of the civilising mission undertaken by imperial Britain as the character is in fact claiming his legitimacy over the land with a “here” and displacing the legitimacy of Britain with a “there”. Even Bobby never entirely dismisses the British presence and cultural imposition on his daily existence and identity but rather attempts to compose with it: But read the histories; I am the only Noongar alive today who is mentioned in Dr Cross’s papers, published in your own mother country. Your mother country, he said to the tourists not mine because my country is here, and belonged to my father, and his father before him, too. […] We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we’d lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours… But yes, of course, you’re right, you’re right; my life is good, and I am happy to talk to everyone, and welcome you as friends. The same God and the same good King looks over us all, does he not, my fellow subjects? (106)

The evolution of the character throughout the story shows that he has finally reached a stage where mimicry of the white man has become resemblance and menace to the mainstream, and that fear and trauma repress and even control such menace. For instance, Chaine threatens Bobby and his people when Bobby speaks out and dares defy the colonial authority to denounce the white man’s criminal acts. Scott highlights the many divergent forms that colonisation took, putting into perspective the anthropological interest of Dr Cross and the economic greed of Chaine. Yet, as the characters’ experiences show, the colonising process produces a duality so that Indigenous subjects may perform whiteness and be Indigenous, while non-Indigenous characters may utilise blackness but never be at one with it. Such an outcome is perceptible in the grave and is literally imprinted in the soil Dr Cross was

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supposed to share with Wunyeran: “What had been a path was now a torrent carrying twigs, branches and household rubbish … a nation’s fluttering flag?” (357). The initially good intentions on the part of the colonial subjects translate into colonial violence and dispossession – a result ironically and tragically encapsulated in the very use of the oxymoronic geographic construction of the space labelled “friendly frontier”. In her discussion of interrelations between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australia, Marcia Langton often argues that “Aboriginality” is a matter of intersubjective relations and it is conceptualised repeatedly in a process of dialogue, representation and imagination. Langton’s view that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people create “Indigeneity” is perceptible in the way Kim Scott depicts encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Hence, Scott’s novel inscribes the relationship between Dr Cross and Wunyeran to the realm of the spiritual earth: “Wunyeran and Cross … spirits fusing in the earth” (350), all the more so their corpses cannot remain together in the same grave – the grave expresses metaphorically a duplicitous postcolonial reality. Despite its initial aim of showing that Indigenous and non-Indigenous encounters were sometimes harmonious, the novel approaches colonial enterprise as a panoptical structure; a panoptical arrangement of bodies in space and minds in collusive harmony that would perpetuate the rule of the colonial power, inculcating some passivity within its subjects (Foucault, 1977). The friendly relationship between Dr Cross and Wunyeran is indeed achieved in the Foucauldian sense through a symbiotic relationship in which the Indigenous population must abandon the less civilised customs and cultural heritage and assimilate into a larger colonial collective, that is the colonised state. The story insists that the colony is the benevolent replica of the home nation, with resistance insidiously abrogated by the imposition of a new identity and the creation of a new “Indigenous” or “native” space: “We are two men of such different backgrounds, thought Cross and, attempting to fuse them, we are preparing for the birth of a new world” (129). Cross’s assumption runs counter to the focus on Bobby’s experiences in white society. Bobby’s displacement through times and places shows that the construction of a new world is rather synonymous with the destruction of an ancient world and the imposition of cultural barriers. A country where social categories like “new world”, “nation”, “race” and “blacks” consequently function to exclude subordinate groups – even though the latter may indeed display forms of resistance and survival.

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The interaction of divergent histories is a means to rebuild subjectivities and cultural otherness. Colonial structures and the delineation of Indigenous territories are central ideas in Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria. Published in 2006, Carpentaria addresses the boundaries of time and place from the perspective of a small-town community in the state of Queensland. The story is set in the imaginary coastal town of Desperance, a township shaped by cyclones, monsoonal floods and a river that spurns human endeavour with its incomprehensible tides. The name of the town ironically encapsulates the sense of hope and desperation that illustrates the daily life of the community. The novel’s style and focus share some of the narrative features found in a story by Tim Winton or in stories from the US Deep South, stories by Carson McCullers or by William Faulkner, with their de-idealised vision of rurality and modernity, exploration of social issues and the cultural character of the country. The novel thus seems to convey a sense of regionalism if not localism or compartmentalisation, highlighting the perceptions and expression of the distinctiveness of people in divergent geographical locations while enabling disparate elements to function together. In her essay ‘On writing Carpentaria’, Wright consequently explains that her story stemmed from an interest in stories that did not extend from the colonial past or the postcolonial present but that erupted from a history still engraved on the soil, rock and caves of pre-colonised Australia: I felt the urgency of its pulse ticking in the heartbeat of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The beat was alive. It was not a relic. It was not bones to examine. It did not come from the dead world of academic expressions of identity or native title. The beat I heard was stronger and enduring even while tortured and scarred through and through. The beat belonged to the here and now. And the story to be told, it does not only come from colonisation or assimilation, or having learnt to read and write English, or arguing whether people with an oral history should write books, but is sung just as strongly from those of our ancestors who wrote our stories on the walls of caves and on the surface of weathered rock. (‘On Writing Carpentaria’, 12)

Wright’s novel, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, is then not a historical novel in the sense that it does not openly rewrite historical events but rather imagines the past and the present experiences of various characters delving into the unfinished “postcolonising” nature of the nation-space. Yet, despite the novelist’s insistence that she did not write a historical novel, it might be worth taking into account the social and political context of the early 2000s. Set in the post-Mabo era, which marked the first milestone in land rights issues and Indigenous ownership,

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the story, with its focus on the spirituality of the environment and the oral form of individual narratives, sketches a space for an uncanny return of histories and for the blurring of boundaries. Carpentaria was released when the federal government was refusing to deliver an official apology to the Indigenous people for the Stolen Generations and was announcing its national emergency plan in Indigenous Affairs as a means to resolve what it saw as a major ongoing social crisis in Indigenous communities. A member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, Alexis Wright sets her epic novel in the gulf country of north-west Queensland, a geographic space that embodies the sense of nothingness and boredom hovering above the life of the locals. The focus on the life of two Indigenous families living on the margins of an AngloAustralian cluster of officials, “true-blue Aussies” and the Gurfurrit mine, sets the décor for a chronicle of possession and dispossession. Desperance is a place where violence and lethal racism disrupt human relationships while the uncanny world of ancestors and natural spirits is excavated by an abrasive modernity, encompassed by the mining industry cutting the ground, disregarding the locals and the notion of a sustainable environment. The story is critical of the primacy given to the economic factors, pointing out that a highly industrialised landscape has replaced the natural environment and the island has become a slagheap. The mine, set in opposition to the invigorating Indigenous caves, is the instrument of control and destruction of sacred territories. Its mechanisms create a hole in the heart of the “country” and among Indigenous tribes, spurring a symbolic violence to sustain a social and political order posited as natural and legitimate: And living in car bodies and whatnot, which was illegal. All of it was part of Joseph Midnight’s extortion racket with the government. This was what he got for agreeing to the mine. The government gave him a lot of money, a thousand dollars, and said, Go out there and shoot the vacuum cleaners, all of the Hoovers, and Electroluxes – all the feral pigs. Money talks. This was what he got for his Native title rights. Money to shoot all the pigs. He was supposed to exterminate them from the entire Gulf of Carpentaria once and for all but he never did that. He let his useless relatives take all the little baby piglets home for pets and they bred up ten piglets each. (53)

The government’s appropriation of Joseph Midnight’s Native title rights re-enacts the coloniser’s understanding of the land as a commodity for exploitation and modernity regardless of the original owners and their spiritual bind to “country”. The ironic and acute exposure of the colonising attitude, and the official manipulation, places the mine as a colonial orb at the centre of town; an orb that directs politics and economic exploitation

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and sustains the western culture of the outback based on the ideal of the settler in an untamed environment, and on the image of the working-class hero climbing up the ladder of an affluent and supposedly egalitarian society. Wright inscribes her tale in Indigenous cosmogony and overtly subverts national values, one of which is the ethos of egalitarianism, in such a way that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters act against them, in the light of widening social disparities and declining public concern. She shows that despite Australia’s persistent mythology of egalitarianism and political unity, the space of the nation falls into bioregions, opposed by economic factors, and social and cultural gaps. Rural and isolated Desperance is symbolically placed “up north” in opposition to the more urbanised place of “southern politicians”. Consequently, Carpentaria is clearly not circumscribed to the territory of nation but rather to the northern region and the location on the geographic map of imaginary “Desperance” so that the territory is a space of signs and traces left by diverse individuals at different times. Desperance is a macrocosm with conterminous spaces, belonging respectively to the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, to old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, to the white officials of Uptown, and to the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine. The spatial and geographic appropriation by antagonistic forces divides the world into what Pierre Bourdieu identified as “fields”, which arise from the tensions and struggles of the characters who, as social agents, attempt to occupy a dominant position in their field. The division of space between various Indigenous groups and their attachment to a particular area on the verge of town shows that after colonial settlement and warfare, Indigenous people reconfigured their relationship with their own land, which then fashioned new entitlements and generated new layers of meaning over the old (Reid, 2000). Normal Phantom, whose name signifies the abnormality of his presence, as a wraith in the daily life of the mainstream, lives on the edge of town, ruling over his mob like a king and enjoying his superior status as the owner of the first Indigenous house, a ramshackle “corrugated-iron fortress”: Normal Phantom turned away from the glory of the storm clouds lacing the sea, to look in the eye, grab by the horns, all the grey-coloured calamities of a man’s life. Behold the sight of welcome home, embedded in the neverending rattling corrugated-iron shanty fortress, built from the sprinklings of holy water, charms, spirits, lures acquired from packets of hair dye, and discarded materials pinched from the rubbish dump across the road. This was Number One House. Normal Phantom’s house was the first blackfella place built on the edge of Desperance, before the two warring nations, one

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Part I without land, ended up circling the whole town. (12)

Wright extends the examination of the house as the marker and bearer of personal history in a chapter titled “Number One House” (92), and which seems to operate as a response to the canonical house depicted in Tim Winton’s celebrated novel Cloudstreet. Published in 1991, Winton’s novel is still hailed for its celebration of ordinary people and working-class Australia, focusing on two Anglo-Australian families, the Lambs and the Pickles, who are compelled to share a big ramshackle house at Number One Cloud Street, a house filled with memories, histories and ghostly Indigenous figures. In her novel, Wright seems to allude to Winton’s work to suggest a different story with two Indigenous families, the Phantoms owning the Number One House in Westend Pricklebush and the Midnights occupying the Eastside camp, fighting and getting together. The two families are thus depicted, just like the Lambs and Pickles in Winton’s novel, as a bunch of misfits and originals. The Phantoms own a house, which is as cranky as Winton’s Number One Cloudstreet, sitting on Dreaming tracks, and where a white cockatoo speaks in tongues, like the pig does in Cloudstreet. Normal Phantom’s perception that the uncanny nature of the house is pervading his mind and body is a reminder of Fish Lamb’s perception that the house is occupied by the ghostly presence of Indigenous girls, drifters trespassing on the present. Number One House is built upon Dreaming tracks and is impregnated by the spirit of the Rainbow Serpent, bearer of creation and destruction: The house was a hornet’s nest, like Angel Day [Normal Phantom’s wife], and Normal spoke of it as if it were her. The house had been inadvertently built on the top of the nest of a snake spirit. He always blamed her for that. From day one, he knew and always said, “This house makes my bones ache.” He told her how he felt something coming from under the ground into his bones. He only spoke to deaf ears. But he knew whenever he left the house he would instantly feel as though he had unshackled himself from the weight of a sack strapped over his back. Then he came back, he felt as though he had been hypnotised into thinking that he would never move away from its field of gravitation, even if he willed himself from it. (13)

The construction of the house on sacred land destroys the Phantom family’s unit and confronts rather than reconciles two different realms, the reality of the present and the uncanny nature of the past. The “unnatural” positioning of the house metaphorises the assimilation of the Phantoms as white trash and bogans on the margin of town (and society), placing the Indigenous other in a position that equates with any non-Indigenous

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Australian displaying anti-social behaviour. The novel subtly alludes to the perceptible Americanisation of a postcolonial Australia in a global environment, an Australia that seems in that particular case to extend from the United States rather than from Britain or Europe. The Phantom boys are depicted like a Hollywood gang (114), while the Phantom sisters (215) – subtly described as Shakespearean witches spouting steam and walking out with a pack of dogs (114) while Big Mossie Fishman, the religious zealot, has “a Clint Eastwood face” – tune into the Oprah Winfrey Show. The novel’s humoristic strain and critique of modernisation and economic rule over ancient law construct modernity as the repository of trash and depict the individual as no longer alienated but fragmented, positioned in a world where memory and personal history have been replaced by artificial manifestations of history and belonging. The modern is ultimately nothing more than the reconstruction, in motion, of the structures of community – the act of moving the community to another space. The waste derived from modernity consequently marks the move away from the space of “country” and is emphasised by the wreckage caused by the cyclone hitting Desperance. Alexis Wright draws on the dramatic topography of a region gnawed by greed and mining to provide an essentially non-European vision of the place of the individual in the world. The story, with its strong encroachment on Indigenous stories and culture, sets to restore the lost connection between a culture plagued by modernity (and colonisation) and a nurturing past inscribed in the earth, sky and ocean. The spatial divisions of the town, with neighbourhoods known as “Uptown”, “Eastside”, “Westside”, function as an allegory of Australia and Dante’s inferno, with Uptown being the “centre of civilisation” and embodiment of England and royalty, ironically “marked on no map” (57), and the Pricklebush and the Eastend being clearly marked as Indigenous countries. The configuration of the town in contiguous spaces relies on mysticism and a stark reality where Indigenous characters, like Angel Day (Normal Phantom’s wife), have been converted to Christianity but retain their Indigeneity (22–23), drifting between worlds, while others advocate a spirituality that is explicitly absent from society but manifested in landscape. The plot gradually progresses from minor (personal) stories to major history, offering a large-scale commentary on the political nightmare still experienced by Indigenous people in the space of the real. In her essay, “On Writing Carpentaria” (2007), A. Wright argues that her writing project relied on two essential questions. The first was how to try to understand the idea of Indigenous people living with the stories of

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all the times of this country, and secondly, how to write from this perspective. She adds that the combining of ancient and historical stories resounds equally as loudly in the new stories of modern times. In the novel, chapter 2 devoted to Angel Day, starts with the voice of a narrator providing a view from above the actual time and place, introducing the story in a voice that again recalls the narrator in Winton’s Cloudstreet or even the narrator in McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. The narrator, who is not a specific character and remains rather objective, surfaces in and out of the stream of narrative to guide the reader and make subtle forewarnings, at times like a Greek chorus. Addressing the reader with the direct pronoun “you”, the narrator stands as the keeper of the tale, insisting that the plot encompasses “THE BIG STORIES AND THE LITTLE ONES IN BETWEEN” (12). The use of a capitalised sentence combines history and personal stories, and suggests that the narrative of the nation and its individuals tells of both the connections that unify multiple actions over a span of time performed, in most cases, by a multiplicity of characters, and the connections that link multiple viewpoints and the telling of those actions. The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story “told”, so that it “is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character” (Ricoeur, 1985: 88). Hence, the story entangles the western perception of time with spiritual time (12) so that identity takes place in the dialectic between the Dreaming tracks (the songlines) and the geographic routes (the colonial map). The narrator’s statement that the story encapsulates the “big stories and the little ones in between” echoes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s claim in A Thousand Plateaus, that “one is made of lines, not only lines of writing since lines of writing conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines of writing” (215). The characters’ reconnection with Indigenous stories and reading of the natural components therefore operate not as a rewriting of history but as a telling of official history not just “from” but “from within” the land. History is indeed not to be read on the configurations of a place imagined and constructed by colonial Australia but rather from within the confines of the land and the Dreaming tracks. In an interview she gave after receiving the Miles Franklin Award, Alexis Wright said that her writing, like in most Indigenous stories, “collapses history”: We come from a long history and association in this country, we have got ancient epical stories that tell about how the land has been created, and that is still very important to Aboriginal people whether they live in urban areas

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of the country or remote areas. And the way people tell stories; they will bring all the stories of the past, from ancient times and to the stories of the last 200 years (that have also created enormous stories for Indigenous people), and also stories happening now. It is hard to understand, but all times are important. I have also studied writing and literature from overseas, where other writers have a long association with their country. Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Eduardo Galeano, South American writers, and also the French-Caribbean writer, Patrick Chamoiseau. (O’Brien, 2007)

Wright’s influences and techniques are visible in the oral style of the novel and the role allocated to the third-person narrator as the teller of the tale, the beholder of a memory sustained by oral stories and transposed in her novel like a long song. Her Indigenous characters are no longer shadows haunting the place, reminding Anglo Australia about past injustices, but are rather major dominant presences whose perceptions of the natural systems and territories allow the transposition of fiction into spiritual stories and reality rather than the opposite. Will Phantom, the hero-activist, is caught in the cyclone and swept away on a sea of stories, a creation site where he feels the urgency to “rip off the bare shell of his being so that he could walk away from thoughts that were so oppressive” (473). It is virtually by looking into the eye of the cyclone that he can clearly hear the earth murmuring and visualise the presence of the Dreamtime and the collapsing of colonial history: It was at this point he realised how history could be obliterated when the gods move the country. He saw history rolled, reshaped, undone, and mauled as the great creators of the natural world engineered the bounty of everything man had ever done into something more of their own making. (488)

Throughout the story, the wilderness is approached as a means to reconnect with the true self and as a refuge from the authoritarian governmental body. The allusion to and prominence of the Dreamtime stories is subtly marked by the visible crawling of the Rainbow Serpent (490), a spiritual presence that designs micro-movements, secret lines of orientation and disorientation, running like a whole sub-conversation within discourse, growling against industrialised space (467), and that in fact operates as a micro-political discourse within the broad political spectrum. Indeed, the underlying presence of the fauna and flora often reminds the reader that although modern societies tend to cast “nature” and “culture” as opposites, they constantly mingle, like water and soil in a flowing stream (of consciousness), and are the major components

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of the life of the drifting individuals. A constant play with genre and symbolic imagery sustains the story’s embryonic structure and intertwining of forms, from the fairy-tale effect to the telling of folk stories derived from Greek mythology (the story of Leda), biblical stories that account for a colonial reality and the spiritual songlines that advocate an Indigenous reality. The novel starts in medias res, with the narrative voice setting the decorum and breaking into what may be the first songline: A NATION CHANTS, BUT WE KNOW YOUR STORY ALREADY. THE BELLS PEAL EVERYWHERE. CHURCH BELLS CALLING THE FAITHFUL TO THE TABERNACLE WHERE THE GATES OF HEAVEN WILL OPEN, BUT NOT FOR THE WICKED. CALLING INNOCENT LITTLE BLACK GIRLS FROM A DISTANT COMMUNITY WHERE THE WHITE DOVE BEARING AN OLIVE BRANCH NEVER LANDS. LITTLE GIRLS WHO COME BACK HOME AFTER CHURCH ON SUNDAY, WHO LOOK AROUND THEMSELVES AT THE HUMAN FALLOUT AND ANNOUNCE MATTER-OF-FACTEDLY, ARMAGEDDON BEGINS HERE. (1)

The use of the capitalised form does not constitute a subtext but rather the narrative’s main thread. The introduction to the novel, delivered like a prophecy, clearly asserts that the world of Carpentaria is the island of the shadow of death where tragedies, battles between opponents, the Phantoms and the Midnights, between Indigenous families and the descendants of settlers, take place. The novel falls into fourteen sections, running like a cycle of songlines to configure a history that incorporates all stories and times, since “Time” is neither fixed nor linear and the official version of “History” is a fake. Such an idea is conveyed through a symbolic descriptive frame since Desperance surfaces as the epitome of the colonial construct – a construct that is clearly rotten at the core, with an unfair justice system that dismisses “the idyllic city cop with a click of the fingers” and supports the return of the “valley cop”, who re-emerges “like a circus trick” (333). Postcolonial space is conceived through a binary between the city as the civilised centre of an elite and the country as the wild and careless world of tricksters and jesters. The narration constantly allows incursions into Indigenous spirituality, positing that the Dreamtime is reality and the reality of the town mere illusion. Coming back from his voyage at sea, Will Phantom is thrust into the yoke of modernity and artificial values: Now Will, who had spent too long following the illusions of the Dreamtime, was thrown back into the real world, where men became

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clowns and clowns men, which was another string of illusions altogether. (164)

The interrelatedness of stories and contingent time-spaces replace personal and spiritual histories viewed as centres with networks understood to be the social and political systems implemented by outside forces, either from the southern political states or Uptown. The unleashing of the cyclone – echoing the reality of Cyclone Tracy, which devastated the city of Darwin in 1974 – suggests that man and environment are ineluctably affected by wild, unnatural and uncontrollable forces; forces often perceived as “incongruities” that do not fit in with the social and political representations of the world. The narrative delves into the magical chanting of an oral tale marking Normal and Will Phantom’s parallel epic journeys to the sea. The sea and the water, which Uptown people tend to resent, are mystic and powerful; they deliver personal and universal messages to the traveller. For instance, the central image of the ocean marks the point of origin, the space of birth and homecoming for both Normal and Will but also for Elias Smith, the “whitefella newcomer” who comes “from a distant, mysterious place on the globe” (50), “plopped up like a giant cowry shell on the beach” (98) and assimilates with the Indigenous population. In his renaming of the river as “Normal’s River”, Normal Phantom erases the stamping on Indigenous land of the river’s actual name, the name of “a long deceased Imperial Queen” (9), eradicating the imposition of a colonial reality and creating his own reality. The novel’s aesthetic appreciation of place verges on an ecological approach and the suggestion that one does not in fact create the wilderness and “Country” since they make and remake themselves. The focal positioning of the natural environment, and more particularly of the ocean, seems to draw on the Deleuzian model of differentiation whereby the movement of the water, the natural elements and the Dreaming tracks challenge the form and rise to the surface to disintegrate a constructed colonial reality. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze argues that with differentiation, it “is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground” (28). He further emphasises the destructive power the matter of differentiation holds over form by saying: all the forms are disintegrated when they are reflected in [the] rising ground [of matter] ...the rising ground is no longer below, it acquires an autonomous existence; the form reflected in the ground is no longer a form but an abstract line acting directly upon the soul. When the ground rises to the surface, the human face decomposes in this mirror in which both determinations and indeterminate combine in a single determination which 'makes' the difference... It is better to rise up the ground and dissolve the

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42 form. (28–29)

The prominence of the ocean and seascape subtly establishes the difference from the daily reality of Desperance, undoing the temporal, economic and geographic appropriation of town, city and government, and resisting the nationalistic force of a postcolonial Australia. A nation still viewed as an extension of Europe and which, according to A. Wright, is, like Desperance, “a desperate place that needs to grow better understanding between one another” (Joseph, 2009). Wright’s statement and novel share a view held by two leading Indigenous figures, Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson, who both reject the idea that colonialism alone is responsible for the Indigenous predicament, insisting that Indigenous people, like the “white liberals and the old left”, cannot solely justify their claim and purpose on the ideology of victimhood, entitlements and rights (Langton, 2008). The novel’s focus on the return to “country” of Will Phantom and Joseph Midnight’s singing directions to Will in an attempt to reconnect with personal histories and Indigenous appreciation of the land expresses a gap between the older and the younger generations when discussing the position of Indigenous people in town and society. Will Phantom clearly sees that the only conflict to be had is with the mining industry and finance, and such conflict involves not only Indigenous people but also outside individuals like Elias and the main community as a people (375). Old Joseph Midnight dismisses Will’s explanation and insists that the war between tribes is part of Indigenous culture, and the so-called “New World” cannot interfere with that. In saying so, Old Joseph refutes Will’s common sense out of fear that the hope for a better world, with people completing their journey back to “country”, will be undermined by the mining industry trespassing upon people’s social space, displacing the locals to take further control of the territory, exploit and extract the land’s natural resources. Wright’s Indigenous characters act in such a way that their Indigeneity only has meaning when understood in terms of intersubjectivity and not just within Indigenous groups. Thus, the bond with inherited places, shaped by kinship, descent, culture, spirituality or religion, does not preclude non-Indigenous figures like Elias Smith from engaging with the land and fighting against corporations and political schemes. The arrival of Elias Smith in Desperance points to the character’s natural connection with the spiritual world and cosmic polarities: You could tell this man might be equated with the Dreamtime world because when his memory was stolen, the mighty ancestral body of black

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clouds and gale-force winds had spun away, over and done with, in a matter of flash. The old people said they knew this time had happened to Elias Smith because they had been awake all night watching the sea, and seen the whole catastrophe of clouds, waves, and wind rolling away, off in another direction. Elias was left floating in the watery jaws of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and as luck would have it, he grabbed a polystyrene fruit box with a bit of fruit still left inside to eat. He floated away on the currents heading our way. (50)

The arrival of the drifter in Uptown, the place where all people were born without lands (61), embodies the communion between man and environment and the integration of Indigenous beliefs in whiteness. Elias’s incorporation in Indigenous space purports the idea held by Achille Mbembe that “identity has no substance but is constituted by practices of the self, which is itself an application for Sartre’s declaration that existence precedes essence” (Moses, 2010: 18). Alexis Wright’s comment on the writing of the novel clearly suggests such a view and encourages an opening onto the postcolonial space not as an extension – and in fact dislocation – but as a root: I have a theory that Carpentaria was imagined from an Australian heritage that has created disconnected islands of individuals, families, races, regions, beliefs, just as the continent itself is an island disconnected from anywhere else. Just so! In such a scenario, and without settling for one explanation for the novel while others can be imagined, Carpentaria is the land of the untouched: an Indigenous sovereignty of the imagination. Just such a story as we might tell in our story place. Something to grow the land perhaps. Or, to visit the future. (Wright, 2007)

The overlaying of the characters’ stories on a geographic and sacred land colonised by the mining industry and urbanisation uncovers a forgotten world of dreams and histories hovering above the underworld of a nightmarish history and a gloomy postcolonial present. Carpentaria is in part an act of reclamation and the expression of the anxiety and trauma generated by territorial loss, fragmentation, industrialisation and the loss of the community spirit, a loss of values that affects not only Indigenous people but also Australian society as a whole. Indeed, the focus on the land and the spiritual bond with Indigenous culture extends to non-Indigenous Australia through stories published during and after the reconciliation period. Ideas of nation, community, cultural categories such as “Indigenous” and “non-Indigenous” (“non-Indigenous” being often understood as “Anglo-Australian”), along with the debates on cultural reconciliation and belonging to place, have been subject to a number of stories by non-

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Indigenous authors published in the midst of national debates on the Australian constitution, national reconciliation and the official apology to the Stolen Generations. The Australian government’s decision to brush off the apology, arguing that Australians as descendants of settlers should not be held responsible for the past and the fate of Indigenous people, sparked criticism and encouraged the production of fictional works dealing with trauma, guilt and recognition, the sense of place and the incorporation of Indigenous culture in postcolonial Australia. The voyage inward to the deserted and harsh interior or to settler territories located in the farming areas is a recurrent literary theme of the reconciliation years, along with the encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters in the bush and their desire to reconceptualise “country”. The bush, as a potent symbol of freedom and imprisonment, has always occupied an ambiguous place in the Australian consciousness. It is perceived as the space of both political deprivation and reconciliation from colonisation and the emergence of the postcolonial nation to Aboriginal Land Rights Acts in the 1970s, the Mabo judgement overturning the doctrine of terra nullius (1992) and Native Title Acts (1993). Besides, it is also worth noting that perceptions of the bush hark back to the nationalist movement of the 19th century, which still holds a mythical place in Australian writings, whether in the depiction of open spaces or the bushman enjoying the struggle and connection with a wild environment. By the end of the 19th century, the bush provided non-Indigenous artists, writers (Henry Lawson or Joseph Furphy) and historians with a “sense of Indigeneity” as the dry and harsh environment was perceived as being the epitome of Anglo-Australian culture and the bushman, whose knowledge of the Indigenous perception of the land made him an accomplished individual, a man of nature standing not only above the Indigenous people but also above an urban Australia that was no longer a replica of the inherited system from Britain. Thus, since the beginning of settlement and colonial history, the construction of a national character and the dream of a national destiny have been intrinsically bound to notions of land and pastoral life but the incorporation of western ideals in spiritual and Indigenous countries provided the spiritual and Indigenous land with a complex overlay of meanings. The persistence of pastoral and pioneering stories in Australian fiction has been openly counterbalanced since the second half of the 20th century by stories about quests within deserted places and experiences in the interior desert, the symbolic space of national belonging and cultural identity – with the view that Australia still extends from Britain or Europe but has nonetheless acquired its own “identity” in an Asia-Pacific environment. Roslynn Haynes, in her study of

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the desert and its impact on Australian culture, argues that the centre of Australia and its associated Indigenous culture somehow attracts white Australians because of a need to overcome their own Eurocentric limitations and embrace a different kind of cultural enrichment (1998: 264). David Carter (2006) shares such an idea, adding that rural ideologies have remained powerful in the discussion of the perception of space and geography, and the belief that there are distinctive, superior rural values still draws upon a fundamental opposition between bush and city when instead their interdependency could be stressed. Carter’s point on the interdependency between the bush and the city, country and urban/rural spaces, is illustrated in works dealing with the issue of belonging and land rights during the reconciliation process. Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2002) tackles such interdependency and issues through an ecological approach reminiscent of the 1970s’ ecological philosophical movement of Val Plumwood and the writings of Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal in an attempt to connect the coastal places to the harsh interior and address the sensitive issues of Indigenous rights and belonging. Winton explores the “ecological” centre through the meanderings of an Anglo-Australian marginal figure and suggests a new way of embracing the wilderness. The arid land is no longer “wilderness” but “country”, with an emphasis on the beauty, variety and unique topography. The novelist enters Indigenous sacredness through the interaction between a non-Indigenous character and the Indigenous environment, landscape and people. The use of landscape as a character and the integration of two semi-assimilated Indigenous characters foreshadow the theme of reconciliation and apology to the First People. A diverse and untamed geography not only propels the non-Indigenous other in the space and culture of the other but shows the dilemma of replacing one or the other within the broader spectrum of multiculturalism and postcoloniality. The interaction of black and white Australia not only shows that the reified Indigenous is caught in what Edouard Glissant coined “errantry” but also that the non-Indigenous character, who is himself a reified subject of modernity, is invariably caught in exile and errantry. The novel’s fragmentary structure forms the basis of a discourse that plays with language, and the collisions of cultures are seen as productive to a relation between different subjects and objects so that totality becomes diversity. In Winton’s novel, the dialectical relation between supposedly antagonistic forces clearly operates as a “tool of decolonisation” that, by extension, creates a “dialectical tension within de-colonial self-identification” (Skeritt 2012). Winton’s perception of space and the place of individuals within the colonised and authentic ancient territory then complies with Marcia

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Langton’s discussion of “Aboriginality,” in which she intuitively recognises the political power of identification to “lessen the pressure of assimilation” while noting that this only has meaning when understood in terms of intersubjectivity, which dissolves particularity in favour of the unity of a singular other (Langton 32). Alongside Winton’s interrogations, the examination of colonial trauma and history in other fictional works published during the same period also exposes colonial history, whether regional, historical or political, only to chart a postcolonial Australia which is no longer tied to the British or European centres but is an independent and culturally distinctive nation in the Asia-Pacific region. Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth, Gail Jones’s Sorry and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River unearth the dark episodes of colonial and postcolonial times, suggesting that “fear and guilt were part of the colonists’ moral puzzle from the beginning; denial, the narrative of avoidance, was part of a genuine attempt to foster emotional possession of the land” (Reid: 180). Inspired by the story of her own great-great-great grandfather, a convict sent to Australia from London in 1806, Kate Grenville’s novel tackles Australia’s colonial past and relations with Indigenous people to design a fiction of reconciliation based on the understanding of the land and on settler and Indigenous contacts. Grenville’s focus on land rights and her claim that the novel is inspired by the life and experience of her ancestors sparked controversy, with critics blaming what they saw as the selective appropriation of a national history. Moreover, the novelist’s statement that writing the fictional story was like being “up on a ladder, looking down on the history wars” (Koval 2008) led to an ongoing and public conflict with Australian historians, such as Inga Clendinnen and Mark McKenna, over the rights and responsibilities of historical fiction. Inga Clendinnen’s article on the validity of history and historical sources, for instance, takes an interest in The Secret River, arguing that the novel shows an attempt by novelists to “bump historians off the track” (Clendinnen 2006). Despite the criticism levelled at her, Grenville nonetheless joins the line of a great number of Australian (and postcolonial) authors whose stories take place on the boundaries between fiction and history in an attempt to explore the blankness at the heart of Australian culture, a blank void that encapsulates the dark reality of history. Grenville’s novel interestingly takes its title “The Secret River” from the anthropologist W.E.H Stanner, who wrote about “a secret river of blood flowing through Australia’s history” to describe the brutal acts of genocide against Indigenous people by British colonisers and the subsequent historical silence

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about these shameful events (Stanner 1968). Thus, the retelling of colonial history and the political and social consequences on postcolonial Australia revolves around the construction of reality and the exposure of a silence that has been institutionalised and needs to be voiced.

B. The Sound of Indigenous Silence Gail Jones tackles the sensitive issue of the Stolen Generations and the criminal acts committed against Indigenous Australians brutally taken away from their families, sent to orphanages or put in foster-care as part of assimilation policies in her novel Sorry (2007). Jones’s novel is another example in contemporary Australian literature of the attempt to heal the anxieties of (un)belonging at a time when discourses of the sacred and Indigenous culture manifest themselves in the public domain of the modern nation. In her story Jones allegorises the “forgetting” of the Stolen Generations to suggest that the foundation of the nation took place at the expense of unutterable acts of Indigenous dispossession and criminal acts, if not genocide. Sorry constructs a settler-narrative that deconstructs the settler-dream of opportunities for all and the individual’s oneness with nature, depicting the coming of age of Perdita, the unwanted girl raised by self-absorbed British parents in the barren country of Western Australia in the early 1940s. The crux of her narrative of settlement is the murder of Nicholas Keene, an English anthropologist, by his own daughter, Perdita, and the disquieting silence over the motive and the unfair treatment of her Indigenous friend of heart, Mary. The novel’s title “Sorry” subtly takes as an underlying element the “Great Australian Silence” coined by W.E.H Stanner, introducing the story through a whisper: A whisper: sssshh. The thinnest vehicle of breath. This is a story that can only be told in a whisper. There is a hush to difficult forms of knowing, an abashment, a sorrow, an inclination towards silence. My throat is misshapen with all it now carries. My heart is sour, indolent fruit. I think the muzzle of time has made me thus, has deformed my mouth, my voice, my wanting to say. At first there was just this single image: her dress, the particular blue of hydrangeas, spattered with the purple of my father’s blood. (3)

The first passage owes its density to the dialogical form that associates both the whisper and the impending secret nature of the plot to the unease and speech disability of Perdita, the main narrator and character, and by extension to the gaps in national history. The main character’s bits of

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memory told through her own stuttering and a fragmented narration function as an allegory for Australia’s own troubled past and construct divergent but dependent layers of meaning. This dramatic story falls in four parts, each one concluding with a major event in Perdita’s life: the arrival of Mary, the ravaging cyclone, the Japanese attack on Broome in 1942, and the resolution of the past and the crime. Jones depicts the family (the tenet of the Victorian age) as a dysfunctional family and in so doing binds the fate of Stella, the Indigenous girl, to the fate of Perdita, the white alter-ego and unloved daughter. Nicholas, the father, is depicted as a frustrated First World War veteran, bearing shrapnel in his back in Christlike fashion, and a character whose dreams of becoming a famous anthropologist remain unfulfilled because of his imperialist narrowmindedness and indolence. Stella, the mother, is caught between her Shakespearean world of dreams and reality, wandering like Sycorax, the mother of Taliban in The Tempest, and living as the alienated wife trapped in rural and colonial Australia. Perdita, the daughter whose parents wanted to see die at birth, grows up alone and deprived of love but is very close to Billy Trevor, the deaf-mute son of the neighbours and the alienated Indigenous people her father so disdainfully studies. Her statement that her heart is “sour, indolent fruit” inscribes her sense of guilt and responsibility in living organisms while her recollections of the blue of hydrangeas on the dress of Mary, her Indigenous friend, and the purple colour of her father’s blood incorporate time and action in nature and perception through sight. Jones’s novel tackles the interrelationships between the human and the natural worlds just like in Shakespeare’s work – through dramatic and poetic models of intervention, management, prudence and profit. Moreover, a psychological approach intersects vision (the primary input to more general memory systems) and memory to create a visual memory so that the importance of internal sources of sensation and perception complements the experience of the external world. The character’s attempt to enter Indigenous consciousness and “Country” does not occur through settler-narratives of Australia but through the imaginary world and perception drawn from the Renaissance and incorporated into her own space and perception. The threading of Shakespearean symbols into the narrative canvas and the personal development of Perdita debunks fiction and reality, imagination and truth so that the constructed real is dismissed in favour of the obliterated reality and history. The environment naturally surfaces as a social construct that seems to legitimise the existing social and dual postcolonial order. Perdita, who feels she is closer to Mary, her Indigenous friend, than to her family,

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views her own environment as an amalgamation of both Christian and Aboriginal (pagan) philosophies. From the very beginning of the story, Jones sets a stage for dramatic characters whose actions and development suggest in the Foucauldian sense that “social powers operate through a regime of privileged speakers, who have historical embodiments as priests, kings, authors, intellectuals and celebrities” (Frommes & Glotfelty 1996: 15–29). She shows that the words of these privileged speakers are taken seriously against the discourse of meaningless and often silenced speakers such as women, minorities, children, prisoners and the insane. In so doing the novelist strives to give a voice to the silenced others through the retelling, through the effect of stuttering, of a tragedy by Perdita. In an essay on justice and the poetic of narratives dealing with the colonial past and the treatment of Indigenous people, Jones argues that the “testimonies of the ‘stolen’, i.e. the Stolen Generations, are texts of a special kind, a kind that is not ‘poetic’ but straightforward in their depiction of manifold grief”. She adds that such testimonies are “often strikingly eloquent in the quality of anguished ineloquence”. The testimonial text, she says, “is to a certain extent opposite to the poem as it claims intimate referentiality, a singular, located voice, an immediate and intimate connection between statements and truths”. She adds that “since the narrative force of testimony in this case can only ever be Indigenous, non-Indigenous writers wishing to engage with ‘stolen’ matters must write from another perspective and perhaps use forms of indirection that will signal a refusal to ‘claim’ the experience of others” (Brennan 2008: 77). In the postscript to the novel, the novelist consequently iterates her desire for justice and her poetic use of the term “sorry” by reminding the reader about the political and cultural context at the end of the 1990s and Prime Minister John Howard’s decision not to apologise to the Indigenous people despite the recommendations of the “Bringing them Home” report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, and despite the nation’s unconditional support for an official apology. Jones expresses her desire for an apology and further native title grants in a spirit of reconciliation, in the novel’s acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge that Aboriginal Australians are the traditional custodians of the land about which I write, and that their spiritual and material connection with the land is persistent and precious. This text is written in the hope that further native title grants will be offered in the spirit of reconciliation and in gratitude for all that indigenous Australians have given to others in their country. (217)

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Sorry symbolically develops through the evocative descriptions of the remote, spiritual and inscrutable Australian bush, through the sheer isolation of the country and the alienation of characters. Indeed, while the local place seems far removed from the horrific events of the war in Europe and the impeding attacks from Japan, it is clearly rotten at the heart by the nation’s own unavowed genocide – such a rotten state extends to the acute psychological disturbance that occupies Perdita’s discourse, affects her mother’s mind and drives her father to the brink of insanity. Landscape clearly occupies the character rather than the opposite. For instance, Stella’s tormented soul apprehends the Australian landscape as a “vacant and desolate” space, and Broome is designed as a mosaic of cultures and yet the “place of utter barbarity” (14–15). Moreover, Nicholas, the traumatised First World War veteran, is drawn to the Australian heart of darkness, wishing to “uncover the mystery of what he liked to call ‘elemental man’” (7). He turns to the study of anthropology and migrates to Australia “for his field work because it appealed to his sense of the insane: what intelligent Englishman would go willingly to Australia? A black continent, certainly, and full of intractable mysteries” (11). Thus, from the confines of her physical and psychological emptiness, Perdita is drawn to “country” and is able to embrace landscape through the teaching and initiation of Mary, integrating a space of fulfilment away from home: She learned from Mary that if you lick stones they colourfully shine – agate, chrysoprase, rose-coloured quartz – that if you put your ear to the dirt you can hear footsteps miles away, and buried life going on, somewhere underground, that there are waterholes, jila, hidden in the desert country that the kartiya, the whitefella, will never see. There was an entire universe, she was discovering, of the visible and the invisible, the unconcealed and the concealed, some fundamental hinge to all this hotchpotch, disorderly life, this swooning confusion. (60)

Perdita embraces landscape and the discourses of the sacred with Mary, the substitute family member and sister. She undergoes the experience of being in place and out of place in a moment of decolonisation where her postcolonial reality is no longer reality, “the hotchpotch”, and the Indigenous understanding of the land is the substantial reality, “the entire universe” – the one becoming the other and the familiar becoming the strange other. Mary teaches Perdita knowledge of the land, her own sense of kinship and sharing as passed down from her Aboriginal community. She occupies a focal position in the story of Perdita and the memory and evocation of her character are imprinted in the

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topography of landscape so that Perdita’s world without Mary in it “turns to stone” and becomes “dreary territory” (111). Her Shakespearean name, which embodies “that which is lost”, is appropriate given the fact that she is not only neglected by her parents, being the unwanted child, and left abandoned in a personal wasteland but also because she was raised by Mary, the substitute sister she is doomed to lose. Perdita somehow endorses the role of the white Indigenous being at one with the Indigenous environment and an outcast in her own home environment. She can only find relief in her harmonious relation with the flora and fauna, and escapes by fleeing into the bush – the uncanny territory and protective shield against domestic violence. The three bush kangaroos she perceives in the darkness of the night allow for her realisation that “the world is also these fond, benevolent presences, fur-warm and comforting, wanting nothing, silent” (35). Landscape incorporates Perdita’s blurred memory and vision, the “vision that rests in concave spaces, the dubious sequence of events, the corrosions of any and every violent action” (124). The character’s tormented soul and history are natural elements of her own landscape of the mind, a space of enclosure that opens as soon as she leaves “Country” for the city of Perth – the space that she constantly compares to the open bush left behind but where she in fact recovers her memory: Perdita had yet to realise how utterly lost she would feel; how there are no replacements, ever, for the locations of childhood and their avid, intensified, blazing, encounters. […] I have thought all my life, this moment of eclipse. It is perhaps departures are complex, not simple, that we are tempted to cast them reductively, as if they were episodes in a novel, neat and emblematic. There is a relish with which people speak of their childhood, but also a shrewd suppression of moments of inversion, when what is deducted begins to define the experience. In the deepest folds of memory, the heaviest sediments, paradoxically, are those produced by loss. The convolutions of what we are include unrecognised wanderings, pilgrimages, perhaps, back to these disappeared spaces, these obscurely, intangibly attractive sites. I wanted a ‘last glimpse’ memory that could seal the shack, and the death, and my life with Mary, into an immured and sequestered past. To guard against what? To guard against haunting. (117)

The form of the passage, with its topographic outlines, designs a storywithin-a-story, common in modernist fiction, but which operates from the perspective of Mary rather than the main narrator since Perdita’s story is encapsulated in the story of Mary rather than the opposite. The oscillation between the third-person and first-person narrator marks the trespassing of boundaries between the present, seen as being distant, and the space of the

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autobiographical account of the traumatic and fragmented past, viewed as the centre of reality and psychological entrapment for Perdita and as the place of physical imprisonment for Mary. Such a fragmentation of and trespassing into divergent realities are manifested in Perdita’s sudden gaps and abrupt syntactic discontinuities, characterising the paradox of what Lyotard describes as “the aporia of art [and] its pain”, the aporia that “does not say the unsayable but says that it cannot say it” (Luckhurst 2008: 80). The murder at the centre of the story is, as is often the case with traumatic experiences, recalled over and again in disconnected segments that resemble camera flashes or a cinematic montage of visceral images, which Perdita simply cannot remember or put together. Thus, the character is in fact the “witness and not witness” (147) of that traumatic event and, as a result, feels “tear-blinded and overwhelmed. [...] as if a cloud has blown through her eyes and into her head” (137). Nicholas’s death becomes the trauma, the unresolved matter that shatters and haunts Perdita’s life, but it also disrupts both Mary’s and Stella’s world. Stella witnesses her husband’s murder and then remains silent when Mary wrongfully takes the blame, is jailed and becomes even more alienated. The Indigenous girl takes the blame while Perdita is compelled to forget the traumatic event (or rather fails to record it in her psyche), developing a psychogenic stutter as a signifier of her guilty silence. Perdita’s disability consequently becomes more acute when she attempts to retell the death of her father: “A strange elliptical quality entered her telling, a manifest inaccuracy. Her mouth became muddled; she could not speak” (165). The narrative explores the space of historical amnesia to examine the extent of forgetting unspeakable acts (Nicholas’s death and Australia’s criminal past), suggesting that history does not read like history but rather as the most horrid lie while reality is marred with gaps and a complicit silence, just like the stutter of the main character. Jones’s use of epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter, lines from Winter’s Tale at the beginning of chapter one and from Macbeth for the following three chapters, attests to the impending tragedies of the main narrative and the intrinsic relation between dreams and reality. Shakespearean dramas hover above the narrative, suggesting that both Perdita and Stella are, to borrow from The Tempest, “such stuff as dreams are made on” and their little life rounded with a sleep, namely their silence. In one of her sessions with Doctor Oblov, Perdita reads from Macbeth, returning to the moment her mother last chanted these words as her father lay dying, so that “some mind-forged impediment to memory” falls away […] and Perdita can clearly see, “as if cinematically arranged, the complete, recovered scene of her father’s death” (192). The character’s

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omission, which matters more than the crime motive, encompasses the country’s political amnesia to the crimes committed against Indigenous people. The narrative’s constant references to the functioning of memory and to the presence of gaps and silences rely on “a visual perception that cannot be understood independently of visual memory” – “a memory that supports the mapping of perceptual input onto existing knowledge structures guiding and constraining perceptual selection” (Brogger & Kolheif 2010: 18). In fact, the memory of the period following Nicholas’s death and told through the first-person narrative, which is a restrictive form, occurs through the visual description of the European map as the encoding of violence. The recovery of the events takes place through the ongoing global events and the depiction of WWII Nazi expansion on the European map so the link between Europe and Australia is expressed through nature, time and space that design personal history as the extension of war. Indeed, Stella’s conflicting mind and reasoning is prevalent in her use of the map of Europe and her drawings of swastikas as visual memory. Her manic behaviour is paralleled with the ongoing German and Russian appropriation of territories and the ethnic cleansing of Jews; it also circumscribes both the mother and daughter to a world of pretence and negations: I had been nowhere, seen nothing, never attended school, yet I held in my head a war-time globe, the ‘thick rotundity of the world’ composed of cities aflame, armies massing, territories fought over and lost and turned into graveyards. The map on the wall, corpulent Europe, became covered with Stella’s tiny drawings of swastikas. At a distance they looked like spiders, swarming across the paper. From my mother I had already received an engrossing and gaudy education; the world at war magnified my national cartoons and my mechanical geography, and gave me a confident, absurd contemporaneity. (100)

The use of the European map and its central positioning in the domestic space alleviate the sense of isolation from the British and European homeland at a time when Australia’s geographical location had an impact on attitudes to cultural otherness. As a matter of fact, the distance from Europe and the proximity with Asia resulted in the settingup of a protectionist ethic – the White Australia Policy – still at its height and justifying the increasingly stringent immigration controls against Asians and the political denial of Indigenous people. The encoding of a reality from outside (from Europe) to create a new memory and obliterate the reality experienced inside (in Australia and in the domestic sphere) allows the characters to convert the act of the murder into a construct that can be stored within the brain, “the concave spaces” (124), so that truth is

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buried and the subject protected from reality. The epigraphs from William Shakespeare’s plays thus symbolically function as metaphors for an Australia which surfaces as a house plagued by Englishness and folly. The constant references to the British playwright expose Stella’s compulsive condition and disorientation: the character recites verses as a means of survival to retain her metropolitan English culture and make sense of the uncanny world within and around her. She chants to the storm and the land, borrowing from the lines of King Lear, cursing the weather and the elements (85). Stella is unable to find relief in a landscape she thinks is hostile – and that, in fact, reflects her tormented soul and foul story. She is enmeshed in the vaults of time and space, just like Perdita. The sense of un-belonging that occupies Perdita’s mind takes place through her own disconnection from her mother and the space of the postcolonial nation, a nation built on lies and omissions. As she is lying on the earth and looking at the sky, the character sees a blank, a large void that signifies the process of her memory and the obliterating of the past. The character’s thought, which subtly echoes her own mother’s previous reciting from Macbeth (V, I), that “What’s done cannot be undone” (201), is read as the acceptance of guilt and the inscribing of the tragic past on the impending “sorry future”. The ghostly figures that surface when Perdita confronts the truth, whether in the space of the house or in the outside bush, stand as the guardians of two adjoining and symbolic territories; territories where the shamelessly dead and living (213) coexist and interact throughout a troubled reality. The symbolic imagery and intertextual connections subvert the generic features of the classical murder mystery, the narrative developing from the enigma of guilt towards the comfort of resolution and the never-ending guilt process. During one of their therapy sessions, Doctor Oblov discloses the loss of his sisters, which he says is visible in his baldness. He tells Perdita that: “We have no control over these symbols when they happen […]. Only afterwards, later, can we try to understand or repair them” (174). The doctor’s claim that one can only “try” to understand or repair what is lost or damaged, since nothing is entirely recovered or done with, literally operates as the novel’s central idea of reconciliation. Indeed, the story does not provide either restitution or justice even though Perdita survives the trauma of guilt and is able to recover her memory. The approach to history and story is that, as the character says, what “remains is broken as (my) speech once was” (212). Consequently, it is when Mary dies in jail that Perdita is at last able to express her true feelings, sorrow and regret, and that her word “sorry” can be uttered and heard: “I should

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have said sorry to my sister, Mary. Sorry, my sister, oh my sister, sorry” (211). Perdita’s slow and painful progression towards the past, truth and reconciliation with otherness casts her into the psychological space of guilt and within the structures of colonialism, in a space of grief that is consistent with the postcolonial nation. Jones’s novel exposes the legacy of cultural dislocation derived from the Eurocentric vision of place, genocide and dispossession, and in so doing designs a territory where history is similar to the cat’s cradle that Mary fashioned from strings at a time she was living with Perdita’s family and repeatedly raped. Personal stories and history are indeed like the cat’s cradle, fashioned by “nets, webs, cords intertwining”, with no beginning or end, like the design of a universe – a white space that encapsulates Mary’s “secret secret” (206). Mary’s statement that she has a “secret secret” implies that she has access to another space within the space of the other. Her silence plays an active part in the dramatic outcome of reality, emphasising the sense of strangeness and mystery but also suggesting that the non-Indigenous character cannot entirely reconcile with the other and fully embrace settler-history. It is worth noting here that the novel’s special dedication to Veronica Brady subtly brings to the fore Brady’s suggestion that some “Australians seem trapped within what is left of the wholly rationalist mind-set, which is unable to cope with difference” and Aboriginal spiritualism, as well as her interrogation as to “why the rationalists, distrusting the notion of sacredness and suspecting the metaphysical, fail to move ‘across the boundary’” towards otherness (Read: 5). Such ideas and questionings can refer to Perdita and Stella since they are unable to fully connect with Indigenous culture. The transcending of cultural boundaries as a means to assess historical truth and reality has been explored by other novelists, and Jones’s examination of colonial and intercultural relations, through the use of language and silence, is reminiscent of David Malouf’s writing, especially his novel Remembering Babylon. Malouf represents language through the boundary situation, using the boundary as the space that both separates and unites distinct fields; he is interested, as he says, in “a kind of language, the language of gesture or the language of silence that does not require words so that, when most is happening nothing is actually being said, or not in words anyway” (Papastergiadis 1994). Malouf’s indications on the use and purpose of language and the sound that silence conveys reverberate in Jones’s novel. Indeed, Mary’s refusal to speak the truth expresses metaphorically the settler’s negation of Indigenous history and people as well as the impossibility for the novelist to fully speak for the Indigenous other, set apart. Mary denies Perdita access to her sense of

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alienation and only becomes more inclined to share and speak when she learns sign language to communicate with Pearl, who is mute: So it was that they became a new community of four, all repudiating the clumsy instrument of human speech, and participating instead in the silent articulations of the body. Mary learned very quickly, much quicker than Perdita, and had an emphatic, declarative style. Her hands were ample gadgets, her spirit was enlivened. Pearl joked that Mary signed with an Aboriginal accent, and Mary was charmed by this quirky, possibly accurate, description. They entrusted to each other the conversion of words to embodied tokens; they watched each other attentively, seeing voices; they developed an idiom, an idiolect, and withstood the derision of the Greensleeves staff to communicate with eloquent pleasure. […] this was a language rich with hidden density, such as the body itself carries, and soulful as each distinctive, utterly distinctive, signer. (205)

The characters become active participants in the world of silence and communicate through visual language, such “visual utterances” being expressed through the manifestation of otherness. Sign language allows the four marginalised characters to occupy space-times and “existential territories” so that it is both embedded in history and incorporated in ongoing cultural and political moments. It is also apprehended as an internal and differential system, a discursive formation with its own connections and potentialities. Moreover, the dialogic relationship between possible worlds and processes of existential singularising stems from affective, cultural, ethical and political forces; forces that signify tensions with the exterior space. For instance, Mary incorporates the prison as the new settler-home, a colonial epicentre where she feels needed, her secret is sealed and her cultural identity trapped in colonial discourse. She remains impenetrable even though she is more active through silence and sign language. Her detention recalls her previous confinement as the enslaved subject in Anglo Australia and shows that the mechanisms of discipline that control the individual as a criminal replicate the outside social and institutional structures, spaces of unspoken histories and utter violence. Jones’s novel told in a whisper denounces the ruthless binary logic of colonial history, which placed Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures in mutually antagonistic relations and imposed spatial boundaries. Sorry shows that despite their spatial separation, the Indigenous (Mary) and the non-Indigenous (Perdita) subjects are bound to each other so tightly that each is unthinkable without the proximity of the other. The novel illustrates what Paul Gilroy calls the “geometry of colonial power”, which is “notable for the stress it placed on recognition and interdependency and the way it pushed cultural questions to the fore: each

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racial and ethnic type turns out to have its own space where it is at home and can be itself” (Gilroy 2004: 51). Told from the perspective of the settler-character and not the cultural other, Sorry addresses the postcolonial nation, suggesting that the imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life and discourse in the no-longer-imperial country and yet fragile postcolonial nation.

2. Country revisited The representation of what is “true Australian identity and culture” and the characterisation of “Australian writing” rely on geography and the isolation of individuals. Stories by David Malouf, Tim Winton and Richard Flanagan remain emblematic and meaningful markers of an Australian literary canon that may operate against modernist and postmodernist forms inherited from Britain and Europe. In the foreword to The Literature of Australia (2009), an anthology edited by Nicholas Jose, Thomas Keneally refers to the country’s paradoxical nature. The Australian territory, he says, is a new but old country, a true-blue territory and colonial heart of darkness, a place of new beginnings where the fallen (the convict) became the born-again other. Keneally notes that the country became home to a literary space of creative contradictions, a discursive place, which operates as a “netherworld” against Europe (Jose: xxviii). Keneally’s points highlight the idea that the nature of the geographic space reflects the ambiguous and complex history of the multicultural nation, and the foundations of the nation rest upon a set of dual representations. Such a complex and dual nature surfaces, for instance, in the writings of Patrick White and Judith Wright, who depict Australia as the space of a young immigrant society and yet the world’s oldest culture, the first of lands and the space of tangible tensions between antiquity and the modern. Landscape, as Patrick White suggested, is the real presence of the country and is now even more instrumental in the definition of postcolonial belonging and cultural identity. Country, region and place are often viewed as particles of the mind in that they become essential protagonists in stories dealing with isolation and alienation within the modern nation. David Malouf in A First Place (2014), a collection of essays and writings, examines the construction of European landscapes and the designing of colonial landscapes in Australia. His postcolonial perception of the Australian continent takes into account Indigeneity and the mapping of Indigenous countries, which he associates to the settlers’ integration into space and geography as complementary spaces of culture and identity:

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Part I A land can bear a number of cultures laid one above the other or set by side. It can be inscribed and written upon many times. One of those forms of writing is the shaping of a landscape. In any place where humans have made their home, the landscape will be made one. Landscape-making is in our bones. (167)

Malouf’s incorporation of cultures as layers within the land recalls Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s image and use of the plateau as the layer that is always in the middle and continuously deterritorialised and reterritorialised into infinite new plateaus. His interest in the way Australia’s cultures are either time-oriented or space-oriented reveals how the country’s histories and geographies can influence people’s lives, perceptions and ideas, and how the transition from people to nation is still not quite clear. The novelist openly asks the following questions: So what does it mean to be a nation, and how is that large concept related to place and land, or as we experience it personally – on the ground as it were – as locality, a particular tract of land: a town or a few streets in a town; a church hall, a local pub, schools, a football ground, a shopping precinct? And how is the nation related to that other large emotionally charged concept, a people? (339)

The definition of the nation and its significations are certainly central but complex, always addressed but never specifically determined. Like Malouf, Tim Winton often refers to the space of the nation and, in fact, to the idea that it can be an abstraction. Winton, who is usually hailed as the voice of the working-class and quintessential Australia for his strong descriptions of landscape and sense of belonging, writes out of a Western Australian experience, designing a space for identity and culture, a space where the ideas of “nation” “community” and “belonging” are subverted. His writing conveys a sense of nostalgia for the community spirit, harking back to the memory of the 1960s, and has links with “bush realism”, a counter-culture based in insular and reclusive places, often in the coastal areas of Winton’s “big West”. Winton reflects on the concept of place in his semi-autobiographical work Land’s Edge (1993) and in his co-edited non-fictional work, Local Colors: Travels in the Other Australia (1994), published four years later in the US under the title “Australian Colors: Images of the Outback”. Despite a strong affiliation to the suburb and coastal areas in and around the metropolitan area of Perth (Western Australia), Winton set a story outside his literary territory, in The Riders (1994), after he had experienced life in Europe during the late 1980s and at the time of the bicentennial celebrations of Australia as a nation. Thus, when the bicentenary was sparking fierce debates which then led to a

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march against the colonial ideology of Australia Day, Winton was experiencing his antipodean heritage in his various displacements in Europe, including Britain and Ireland. When he returned to Australia, the novelist was adamant that his sense of belonging did not extend from a British or European heritage but rather from the wild nature of the Australian coast, “being at the last edge” and feeling part of the land, staring out “at the blinding field” (Land’s Edge: 34). The publication of The Riders certainly best embodies Winton’s experience in foreign places and alien spaces in its constant comparisons with Australia. Both the geography and sense of perspective operate as differentiation and distance from Europe and the mother country. The English-speaking nations are the home of the descendants of the character’s family while Australia looms not in the background but rather in centre stage as the home-territory, the place of origin and future. The photographs and texts of Local Colors: Travels in the Other Australia complete Winton’s realisation that Australia had a common past with Europe but not a common present or future. His travels in the “Other Australia” suggested in the title of the book are clearly an attempt at connecting with the unfamiliar, the deserted and spiritual areas of the outback, centres of realities and signifiers of national history: “Australia’s outback people are spread so thinly across the continent that, like signposts, turn-offs, natural wonders, they become events in themselves” (11). Winton’s writing since then has tended to shift from nostalgia for the past and the community spirit within the spectrum of mainstream Australia to an ecological approach that implies interdependent communities, integrated systems and strong connections among constituent parts: Faces are landscapes of their own I suppose. You can see the seasons in them, the passage of time, of conflagration and drought, of bounty gone. You can see the nuggetty foundation coming through. […] There isn’t the optimism you see in American faces, for there was no glorious frontier, no promised land, only a long, tough apprenticeship to the land that rendered people equally unequal. Curiously, the land often renders itself in faces too, and it bears similar stories. Antiquity, attrition, fire, torrent, the grinding crash of continents. It is startling to see a body in stone, a figure in water and cloud. It is not only at night that trees become men and twigs the writhing bodies of reptiles. It makes the Aboriginal idea of Dreaming so much less quaint, your appreciation a tad less academic. The bush is a beautiful and fearful place. With greatness there is always some intimidation and some magic. (126)

The novelist’s literary displacement from the coastal areas along the southwest to the harsh interior places of the outback is, in fact, significant

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in Dirt Music (2001). The novel extends the issue of cultural belonging raised in The Riders through the European odyssey of the main male character, and tackles the cultural encounters between Anglo Australia and Indigenous Australia, interweaving the Indigenous songlines and the “Dirt Music” of the mainstream (Ben-Messahel 2006). In his novel, Winton correlates two time-spaces and histories in an attempt to convey reconciliation between black and white Australia and replaces otherness centre stage as the core value of Australian society. The main character’s odyssey in the Australian outback, away from the materialistic cities and politics, occurs through a place that is a portion of both geographical space and territories of meaning. The various encounters of Luther Fox, the main character, with the “Other Australia” show, as Winton notes in his Local Colors: Travels in the Other Australia, that the people of the outback are “still caught sweetly between the Dreaming and the California dreaming” (202). The Australian outback provides an illustration of Michel Foucault’s idea that racial and cultural discourse invariably suffers rupture, recovery and transformation so that those who analyse it can never decide whether they are witness to a legacy of the past or the emergence of a new phenomenon (Foucault 1981). Winton’s commitment to the environment and desire to connect with the ‘Other Australia’ in the outback is thus paramount with the consciousness of Indigenous culture and presence. Dirt Music, with its regional and rural impetus acting against the mainstream of urban Australia, designs storied landscapes that interrogate landscape experience within a space that is literally readable and intelligible. The physiographies of the land and the thought remain distinct but interact to form a “spatialisation of being” (Tilley 1994: 14) so that the collective and individual experiences of landscape materialise into cultures of landscape experience, with the formation of self and identity figured through cultural imprints and values. In his novel Breath (2008), Winton focuses again on the coastal areas of Western Australia, examining the themes of adolescence and manhood, place and the environment, identity and cultural and political issues. It is worth noting that the novel is set a few years after Winton made public appearances to oppose the Ningaloo Reef resort development in Western Australia and insist on the bonds that Australians share with the environment. In Breath, the discovery of the world of surf with all its impending risks and dangers, from childhood to adulthood, is associated to the realisation that the past is still hanging over the present, just like the flotsam and jetsam of the ocean waves: That week I slipped away at every opportunity from whichever characterbuilding group activity we’d been wrangled into, and made my way to the

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cemetery or the little beach below it. From there I could gaze across to the distant wharf at Angelus whose cranes and silos looked too small to be real. It was like seeing the familiar world at a twofold remove, from another time as much as another direction, for it felt that I was in an outpost of a different era. It wasn’t only the colonial buildings that gave me such a sense, but also the land they were built on. Each headstone and every gnarled grasstree spoke of a past forever present, every pressing, and for the first time in my life I began to feel, plain as gravity, not only was life short, but there had been so much of it. (117)

Throughout the novel, the beach, an icon of Australian culture, is used as a threshold and liminal place set on the brink between the worlds of land and sea, divergent spaces that the character traverses, remaining either in a present situation or retreating to the past. Thus, “places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolisations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body” (de Certeau 1984, 108). In his writing, Winton clearly creates the vision of a national landscape that deunifies and complexifies its objects/subjects and therefore also denaturalises and historises them. The novelist tends to separate the two components of national identity – individual identity from collective identity – and infer that national identity is just one variation of possible combinations of individual and collective identity. Moreover, the focus on the features of the landscape and the signifying and memorising strategies with which humans attach history and identity to the landscape beyond any nationalism outlines the traces of natural and historical processes manifested in landscape so that the meaning in the land is inseparably linked to the meaning of the land. Winton’s “imaginary republic”, an expression he used to define his fiction, refers to the imaginary space and country that allows for the cross-bordering of characters from one story to another, and that establishes a sense of place through the creation of a fictional territory in Western Australia, just like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha (Ben-Messahel 2006). Thus, the act of naming fictional geographic areas or renaming places charts a Wintonian map, which represents a distinctive, cohesive geographical and political identity so the individual, a component of place, is often defined by it. Winton’s fiction operates as “a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places” (de Certeau 103). The fictional local places become, just like the city of Perth and its surrounding areas, habitable and real spaces, vistas onto other worlds, conjuring up the past and referring to other histories, where otherness becomes the norm.

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A. The Nightmare of the Australian Dream Since his celebrated novel Cloudstreet, Winton started to move away from the thematic of the loss of the community spirit and nostalgia for the vibrant 1970s in working-class Australia in order to penetrate the social and cultural environments of the nation in a global perspective. The Riders (1994), like The Turning (2004), Breath (2008) and Eyrie (2013), venture into adult territory, associating the themes of masculine powerlessness and loss to the maturing of the Australian nation within a global environment. The dismissal by Winton of the cultural ties with Europe, including Britain and Ireland, conveyed in The Riders through a hostile geography and the main antipodean character’s ordeals, is even more perceptible in his next two novels, with their focus on the themes of anxiety and displacement at a time when the validity of some Australian national myths and history were being discussed. In the later works, the egalitarian and multicultural models trigger a sense of gloom, instability and uncertainty, and convey the idea that the “community” no longer implies cohesion but cultural isolation and violence. Winton’s most recent novel, Eyrie, is set in the urban landscape, with a block building as the locus, laying emphasis on Western Australia’s mining developments as signifiers of the state’s 21st-century plague. The novel advocates the loss of the community and suburban spirit of the older generations, often located on the edge of natural and wild landscapes, and the emergence of another kind of community shaped by economic and political greed, and active in a social space marred with Internet connections and satellite dishes. Tom Keely, the main character, is a disgraced former environmental advocate who dropped out of the middle class and adopted a semi-vagrant lifestyle of booze and pill-popping. In his various encounters with members of the social community, Keely heralds a concern for lost times and the rise of a more affluent society which perpetuates injustice, favours an implicit norm of identity stemming from socio-political definitions of the nation and that in fact leads to the exclusion of the social others: Home was only forty metres away, sixty at the most. […] The Mirador. Not much of the winsome Spanish turret about it, that’s for sure. It was a classic shitbox: beige bricks, raw concrete galleries, ironbar railings, doors and windows like prison slots. Hard to credit that fifty years ago some nabob thought it a grand idea, a harbinger of progress. The place had grown old and grim within months of its completion and the subsequent years had not been gentle. Locals despised it. But it had been a haven for old folks, retired lumpers and clerks, invalid pensioners, transients, drunks and welfare mothers. They were still there, many of them, lately joined by

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the first gentrifying hopefuls and middle-class casualties like himself. […] Like him, the building was a product of the sixties. And like him it was too large a mistake to be undone. I’m not much, he told himself on the acoustic forecourt, but I’m home. (21)

As the passage shows, Winton’s use and depiction of landscape design what Nicolas Bourriaud (98) calls “an erre”, which is: […] an invisible line that cuts across city centres and downtown areas, groups together all those who have nowhere to go – vagabonds, nomads, gypsies, marginalised individuals, and illegal immigrants. Thus, the wanderer very quickly finds him-herself associated with the world of criminality.”

The latent irony perceptible in the naming of home as “The Mirador”, the “erre” being a signifier of opening and signified by confinement, extends to Fremantle, a city and seaport in the metropolitan area of Perth. Indeed, Fremantle, former home to the 1983 America’s Cup that brought pride to the community and placed Western Australia on the cultural map, still retains its multicultural and bohemian lifestyle but surfaces as an empty space. Winton seems to view the city just like the natural and open spaces in his previous stories – as a text that the characters embrace and reconfigure. Place becomes a subjective inhabited space open to transformation while the mapping of territory is no longer real but subject to reinterpretation and change. The territory, with its many cultural and social spaces (and its rural and urban modern tribes), encapsulates aspects of cultural alterity so that “every practice, which strengthens boundaries, produces new modes of marginalised difference” (Shapiro 1994: 496). In the novel, aspects of difference are resummoned by redrawing geographical boundaries that in fact exist as invisible forms of internal otherness. However, Winton approaches culture and history from the perspective of landscape ecology, which “avoids distinctions between natural and disturbed regions and uses a new spatial language to describe land by shape, function, and change”, and “accepts chaos theory and its emphasis on diverse complexity” (Howarth 1996: 76). In fact, in his later novels, Winton raises new questions about place and country, wondering where they are situated, what they give and take, what they alter and influence. His stories again convey an ecological approach and run as “metaphors for the land – such as mosaic, patch, corridor, matrix – that use a situational ethics, arguing that disturbance is inevitable, whether it comes from natural or unnatural causes, and that landscape is a continuous history, never quite completed” (Forman 1986: 52).

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The symbolic use of geography and the exploration of isolated individuals confronted by a harsh social environment are features that also inspire a new generation of authors. Past the Shallows (2011), by Favel Parrett, seems to transpose the Wintonian approach to and perception of the environment, advocating a connection to the natural world and the ocean. Parrett uses landscape as a character and suggests that it is both a medium for and the outcome of action and previous histories. Set on the Tasmanian coastline, between bush and ocean, the story is told from the perspective of two brothers, Miles and Harry, whose ordeal is to live not only with a violent father after the death of their mother but also with the natural manifestations of the sea, the third main character of the tale. The physical and visual forms of the ocean design an environment and a setting in which locales occur in a dialectical relation to which meanings are created, reproduced and transformed. The movements of sea and sky symbolically direct the realistic and tragic story of the two young characters in a rural fishing hamlet so that they are oikos to the characters’ shabby existence and fate, home and centres of reality. The novel begins and ends with the same passage, a reflection on the ocean and its hidden treasures, on the water and sky as sole guardians of history, purporting the central idea that the past comes back and withers away like a wave destabilising the present and personal histories: Out past the shallows, past the sandy-bottomed bays, comes the dark water – black and cold and roaring. Rolling out the invisible paths. The ancient paths to Bruny, or down south along the silent cliffs, the paths out deep to the bird islands that stand tall between nothing but water and sky. Wherever rock comes out of deep water, wherever reef rises up, there is abalone. Black-lipped soft bodies protected by shell. Treasure.

The south coast of Tasmania, isolated and wild, is run through with ancient stories and the truth about the absence of the boys’ mother: “the invisible paths”; also by colonial history and personal story, “the dark water – black and cold and roaring”. The story is mostly told through scenes that take place on or by the water, with moments of terrifying confrontation emphasising the dark reality at the heart of the small and supposedly ideal community, or within the family unit. The violent and destructive waves openly foreshadow the persona of the abusive father and explain Harry’s phobia of the water. Harry, the inquisitive, generous and open-hearted boy, is thus filled with a terror of the vast, dark ocean and is tragically only able to connect with the environment and his mind country through death and the beyond (223). The geographic body and space is

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understood and experienced in various ways, forming a contradictory and conflict-ridden medium through which individuals act and are acted upon. The experience of space is in fact always shot through with temporalities so that spaces are always created, reproduced and transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces erupting from the past. The ocean indeed operates as a spectrum through which the reality of the characters can be grasped and interpreted. It is through the ocean that the reader is able to see the true nature of Miles, Harry’s protective brother, as being stoic and brave in the face of fatherly adversity. Miles paddles out on his surfboard and is immersed by the strength of the natural elements so he is thrust beyond the dark past and present into an intermediate space where he can escape from reality and be an other: He lived for this, for these moments when everything stops except your heart beating and time bends and ripples – moves past your eyes frame by frame and you feel beyond time and before time and no one can touch you. (135)

Parrett’s depiction of Miles as a responsible but hurt young man fond of surfing and communing with the water is reminiscent of Tim Winton’s illustration of male characters living on the margins of the ocean and attempting to give meaning to their shabby existence while their past swings back and forth frighteningly over their bleak present and future. In the story, the world of the two main characters, symbolised by the wild lushness of the Tasmanian forest and the rolling power of the sea, is an oxymoronic space filled with beauty and danger, a place where the world and the subject reflect and flow into each other. Notions of “object” and “subject”, “nature” and “consciousness” are thus dialectically related parts of a totality constituted through the being of the body in the world – a body that constitutes a way of perceiving, understanding and relating to the world. Thus, in the opening chapter, Harry has an almost indigenous sense of oneness with the natural world that surrounds him; he feels that the sea is part of him and empathises with a lone cormorant while his brothers are surfing. He finds an ancient shell hidden on the beach and is overcome with a strong sense of mortality and connection with the longgone first people of the area: And every cell in his body stopped. Felt it. This place. Felt the people who had been there before, breathing and standing alive where he stood. People who were long dead now. Long gone. And Harry understood, right down in his guts, that time ran on forever and that one day he would die. (4)

Like Winton, Parrett connects subjectivity and objectivity in a dialectic

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producing a place for being in which the topography and physiography of the land and thought remain distinct but play into each other as an “intelligible landscape”, a “spacialization of Being” (Tilley: 14).

B. Otherness Within Otherness In a discussion on place and belonging, Manning Clark suggested that white people were condemned to live in a country where they had no ancestral spirits since the conqueror had become the eternal outsider, the eternal alien. Clark argued that white Australians should become “assimilated or live the empty life of a people exiled from their spiritual strength” (Reid 2000: 13). His position, which he said came when he was standing in the Australian bush, surfaces in stories where the main characters can never entirely appropriate Indigenous culture or can never be spiritually absorbed in Indigeneity despite an understanding of country. Nikki Gemmell’s novel Cleave and Eva Sallis’s Hiam, both released in 1998, illustrate the plight of female characters who escape to the confines of deserted areas in the Northern Territory, exploring the Dead Heart and confronting the alien nature outside and inside. Personal and cultural identity is reflected in the configurations of the desert occupied by Uluru, the omnipresent rock formation. Gemmell and Sallis interweave the historical and the geographical to explore their characters’ mindscape and convey, in fact, what David Malouf defined as: “a convergence of Indigenous and non-Indigenous understanding, a collective spiritual consciousness that will be the true form of reconciliation” (Malouf 1998: 39–41). Geographical experience thus begins in specific places, extends to coterminous spaces, and recreates landscapes or regions of human existence so that the sensitive issue of Indigenous presence and the trauma felt by non-Indigenous characters are inscribed in the land. The environment is a context for human experience, constructed in the characters’ movements, memory, encounters and associations. Both Gemmell and Sallis look back at the history of colonisation and the reality of Australia at the end of the 20th century, striving to uncover or “pin down”, an expression that often recurs in Gemmell’s novel, a dysfunctional reality. The portrayal of the two protagonists, Snip and Hiam, is set upon the spectre of colonialism “locking the original inhabitants and the newcomers in the most complex and traumatic relationships in human history” (Loomba 1998: 2). The encounter with Indigenous culture combined with the tensions arising from the past is set upon affection for place (topophilia) or aversion (topophobia). The postcolonial condition is explored through its complex fate, the ancient

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land of stories colliding with the actual new world so that questers are compelled to embrace their otherness in places as diffuse and differentiated as the range of identities and significances accorded to them. Sallis’s novel, for instance, revisits the settlers’ quest in the desert through the outside gaze of Hiam, the Arabic subaltern other, who fled Middle-East conflicts with her family and drives through the Australian outback to escape from the trauma she experienced in her new life, as a migrant in the so-called “Land of Plenty”. The novelist draws from her experience and knowledge of multicultural backgrounds and situations to extend the interrogation that most Australians have about the bush, the connection with the space of Indigenous people, the migrant issue and the place of non-Anglo-Australians in the multicultural nation. Thus, Hiam’s physical entering into landscape interestingly translates as the ethnological reading of the Indigenous nations: As she headed beyond the confines of the known outer suburbs and beyond Mallala, the home of the furthest visited relatives, she was ejected from her familiar Australia into a vast, monochromatic land, stitched up with patchy fences, overlaid with weedy paddocks, stubbly paddocks, gold, browns, and more subtle browns. […] The land began to undulate after a while and became increasingly more golden and disturbing. (1–2)

The Australian geography, with its monochromatic nature, displays a combination of colours and reclaims its territorial rights on settler landmarks. The character’s personal story naturally connects with the land and unravels as the unfolding of a map: She tried to concentrate on the thin threads of the story. The story all happened a long time ago, all more than eleven weeks ago. It had a map and reasons. It was broad, meandering, populated and sane. Voices, houses, faces, clothes, colours, arguments, food. (8)

Each phase of Hiam’s life is cordoned off into a particular geography and composite culture: early childhood is flooded with the sunshine of another earth; the paternal voice is echoed through the vines and orchards in the high, terraced mountains of Yemen; memories are as faint and lingering as the smell of her grandmother’s hair; adulthood is set back in the mother country, in Jordan and at the University in Amman, in the multicultural metropolis; marriage and parenthood are paramount with displacement and emigration to Australia, settling in Adelaide. Moreover, the discovery of the natural landscape amounts to liberation while “home” left behind is enclosed in the memory of her missing daughter and husband. The urban

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space, Adelaide, is depicted as the land of decadence and loss where “Islam is a curious word” while the rural and deserted areas in the north are paramount with the sense of being in the world and at peace with oneself. The character undergoes the journey to terra nullius in a subversive manner considering that the world left at home is a void while the world experienced inside the country is dynamic and replenishing: Hiam had never heard of the Gagadju or the great storms of the Top End. She had heard of crocodiles […] It was after midday and hot like a furnace when she was again on the endless road, rushing into the humming, chaotic rhythm, vibrating in the geometric division of the vanishing road. The deep red earth divided in two even halves to let her pass. […] The crucible of the land was closing over her like the closing of a hand. And upon you be Peace. (130)

Hiam’s meanderings through unknown places, often echoed through the iteration of the term “unkempt”, are narrated through the interweaving of the past and the present so that memory and personal experience construct a story “mapped out in blood” (134). The encounter and connection of the “oriental” migrant other with Indigenous Australia operates through the overlaying of a geographic space marked by songlines and a personal space marked by stories reminiscent of The Arabian Nights. The italicised narrative fragments that erupt through the course of narration with the use of Indigenous and Arabic words create an embedded narrative of an Australia that emerges as a composite of various cultures and stories. Hence, the fact that The Arabian Nights have composite origins and no sole proprietor is all the more suggestive of the underlying diversity of Australian stories and the various ways in which one positions oneself in relation to the nation’s history. The superposition of disparate stories from the exterior geography to the interior landscape of the mind goes from those “unkempt” aggregates to consolidation, evoking the post-structuralist ideas that “there is no beginning from which a linear sequence would derive, but rather densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, injections, showerings” […] and that “there is a superposition of disparate rhythms” so that consolidation is creative (Deleuze & Guattari: 339). Furthermore, the outcome of the character’s journey through place and time results in her becoming an “I am”, shedding her identity as “Hiam”, just as she reaches her final destination, Darwin, the “Green North” (133), chanting softly to herself and to the country the consolidated plural space of “the two Easts and two Wests” (139). Sallis’s choice of the interior and deserted places extending to Darwin, also called “the Top End”, tends to “turn the map upside down”

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so that history and cultural encounters are no longer perceived in terms of their connection with Britain or Europe but rather with Asia. Regina Ganter, whose work has shaped a new approach to Australian history by shifting the focus to the north and interactions between Asian and Indigenous peoples and pre-British interactions with outsiders, insists on the sense of perspective when dealing with maps: If we turn the map upside down and start Australian history where its documentation properly begins – in the north - the kaleidoscope of Australian history falls into a completely different pattern. Prior contact with Muslim Asians on the north coasts and the cultural bridge of the Torres Strait into coastal New Guinea, make nonsense of the idea of an isolated continent. Indeed, until World War II, whites were heavily outnumbered in the north by close-knit Asian and indigenous communities. Instead of a White Australian past in the north we see a history of “mixed relations”. (2005)

In this passage, Ganter hints at both Paul Carter’s concept of “spatial history” and Judith Wright’s, who referred to the turning of the map and the spinning of the compass when discussing her ecological vision (Wright 1962). Yet, Sallis and Gemmell also tend to turn the map upside down to enter a form otherness from the confines of otherness, subverting nationalist discourse and the Anglo-centric mainstream. In Cleave, for instance, Gemmell insists on her character’s nonEuropeanness and identification with Indigenous culture, opposing the city to the bush and showing that Snip Freeman is unable to adjust to a western environment. The character not only literally cleaves to the wild places that she associates with home but also embraces the land under her given skin name “Napaljarri” (69) – an incorporation in Indigenous culture and country signified through her own body: Snip is slapped and streaked by red dust in this place, the tips of her fingers are valleyed as if all fluid has been drained from them, her long hair is weighted with smoke and dirt and wind, there are compacted crescents of dust under her nails, vivid accumulations between her fingers and toes, and in the palm of each hand a river map of ochre lines. She’s stinky in this place, sweaty and smoky. She is manless and motherless in this place. She’s been ordered to come here. (52)

The strong commitment to the land by the Anglo-Australian character exposes the unsettled nature of those who belong to the mainstream but remain outside, away from the centre of reality. The interior desert is a space where the character can overcome her own Anglo-centric limitations,

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virtually go native and commune with otherness, while the urban areas or even other regional places encapsulate dark times and places. When the character moves to Tasmania, around Port Arthur, the historical convict settlement, the weather conditions and topography thus reflect “a land soaked in blood” (342) – a territory she cannot relate to and which ironically operates as terra nullius: ‘Neutral territory, that’s what we need,’ Dave said. ‘A place new to both of us.’ A strange outcrop of rock is at the head of the town. The rock will have a dreaming story but Snip can’t track down anyone who knows it. Anything out of the ordinary in this land has a story, that’s what she’d been told, anything unusual, across Australia, has been sung for some time. In the shock of first seeing the immensity of the rock she thought of the Aranda word for land being lonely – meaning land without family or ceremony. She couldn’t. All she remembered was that the words for people being lonely and land being lonely are almost the same. And the ground that Snip stood on felt like partly empty ground to her, there was an absence within it, because the people who sang for it and told stories about it for thousands of years had been mostly erased from it. Almost nothing seemed left of them in this land of smug English placenames, but ghosts (344).

The state of Tasmania is viewed through the grid of colonialism; it surfaces as a territory stamped upon by convict settlement, violence, Indigenous deaths and genocide. The uncanny nature of the geography encompasses the character’s sense of alienation and designs an existential space that she and her partner will experience, a symbolic and mythic place replete with social meanings embedded in buildings (colonial cottages), in objects and features of the local topography. In Cleave, Gemmell pays tribute to “country” and in so doing attempts to engage with it in the same way as Indigenous Australians do, that is “as a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. […] country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease” (Rose 1997: 7). Gemmell also designs a “dreaming ecology” that may evoke Germaine Greer’s appeal that nonIndigenous Australians should embrace Indigenous culture as their own (Greer 2003). In their critical book, Uncanny Australia (1998), Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs argue that Indigenous claims for sacred sites from the last phase of the 20th century onward have been crucial in the recasting of Australia’s sense of itself. Gelder and Jacobs insist that their concern for what might be called the “discourses of the sacred” means “the way in which Indigenous sacredness manifests itself in the public domain of the modern

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nation”, and that the Indigenous sacred, the claims made about it, are signs of a predicament that can be characterised as “postcolonial” (xi). In a paper published a few years later, Gelder refers to Uncanny Australia, insisting that “Australia is postcolonial because even as it remains under the shadow of colonialism, it does things differently, things that could not have been done if it were still just ‘colonial’”, for instance “debates and discourses about the Republic, reconciliation, or the need for sovereignty and for a treaty, the real and symbolic weight of narratives concerning the ‘Stolen Generation’, and Australia’s proper and improper relations to East and South-East Asia and the ‘indigenous Pacific’”. Gelder adds that such issues work to reconfigure the nation but suggests that even if Australia’s postcolonial nature means “more Aboriginal presence”, it “nonetheless translates as less Aboriginal contact for non-Aboriginal Australians” (2006: 163). Gail Jones’s novel Sorry, discussed earlier, surely illustrates this claim, considering that while the story delves into the issue of the Stolen Generations from an emphatically postcolonial perspective that is aware of issues of Indigeneity and cultural abuse, it cannot openly express either the expected “sorry” nor fully reconcile with the Indigenous other (211). Jones explores the ways in which subjective and cultural memory may be located at the intersection of spatial and temporal dimensionalities, within the culture of terra nullius and amidst an environment that articulates on race rather than class. The main character expresses an anxiety at not being able to eradicate the past once and for all as well as the yearning to be reconciled, to express regret for the past and a shattered present. Thus, Perdita’s last words suggest that issues of inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, memory and oblivion, have their epistemological and theoretical basis within the culture of terra nullius, sustained throughout two centuries of colonisation. Indeed, the legacy of the colonial past still bears a mark on the present and is perceptible in writings about the land and the nature of society. It somehow embodies a continuing fear of illegitimacy for settler-Australia and the inability to develop the kind of pluralist inclusive account of the past that might form the basis for a coherent national community. Richard Flanagan’s stories, for instance, often use the colonial past as the underlying layer to the plot, suggesting on the one hand that the free settlers coming to Australia chose it as a space that allowed them to escape from the hold of British rule but in the end remained quite dependent upon Britain, and on the other hand that the migrants and European others chose Australia as a place that allowed them to be free from political oppression or economic hardships but in the end found themselves pushed to the margins of the Anglo-Australian mainstream. Flanagan’s first novel,

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Death of a River Guide (1996), depicts the return to the land of his forebears of Aljaz Cosini, an outcast and solitary figure, through a process that translates as a homecoming. Aljaz Cosini’s experiences and memory flashes occur through drowning and the subsequent spiritual fusion with a geographic body, especially the water as the palimpsest structure of personal and national history. Hence, the body of Tasmania’s Franklin River operates as a vista onto the nature of the earth and as a device through which time and history can be looked at and reassessed – a medium between life and death and an unlimited beyond. The narration starts with the character’s recounting of his birth, setting the stage for a story that begins in the depths of water and the mother’s amniotic fluid and ends in the depths of the river, the extra-terrestrial body of mother-earth: As I was born the umbilical cord tangled around my neck and I came into the world both arms flailing, unable to scream and thereby take in the air necessary to begin life outside of the womb, being garrotted by the very thing that had until that time succoured me and given me life. […] But I miraculously emerged from my mother still enclosed in that elastic globe of life, arriving in the world not dissimilarly to how I am now to depart it. (1)

The account of the past told from the perspective of the dying character on the banks of the Franklin River is highly symbolic and eco-centric considering that the “composition of what we call the ‘environment’ through the combined elements fosters a place-based ethic within which landscape is diverse and localised rather than abstract and generalised” (Macauley: 335–336). Flanagan’s fiction chooses as its main setting and character the Tasmanian wilderness, showing an interest in the interweaving of landscape and personal stories so that national history operates from the perspective of the topography and manifestations of place, and from the personal experiences of characters. Aljaz’s accounts and perceptions clearly inscribe personal story in the water and also chart Australia’s history in its depths, in the flow of the Franklin River. The role and place of the river is central, being both witness to the character’s fate and an ecological marker of Tasmania’s biggest and historic campaign against the state government’s decision to flood the river for hydroelectric power development in the early 1980s. Yet, the Franklin River is experienced as a material quality and as a form of this quality, suggesting the Bachelardian idea that water contains a transitional character, and this characteristic is relevant in the description of outside phenomena as well as inner human experiences (Bachelard 1983).

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The main character’s story develops from the experience of death to birth and to death through the body of water so that water is used metaphorically to describe things that occur or were experienced. His confrontations with his miserable past and the uncanny phenomena manifested in the present clearly initiate a reconfiguration of space and place. Aljaz Cosini is thus made to undergo a series of disturbing challenges (most of which are of a psychological nature) either as a guide in charge of a group of tourists and having to manage different personalities or as the individual drowning and seeing his whole life spiralling out of the water. The confrontation of repressed or forgotten events becomes central to the reinterpretation of the present and the liberation of the mind. The experience of drowning and hanging between life and death gradually calls for a return to a time prior to his differentiation as an autonomous subject. Self and place are reconceived in the telling of story and history through a syncretic vision that combines the present and the past, the first-person voice to the third-person narration, the inner and outer vision. In this novel, Flanagan seems to suggest that the spatial experience of place is vital to the character’s becoming an individual. It is only when Aljaz is caught in the reality of the wilderness and his impending physical death that he is able to speak out and expose his true self and feelings. The confrontation with the untamed environment, after a long time spent outside Tasmania and out of the wilderness (Aljaz is no longer fit for the adversity of the natural surroundings), propels the protagonist back into the dark episodes of his life. Aljaz, the child of European migrants growing up as “half-Tasmanian” (90), comes to realise that he belongs in an undefined somewhere, a space between a colonial reality (marked by history and his past) and a postcolonial illusion (marred by his own failures as an adult, a gloomy present and his imminent death). As a guide, he embarks on a descent into the “memory of loss” (258), an oxymoronic phrase that encapsulates the spiritual poverty commonly attributed to the isolated island ever since the colonial imagining of the land as a source of wealth and crime rather than knowledge and intercultural understanding. The novel refers to Australia’s economic and social developments through the lexicon of the natural environment so that the history of the colonial nation draws on images of landscape, built environments, transplanted British culture, imagined spaces and communities. The character’s cinematic vision pushes the boundaries of the present, re-enacting a past seen through colonial development (and the alteration of landscape) and externalising the inner subconscious:

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Part I I watch the recent past of this place like some crazy speeded-up film; watch how European progress arrives with the mineral boom of the 1880s and 1890s like a vast wave washing over the wilderness, transforming the west coast and leaving funny little towns like Strahan, the strange flotsam of deflated dreams and broken hopes. I watch the vast wild land of the west of Tasmania suddenly fill with people. Throughout its vast rainforests I watch them: prospecting, logging, laying waste to huge tracts of forests with massive fires. At the height of the great boom, in the year of federation, 1901, the mineral wealth of the west flows out through its ports, and flowing in like a king tide are the supplies and equipment and pimps and whores and speculators and sly-grog merchants and those desperate for anything, but chiefly a job, or failing that a dream, all bound for the land that they briefly call Australia’s El Dorado. (188)

Aljaz’s narration designs porous borders between the psyche, the material body and the external world so that images of matter are shared between the inner and the outer, transgressing any sense of closure and boundary between individual experience and material manifestations. The narrative frame seems to build on Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “material imagination”, grounded on the premise that there is an intimate interconnection between human memory and imagination so that imagination shapes and creates memory, and memory exists only as imagination (Bachelard 1983). Hence, the movement of the character from the physical to the metaphysical realm stems directly from images of natural matter; images that are dreamt and viewed and constitute a Gaia principle whereby all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely related and form a single and self-regulating complex system. Places are, in fact, always far more than points or locations; the natural elements are not just illustrations, all bear distinctive meanings and values: “The water […] is no longer destroying me but remaking me as something else, and I am no longer sure if I am me, or me the river or the river me” (321). In an interview on the writing of the film-script Australia, Flanagan refers to his own experience as a rafting guide on the Franklin River in the 80s and 90s as “enormously liberating” and says that he found the beginnings of his world on that river (Berger 2008). He declares that his novels meander across oceans, centuries and generations in winding structure, highlighting that his family stories and experience have an influence on his writing technique: A novel is a cosmos. I grew up in a great big extended family, one of six kids, with 51 first cousins. They all told stories, marvellous stories that digressed and never really began and never really ended; time wasn’t

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something you measured. So I’ve adopted that idea in my novels. (Berger 2008)

Death of a River Guide, with its rhizomatic narratives and its binding of inside and outside spaces, allows everything to take form, even the uncanny elements. Accounts of personal histories show that as the geopolitical map resulted from violent confrontations, political borders tended to erase cultural boundaries and Tasmania and its many “nations” subsequently encapsulate residual aspects of cultural alterity that prevail as invisible forms of internal otherness. Aljaz Cosini experiences a series of disjointed visions of the past as soon as he falls in the water. He believes that the river is where truth and reality can be grasped and that geography manifests itself as moral geography: The stories went on and on. Harry’s [Aljaz’s father] was a landscape comprehensible not in terms of beauty but in the subterranean meanings of his stories. The new roads were not made for such journeys, but, as Harry put it, were simply straight lines to get you from A to B as quickly as possible, which was, he maintained, the way only fools travelled. The old roads built along the routes of the carriageways, that more often than not were cleared widenings of old Aboriginal pathways, were the roads Harry seemed to like best. (91–92)

Aljaz relives the stories and events that have been repressed and forgotten either in his family’s past or during his life as a drifter through “endless casual jobs, the small towns and the big suburbs and the endless roads and the flushing airports, an inventory of despair” (269). The territory is undoubtedly a geographical notion but it is first and foremost a political signifier, controlled by a central power. The contingent nature of the Australian space, specifically its shifting and unstable frontiers, alludes to the “fiction of emptiness” at the centre of Australian spatial narratives and the ambivalence surrounding the settler desire to make Australia home. Flanagan’s novel shows that the incongruous, uncanny, nonegalitarian and even abject are part of the characters’ lives and the nation’s history, that Australians are part of “a vast and troubled country called Australia” (Flanagan 2002). In his acceptance speech for the Commonwealth Prize for his novel Gould’s Book of Fish (2002), Flanagan refers to writing and Australian fiction as a challenge and a subversive space to national designs and official history: Australia has become a country relaxed and comfortable with a certain sort of writing, small in compass, imitative in form, obvious in its limited

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Part I aspirations. It is a flabby writing that neither challenges nor confronts, that does not rub against the grain… Do not mistake me: I am not arguing for some new nationalist literature, nor am I trying to rehash an old idea of great national novels. My suspicion is that great novels are ever antinational, rising beyond them, opposing fundamentally the nonsense of national pretensions with the mess of life.

In Gould’s Book of Fish, Flanagan uses history as one of the novel’s central subjects and suggests that truth is stranger if not more unreal than fiction. Tasmania, just like in Death of the River Guide, reads like an imagined community and replica of imperial Britain anchored in facts but at odds with the surrounding wild spaces: “Van Diemen’s Land – intended by the authorities to be a transplanted England – is mutating into a bastard world turned upside down” (197). Both novels encompass the idea that although Australia is an independent nation and no longer a penal colony, the colonial past still looms over the present and the nation is still estranged from the underlying reality of the country, unable to fully embrace its own history – a history that should incorporate Indigenous history and non-Anglo-Australian histories. William Buelow Gould, a convict and self-made artist incarcerated on Sarah Island (on the west coast of Tasmania), is instructed to paint a Book of Fish. He uses his work to tell the real history of the penal settlement, a space marred by crimes and fake political discourse: I care not to paint pretend pictures of long views which blur the particular & insult the living, those landscapes so beloved of the pobjoys, those landscapes that trash the truth as they reach ever upwards into the sky, as though we only know somewhere or somebody from a distance – that’s the lie of the land while the truth is never far away but up close in the dirt, in the vile details of slime & scale & filth along with the Devil, along with the angels, & all snared within the earth & us, all embodied in a single pulse of the heart – mine, yours, ours – & all my subjects as I take aim and make of the fish flesh incarnate. (93)

Both William Gould and Aljaz Cosini reflect on the state of the nation that dismisses the Indigenous presence and advocates an Anglo-centric heritage, with the migrant others on the margins, and the land a repository of lies. Flanagan’s stories interweave the non-Anglo migrant narrative into the larger national story by depicting lives in a national and regional context. Thus, the novelist focuses on the figure of the migrant other, who is part of the “new nation”, composing an aggregate of the cultural territory and, as Adi Wimmer argues, “questions the trope of the success

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story promulgated within the ideological frame of official multiculturalism in Australia, and writes against [this] grand narrative” (Wimmer 2003). The way Aljaz experiences death harks back to the Australian value of courage in the face of adversity as Aljaz “struggles” in the water but rather than getting the upper hand is held in a place where the surroundings elements seem irrational, difficult to determine, and where memory has a reterritorialisation function: Suddenly my eyes snap open and all sight of the ancient bedspread is immediately lost in the rushing river water. And returning with the water are the sensations of my agonised body, but I shall not dwell upon them. I shall not. To cut out the groping pain I concentrate on my outstretched arm. I can feel that whereas my arm was formerly covered in water to a point a little beyond my elbow, now only my hand and wrist seem to feel the chill of the air. Which means the river has risen a good twenty centimetres or so. Which means that little hope of rescue has further receded as the river grows more wild, the waterfall more ferocious. Somewhere beyond the bubbling blackness a building begins to take shape: a house. More precisely, a home. A sky-blue shack made of tin. And now I see where the home sits: in the crabbed and cracked port town of Strahan, which in turn sits like the crusty skin cancer on the flesh of the south-west Tasmanian wilderness. (Death of A River Guide: 186)

The character’s itinerant territorialities in connected times and places are based on local overlapping divisions and his memories. In fact, the role of memory is to function as the reterritorialisation of discarded past histories and subversive spaces drawing attention to Tasmania as the allegorical embodiment of national history. Aljaz naturally finds himself “able to transcend time” (40) in a way that allows him to re-enact not only the various stages of the trip prior to the catastrophe but also some repressed events in his personal past (or in the lives of his friends and forebears) during convict time. Flanagan’s writing hereby relies on an ecological approach that allows the main character to dwell on the migrant others so that the definition of “nation” is reassessed as the “new nation” incorporating non-Anglo migrants and Indigenous people. The natural environment (especially the symbolic water) becomes an allegorical embodiment of life and death and cultural revitalisation. Aljaz’s thoughts and recounting of the past provide simultaneous stories and meanings and allow for differing worldviews to coexist and various discourses to interpolate and form Australia’s true historical and cultural territory. The hidden narrative of Aljaz’s European and Indigenous forebears concealed below the surface narrative is revealed in such a way that the surface narrative is transformed while colonial and postcolonial discourses

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are subverted. The interweaving of stories and experiences operates against the streamline of national history figuring the island-state as a disturbing and strange place but above all as the place of reality against the space of nationhood. This still underplays the role played by Indigenous and culturally diverse groups in the making of official history, which writes out of history the deaths (even massacres) and racism committed against them and enjoys the telling of yarns that verge on the grotesque and the sensational. Aljaz is, for instance, uncomfortable with the clichéd stories of incest and imbecility that the tourists enjoy: The punters greeted the stories with nervous laughter and nods and shakes of the head, meant to convey bewilderment at such horror, but which was rather them affirming that Tasmania was as they had always conceived it in their ignorance, a grotesque Gothic Horrorland – as if they knew the stories already, which really they already did. The Cockroach tells the stories for effect, not because he believes them but because he knows they are what the punters want and his job is to satisfy their needs. […] Aljaz says nothing […] dislikes them, dislikes telling them. Those stories are too hard. They come from something too close. (132–133)

The yarns that the tourists enjoy emphasise Aljaz’s uneasiness and unsettledness on the island, a perception and state of mind that surface in the movement of the Franklin River, keeper of the truth: “In the detail of a piece of rushing water Aljaz reads the changing visage of the entire river, hears the terrible soul of the history of the country, and he is frightened” (152). The character’s recollection of history and memory of loss is probed on personal and collective levels so the real nature and soul of the country is narrated from an anti-nationalistic stance that gives voice to the migrant and Indigenous others and locates Australia not solely by way of extension from Britain but through a syncretic vision. From his position in the river, through his experience and vision, Aljaz occupies multiple positions and is able to “see” in ways that require rethinking rationalist dualisms. Thus, in the chapter titled “Sonja and Harry”, the third-person narrator recalls the way Harry and Sonja, Aljaz’s parents, related to the country, pointing out their respective divergent approaches and connections to place: Harry, being Tasmanian-born with a convict and Indigenous heritage and Sonja a migrant from Slovenia. When Sonja first views Hobart from the ship, she resents it and perceives the colonial varnish that is laid over “something much older”. She is aware that to have an environment is not simply to have entered and remained, and she realises that she and Harry are mere subaltern subjects. Harry never rises above his working-class status and

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seems to bear the stamp of his convict heritage, remaining apart and chained to his personal story and failures (144). Sonja’s memories of her life in Slovenia, where she used to work in a factory making chains, and her comparison with her new life in Australia are doubly ironic. It places the “new country” as the place of enclosure while the home country, land of political strife and poverty, is seen as the place of liberation. The contrast between Sonja and Harry or even Aljaz and his work partner, the Cockroach, suggests the idea raised by David Malouf that these days, “one in every three Australians was either born outside the country or has no British background”, and that for “these Australians, the past is elsewhere” and the “consciousness of Australians has been dominated by space” (Malouf 2014: 80). Flanagan’s writing re-animates regional pasts and landscapes by evoking the abject and the uncanny; it reconceives Tasmania as home and “country”, as a composite of histories visible in the topography of place from the early days of colonisation: Chill draughts blow through the open slits that serve for windows. From outside, the sound of the gale-whipped waters of Macquarie harbour slapping the shore of the small island which is their prison. Sarah Island. The Devil’s Island of the British Empire, the endpoint of the vast convict system, the remotest island of the remotest continent. From the blacks incarcerated below, from the throats and mouths of the proud people of the Needwonne and Tarkine, come screams and weeping and terrible coughs and wheezing. They believe the building to be possessed by evil spirits. Some are terrified and some propose escape, and some are dying of influenza and colds and horror, and all believe the devils run around the room and spear them in the chest with evil. From outside, the splatter and surge of the rain carrying off the last of the topsoil from the island that has been totally deforested by the convicts’ slave labour. (149–150)

The passage associates part of the horrendous fate of the Indigenous people to the terrible destiny of the white convicts, depicting the stark reality of convict settlement and the destruction of natural habitats; suggesting that the histories of both the “convicts” and “blackfellas” may be brought together and the “memory of loss” exposed (258) as a condition of a new community. Marc Delrez, in his analysis of the novel, wonders about the novel’s status as “anti-national fiction” and suggests that it rather inscribes in the “white Aborigine” narrative, which has become a pervasive feature of settler fiction in “reconciliation” Australia (Delrez 2007). Delrez’s argument, which seems to operate within the discourse held by Germaine

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Greer that non-Indigenous Australians should go native, does not seem to take into account the intersubjectivity between convicts, migrants and Indigenous people, nor Flanagan’s frequent criticism of the state of Australian politics and Australia’s postcolonial stature. Flanagan’s fiction depicts an Australia that neither relies on the idealist vision of the 19th century nationalist movement nor on the “big picture” drafted by the Australian government in the 1990s. The “big picture” conceived Australia’s future as a republic of equal citizens bound not by old ties to Britain but by new alliances and attitudes that would create a strategic economic and cultural future in the Asia-Pacific environment. The novel ironically alludes to the “big picture” and the expanding ties with the Asia-Pacific nations through the sustaining idea of Aljaz’s forebears that Tasmania is a “New Jerusalem”, an island “suspended halfway between Australia and China”, “a land where all were welcome save for His Majesty’s soldiers” (136). The statement made by Ned Quade (Aljaz’s ancestor) fails to materialise since his attempt to escape from Macquarie Harbour and the chains of the Empire is marked by his cannibalistic act to survive and his future as the official representative of the Empire in the colonial mainland town of Parramatta. The experience of the Tasmanian colony and environment illustrates the enduring fact about settlement and integration in the new territory, space of progress and freedom that dramatically becomes the place of discipline and punishment. Ned Quade asks when and how newcomers to Australia finally come to identify with place, embrace the wilderness as home and become part of the colonial space. His personal history conveys the ideas put forward by Robert Hughes in his novel The Fatal Shore that the land which on the surface was alien and hostile became a signifier for freedom and that “on its blankness the absconder could inscribe what could not be read in spaces already colonised and subject to the laws and penal imagery of England” (243). Flanagan’s writing conveys a deep attachment to place and locality as the core of identity and explores the intercultural connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals as a space from which to start re-imagining the nation. Death of A River Guide associates Aljaz Cosini’s belonging to place through ancestral transmission, through a family shaped by kinship, descent, culture and beliefs. The character’s accounts and memories ironically paint a “big picture” of Tasmania’s settler-colonial past with its genocide (57), savagery and historic cannibalism (237), but also with its totemic and spiritual connections transmitted through genealogy (47) and antipodean geographic spaces. Indeed, Aljaz’s personal history is marked by the souls of his Indigenous ancestors coming

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back as sea eagles and by his Slovenian grandmother’s ability to talk to the winds and read the impending events from the face of landscape. The totemic relation with the sea eagle perceived by Harry (47) and then by Aljaz himself (326) symbolises the characters’ Indigenous partial kinship and connection with the land, a “damp black earth” that unleashes the “wet and pungent smell” (70) of country. Such country is nurtured and sung by Black Pearl, his Indigenous ancestor, especially as it signifies the final stage of the journey back home: And he hears the peat crumbling and smells the colours of it growing and at last he knows the song and he knows. How much he loves them! And he sees Black Pearl is holding something on her chest. […] and he sees cradled within Black Pearl’s arms Jemma, all cooing and laughing. Black Pearl takes Jemma’s hand and points at him, and he hears her tell the child that the sea eagle she can see high up in the myrtle tree carries the spirits of her ancestors. But before Black Pearl has finished speaking he feels a warm updraught, and rising with it his body, wings outstretched, feathers feeling every sensation of the crisscrossing air currents, rising in a spiral, a circle growing ever outwards. (326)

The novel’s closing image of “a spiral, a circle growing ever outwards” embodies the persistently active links between the past, the present and the future, a world of stories where histories “collide and exist together” (230). Given the selective and permanently shifting dialogues between the present and the past, the landscape of the character’s mind and the outside geographical body, readers understand that the present inevitably has an impact on memory and on how people remember: “his memory of the river was being destroyed by the natural world of the river itself” (84). Flanagan’s narration of human relationship with the land relies on dynamic exchanges and constitutes an environmentalist intervention that reinterprets Australia’s colonial past, and in so doing, reorients debates about Australia’s future in terms of human/nature co-constitution because “the earth abideth forever” (8) and place can only be possessed in imagination not physically. Thus, in writing back to the country, Australian authors engage with stories and experiences, history and ecology, to subvert the nationalistic narratives of the nation from the perspective and voice of subaltern subjects, the Indigenous people and the migrant others – those who cannot relate to the colonial past and form an otherness within otherness.

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3. Seeking dream territories During the bicentennial celebrations, in 1988, Australians were encouraged to celebrate the birth and development of the nation as an independent and diverse space. David Carter commented that national occasions trace the shifting meanings given to “Australia”, and the way national identity was enacted through the process of celebration and commemoration is visible in the way Australians responded to the 1988 bicentennial celebrations and still respond to national days and events (Carter 2006: 89–105). Indeed, the national event’s motto, “Celebration of a nation”, boasted the country’s progress and sense of unity meant to involve all Australians but nonetheless encompassed the notion of shared Britishness, which sustained the idea that Australia’s destiny was bound to the former imperial nation. Patrick White clearly stood against the national event, claiming that the bicentennial celebrations were a “circus”, that the festivities would benefit greedy men and that the Australian people “should do more for the Aborigines” (Schumpeter 1988). His criticism was expressed alongside the claims held by Indigenous protesters, who renamed Australia Day “Invasion Day”, as well as the concerns of Australians from other ethnic and migrant communities. Yet, it is a fact that the very act of celebrating the 200 years of settlement marked the end of the official version of Australia’s origin and raised awareness that the nation was no longer an outpost of the British Empire. It also became clear that the time had come to address land right issues and the inclusion in the discourse and representations of the nation of Indigenous people, women and Australians of non-Anglo background. On the eve of the bicentenary, historian Manning Clark (1988) published an article in Time Australia suggesting that Australia had reached the stage where true history could be revealed but he also issued a warning against binary representations: Now we are beginning to take the blinkers off our eyes. Now we are ready to face the truth about our past, to acknowledge that the coming of the British was the occasion of three great evils: the violence against the original inhabitants of the country, the Aborigines; the violence against the first European labour force in Australia, the convicts; and the violence done to the land itself. The rewriting of our past has begun. In radical literature the white man has replaced the capitalist as the chief villain in human history. Our history is in danger of degenerating into yet another variation of oversimplification – a division of humanity into goodies and baddies.

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The literature published in the aftermath of the bicentennial celebrations encompasses the issues raised by Clark and other leading historians, for instance Henry Reynolds, whose work first viewed Australian history from an Indigenous perspective, dealing with the themes of convict beginnings, racial inheritance, the treatment and recognition of Indigenous people, ethnic and racial diversity, migration and diaspora as well as Australia’s place in a regional and global environment, ecological issues and the incorporation of the Indigenous approach to the land. Recent fiction incorporates such themes, extending to reconciliation, the complex political nature of Australia as an independent nation with a tie to the British Monarch, tolerance and discrimination, multiculturalism and the mainstream, migrants and refugees in an attempt to retrieve heterogeneity and be more inclusive of cultural and social realities. For instance, David Malouf (2014:327) discusses larger historical and political aspects of imperial and Australian history and ponders on the relationship between Australia and its parent country, Britain: Britain no longer sits at the head of the table. The rest of us no longer use the British, or need them, in our dealings with one another. As often as not it is the British representatives at such gatherings now who feel marginalised and out of place. The fact is, there is no longer a ‘centre’ around which we circulate and dance. We all have shifted place. In terms of where Australia and Britain now stand in relation to one another, the world has turned upside down.

In his essay, Malouf still shows attachment to the British heritage and seems a bit positive when discussing the development of Australia as a nation. In fact, he touches on frontier conflict partly forgetting that it was part of the British inheritance and that if federation made Australia “one nation”, it nonetheless divided the country on the grounds of race. His idea that Britain no longer directs the course of Australian affairs and that Australia no longer stands on the margins of the mother country is also clearly signified in the works of a younger generation of Australian authors. Yet, while Malouf insists on Australia’s inherited history and values, on a “shared common past”, the latter insist on their sense of not belonging or not relating either to Britain or to the rest of Europe. Tim Winton, for example, clearly advocated a detachment from Britain and Europe as soon as he came back from a stay there in 1988: When I got to Europe I knew the moment I set my foot down that I wasn’t European. I’d been brought up all my life to think that I was European. I’m not even faintly European. I looked at the glories of Europe from behind a

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Part I smoking glass. It was like this huge gulf; I admired but it wasn’t hugely connected with me. I felt torn, almost, like torn out of the soil from home. Then when I came back I knew what was going on. I knew if I stayed too long I’d be adrift, and I felt like I was going to wither up and die. I knew this is where I belong, I know my country, I certainly know my landscape as to what it means to me. No one’s really going to be able to convince me that I don’t belong here. (Heffner 1991)

The discrepancy and distance felt by Winton as an outcast on a continent and islands he experienced as harsh and empty are best rendered in his “European novel” The Riders (1994), depicting the wanderings in Odyssean fashion of Fred Scully, an ordinary Australian hunting down his missing wife: Scully crossed to the uphill window to look upon his little scab-roofed cottage beyond the wood. Its chimney ripped with smoke. Lanes and hedges and stands of timber and boggy boreens went out at all angles under his gaze as the wind tore his hair. From here it all seemed orderly enough, leading, as it did, to and from this very spot in every direction. It was a small crosshatched country, simple, so amazingly simple from above. Every field had a name, every path a stile. Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn’t the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes. Here the wilderness was pressed into something else, into something that had already been. (The Riders: 51)

The Riders explores culture from the perspective of the displaced antipodean character and the figure of the alien, the migrant, describing the geographic spaces in terms of opposites to Australia and even opposite space within a larger space, Europe. Ireland and Britain are both viewed as islands and Anglo-Celtic centres deliberately casting themselves away from “the continent” yet do not operate as substitutes for home for the Australian outcast confined in a hostile geography and barren landscape, in spaces delineated by borders and restricting boundaries. The territories as experienced by the character (and, in a biographic sense, the author) operate through constant deterritorialisations that have affinities with the idea of the disembodying of cultural relations. In his novel Winton designs place as a man-made hell, a hell that is no longer Australia with its convict history but Europe, Britain and Ireland, all three surfacing as infernos – globalised modern spaces that tend to annihilate or decontextualise relations, rendering them inauthentic or virtual. Winton’s novel partly harks back to Marcus Clarke’s novel For the Term of his Natural Life (1870–1872) with its emphasis on the inferno as the creation of a colonial power, which Clarke calls “a Kingdom of Hell” (353), and its examination

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of the social origins of such inferno. The story explores the perception of place and space in a European context (and from the perspective of the outsider) to interrogate the cultural origins of the European inferno, thus displacing Australia from the European centres of origin and replacing the country in its national environment, and in the Asia-Pacific space. The stories that Winton published after The Riders are again set in Australian environments and tackle current political, social and cultural issues, placing Australia in a global perspective but in terms of its distinctiveness. Winton, for instance, conveys a humanistic concept of place, largely drawn from phenomenology, concerned with the individual’s attachment to particular places and the symbolic quality of concepts of place. In his writing, landscape is a character and an icon for identity, the images and history of the various landscapes often paralleling the history of the imprinting of certain cultural forms of belonging. Topographical elements become the narrative frame of stories that articulate a sense of meaning and direction for the characters. Outside the domestic and national places there is the immeasurable other space (Europe), which the individual or group has some knowledge of but does not relate to. In his public speaking “The Island Seen and Felt: Some Thoughts about Landscape” (2015), Winton expands on his belief that “Australia is the place, which is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea” and claims that landscape takes precedence over national designs: Undoubtedly the nation and its projects have shaped my education and my prospects, but the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations is substantial. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family. … Australia is a place with more geography than architecture, where openness trumps enclosure.

In this discussion, Winton refers to his sense of patriotism, which stems from a reverence for the land and the desire to defend the natural world as if it were family, conveying an ecological vision. The examination of place as the country of emptiness in fact extends to a search for a wider view of Australia as an ecological construct and oikos in which consciousness becomes an active agent reshaping cultural, physical and social environments. “When I am abroad I feel the tectonic grind”, says Winton in his talk, which is exactly what his main characters feel and experience as they are travelling through different geographical spaces and voyaging in consciousness. Winton’s prose incorporates Edward Said’s codification of the “voyage in” as the movement and integration of the Australian other

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into the metropolitan European and formerly imperial space. In his novels, characters virtually “voyage in” the natural but also political, social and cultural environments, interrogating the definition and construction of ethnic or national identities, the sustaining of colonial discourse within the space of the former colonial powers and the place of the position of the postcolonial other, perceived as an exile. In his “Reflections on Exile” (1990), Edward Said discussed the enabling, liberating aspect of the exile’s position in terms of the particular kind of awareness he ascribed to it: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to [...] an awareness that [...] is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus, both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally.

Discussing the exile’s contrapuntal awareness, Said is describing an ideal situation whereby new and old elements coexist in a resourceful manner but the Odyssean experience of the Wintonian character seems to be of a different kind. In The Riders, it is in fact the character’s old world in Australia (and his memories) that is vivid and actual while the ancient (metropolitan and modern European societies) is negative and deadened. By depicting the past as a more dynamic space than the actual present, the novel confronts the old world (Australia) and the new environment (Europe) through a subversive mode. The tensions and antagonism that cultural encounters entail leave the main character stranded between incompatible worlds while the perception of Europe as a constraining and artificial space enhances the idea that all nations are mental constructs rather than concrete realities.

A. Recasting Centre and Margins Winton’s stories and essays, with their focus on the centrality of the environment and the Australian characteristics of place, operate around Dipesh Chakrabarty’s much-quoted postcolonial injunction to “provincialise Europe”, which means in Winton’s case deconstructing the universalist claims of European modernity by looking at the Australian context. Indeed, Winton looks at the Australian context but makes visible the history of European modernity’s “own repressive strategies and practices” and “the part it plays in the collusions with the narratives of citizenship in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of

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human solidarity” (Chakrabarty 1996: 243). This idea became more explicit after the novelist’s personal travelling experience around Europe in the late 1980s. In his work, Winton engages with – rather than subverts or rewrites – European thought and history, just like Christos Tsiolkas does in his novel Dead Europe (2005). Both writers use the travel motif in a manner that de Certeau (1984:98) describes as “an in-between zone, a condition of moving through space, with feelings of transience rather than of identifying place with a fixed order of positioning”. Hence, travel constitutes a translational third space between colonial countries and “the colonised home country”, the place where identity structures can be undone and remade from an Australian perspective. The novelists, without negating the European imprint on Australia’s colonial history, thus write back to the political geographies of former colonial countries. Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe utilises the theme of the journey back to the country of origin to explore the nature of individuality and reconfigure the themes of belonging and integration in the city and suburb, addressing the complex issue of cultural transmission and the imposition of culture in an unstable present. The meanderings of Isaac, a young Australian-born photographer, through the Europe of his father’s stories, between Greece and Britain but also France and Germany, point to the importance of the urban space as a two-way mirror of history and otherness. The novel initiates a subversive dialogue that reinterprets the space of reality and imagination as a transitional place of encounters, a territory with porous frontiers and borders. European cities and their environments surface as active modern artefacts marred by deaths, war crimes (crimes also to be found in family history) and negativity. Those places are symbolically marked by the image of a reptilian face, which, contrary to the Australian Indigenous Rainbow Serpent, is synonymous with evil and destruction: There were the cities of modern Europe. The modern streets of Europe: Alexandersplatz, Rue d’Alsace, Kalverstraat. The streets were modern and sleek but the bodies in these cityscapes seemed ancient and damaged and broken. In print after print, there appeared the same reptilian face. The dark, ghoulish boy, his face sometimes leering, sometimes grinning, always emaciated, always hungry, always reaching out grimly towards my gaze. (336)

Isaac’s proof-sheets not only memorise a gloomy present but also take instances out of time in places replete with historical events and all situated at crossroads: Alexandersplatz, the landmark of the German reunification; Rue d’Alsace, historically one of the most strategically crucial regions in France, and the contested place and subject of the feud

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between France and Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries; Kalverstraat, the Dutch area where shootings and fires took place in 1945 and again in 1970. Yet, such places also encapsulate a culture of consumption that permeates people’s minds to such an extent that reality is filtered through the logic of exchange value, advertising and appearances. Greece, place of antiquity, is a highly significant territory since it encapsulates two types of memory, the first referring to essential events (cosmogony, theogony, genealogy) and the second referring to past existence, to historic and personal events (Eliade 1988). Tsolkias depicts Greece as a modern purgatory, like Winton in The Riders. Greece is, like the rest of Europe, a Babylon of exploitation (37), a market for sex and human depravation (137), the place of artifice celebrating “the artistic achievements of the Greek diaspora” (46). Athens, the cradle of civilisation and democracy, is nonetheless prone to enclosure and has become a signifier for consumerism, a space where reality becomes surreal and where the individual is eventually thrust into a “hyperspace”: It had been over twelve years since I had been in Athens and even after only two days I was aware that this was not quite the same city I had visited when I was twenty-three. The bilingual blue signs had not changed, nor had the sun and the dust. But the alleys and arcades behind Omonia had been cleaned up. A giant inflatable corporate clown floated high above the entry to the old market square. Its monstrous grinning face mocked the Greeks smoking and drinking below. The five rings of the Olympic movement were everywhere, as were the red and orange circles of MasterCard. Arabic and Mandarin calligraphy competed with the ubiquitous Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Athens had changed. (29–30)

Tsiolkas depicts European cities as the most extended of man-made spaces. Athens is an important vector of social and cultural change but also embodies the violence and oppression of the outcasts in slums and streets. The space of the city is structured as an urban assemblage so that constituent elements are related to other exterior components and change their composition. It is thus in the relation between humans and their geographic environment that the city generates a sense of the community as well as vibrancy and isolation. Isaac’s “Odyssean” journey starts in Greece and gradually moves through a post-communist Europe shadowed by cultural uncertainties. The image of Europe, which surfaces through the train windows, the bus and underground rides, the walks along the streets, is marked by cultural and religious beliefs – undermining states that are just like the commercial blitz that alleviates Europe’s Enlightenment and

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Greece’s cosmopolitan feel: “This is not Greece. This is fucking MarieClaire” says a journalist to Isaac (35). The characters are witness to the sudden emergence into the contemporary arena of individuals from countries then considered “peripheral”, a situation that corresponds to the advent of a globally integrated capitalism, commonly known as globalisation and depicted as a space of division rather than unity. Indeed, place operates as a dystopia governed by materialism in the territories of the Pradas, Guccis and Versaces (134), no longer the stage of a fairy-tale but of a horror-story, right after the Velvet Revolution (179–180), and surfacing in fact as the metaphor of a Hugolian hell on earth (266). The story consequently highlights the idea that Europe has become a modern Babylon where people no longer go East but migrate to the West and share a single language, the lingua franca of money and finance, rather than the expression of cultural unity, commitment and social values. In his Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that concepts such as “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history” (4). Tsiolkas refers to these concepts not only to subvert the idea of European history and enlightenment but also to interrogate Australia’s tie with Britain and Australia’s own demons. Dead Europe, despite its constant references to death in various forms (cultural, economic, political, ideological, social…) extends to the examination of the state of Australia. Europe then seems ironically to have become a “New World” (331) – in fact the “Brave New World” where men do not act in a refined or civilised manner but are rather subject to the most despicable acts. The political, cultural, economic and social upheavals of the Velvet Revolution, along with the Second World War and an impending Americanisation of societies, ironically resonate throughout the present world and in the lives of characters. European history, including British history, is no longer universal but traversed by diasporas and undocumented migrants from former colonies and the so-called “third world”. Modern history, ethnicity and population uprooting subtly trace the lines of Europe as a common wealth of shifting centres: They were to leave in three days and she [Isaac’s mother] knew that this offered scant opportunity to see anything of the city [London], but on her daily walk from the hotel to the hospital she saw enough. This was not Australia. […] As if visited by a distant memory, she saw that this city was indeed European, by which she meant ancient. […]

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Part I She had been born in a remote corner of damaged destroyed Europe but it had still felt like the centre of the world. As a Greek she knew she was at the centre of the universe. She could not help wondering what it would be like to have come here, to have migrated here instead, to have remained in Europe. She would probably not feel that hunger for something else, which, for her was the meaning of being Australian. O neos kosmos. The New World. […] she saw a young Irish girl begging, her child wrapped in a small blanket in her arms. […] Rebecca found herself speaking out loud to Lucky. Imagine, husband, all these centuries of being a superpower, of meddling in the world’s affairs, of wanting power, and this is what you end up with. (399–400)

Isaac’s mother sees the kind of Europe she still longs for in terms of her non-integration in Anglo Australia, as the post-WWII migrant other. She still places herself outside the mainstream while she claims that Isaac and Colin are not European but “children” of Australia. Her belief that Colin is not European (or British) is reinforced as the latter experiences the entry into Britain as the passage through the gates of hell, going through the customs barriers of the Schengen area, ethnic profiling (330). Indeed, Britain offers no respite to the travellers and while Isaac, as an Australian of Greek descent, feels free of identity and colonial ties in Australia’s socalled “mother country”, he thus senses the incongruity of the postcolonial situation. The character captures the political and cultural reality of Australia in such a way that it fails the expectations of Anastasia, the outsider to Australia, who yearns for exotic images of the environment and Indigenous people rather than what she perceives as Isaac’s “homo-erotic” representations: I was annoyed. I had wanted the photograph to represent something about the discontinuities in the Australia I had lived in. The incongruity of this young man, his appearance and demeanour belonging to the highlands of Scotland framed against an unyielding ancient red desert, his clothes and attitude no longer suited to a working life spent largely behind a computer. (33)

Isaac’s interrogation of culture in terms of belonging to a country of origin does not comply with Anastasia’s perception that he can only identify as Australian (35). The two characters’ conversation evokes the role of Indigenous people in the Australian mainstream and suggests that the Indigenous being does not place himself as “other”, despite his American outfit – “a young Aboriginal boy, a baseball cap on his head, a Tupac t-shirt on his chest. He was standing outside a Greek bomboniere store” (35) – but rather as a “radicant” subject who has developed in

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accord with the cultural forces of uprooting, between globalisation and singularity, responding to “the living conditions brought about by globalisation” without confusing himself with them (Bourriaud: 57). Moreover, Isaac’s interrogations about his cultural identity also bring to the fore the ideas raised by Sneja Gunew when she examines the consequences of colonialism and multiculturalism. Indeed, when referring to Australia and Canada, Gunew notes that for those immigrants who locate their ancestry in European Western cultures and languages other than the British, an absurdity arises since notions of the European, made synonymous with Englishness, clearly exclude continental Europe. In fact, she adds that “non-English” becomes “non-European and non-Western”, and “English”, being linked to settler colonies, tends to reproduce an imperialist attitude by assuming “a totalising move where the border is between the English (and even British) and the rest, not between Europeans (or the West) and the rest” (Gunew 2004: 49). Tsiolkas often relates to the sustaining gap between Anglo and non-Anglo Australia, especially the non-inclusion of otherness in a mainstream built upon extensions from England, Scotland and Ireland. In an interview (2005), he even argues that his experience as a traveller in Europe and the parallels he saw between Europe and Australia as far as racism and culture were concerned were essential to the writing of his novel: As I was working on Dead Europe I realised the way religious belief and racism interact, and I don’t think that’s uniquely European. I think it manifests itself in particular ways in Europe, but it’s also here in Australia.

In the story, Australia is clearly no longer the place of innocence and the multicultural nation, ideas that are signified in Colin’s faded tattoo of a swastika, a reminder of his fascist youth and a past that led to the desecration of a Jewish grave, for which he refuses to repent despite his love for Isaac. While the swastika also binds Colin’s dark past to the dark past of Isaac’s European ancestors (who exploited and killed a young Jew they had initially agreed to hide from the Nazis in exchange for money), it also refers to Australia’s failure to embrace its cultural diversity and the history of its cultural communities. In her article on the meaning of Europe and the postcolonial in Tsolkias’s Dead Europe, Milena Marinkova questions the nature of postcoloniality in settler countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, drawing an interesting parallel with the Balkans. Referring to a wide range of critics, Marinkova (2013) insists that:

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Part I The compromised duality of the settler-invader subject (simultaneously dominant/coloniser of the indigenous people and subaltern/colonised by the imperial centre), the insufficiently anti-colonial stance of Anglo-Celtic cultural articulations and the ongoing colonisation of indigenous peoples (as well as discrimination against other non-dominant groups) are some of the factors that undermine the universal application of the term ‘postcolonial’ to the settler-invader cultures (Gandhi, 1998; Hodge and Mishra, 1991; Hutcheon, 1989; McClintock, 1992).

Tsiolkas tackles those ideas in The Slap, a novel that starts in the Australian iconic space of the backyard and the gathering of a “multicultural mob” around the Aussie-style barbecue. Published in 2008, the book was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and it also won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Critics hail its unflinching exposure of domestic and suburban life in 21st-century Australia, the confronting stories of loyalty and happiness in the alleged “Lucky Country”. However, Tsiolkas argued that the purpose of The Slap was mainly to delve into the social and political changes that had occurred in Australia, with the rise of the middle class and the country’s economic priorities since the 1990s: I’d been wanting to write a novel about contemporary Australia. I wanted to write a novel that reflected something about the huge changes that had occurred in my society. And look, reality is we have all our mythologies, but the reality is that most of us in Australia live in the suburbs, most of us have this urban existence and it seemed to me that the suburbs themselves were being transformed, under the – with Paul Keating and John Howard, because I think there’s a connection between those leaders, there was this sense of the aspirational class that suddenly dominated all our media, and I wanted to examine what that meant, what did it look like, what did it sound like; who were, who is, and who are the aspirational class. Anyway, that is the origin of this book called The Slap. (Sales 2009)

The novel draws a realistic portrait of Australia viewed “from its own backyard”, provincialising Europe but also the rest of the world, the “somewhere overseas” (184), addressing issues that are “universal” such as education and culture, social class aspirations and fears yet putting under scrutiny the current state of Australian society. The story situates Australia in a global economic environment and no longer in the AsiaPacific region. The multicultural tenet surfaces as one of the main themes to suggest that the stringent policies targeted at “new” migrants and refugees undermine the very essence of multiculturalism. Told from the point of view of eight characters (friends and family, who all witnessed the slap given to an obnoxious child), the novel provides a multifaceted

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picture of Australia’s present reality and, interestingly, delves into middleclass suburbia. The territory of the Melburnian suburb, extending from the west to the east of the city, can be interpreted through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of what is alternately called the virtual, the diagram, the rhizomatic or the map. Indeed, Tsiolkas provides a social and cultural map that: is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. […]. A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 12)

The territory of the suburb emerges as a concept created to fix and place various strata of society (social class aspirations and social clash deprivations) even though such strata are fundamentally open spaces. The cultural, ethnic and social mix of characters traces the contours of the city of Melbourne as the epitome of the Australian way of life, confronting different sets of Australians and engaging with the definition of multiculturalism and the belonging of migrants and refugees. The layered narratives uncover the diversity and inequality of suburban experiences, shaped by gender, social standards, ethnicity and location, subverting the expected and dreamed homogeneity of old characterisations of suburbia, the embodiment of Australia’s egalitarianism and community spirit. Tsolkias (2011) said that writing the novel was “about cutting off the ghosts of Europe”, adding “The Slap was completely about my place, about Australia: that was how I saw it.” The novel explores the reality of 21st-century Australia through the spectrum of cultural diversity: Manolis and Koula, as first-generation Greek migrants; Hector, the son, and his half-Indian wife Aisha; Harry, the Greek-Australian cousin; friends, among whom there are Bilal, an Aboriginal Muslim convert, and Anouk, a Jewish television scriptwriter; Hector’s lover, Connie, the orphaned teenage daughter of a bisexual father who died in London and wished to be buried there; Richie, the Aussie kid struggling with his sexual orientation; Ali, the Lebanese Arab and Jordan, the descendant of a Malay headhunting tribe. Such representations and characters tend to place Australia apart from the rest of the world, whether Europe or Asia, and subvert the marketed image of the Australian suburb as the Anglo-centric, egalitarian and diverse place epitomised, for instance, in

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TV series such as Neighbours, which is set in a fictional suburb of Melbourne, and Home and Away, which takes place in a coastal town in New South Wales. Following its publishing success, The Slap was adapted to the screen as a TV series and met with positive responses in Australia and other countries; it was so popular for its representation of middle-class multiculturalism that the US network NBC broadcast a version set in Brooklyn, tackling the same themes but adapting them to an American audience. The novel’s main themes interrogate the suburban fantasy and imagined community inherited from the 19th century, conveying the idea of an Australian way of life that befitted the then contemporary experience of a larger part of the Australian people. Such a perception relied on the assurance that there was a community united by shared values rather than money, and that it was also a safeguard against the outside threats, commonly identified at the time as Communism and non-Anglo immigration. Such an imagining and ideal representation sustained the image of the suburb as the space of a uniform white middle class. The Slap virtually strikes back at the notion of the ideal suburb inherited from the past and implies that suburbia is in fact the antithesis to an “authentic” Australian culture and classless society. Thus, the novel’s multiple points of view and depictions of place suggest that geographical areas harbour some chaos or, at best, extrinsic harmonies of an ecological order, a temporary balance between social microcosms. In the story, for instance, the geographic division of place relegates the racist Australians to an “‘out there’” placed “somewhere between the yellow lines that marked the inner-city zone-one train and tram tracks on the Melbourne transport maps” (62), shifting the conceptual oppositions between the inner city occupied by an AngloAustralian mainstream and the suburb inhabited by a multicultural mob. Hence, the suburban space clearly emerges as a site of divergences, of multi-layered and fluid experiences, while the concept of community encapsulates a vast range of cultural connotations and differences. Cousin Harry, the Mediterranean macho per excellence and giver of the slap, lives in the east suburb. He dismisses the western suburb as grim and drab (91) and he enjoys his life in the same way as all other Anglo-Australians living in their modern and gentrified suburb: Harry stood on the verandah, naked except for his Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and his black Lycra Speedos, looking over on the flat calm waters of Port Philip Bay. The setting sun painted the horizon in swirls of red and orange and the spires and flat-topped skyscrapers of Melbourne were just visible through the late afternoon smog that sat over the city. Harry’s body glistened from the suntan lotion and sweat; the day was still

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scorching hot and there had been no breeze since the early morning. He could smell the meat that Sandi was sizzling in the kitchen and he rubbed his hand over his stomach, anticipating dinner. Cars were crawling slowly, bumper to bumper, along beach road. Fuck you, losers. (83)

This passage seems to convey a new version of the iconic scene and famous photograph, Sunbaker (1937), by Max Dupain, which represents Australian beach culture. Harry is relaxed, basking in the sun, his body exposed on the verandah, not turned towards the sand, his gaze turned towards the ocean. The stillness of the water standing in sharp contrast with the flaming colours of the sunset over the modern inner city, the smell of meat evoking the Australian “barbie” and outdoor lifestyle. Such a present-day scene is positioned quite explicitly as the embodiment of the Australian way of life and a reflection of the monoculture desired by successive governments, a culture encoded in whiteness, suburban space and middle-class life. Harry is symbolically standing on the verandah, the interval space that embraces the fabric of the social environment – unlike the inside of the home with its closed doors – and this can be interpreted as the metaphorical transition of the cultural other into the Anglo-Australian mainstream. So, the verandah is “an invitation and challenge (if somewhat belated) to explore the cultural significance of place, and the spatial catalyst which puts Australians in touch with their country” (Drew 1992). Harry’s superior attitude and materialistic views (84) are paralleled with the individualism-ethos encoded in the western suburbs and the heart of Melbourne, still viewed as the “Marvellous Melbourne” of Federation days, but Harry, the Greek-Australian, is as violent, sexist and individualistic as Gary, the Anglo-Australian, seen as a social and cultural other from the perspective of Harry, as well as Manolis and Koula. Indeed, Harry and Gary epitomise the Australian ocker and feel the same kind of grudge against those they think embody the elite. Yet, Harry, who is still viewed as a cultural other within the mainstream, enjoys the comfort of the Anglo-Australian suburb and his social status as the “upwardly mobile wog” while Gary loathes his status as a social failure living in a shabby area. The co-existence of divergent social microcosms in the suburban space, the depiction of Melbourne and its suburbs as “countries” within the country, is an idea Tsiolkas introduced in his début novel Loaded (1995), with characters travelling through a space divided into distinct compass points, each of them encapsulating different stories and aspirations. Suburban places are thus unrelated but at the same time always already connected, their connection allowing, to borrow from Judith Wright, the East to become West and the West to become East in such a manner that the “compass spins frighteningly” and that individuals “must find for

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themselves a new axis” (Wright 1962). Tsiolkas’s description of the experience of the suburb lays bare the paradox of the multicultural situation in postcolonial Australia. As a matter of fact, Australia’s multiculturalism is comparable to a system for distributing meaning, defining individuals according to their social position, reducing being to cultural identity and dealing with the notion of origin regarded as a political ploy. The failure of the Australian way of life is very significant in the way some of the characters see and identify one another through cultural origins. Koula, who is part of the first generation of Greek migrants, never calls her daughter-in-law, Aisha, anything other than “the Indian” while Anglo-Australians are “The Australians” or “That Australian”; Rosie, as her name symbolically suggests, craves the comfort of a home set in a what seems to be a “purely white, Anglo-Australian” environment, closer to the colonial and historic centre of the city: Spring Street turned into St Georges Road and the skyline of Melbourne suddenly came into view. This is where she wanted to be, this had been her world for years, where she dreamed of buying a house. But if some shitbox in Thomastown was going for three hundred grand then there was no way they could afford to buy here. The inner north. The cafés. Her favourite shops. The pool. The tram rides into Smith Street and Brunswick Street. The luxury of the Yarra River and the Merri Creek for long walks. It was unfair – it was here that they belonged. (249)

Rosie, the Anglo-Australian from Western Australia, wants to be part of the “not-so multicultural environment” but has mixed feelings when thinking about race and cultural issues; she yearns for the “neat” and “modern” space of cafés that are in fact reproductions if not transpositions of European spaces. She thus craves the sense of Britishness she was brought up with, reflecting that Perth outshines Melbourne for its whiteness, pristine landscape and sense of belonging: It was where the sea and the wind and the land all came together and made sense. The impossible blue of the Pacific was pretty but it did not contain the elemental harshness of her ocean, of her sea; it could never feel like home. (241)

Rosie’s perception suggests the idea that suburban living characterised by multiculturalism in Melbourne contrasts with the popular (and colonial) idea that the essence of Australia lies in the pastoral region. The character’s Anglo-centric vision clearly stems from her family history and is reminiscent of the Menzies era and the political rhetoric of the 1950s – a rhetoric that sustained the settler-colonial project, which established the

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suburb as the imposition of whiteness through the occupation of places on the fringe of the city and perceived to be virtually empty. Such a view, in fact, undermined the sense of national cohesion as much as it highlighted regional or local differences. For Rosie, distant Perth seems to outshine Melbourne in terms of its “proper Englishness” and material comfort (232) despite her awareness that Melbourne, like the bush, is “real Australia” – places that “wash Europe off the individual” (257) despite the fact that she envies the eastern city’s multicultural neighbourhoods for their community spirit. Rosie’s mixed feelings and complex attitude towards cultural otherness and belonging embody the inability of some Anglo-Australians to fully embrace multiculturalism. Moreover, her attitude towards Bilal, the Indigenous Muslim convert, which is shared by other characters, exhibits the prevailing inability “on the part of Anglo-Celtic descendants of colonisers (and other immigrant beneficiaries of European colonisation) to face their colonial heritage and its ongoing consequences”. In his work, Tsiolkas suggests that such an inability “persists in the colonised country itself in the form of insecurity in the senses of belonging of the nonIndigenous majority. This insecurity manifests as ongoing fear of “outsiders” and ambivalence toward multiculturalism, and, particularly in times of heightened insecurity such as the current ‘war on terrorism,’ it erupts in the form of defensive nationalism” (Diprose 2008: 31). Rosie’s respective “unease around Aboriginal people” (244) and attempt to shake off her primary racist views by reassuring herself that her friend Aisha – whom she defines not as Australian but as “Indian” and “black” (245) – recall Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea of anachronistic exclusion (1998) whereby subaltern peoples are inevitably placed outside modern time and are thus perceived as primitives preceding modernity. Bilal, who somehow remains an enigmatic character, has an “unmistakable black accent” (228) and is still viewed as the Black inclined to drinking and trouble when “trespassing” in the pub, a locus of Australian folklore, even when he is, ironically, only there to bring Gary, the “Anglo-Ocker”, back home (284– 285). Moreover, the novel’s main interest in multiculturalism also extends to the role Indigeneity plays in race relations in postcolonial Australia, and the idea that the contemporary theory of race and racism, focusing on skin colour and morphological features as signs of difference or subaltern identity, places the other as a second-class citizen, and consequently affects the political imaginaries of the nation. Indeed, the characters’ past and relations with others both develop through their sense of place and their positioning within the social and cultural canvas. References to the past provide different angles on the state of society as much as the very act

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of “the slap” compels characters to ponder on the act and remember past events to such an extent that remembering becomes a source of inner conflicts and social tensions. Manolis and Koula, who are part of the last standing generation of post-WWII Greek migration to Australia, not only have conflicting ideas about their integration compared to Australian subjects but are also respectively confronted by their own positioning as postcolonial subjects. Koula still views Greece as the home country and the lost paradise while Manolis expresses a nostalgia for a lost paradise as a migrant to Australia in the thriving 60s (317), being conscious that society is part of a global space and Australia’s innocence is long gone, if it ever existed: He had left his damn village a lifetime ago, sailed across the globe to escape it, but the village came to him. He turned off High Street and zigzagged the side streets to Merri Station. A young Mohammedan girl, her hair veiled, was standing outside the vestibule on the platform. […] She too had brought the village with her, wherever the Devil she was from. […] An older girl, also veiled, was locked in an embrace with a thin youth, his hair a shocking orange. She noticed his glance and drew apart from the boy, who looked up and stared, at first fearfully, then angrily at Manolis. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ […] Manolis shook his head and walked away. They spoke to him with the language of evil. It was not their fault. This was not a time of good men. (340–341)

Suburbia is no longer a safeguard against inequalities, ethnic separation and violence. Manolis is keenly aware that North Richmond, former home to post-war Greek immigrants, is now occupied by recent migrants from South-East Asia (341). His perception shows that the cultural and social geography of place consequently initiates an urban and national space of edges – boundaries or transitions where two or more cultures converge and interact – where similarly rich and diverse groups exhibit and share cultural and linguistic features. In the story, different types of characters thus meet and interact in such a way that the definition of belonging to place expands to divergent and shifting forms of belonging. The novel, like other previous works, indicates that the sense of belonging can very easily be disrupted by the unfamiliar, the strange and violent, and that “the political codification of events, strangers, and social groups may quickly pose a threat to the national community” (Diprose 2008: 37). Moreover, it marks a clear break from the European heritage by showing that different generations of Australians navigate the structures of belonging in multiple ways (Gunew 2014). Hector, the son of Greek migrants, fully embraces his diversity and Australianness and is able “to

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fill that word Australian” (255), while Bilal openly expresses his disgust at Rosie and Gary, calling them “bad blood” and singling them out as “mob” (287). Bilal’s rejection of Rosy and Gary is not targeted at their being Anglo-Australians but rather at them being, in his view, socially unfit and unworthy. His use of the term “mob” substantiates the Anglo-Australians as extended others and directs the discarding of “such others” not to the colonised but to the descendant of the coloniser. Social rather than cultural divisions also illustrate Hector’s view of Gary: Gary’s world was not their universe and it was one reason Hector preferred detachment in his interactions with him, had always avoided conflict with him. There was no small-talk, no frivolity to be had in conversation with Gary; even when they were innocent or harmless, his questions and statements seemed underscored by threat. Gary didn’t trust their world, that was very clear. (32)

The depiction of Gary from the perspective of the non-Anglo-Australian character operates as a subversion of the binary social relation “Us and Them” in such a way that Gary and Rosie are then viewed as the strange and socially-deprived individuals within the community. By looking at how society breeds anxiety and dysfunctions, The Slap emphasises the importance of social power relations in defining who, in fact, the subaltern is and who is in a position to subvert the authority of those who tend to see themselves as the centre (Bhabha 1996). When the novel was long-listed for the Booker Prize, Tsiolkas said in an interview that the book was about the hypocrisy and selfishness of his own generation, of “those who have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and have spent their new-found wealth on plasma TVs and crap”. He also insisted on his desire to address the multicultural tenet of a nation estranged from Europe and caught in the economic swirl of globalisation: Every time I come to Europe I feel less European. I feel Europeans are so much more class bound … it feels so much heavier here in Europe, not just in Scotland but in Greece, Italy. That must have an effect on your literature. [...] the early 1990s were the last time I felt proud of Australia. I had travelled in Europe – it was after the wall came down – and all I heard was foul racism about immigrants. But now things have gone backwards. Things have become more selfish. And you can’t separate the politics of what’s happening economically from multiculturalism. (Tsolkias 2010)

Tsiolkas added that The Slap was written “in a very bleak time”, during the ascendancy of Pauline Hanson and One Nation politics, also during the

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premiership of John Howard, and that the pervading anger of the characters was also his own. The novel makes very brief references to Europe, Britain and the rest of the world; for instance, the Asian environment is viewed through the looking glass of the short business and tourist trip to Bali. Australia, like other places, is designed as a fragmented postmodern society where everyone originates from somewhere else, even the Indigenous character, who comes from one of the many “countries” on the map of Indigenous Australia. Yet, the emphasis on culture and diversity suggests that rather than being fragmented and multicultural, Australia is a new cosmopolitan place and positions Tsiolkas, to borrow from Sneja Gunew’s words, as “an exemplary figure of the neo-cosmopolitan globalectic writer”, who “facilitates new relations between national cultures and the global.” If one takes into account the “very elements that have been traditionally associated with their [the writers] constitutive oppression, the belief that they are at home nowhere or in more than one place, … that they can navigate the structures of belonging in multiple ways, not least by challenging the complacent assumptions or self-evident universalisms that undergird many forms of both nationalism and globalisation” (Gunew 2014: 12). The Slap, therefore, probes the ecologies of belonging through the national scope and “de-Europeanises” Australia to respond, as Tsiolkas suggests, to the mounting tensions arising from global population displacements and the resurfacing of nationalist and populist discourse: I wanted to return to the suburbs, those vilified spaces that are not quite the city and not quite the country, in which the majority of Australians live. These suburbs define a nation that was created simultaneously with the birth of the car: the suburbs as portrayed in Neighbours and Home & Away. But I needed to give voice to the reality of the contemporary Australian suburb, one of high-street shops in which one can hear dozens of languages, populated by generations who have never felt an allegiance to a colonial British and Celtic history. My parents live in a suburb three stations away from Ramsey Street; their neighbours are Chinese, Vietnamese, Egyptian, Maltese and Greek. I live in the northern suburbs of the city, where from my backyard I can see the spires of Catholic and Orthodox churches, the minaret of a mosque. Having said farewell to Europe in my last book, I was hungry to write about an Australia I rarely saw represented on the pages of Australian literature or on screen. (Tsiolkas 2014)

In his writing, the novelist manages to show that diversity initiates new cultural forms, that cultural crossovers foster a new discourse of otherness,

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a national consciousness, rather than sustain emptiness and a multicultural ideal, that the latter nurtures Anglo-centric discourse and representations. Tsiolkas’s fiction thus ventures beyond the postmodern scene that endlessly re-enacts the rift between coloniser and colonised, the mainstream and minorities, as well as beyond postcolonial deconstruction to design a space of translation that would establish a possible dialogue between past and present, the universal and the world of differences, so the recasting of centre and margin from the perspective of the diasporic suburb deterritorialises colonial and postcolonial perceptions.

B. The Reterritorialisation of Australia Paul Gilroy notes in his critical work Postcolonial Melancholia that “the imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries” (2), and that the resurgent power of the United States and the discourse on civilisations made multiculturalism an aspect of a culture clash, which has an effect on postcolonial and multicultural societies. Gilroy argues that even if “tales of colonial brutality … cannot capture the complexity of imperialism” (48), they nonetheless need to be exposed to supersede the nationalistic attempt to bring back to life “a sanitised history” of imperialism. Such ideas recur in Tsiolkas’s work but also in Richard Flanagan’s stories and public speeches. Indeed, Flanagan’s statement that he does not relate to the grand idea of the Commonwealth, nor to Britain, clearly speaks against the nationalistic and Anglo-centric discourse that has illustrated Australian politics since the beginning of colonisation – and that operates against cultural diversity and national consciousness: Still, through my youth there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy, English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn’t. We were told that we were an English people and it was often claimed that we referred to Britain as “back home”, though I never knew anyone who said such an absurd thing. We were assembled behind police lines to cheer strangely long, low-slung cars from which flags fluttered, believed what was bewildering must somehow be appropriate, memorised long lists of English kings and queens, and thought that what was irrelevant must somehow be history. (Flanagan 2002)

Flanagan’s definition of “history” from the perspective of Britain as being “irrelevant” to Australians displaces the older, imperial notion of Britain and, in the process, Europe, as the historical centre. The novelist’s

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interest in environmental issues and appreciation of Indigenous belonging is manifest in his writing and stories that turn to the land to trace the contours of history, culture and identity. The depiction of colonisation as an inferno often encompasses a denunciation of the silence that enshrouded Australia and Tasmania immediately after the end of the convict system. Largely located in Tasmania, once called Van Diemen’s Land, Flanagan’s stories emphasise the social origins of the convict settlement and its ramifications on the postcolonial society, incorporating the often-absent others, Indigenous people and non-Anglo migrants. His three novels, Death of A River Guide (1994), Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) and Wanting (2008), delve into convict society and post-convictism, describing a hierarchical space, inherited from Europe, which is unstable, unpredictable and violent. In the last two novels, the fictionalisation of real characters allows the narrators to liberate the past and expose the true history of Tasmania, a history used to interrogate the effect that desire has on mankind and how it often entails reason, expanding on the fallacies of rationalism and utopianism in colonial times. In Gould’s Book of Fish, Flanagan tackles the complex relationship between facts and fiction, as regards history and identity, and extends his interest in Wanting, which also deals with history to examine how individuals attempt to create their own subjectivities while establishing a relationship between themselves and history. The representation of history through narrative and language rests upon a process of deconstruction common to postcolonial writing so that both history and the characters’ desires are shifting and constantly questioned or redefined (Ben-Messahel 2013). Flanagan approaches issues such as the British genocide of Tasmanian Indigenous people, the murderous rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment and, above all, the abominations of the British Empire’s penal system with the underlying consequences on the definition of Australian society and history. In a co-edited collection of essays titled The Rest of the World is Watching, the novelist quotes from Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations when discussing the past and Tasmania’s historical silences: “to articulate the past historically […] means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger […]. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it” (Flanagan 1990). The deliberate reference to Benjamin, who argued against the idea of an “eternal picture” of history and preferred the idea of history as a selfstanding experience (Benjamin Thesis VI), emphasises Flanagan’s rejection of the colonial past as the continuum of progress and his dismissal of colonial history as Australian history. In Gould’s Book of

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Fish, the main character admits that he is painting a distorted version of the environment and that his creations, made to suit the colonial gaze on nature, do not fit comfortably with the “strange and bewildering” new landscape: I care not to paint pretend pictures of long views which blur the particular & insult the living, those landscapes so beloved of the Pobjoys, those landscapes that trash the truth as they reach ever upwards into the sky, as though we only know somewhere or somebody from a distance – that’s the lie of the land while the truth is never far away but up close in the dirt, in the vile details of slime & scale & filth along with the Devil, along with the angels, & all snared within the earth & us, all embodied in a single pulse of a heart – mine, yours, ours – & all my subjects as I take aim & make of the fish flesh incarnate. […] I am William Buelow Gould, party of one, undefinable, & my fish will free me & I shall flee with them. And you? – well mark the great Shelley – Ye were injured, & that means memory. (93)

Gould is compelled to respect the traditions of European art and not pay attention to the local characteristics. In so doing he takes part in the development of a national and “exotic” mythology: “this was not a colony of men at all, but a colony of fish masquerading as men” (250). Sentenced to 49 years of imprisonment, seven years for theft of personal property, a further fourteen years for insubordination and twenty-eight years for mockery of the crown (42), Gould, son of nameless parents, forger and convict, is instructed to paint the Indigenous marine life of Macquarie Harbour by Tobias Lempriere, the prison doctor, who seeks prestige and hopes to become a fellow of the Royal Society by completing a project he sees as man’s dominion over nature. The novel narrates the life and fate of Gould, by means of flashbacks and flash-forwards, but also depicts the consequences of colonial sovereignty on the life of individuals, the convicts, the working class and the Indigenous, while highlighting the ambivalent legacy of the French Enlightenment. The references to the Age of Enlightenment in the midst of British colonial horrors is ironic considering reason as the basis of legitimacy and authority sustained colonial expansion and cultural annihilation. In the opening pages of the novel, the 21st-century narrator insists on the idea that history and subjectivity are neither homogeneous nor still: We—our histories, our souls—are, I have since come to believe in consequence of his [Billy Gould’s] stinking fish, in a process of constant

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Told by Sid Hammet, who, a century later, comes across the Book of Fish and becomes entranced by its reading and the reincarnation of man as a fish, the passage highlights the tenuous line between political space and natural space – a line that blurs the tangible discrepancy between the history of man and the natural environment. The blurring between the colonial interpretation of history and Tasmania’s reality then subtly extends to the distortion of real figures, emphasising the fake nature of storytelling and history. In the novel Gould has formerly been apprenticed to Jean-Babeuf Audubon – a British painter of birds, who is the subverted figure of John James Audubon, the US painter of birds – and decides to paint fish rather than birds like his master. Furthermore, he does not concur with Audubon’s technique of distilling a life “into a single image” since he uses the representation of the fish as a window into the past, providing a natural history of the marine world and its bare life, and establishing parallels with the Indigenous and local life of subaltern others. In fact, Gould’s definition of natural history is a story that relies on matter that exists objectively; it is not a history of nature envisaged by Eurocentric approaches to place and the natural elements. The character’s understanding of the natural elements and man’s place within a complex system of living organisms relies on an eco-centric view by which he can grasp the true reality of the colony and modernity: He began to see everywhere unsettling evidence that the Past is as much a Chaos as the Present, that there is no straight line only infinite circles, like rings proceeding ever outward from a stone sinking in the water and Now. (245)

Throughout the course of events, time operates like the movement of the natural elements, stone and water, and draws concentric circles reminiscent of Indigenous waterholes and travel lines, all having multiple meanings depending on their context. Thus, the history of nature, which incorporates Gould’s bare life and the natural elements, is nature grasped as historical meaning, as the object of knowledge, while natural history incorporates Gould’s colonial life and fate and thus expresses the historical grasped as the natural. William Gould’s observations and paintings of fish in twelve books subvert the linear form of history telling and the recording of historical facts, especially as the book keeps disappearing and appearing over time, being found in the 21st century by Sid Hammet and read and reinterpreted from a postmodern perspective. Sid Hammet is ironically a latter-day Gould – a trader and restorer of dubious antiques –but it is only

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through his renarrativisation of Gould’s life story that the reader is really able to understand how colonial life became possible on Sarah Island. Layered narrative voices operate from the opening chapter, creating chains or strings of utterances in the Bakhtinian sense that discourse is fundamentally dialogic and historically contingent (positioned within and inseparable from the community, history and place). Thus, in the novel, the word or utterance in Bakhtin’s view is the main unit of meaning formed through the narrator’s relation to otherness, other people, others’ stories, the lived cultural world in time and place. Therefore, the “word” is always already embedded in a different history from different perspectives, and in a chain of ongoing cultural and political moments: IN THE BEGINNING was the Word, and the Word was with God, & the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with the Old Dane as was with God, all things were made by him; & without him; & without him was not anything made that was made. But then the Word was made flesh & dwelt among us as part of our darkness, & it comprehended not our darkness; for its flesh was putrid & slimy green bloated rotted rags floating flotsam-like around my cell. As I tried to keep my head above this slime forever into the primeval Word, it became my life’s most sacred desire to expose that Word & the World were no longer what they seemed and they were no longer One (309).

At the end of the story, Gould is symbolically transformed as a “weedy sea-dragon” admitting that “there is something irretrievably fishy” (391– 403) about humanity. Not only is he playing with words and subverting their initial meaning but he is also referring to his own animal body as a rhizomatic species, a form that in the Deleuzian sense allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. Gould’s rhizomatic body encompasses planar and transspecies connections, and is opposed to the colonial arborescent conception of knowledge (Deleuze & Guattari 1987), which works with dualist categories and binary choices. The book’s polyphonic speech and discourse tied to the sea dragon with weeds examine the colonial past of Sarah Island, Tasmania’s largest penal settlement and shipbuilding yard (a place of regress and progress) in twelve fish chapters. Each fish is thematically attached to a character and each character is in turn attached to Gould, sharing some of his characteristics, being masters of fiction making, conmen, cheats, liars and even magicians. Thus, all characters develop gradually through one another’s perceptions and opinions, with Gould’s point of view predominating, while the account of convict and Indigenous ordeals in the colony always extends to personal reflections on

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the state of being and existence, on the existential metaphysics of everyday life. The book’s epigraph, a reference to William Faulkner’s As I lay Dying, establishes a link not as it may seem with the main character of Gould but with Flanagan, the novelist who, in Faulknerian style, plays with the narrative technique by manipulating conventional differences between the stream of consciousness and the interior monologue. Indeed, the confrontation or journey between the imaginary and the real, imagination and fiction, enables the teller and, in the process, the novelist to open imaginary spaces for free speech in the real geography they traverse. Gould’s autobiographic writing strives to show how the colonial and sovereign British power can legally affect individual life and illegally undermine it. As a prisoner, Gould lives the abject, creaturely life of the convict and the humane, spiritual and somewhat uncanny life of the individual who is alternately part of an ecological system and at one with the other elements that compose the real world. In Flanagan’s work, history and literature create a particular Tasmania, a performative narrative about convictism and progress that invariably swerves to a meditation on art, history and nature, asserting the primacy of the antipodean land and living organisms against the colonialist’s artificial discourse and fake creations, which are imposed upon cultural others for the sake of European progress. Flanagan clearly deconstructs the romantic notions of progress and order inherited from Europe and exposes their impending violent and brutal ways towards subaltern subjects and the alteration or destruction of the original environment. Pobjoy, the jailer, says that the shape of Tasmania is “a damn mask” (187), concurring with Gould’s initial remark that “colonial art is the comic knack of rendering the new as the old, the unknown as the known, the antipodean as the European, the contemptible as the respectable” (68), suggesting, like Gould, that civilisations distort the natural environment to create wilderness while science creates lies rather than interrogates the principles of nature. The commandant of the settlement, a former felon who has gained power and is able to impose his demented fantasies on the convict settlement, uses slave labour to transform the island wilderness into a replica of European grandeur. The commandant hence takes part in the colonial enterprise of transplanting England onto Van Diemen’s Land. He instructs his slaves to build a railway to nowhere and the Great Mahjong Hall; he also orders Gould to paint scenic backdrops to provide an illusion of shifting landscapes. Yet, the character’s colonial dream and folly are fulfilled not through the emergence of a purely English environment (the railway is sold to the Japanese and the Great Mahjong Hall becomes a

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playground) but through the mutation of the colony into “a bastard world turned upside down” (197). Thus, the English past and present are artificially recreated rather than genuinely expressed and, as Gould himself suggests, the future will only stem from personal history and the oral form, from free and personal compositions: “I am William Buelow Gould, & my name is a song that will be sung” (79). Gould’s histories deconstruct the dominance of Britain and Europe, the main canonical powers, by ushering in minor and subaltern voices along with their divergent world views; a positioning which is clearly antiimperialistic, non-Eurocentric and post-canonical. His experiences and recording of his life in a journal open a scope reaching far beyond the dull, destitute and violent life in the convict settlement, the journal acting as a counter-space to hegemonic power, a heterotopia, where time and history become heterogeneous, metaphors for the reality and unreality of utopian colonial projects. The development of Gould’s life accounts for the idea that from the beginning Australia was not a void, a terra nullius, where individuals and things can be placed and imposed upon space. In fact, Gould understands in the Foucauldian sense that people do not live inside a void that one could colour in with different shades of light but inside a set of relations that delineates other sites, relations which are irreducible to one another and not superimposed on one another (Foucault 1984). In a review on wilderness and history, Flanagan asserts that Gould experiences history as part of his connection to the natural environment, saying that Australia’s colonial history, particularly the personal history of the convicts and the working class, their cultural involvement in place making and their embodied intertwinements with the natural world, is in danger of being ignored. He even highlights that some convicts and settlers showed an interest in Tasmania’s natural environment and sought accommodation within it (Flanagan 1992). Gould’s Book of Fish illustrates such claims and suggests that places, rather than spaces, ground identifications, that if places are no longer the clear supports of people’s identity, they nonetheless play a potentially important part in the symbolic and physical dimension of their identifications. Flanagan’s writing is highly critical of colonialism and its totalitarian practices; it exposes the brutal forms of control exerted by England during the post-Enlightenment period and suggests that Australia is still positioned in the shadow of colonial oppression. The shadow of the colonial past certainly still looms over the Australian present and discussions of Australia’s postcolonial nature. David Malouf, for instance, often refers to imperial history and attempts to find ways of reconciling the various and co-existing cultural spaces that

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may define national space. He argues that Australians cannot believe the European notions of culture are either essential or universal because they have to live side by side with people who live in a completely different way, meaning indeed Indigenous Australians, and once non-Indigenous Australians admit that is a human way and not a primitive way, the way things may operate is then never the only way (Papastergiadis 1994). Indeed, Malouf’s examination of what he sees as Australia’s “complex fate” (Malouf 2014: 142–159) in its relationship to Europe is prevalent in his stories and essays. His deep attachment to place displays a sustaining of the British cultural heritage and shows a complexity, on his part, in establishing bridges with the non-English cultures composing Australian culture. In his novel Remembering Babylon, Malouf covers the themes of isolation, language, cultural contacts, the settler-community and the marginal other, the idea of living on the edge of society, subverting the pastoral ideal inherited from Britain, and thus suggests that Australia, like the central indigenised character, Gemmy Fairley, is now a hybrid “British object” (3). Set in a small community of Scottish settlers on the south coast of Brisbane, the story associates the fate of the nation to the eruption from the wilderness of Gemmy, the former child of the Empire sent to Australia for the term of his natural life and raised among Indigenous tribes, after he was shipwrecked off the coast of Queensland. Gemmy embodies the connection between the non-human and human, the natural and alien, the untamed and the civilised; his interaction with two contiguous cultural spaces, black and white, shows that individuals and objects do not exist “in themselves” but only in their relation to one another. Such an idea is often raised by Malouf to express the view that Australia is bound by the complex fate of being the space of the old world and the new, caught in an anterior world and the intimidating weight of the past, in a simultaneous movement of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, as the following passage from the novel shows: The country he [Gemmy] had broken out of was all unknown to them. Even in full sunlight it was impenetrably dark. To the north, beginning with the last fenced paddock, lay swamp country, bird-haunted marshes; then, where the great spine of the Dividing Range rose in ridges and shoals of mist, rainforest broken by sluggish streams. The land to the south was also unknown. Settlement up here proceeded in frog-leaps from one little coastal place to the next. Between lay tracts of country that no white man had ever entered. It was disturbing, that: to have unknown country behind you as well as in front. […]

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The sense then of being submerged, of being hidden away in the depths of country, but also lost, was very strong. [..] and all around, before and behind, worse than weather and the deepest night, natives, tribes of wandering myalls who, in their traipsing this way and that all over the map, were forever encroaching on boundaries that could be insisted on by daylight – A good shotgun saw to that – […] six hundred miles away, in the Lands Office in Brisbane, this bit of country had a name set against it on a numbered document and a line drawn that was empowered with all the authority of the Law. (8–9)

The “unknown” and the “depths of the country” thus naturally become the spaces of understanding, knowledge and reality, locations that deconstruct colonial assumptions and conceptual associations with Britain. Moreover, the novel’s depiction of Gemmy as being caught between two worlds, the “civilised” and the “primitive”, extends to the settler’s empirical view of Australia and paradoxical understanding of place. Place is on one hand a symbol of hope and expectations but on the other hand, it is also a metaphor for placelessness, becoming imprisonment and separation from “Home”. In the novel, Jock McIvor, the Scots farmer, epitomises the idealisation of a pastoral, gentle nature stemming from the distant imperial centre; his nostalgia for the lost original community depends upon deeply encoded cultural frameworks: He [Jock McIvor] was often homesick though he did not say so. The land here never slept. If only he could wake one day and find it, just for a day, under a blanket of snow! What he missed were the marks of change. The crying, high up, of curlews flocking to a new season, to some place thousands of miles to the north where it had been winter and was now breathing the freshness of spring, brought an ache to his heart for the sight of rowans just bursting into sticky leaf, and for days afterwards he would be rough-tempered, as if the need of bark for the shiver of radiance was in himself. (76)

The character idealises the absent form of nature and place in pastoral terms, his focus on his other ideal “lost” place and his reading of the land as terra nullius prevent him from seeing what is immediately present and real, while his wife resents the virginal place with its absent ghosts since “her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with breath” (110). Ellen McIvor yearns in fact for some kind of “absentpresent other” located back home in Scotland; she needs to identify with signs and markers as a means to belong and be located in time and space.

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Her sense of belonging and dissolution derive from her personal history and Scottish (European) genealogy. The character’s definition of society engages with the analysis of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983) considering that from her perspective, society only exists through a series of “territorialisations” or inscriptions upon the “body without organs” and that the first inscriptions on the land are relations of kinship and filiation structuring primitive societies. Ellen McIvor’s appreciation of the Australian geography, particularly the bush, is constricted to the nothingness that she perceives as a cultural and social void and as the perfect antithesis to Scotland and Europe. It is worth noting that the McIvors’ perception and attitude are also illustrated in other Australian novels published years later, for instance in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River or Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth. However, when speaking about the idea of the void and the binary between nature and culture, the foreign and the familiar in his novel, Malouf says: This book (Remembering Babylon) is not about a purely Australian experience. It is about an experience of landscape or a relationship to the world that is clearer in a place like Australia, or in these people’s situations, because all the other kinds of explanations and comforts are taken away from them. This absence makes them ask the question: what is man’s place in the world? Whereas, if you live in a little village in England or Ireland or Scotland, where you know the name of every field, where every part of the landscape has events and a story related to it, where you know every steeple on the horizon … Take the same people out and put them somewhere where all of those things are gone, and then, yes, they are in a kind of void. This opens up the question of what it is we need as humans to place ourselves in the world and how difficult it is to achieve that. (Papstergiadis 1994)

Remembering Babylon openly questions the romantic assumptions of Nature and otherness as figures of symbolic value and universal significance through the characters’ varying perspectives on the environment and the way they situate themselves within a nature that is first alien but gradually becomes familiar. The settler’s perception and appropriation of place subtly establish new relations of alliance and filiation with the earth, re-coding European social structures and mechanisms and deterritorialising the sacred earth of Indigenous people. Thus, in this novel, Malouf suggests that geography is in a constant state of reconceptualisation, that place surfaces as the transformative site of

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confrontation between nature and culture, and that it is through such transformation that Australia can address the future: Our poor friend Gemmy is a forerunner. He is no longer a white man, or a European, whatever his birth, but a true child of the place that will one day be, a crude one certainly, unaware of what he has achieved – and that too perhaps is part of His intention: that the exemplum should be of the simplest and most obvious sort, deeply moving to those who are willing to look, and to see, without prejudice, that in allowing himself to be at home here, he has crossed the boundaries of his given nature. (132)

In this passage, Mr Frazer, the minister and botanist, records a new entry in his field notebook. He refers to the way Gemmy’s oneness with the native land transforms the very nature of the cultural power that dominates Australia and creates a postcolonial identity. Landscapes and states of mind are indeed brought together in a probing vision of discovery and racial tensions so that history is depicted as a natural development of reason and progress, and geography as an affect or process of transition that the body undergoes. In fact, Malouf posits geography as an affect, a “transpersonal capacity which a body has to be affected (through an affection) and to affect (as the result of modifications)” (Anderson 2006: 733–752). This approach is expressed in his essay on the place of the individual on the map: But geography is as much convention as fact. It is a way of seeing. Maps can be approached from any angle, they can be reversed. We have only to turn our minds upside down, stop thinking in terms of our inherited culture, to which we will always be peripheral, to find ourselves standing at the centre rather than the edge of things. Which brings me back, once again, to that classroom of forty years ago; to the idea of Australia which exists in our heads as a map. (Malouf 2014: 106)

Malouf’s idea, in his essay titled “Putting Ourselves on the Map”, has a resonance in Nikki Gemmell’s novel Shiver (1997), set in Antarctica with incursions into Tasmania, the starting and finishing lines of the main character’s journey. Gemmell’s first novel is part of a trilogy about strong female characters undergoing a physical and psychological voyage into the heart of a country – in Antarctica (Shiver), Australia (Cleave 1998) and England (Lovesong 2001). Gemmell’s writing trajectory establishes a line from the most southern tip of the Australian continent to the Australian centre (the Dead Heart) and to the former colonial centre, dealing with geography as spatial history. In so doing Gemmell’s stories start to explore issues of

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identity and culture in a somewhat no-man’s land, the white and blank space of Antarctica, before moving back to the Australian desert, the country’s historical heart of darkness, and to the point of origin, England, signifier of the main character’s banishment from her Australian community. Shiver intertwines two narratives: the polar journey as the journey into the self and the journey into the interior of the continent as the quest for Australian identity. The beginning of the novel starts with a prologue printed in italics, corresponding to the main character’s voice, surfacing in a present which in fact is a future, located in the Australian desert and at a time that corresponds clearly to the time frame of Gemmell’s second novel Cleave, published a year after Shiver. The voice from the future expresses the main character’s interest in place, “I’m here because Antarctica has given me a taste for deserts” (1) and associates the Red Desert of Australia to the icy blue desert of Antarctica (2). Shiver locates the beginning of the journey in Tasmania, at the Australian Antarctic Division of Kingston, a complex situated on the edge of the city and which operates as both a scientific and political centre. Fin’s expedition to the South Pole aims in part at “demystifying the nation’s presence on the ice,” (11) referring to Australia’s territorial claim and, in fact, colonial hold on the land, but also to the idea that Antarctica may be Australia’s historical white page on which to write. Thus, Fin’s mental representation of Antarctica is reminiscent of the discourse of the eighteenth-century explorer journeys to the North and South Poles: The land of mythical tragedies. The place of ship’s hulls being crushed by ice, of long treks into darkness and death, of soles falling from feet and being strapped back on, of feet freezing and splitting, fingers dying, toenails coming away, mates disappearing through holes in the ice, mates walking away in blizzards, saying I’m just going outside and never coming back, of men lying down to die and placing their hand across the chest of their already dead, dear mate. (27)

In this passage, the character’s reference to “mythical tragedies” is all the more ironic considering that Antarctica, unlike every other continent on earth, has never had an Indigenous people and therefore has never had the types of myths and legends people develop to explain their relationship to the land. Fin’s Australian vision of the white wasteland is then Eurocentric, never interrogating the meaning of Australia’s presence in Antarctica or asking to what degree Australia has achieved some centredness and re-enacted European strategies, claiming and “colonising” part of the southern land. The character’s first encounter with Antarctica occurs through the visual representation of the place on the world map,

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being turned upside down and located like Australia “arse end up on the display globe” (32), a centre on the periphery of the rest of the world. Thus, the southern continent is, like Australia, a complex and heterogeneous place that can only be approached from various perspectives. In fact, the character’s experience in the other peripheral great southern land deconstructs the definitions of periphery and centre. Australia and Antarctica, both conceptualised by Europeans as the “great southern land” and harsh and desert continents, tend to surface as two centres of reality, one reflecting the other, while Australia’s own otherness is more acute and perceptible when seen from the window of Antarctica. The focus on the wild beauty of the white continent subtly increases the idiosyncratic nature of the characters and the trivialities of life at the station. Gemmell depicts a community reminiscent of the isolated and somehow feral places often depicted in the fiction of Tim Winton, creating an Antarctic reality effect, which is signified by the use of local slang, acronyms, sexual encounters and rituals. Rather than expanding on the environmental issues and the consequences of scientific exploitation of the continent, Gemmell focuses on Australian culture and the male culture of Antarctic communities. The place she depicts interestingly ties in with the definition of Antarctica by environmental historian Stephen Pyne (2013): Here is Dante’s imagined innermost circle of hell as an inferno of ice. Here is the Earth’s underworld. […] There is no centre and no edge. There is no near or far; no east or west; no real here or there. […] The ice sheets are acultural, too. There is no basis beyond the Barrier for norms of social behaviour or sources of knowledge, other than those we import.

Thus, Fin, the female journalist who travels on the icebreaker Aurora Australis to Davis, realises that cultural practices are isolated and amplified in the Antarctic station, that the sole representatives of the Australian presence on the continent, the station inhabitants, are removed from their familiar surroundings, threatened by a hostile environment and carrying the weight of political and scientific expectations. The malecentred culture she perceives as soon as she is on board Aurora Australis is ironically reminiscent of the bush ethos of the Australian legend, which defined the nation as a gendered (and racialised) community. For instance, Fin’s experience shows that masculine outdoor traditions are maintained; beer drinking and barbecues take place in extreme temperatures. She is taunted for her feminine attributes and thus forced to adopt the masculine codes and rituals of station life. She is compelled to stick to the gender order imposed by her male counterparts – an attitude stemming from the

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imperial imagery of frontier manhood and which is manifested in the Australian figures of the bushman, pioneer and working-class hero. Shiver (like Cleave) uses the theme of displacement and the journey to an isolated and alien location as a means to return to the heart of the country that is Australia. The novel lays emphasis on geography as a “processual logic of transitions that take place during spatially and temporally distributed encounters in which each transition is accompanied by a variation in the capacity” (Anderson 2006: 733–752), and in so doing constructs an ecological map of the self, “a map which is always variable and constantly altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectives” (Deleuze 1988: 127–128). Antarctica occupies a focal position in the character’s consciousness, developing as the Antarctic dreaming, so that the outward journey operates as the metaphor for the inner journey – a journey of growth, development and self-discovery: “I’ve been told that everyone comes back from Antarctica comes back a different person” (97). The main character’s business trip to the extremity of the southern hemisphere initiates a search for self-identity in an environment that is hostile not only physically but also culturally. Fin’s changing subjectivity follows Catharine Hartley’s theory of the changes wrought by the isolated polar environment: The first obvious psychological effect is that life in the outside world becomes totally insignificant, and with little to distract the mind other than cold and extreme discomfort, the mind becomes one’s entire focus. This can lead to mental purification, or uncover deep wells of pain. All return from Antarctica changed – sometimes for the better but often for the worse, unable to take up their lives in normal society. (Hartley 2002)

Returning to Australia, Fin is indeed transformed by her journey. Not only does she undergo the loss of her Antarctic lover but she also rejects urban life, travelling into another desert landscape in central Australia, a desert she calls home (272), and which is another centre like Antarctica. A place where, as Stephen Pyne (2013) suggests: nothing holds because there is nothing to do the holding and nothing to hold. There is no Barrier: there is almost nothing at all. At the Source it becomes clear just what the Ice does. It simplifies. It takes, it reduces, it reflects. … Yet the self can only exist — can only be felt and known — in contrast to an Other. At the source there is no Other. There are no other creatures, no other environments, no other emblems of a world beyond. There is no basis for meaning. There is only ice.

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The signifier of Fin’s final journey and dream is symbolically an Australia mediated by a somewhere else, surfacing between the shadow of Antarctica and the uncanny manifestations of the Australian outback: I’m here because Antarctica has given me a taste for deserts. The meanest motherfucking desert of them all has given me an addiction for wide lands and tall skies and air that hums. It’s a furious need; it’s under my skin and it isn’t going to let me go. I lie in my swag in this other desert, sharply awake. The wind has blown all night, blowing away sleep. I’m writing about Antarctica, by torchlight, on my belly. Just like I used to lie on my belly on the ice. […] I think of the strict Antarctic palette of white and blue and grey and black. Bellies of pink arc above us as Major Mitchells swoops by in a sudden evacuation. The smell of eucalyptus is flint sharp in the air. I look across at Rick. He’s kicking sand over the grey remains of the fire. I think of snow being kicked over the carcass of a day-old seal. Antarctica is seared like acid on my mind. …I can never go back. (1-3)

In the novel, the Australian desert becomes a substitute for the lost paradise in Antarctica, and Fin’s story naturally becomes the crux of Gemmell’s second novel, Cleave. Mainly set in the Central Australian desert, around Alice Springs, the novel follows the spiritual journey of Snip Freeman, the Anglo-Australian female marginal and hybrid figure, looking back at the history of colonisation and at postcolonial Australia to expose the country’s dysfunction. In this second novel, Gemmell insists on her character’s inability to adjust in the western world, indicating that Snip Freeman was brought up in the matriarchal house “that never celebrated the land it was on. […] A family home firmly shut to the world” (82), and that she is unable to breathe in an urban space. Gemmell suggests again that Australian cities are synonymous with imprisonment while deserts and their harsh environments convey a centre of reality and meaning, a space for radicant subjects “with pathways among signs” (Bourriaud: 53), but pathways that can be taken and infinitely reconceived and retraced. In Cleave, Gemmell interweaves polarised cultures, constructing the Indigeneity of Snip and conveying what David Malouf advocates in his A Spirit of Play, The Making of Australian Consciousness: “a convergence of Indigenous and non-Indigenous understanding, a collective spiritual consciousness that will be the true form of reconciliation…” (1998: 39– 40). Yet, she also suggests that the nation-state is no longer a collective and exclusive space of identification with Europe but rather that it has become a deconstructed and dematerialised space where the figure of the nomad and the marginal compose a nation advancing in all directions and across surfaces. Gemmell joins a long line of Australian authors who

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depict the nation as the space of exotes, meaning, as Victor Segalen put it, “that there is no other; rather, there are other places, elsewheres, none of which is original, still less a standard for comparison” (Bourriaud: 67). These authors not only write against colonial history but also proceed with postcolonial history and Australia’s place in a global environment to advocate diversity and warn against the dangers of uniformity. Thus, the attempt to reterritorialise the cultural space of the homely nation implies that unity can only be achieved through difference and otherness. The politics of home and belonging through displacement and the incorporation of cultural others within the multicultural ideal in postcolonial Australia have clearly surfaced as recurrent and critical issues in the fiction published from the late 1990s onward, subverting existing discourses and manifestations of otherness.

PART II DIASPORIC SPACE, THE DEVOLUTION OF LITERATURE

The purpose of this part is to explore the politics of home and belonging in displacement, the ambivalence of the postcolonial situation, the polyvalent nature of cultural identities and histories within it, and the co-existence of a multiplicity of cultural cartographies associated with it. Such an inquiry not only draws upon concepts by postcolonial theorists Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, particularly “othering”, “hybridity” and “mimicry”, but also confronts the paradox of cultural identity in a geographic space that has become more global and yet surfaces as a centre within the Asia-Pacific region. The work of authors labelled “cosmopolitan”, “multicultural” or “migrant” shows that the ways these Australian authors have fictionalised encounters with Europe, Asia and the Middle-East, either within Australia or in foreign settings, bring to the fore the politics of identity and the reconfiguration of cultural space. This part examines some literary texts that may illustrate popular and subversive cultural formations within the nation-state in order to retell the migrant/diasporic experience. Thus, questions as to whether “migrant writing” does not simply translate as writing about migrancy and displacement, wondering whether “migrant writing” is a category on the margin of a canonical Anglo-Celtic Australian literature or a characteristic of national fiction that reflects an engagement with other cultures, are explored through the processes of hybridity, rewritings and social commitment. In a discussion on the reception of Australian literary works and the definition of Australian culture, Sneja Gunew evokes those other “countries” that also reside within Australia, either Indigenous countries or, she says, “those wispy filaments attached to those who once came from a place other than England or Ireland” (Gunew 2005: 73). Gunew insists that those “other countries” and diasporas all deal with the issues of nation and ethnicity, subverting the image of “Australia” as a multicultural orb: In addition, what might ‘Australia’ look like when these other motherlands are acknowledged as spaces of origin? Australia is the mother who is not

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Gunew’s statement thus posits the questions of home, belonging and identity as part of the ambivalent attitude Anglo-Celtic Australia seems to have about space and geography, an attitude fraught with anxiety and a sense of isolation from the European motherlands. Her observations echo Nicolas Bourriaud’s claim that “postcolonial deconstruction may have facilitated the substitution of one language for another, the new one contenting itself with subtitling the old one, without ever getting started on the process of translation that would establish a possible dialogue between past and present, the universal and the world of differences” (Bourriaud: 14–15). Furthermore, as the works of contemporary Australian authors show, the idea that Australia may encapsulate motherlands other than Britain challenges the hegemony of the nation-state and the definition of who is a migrant and who may be part of a diasporic space. Derived from the Greek work, diasperien, the term “diaspora” was originally circumscribed to the Hellenic Jews living in the countries west of the Levant, until it became gradually common to refer to individual groups compelled to migrate and leave their home country for economic opportunities. According to James Clifford (1994:307), the main features of diaspora include “a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host (bad host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship”. Clifford clearly contends that tribal cultures cannot be labelled “diasporas” since their sense of rootedness in the land is precisely what diasporic people have lost, and he suggests that indigenous diasporas are a form of internal migration. He thus rightly highlights the possibility that diasporas may be complicit with the settler and colonial drive to seek and occupy new territories. Clifford’s statements find a resonance in David Malouf’s writings, stories and essays. In Remembering Babylon, for instance, Malouf utilises the Indigenous story and the theme of nativeness, stressing continuity of habitation, aboriginality and advocating a natural connection to the land to “justify” a sense of belonging. Gemmy, the Indigenized British subject, and the McIvor children tend to see the land as space rather than soil, as an almost infinite openness, a transcendent or mystical area that becomes the

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place of rootedness and the community on the margins of the imperial centre and other localities, regions or nations. The same process of enrooting in colonised space is central to Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River, a story that depicts, through the history of Australia’s settlement, the settler’s identification with the environment and the appropriation of a territory that the settler delineates by naming it through genealogy, for instance “Thornhill Point”. William Thornhill, the exconvict from England, is concerned with becoming an other; that is, an Australian citizen free from the past and different from the English. His sense of otherness is expressed in the parallels he makes with the Indigenous people. He shares their subordination to colonial authorities, though in a less violent manner, and sees the plot of alien land as enrooting, belonging and becoming other. The novel historically dramatises the settler and colonial dream but geographically denounces the historical nightmare for the Indigenous people as well as for the convicts who were sent to the colony for the term of their natural life. The story focuses on the evolution of the Thornhills in a place that becomes “home” and establishes parallels with the development of the colony and Australia’s impending marginal and hybrid nature – a hybridity stemming from cultural interaction: At other times Dick went down to the river. Thornhill had seen him there more than once, around on the other side of the point. The blacks’ side was what they called it. He had seen Dick there on a spit of sand, playing with the native children, all bony legs and skinny arms shiny like insects, running in and out of the water. Dick was stripped off as they were, to nothing but skin. His was white and theirs was black, but shining in the sun and glittering with river-water it was hard to tell the difference. He ran and called and laughed with them, and he could have been their pale cousin. (211)

Alongside Grenville, other stories such as Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance tackle assimilation into otherness as a signifier for national identity and separation from the mother country. In a chapter subtly titled “The Heart of Home”, in reference to the Victorian ethos of “Home and Domesticity, the Constitution and Christianity”, Scott shows that both the colonial and the colonised subjects become assimilated and hybridised. Bobby’s semi-assimilation to white society is consistent with the Indigeneity of Christopher Chains, the new Australian subject, who no longer relates to the mother country: With the possum cooking in hot ashes and earth, and his sister and Bobby down at the river, Christopher read by the fire. Oh yes, books came,

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Other authors show how issues of ethnic, cultural and racial difference subvert the political idea of the united community, the nation’s history and character. In their writings, the configuring of otherness and belonging through intercultural relations charts a dividing line between the metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery but nonetheless sustains the objectification of the Indigenous other and the ambivalence of colonial discourse. Indeed, the Federation movement and the implementing of the White Australia Policy secured a sense of whiteness against “foreign contamination”, blurring the lines between race and nation. Italians, Jews, Greeks and other cultural groups, migrants from Asia, for instance, were not white enough to be incorporated into the Anglo-Celtic destiny in the southern hemisphere, and the Indigenous groups were ignored. Hence, the question of identity, belonging and citizenship again erupted in the public sphere during the first decade of the 21st century as parliamentary debates surrounding asylum seeker policy, arguments regarding who belongs to the nation, or who has the right to apply to belong, were consistently debated in the media and political circles, challenging the multicultural tenet and definition of nationhood. As “new migrants” and refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle-East or Africa began to try and reach the shores of Australia, minority discourse revealed, as Homi Bhabha states, “the insurmountable ambivalence that structures the equivocal movement of historical time”, and questioned the way in which one “encounters the past as an anteriority that continually introduces an otherness or alterity into the present” (Bhabha 1994: 155– 157). In her novel Hiam (1998), Eva Sallis, for instance, depicts the cultural confrontation with time and place of a Middle-Eastern female migrant, who travels to the interior of the country. The entering of landscape and the connection with the Indigenous other take place through the figure of the migrant “oriental other”, namely Hiam, whose meanderings through the Dead Heart work as a metaphor for her dead past life. The ancient places and the Indigenous markers on the land increase the idea that Australia’s colonial history is not Australian history per se and that the present is an Anglo-Celtic construct. Thus, in the novel, the geographic expanse of country with its initial impression of sameness conveys a pluralistic insight into the land and culture.

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In The City of Sealions, published four years later, Sallis again tackles displacement and clashing cultural and ethnic identities through a young woman’s flight from her island home to Yemen. Lian travels there to study Arabic and absorb a new language and culture to escape the ghosts of her mother’s past. She clings to her settler heritage “being an islander and an Australian” rather than to her Vietnamese heritage (her mother is a former refugee to Australia), and her decision to immerse herself in Arabic culture and language, sparked by the desire to escape from home, results in her understanding of who she is and what she has become. Sallis is part of a group of writers who engage with political realities and tackle the problems of being different to the mainstream. Her diasporic novels are genealogical novels in that the lives of the main characters unfold alongside the lives and memories of their parents so that identity, belonging and social relations are based on ancestral connection and kinship. Nam Le’s short-story collection, The Boat, incorporates Sallis’s approach of depicting diasporic identity as displaced identity in a home placed away from home, focusing on personal histories of disturbances and trauma to trace the boundaries within the nation. Le’s approach and stories mark the emergence of a new and distinct stage in transnational writing in Australia that surfaces out of diasporic and migrant experience, and initiates a re-reading of Australian literature from outside the dominant culture, from a position that does not lie in the shadow of Britain or Europe and that also attempts to avoid the “ethnic” labelling commonly laid on non-Anglo-Australian authors. The experience of mobility and absence from home then often reinforces the sense of belonging and affiliation with culture so that terms like “postcolonialism” and “multiculturalism”, which can be totalising, tend to elide difference. Issues of migration and ethnicity exceed the binary distinction between the migrant and Australian society to highlight the presence of shifting centres and margins within the multicultural fabric, conveying heterogeneity within ethnic communities and in diasporic relationships. Indeed, there are many diasporas in Australia and the concept of “home” for Anglo-Australians is as compelling as it is for non-AngloAustralian migrants. Furthermore, the term diaspora that can signify transnationality, and movement can then be approached in two ways. It can either refer to the “diasporas of exclusivism”, diasporas of the British colonial period (the indentured or non-indentured labour migration for instance of the Chinese and Indian communities), or to the “diasporas of the border”, of the voluntary migrants of post-WWII settling in a new continent (Mishra 1994: 310). For instance, novelist Christos Tsolkias’s

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interest in the Greek diaspora and the cultural changes and discourse occurring in 21st-century Australia underscores the ambivalence of the postcolonial nature of Australia, the polyvalent nature of cultural identities and histories within it, and the co-existence of cultural cartographies associated with it. Tsiolkas’s position, shared by Eva Sallis, ties in with Stuart Hall’s claim (see Drew 2008) that multiculturalism is often equated with an essentialised notion of ethnicity in which “everybody secure within his or her own ethnic group is competing with other ethnic groups on a hierarchy for resources” while each individual is “slotted into pluralistic space.” Like Hall, Tsiolkas advocates an “adjectival multiculturalism” that expresses a “sliding and translation” between differences, a “mongrelisation” of cultural identities without an idealised and homogenous, past (Drew 2008: 205). His stories tend to question the idea of “Home” for Australians through domestic and family ideology, delving into the political ideal of the tightly knit community, nationalism and identity. Tsiolkas uses place as the forging of consciousness and personal experience, tackling the effect of national history in a way that equates with Malouf’s view that “all meditations on history in Australia begin as geography lessons. Geography is fate” (Malouf 2014: 100). Such is fate that since the beginning of colonisation and with the implementing of the White Australia Policy, Australia’s geographic position within the Asia-Pacific region has been configured as a far-flung outpost of Britain and then Europe, on the border of the Asian continent, clinging to its colonial history and settler culture. In his critical book Homing In, Bruce Bennett examines the themes of alienation and belonging in a changing Australia, and quotes Brian Castro’s plea against the Eurocentric and neoconservative discourse in media and political circles: … Australia … has written off Asia for almost 200 years; written off the countries of Asia, with various cultural traditions of thousands of years. Perhaps it is time to write ‘Asia’, to write within it and of it, rather than just about it. The word Asia is found after all, in the word Australia. If Australia wants to refigure itself in its relationship to the countries of Asia, to become part of Asia, as it were, then Asia must also be part of Australia. (Bennett 2006: 207)

Castro’s observations involve, as Bennett suggests, a reconfiguration of space and a deterritorialisation of Australia’s central position in the AsiaPacific region. While Asia is still viewed as the unknown, mysterious other against which Australian culture has defined itself since Federation, writings about Asia operate as counter-discourses to the ideologies of the

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global and the national space. Diasporic forms of nostalgia, longing and memory surface in the work of Arlene Chai, Eva Sallis, Beth Yahp, Nam Le and Nicolas Jose in their characters’ identification and un-relatedness with Australia and Asia. In their stories, the Asian-Australian encounters mark a shift away from the Anglo-centric conceptions of Australia to a more complex vision of the country that includes rather than excludes Asia. Nicholas Jose’s depiction of Asia, for example, establishes links between Australia and Asia, and many of his themes interpolate narratives that evolve in disparate settings or establish an unstable parallelism through the course of the characters’ fate, designing a hybrid narrative made of unsuspected intersections between different cultural spaces. On the other hand, Gail Jones’s novel, Dreams of Speaking, explores modernity, memory, loneliness and crosscultural friendships in a global perspective. Commenting on the relationship between Asia and Australia, Jones argues that Australia is part of Asia as much as Asia lies within Australia: “My own cultural identification is with the Asian region. I believe Australia needs to look to Asia, not to the imperial centre, for its inspirations, dialogue and creative collaborations” (Jones 2008). Both Gail Jones and Nicholas Jose tackle intercultural and transcultural relations from the perspective of a multicultural nation in the Asia-Pacific and design an in-between space that becomes a site of difference. In their novels issues of identity and otherness surface through a hybrid construct that transgresses the scope of time and space and then subverts the boundaries of genre and discourse. The two novelists negotiate (between multicultural) identity and displacement and in so doing refute Eurocentric views about the world. Both tend to design the text as an artefact that operates as the real in a dislocated global environment. Furthermore, diasporic forms of longing, memory and (dis) identification are also shared by a broad spectrum of non-Anglo-Celtic authors. The themes of individual dispersion, geographic separation from homelands and political, cultural and social exclusion are increasingly explored from the host-country in border relations with the old country, through a displacement made possible by modern technologies of transport, communication and labour migration. Wenche Ommundsen (2004:5) highlights the complexity of Australia’s multiculturalism, and her emphasis on multicultural writing and diasporas exposes the challenge of cultural citizenships in a global environment: In the context of an increasingly globalised world, multicultural literary traditions play important roles as mediators between local (or national) and global cultural forces. Multicultural Australian writing represents the

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Ommundsen’s arguments suggest that “multicultural” fiction as postmigratory writing deterritorialises the literary canon so that ideas of “home” and “belonging” include a more complex conceptualisation, one which foregrounds ambivalence, fragmentation and plurality as new ways of thinking about space and identity. Thus, the representation of “home” corresponds with Ahmed Gamal’s point that “home” is redefined as a social reality structured by discourses and extends to “abroad” – a space situated in the liminal and borderline existence of the cultural other (Gamal 2013). Gamal’s point is interesting in the reading of Australian fiction as it clearly suggests that post-migratory literature can be described as a type of postcolonial literature that fundamentally problematises the condition of migrancy by deconstructing the binarism of home and the world and thus by linking the global to the postcolonial. The “post” would therefore represent an oppositional rhetoric of emerging voices that profoundly challenge the hierarchy of binaristic essentialism. As a matter of fact, recent fiction from Beth Yahp or Nam Le can be approached through the post-migratory literature defined by Gamal and other critics (Boehmer, Mardorossian) for their reconstruction of new contact and cosmopolitan zones within historical settings and transnational contexts. Nam Le, Beth Yahp and Arlene Chai, for instance, refer to cultural inheritance and traditions as much as to their postcolonial belonging in Australia. Their stories tackle the global and the postcolonial and deal with the themes of migrancy and displacement in both form and content. Their examination of place and culture depicts the domestic as well as the wider public life, shifting from Australia to Asian places but also to other international environments, exploring subterranean motives and feelings so that the complexity of cultural inheritance and extension from the home country is even more acute. Their central themes of upheaval and dislocation generally result from political turmoil in the mother country and hark back to the imperial past. All three novelists deal with the issue of migrancy in a way suggested by Glenda Sluga (1987:40–49), that “culture creates its

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own dreaming – myths which evolve and revolve around memories of social origins. Immigration, the status of being an immigrant, has always fascinated, partially because of the experience of uprooting, of exile from a habitual orientation of culture and social meaning that might constitute that dreaming”. Le, Yahp and Chai design a new mythography for the displaced character, which experiences a different life and culture and desires to transcend the structures of the nation, the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity. Their stories explore identity formation in colonial and postcolonial contexts within the margins of national spaces so that Australia looms, either in the centre or at a distance, as the ambivalent, liminal and interstitial multicultural space formation. The political ambivalence of Australia and the utopic/dystopic tensions visible in society and the geography of the country, the diaspora visions, tend to be entangled in global histories. Through the work of authors such as Richard Flanagan, Andrew McGahan, Christos Tsiolkas, Eva Sallis and Nam Le, recent Australian fiction scrutinises history and personal experiences within national boundaries. Each of these authors interrogates the extent to which one is no longer an other and examines the incorporation of the cultural other in the political space and national discourse – in a world where race is still often read as a marker of crucial difference, a legitimate basis for seeking or maintaining separateness. A world, which to borrow from Frantz Fanon, is divided into compartments, a Manichean world filled with certainties and yet colonial on the surface – a world where the Indigenous and the migrant other are hemmed in and cannot go beyond the limits imposed on them by the country’s inherited settler culture.

1. Post-hybridity Since Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim in 1975 that 19th-century novels use “hybrid constructs” to support “two styles, two languages and two narratives”, the term “hybridity” has successively been applied to modern, postmodern and postcolonial writings, attesting to the dismantling of the empires and the past in a global and diverse environment. Literature from former settler colonies like Australia examines otherness, cultural encounters, identities and hybridity as a way of petitioning the past and addressing discourses on multiculturalism. The difficulty for Australia in placing history on the “chronological map” and the need to bridge different cultures and stories – Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories through the reconciliation process – have, since the 1990s, been marked by

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the need for the Anglo-Celtic nation to be positioned within the AsiaPacific region. Not only has Australia been looking forward to an Asian (economic) future, but in so doing it has also been looking back to the past migration histories and to the settler-dream and identity. Indeed, the celebration of “hybrid identities” in the field of cultural and postcolonial studies tends to reinforce homogeneity and nationalistic views and suggests that the apprehension of non-Anglo-Celtic or European others further develops a discourse that enhances the gap between those who belong to the mainstream, i.e. the Anglo-Celtic majority, and those who are “multicultural” or even “Indigenous”. Moreover, the emphasis on hybridity and the fact that it is essential in the crossing of boundaries and in the acceptance of liminality do not incorporate Indigenous culture and experience and to a certain extent mitigate the colonial past. Consequently, the term “hybrid”, which was used in the 19th century to refer to mixedrace children and carried the racist connotation of “other human beings”, is still debatable as it raises the question as to whether the idealising of hybridity may be a new form of racist othering. The “hybrid” nature of Australia has been significantly asserted in the naming of the geographic space and the definition given to the country as the liminal place extending from Britain and the European continent, since the beginning of colonisation. The successive following names, “Great South Land”, “Terra Australis Incognita”, “Australasia”, “New Holland”, “the Antipodes”, even the colloquial use “Down Under”, not only raise the question of the origin of the name, its variants and time of use, but also interrogate the space they define, whether they relate to a region, a group of islands or a continent. However, the country’s latitudinal status in the deep southern hemisphere also displays an ideological and political positioning. The definition of Australia reflects, in fact, the way it sees its neighbouring countries and Asia, a region that is, from an Australian perspective, geographically “near in the north” but “away culture-wise” considering that Australia defines itself as a “European” country in status, although it is still viewed from the outside as different. Christos Tsiolkas’s essay on the situation of asylum seekers, titled “Strangers at the Gate”, openly speculates on the state of the nation and cultural identity: The reality is that there isn’t “one nation” that makes up Australia, only competing notions of “nationhood”. There is the cosmopolitan, educated nation of the inner cities and the parochial, anxious communities of the urban fringes and the bush. Asylum seeker rights are easily understood and supported by cosmopolitan Australians. […] We are well-travelled, we are not suspicious of multiculturalism and we are confident of processing and

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adjusting to change. To those still living there, even I am a foreigner, let alone someone of another ethnicity or religion. (Tsolkias, 2013)

Tsolkias, who insists on the “cosmopolitan” nature of multicultural Australia, highlights the dangerous rhetoric of purity and essentialism that surface in political discourse and seem to affect social cohesion. He does not define Australia as a hybrid space, as “the construction of cultural authority within conditions of political antagonism or inequity” (Bhabha 1993: 58) but rather as a cosmopolitan and culturally inclusive place, a place that re-conceptualises the current multicultural discourse in a new dynamic that connects nation-states to globalisation via diasporic ties. Brian Castro, on the other hand, views hybridity as a medium that “confuses the ‘interior frontiers’, those national identities set in the midst of heterogeneity, and charts a passage which disrupts the either/or”; he suggests that hybridity is liberating but at the same time oppressive: I write precisely because I want to write myself out of my artificially imposed corner . . . I am not only Portuguese, English, Chinese and French, but I am writing myself out of crippling essentialist categorizations, out of the control exerted over multiplicities. (Hallemeier 2011)

Castro clearly speaks against the Eurocentric and conservative views of a group of historians, Geoffrey Blainey among them, labelling them “white blindfold views”, and urges Australians to reconfigure their sense of space and identity within the Asia-Pacific region, touching upon the Deleuzian concept of deterritorialisation. Castro views Asia as a new form of othering that may exclude or entrap; as a site for the “collective intermix and juxtaposition of styles and rituals which could change the focus and dynamics of Australian art, music and language” (Castro 1996). His syncretic vision addresses self and genre to subvert the prevalent differentiation between a dominant Anglo-Celtic centre and multiethnic and liminal subjects. In a somewhat similar manner, fiction by Nicholas Jose, Beth Yahp, Arlene Chai and Eva Sallis interrogates the use and function of hybridity as signifying the difference between the self and otherness, a “traditional” foreign place (Asia and the Middle-East) and the “modern” West. These writers examine the negotiation of agency and freedom from disparate structures of authority, and highlight the various meanings derived from encounters in foreign environments. Some critics suggest that the depiction of Asia is often constricted to colonial and Oriental representations tinted with cultural and sociopolitical stereotypes, depicting Asian characters sexually and racially. As

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their works show, Beth Yahp and Nicholas Jose do not succumb to any Orientalist view of Asian subjectification. Beth Yahp’s Crocodile Fury, with its interrelated narratives, explores Asian female subjectivity through the figure of the Pontianak and the romantic lover, while Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread subverts the Asian-Australian narrative with the Asian woman as an exotic subject and the object of sexuality. Set in an unnamed place in Asia, most probably in Malaysia, Beth Yahp’s novel explores the many forms that subjectivity encompasses, playing with hybridity so that culture and identity are shifting concepts. The concept of “home” is, in fact, depicted as a hybrid manifestation extending from the imagined space, the actual reality and the remembered personal histories. The young narrator’s account of her life and family story – a story marked by the omnipresent grandmother who rules over her the family unit – is circumscribed to a setting and society that beyond apparent rigid structures combine elements of materiality and spirituality. Henceforth, the interaction of Malay folklore and elements of the Western gothic, with the central figure of the Pontianak, translates as an extension of the past into the present and the encoding of imagination and reality. Specific settings and locations encapsulate a ternary perception of space and reality with, for instance, a rich man’s house transformed into a convent and then military quarters for a communist regime, the town set beyond in the foothills, and the jungle leading into the sea. The irony laid on the use of place and the interplay between the magical or supernatural create heterogeneous realities and subvert ideas of space and place. Haunted spaces and female subjectivity operate as places of exchange and experience, obliterating any attempt to define a single truth or origin in favour of simultaneous or successive enrootings. Yahp’s use of the eerie, magic manifestations of the environment naturally allows overlapping realities to subvert any attempt at homogenising and compartmentalising world culture and the notion of “origins”. The novel’s use of mimicry and parody envisages the inauthentic as the true expression of reality and the subaltern subject as the central presence while colonial entities are dismissed as unnatural, if not forged. In an interview Yahp clearly speaks against common and stereotypical representations of belonging and identity in Anglo-Celtic Australia: In Australia, the Other Asia drapes herself around me in a cloak of cobwebs and is far harder to brush aside. She patiently reweaves any strands I impatiently tear, ignoring my protests that, like the man at the beachside café or those who shout from street corners, some people see only her, not me. … unlike ‘flesh and blood’ women in Asia, this ‘Other Asia’ is constantly attached to Asian women in Australia by the dominant

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culture. (Percopo 2001: 4)

Yahp not only relates to her cultural heritage but also refers to her Asian ancestry as an indelible mark in the eyes of mainstream Australia; she seeks to stress, like a number of her fellow-writers from non-Anglo-Celtic heritage, the prevailing gaps in the unity purported by the multicultural canvas. Yahp’s depiction of “the Other Asia” is here an example of Bhabha’s concept of the split screen of the hybrid, whose “self and other is split, only to be grafted back together in a perpetual doubling act” (Bhabha, cited in Papastergiadis 1998). Hence, this double act occupies the main character’s destiny and determines her position in the interstitial place of nothingness: I press my body into the earth, eyes closed, ferns rustling around me. The jungle earth seems buoyant, barely holding me up. If I tip sideways I will sink into the ground. I lie very still, watching crystal. Insects may nip at my earlobes, night animals tread over my belly and still I will not move. Behind my eyelids the jungle dark grows to enormous proportions, in my ears jungle sounds make a pounding like drums. The minutes swell and stretch until I lose sense of everything except their stretch and swell, and I become alternately large then small; infinite, then nothing. Time and space stretch endlessly. (302)

The narrator’s story develops as a hybridising discourse on social and cultural issues, border-crossing between genre and identity, alienation and affiliation, processes that generate never-ending movements and fluid reconfigurations of identity. When engaging with inherited myths and culture, the main character echoes Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, where gender is “performatively constituted” and compelled by regulatory norms (Butler 1999: 47) – and Butler’s conceptualisation of the abject. Indeed, Butler’s ideas on the constructed and performed body highlight the corporeal embodiment of the effects of power – bodies both produce and modify structures and themselves through the discursive realm of symbolic signification: This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects’, but who form the constitution outside of the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the

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The narrator’s retelling of the past and history shows how traditional elements of the local cultures (Malay and colonial) still impinge upon modern subjectivities and spaces. Thus, the mysterious nature of the jungle, on the outskirts of town, encapsulates the past and the desire to reclaim the particular forms of cultural diversity. Such reclaiming occurs through the reworking of the gothic and through a circular narrative that sustain the non-linear processes of remembering and being. Indeed, the anxiety and trauma generated by colonialism, loss and fragmentation are all highly symbolised by the looming figure of the Pontianak, the vampiric ghost in Malay and Indonesian mythology, its vital bond with the environment and substantially with history and personal story. The spectralisation of the Pontianak redefines the ontology of presence into a hauntology of non-presence; consequently, it is the terrifying and differential spectrality that “splits the living present into the site of the coming from the future of that which is undealt with from the past. It is what makes the future possible as the inevitability of the past” since “one cannot control its comings and goings, because it begins by coming back” (Derrida 1994: 11). Yahp’s exploration of life in Malaya, more specifically, in an immigrant Chinese context, attempts to deconstruct the Orientalist vision of Asia and cultural otherness and reconstruct identity as an oxymoronic and fleeting concept. Eva Sallis also conceives identity as a floating signifier, and in her writings, she brings forth the connections between the local and the global so that boundaries become porous and cultural entity is subject to openings and fusion. Hiam and The City of Sealions depict the subject in a migratory or diasporic situation, delving into Australia’s relationship with its Arab community and examining the way complex identities surface in response to socio-economic and political contexts. The blending of Western realism and Eastern mysticism and lyricism emerges from a process of opening an alternative third space where other elements encounter and transform each other. Set between Australia and the MiddleEast region, more precisely Yemen, The City of Sealions again delves into family history to examine the relationship between mother and daughter in an Australia that is multicultural but appears somehow to be discriminating.

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The story depicts the migrant subject, the mother, as an individual whose personal history as a Vietnamese and experience of Australia as a boat refugee work contrapuntally so that feeling exiled and feeling at home concur. Phi-Van is a Vietnamese boat refugee who has settled down as the wife of a white Australian fisherman but still suffers the post-trauma of her wartime experiences. Her life is scarred by physical and emotional displacement and she, in fact, undergoes a double uprooting – first, from her home country and migration to Australia, and then from the urban space to the isolated and symbolic harsh, if not violent, environment of Kangaroo Island. Indeed, the setting of Kangaroo Island, Australia’s thirdlargest island and situated southwest of Adelaide, is dual as it used to be, and was known for being, one of the most lawless and vicious places in the British Empire. It was also the scene of a bloody whaling and sealing industry before it became the current pristine and natural environment where wildlife thrives. Sallis’s incorporation of symbolic images, myths and tales within the personal story of Lian is part of the examination of cross-cultural relations in multicultural and international environments, in Australia and foreign places. When Lian questions the belonging of her mother to Australia, her father replies that she is “a silkie”, meaning that she came from the sea, that she is indeed an other from overseas. Nev’s depiction of Phi-Van is “an early indication of the shifting identities of the female characters in the household and the transitional site they occupy” (Slater 2010), but his use of the term “silkie” is doubly symbolic as it also refers to the selkie, the mythological creature in Scottish and Irish folklore with the form of the seal that can assume human form, which is what Van-Phi and even Lian seem to embody at various stages of their experiences and interactions with others, both seen as others on the border of the multicultural nation. Indeed, Sallis endeavours to underscore the dark side of multicultural mixing by exploring cultural and communal alienation and belonging. Through her mixed heritage, Lian experiences an unproblematic sense of belonging to Australia, having spent her childhood and adolescent years as an “Aussie”, identifying with her Anglo-Australian father and sharing his love of fishing and family history, but she does not quite fit in with the community. In fact, not only is she unable to sympathise with her mother’s apparent madness but she curiously seems to bear the patronising and rather prejudicial remarks of the locals, who treat her as the exotic subject. The narrative accentuates the dark side of multicultural associations and constructions, suggesting that the sense of homeliness co-exists with unhomeliness. This dual binding process occurs through an imaginary that subverts fixed identity positions, something that Sallis highlights when

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discussing the responsibilities Australians, from all cultural backgrounds, should have towards each other, all the more since that they are part of the multicultural society: In Australia we don’t yet have a word or a language that includes us all. We have no way to speak naturally of a many in one. The word multicultural doesn’t manage. Multicultural is used to mean some of our cultures, not all of them. Ethnic means some of our ethnicities and not others. Further, each community and each age group has different specifications as to which cultural or racial groups are them, not us. (Sallis 2007)

In her novel, Sallis mixes a Koranic/Arabic folk tradition with her main character’s “mother-story” to create a text that is postmodern and postcolonial, a story that encompasses conflicting self-images of the colonised and the postcolonial subject. Through her main character, Sallis suggests that identity is created by the outside perception of other characters and their stereotypical perceptions of cultural otherness. Indeed, from a young age, Lian is characterised by the divergent perceptions that her family and the community have of her (12). As soon as she lands in Yemen, she is doubly cast away by foreign students; for instance, British students do not see her as a true-blue Australian, despite her playing up the part of the archetypal Aussie to shock them. Yet, the foreignness of Arabic is an inescapable cultural condition for the enunciation of Lian’s selfhood and identity as she becomes a multifaceted being in an international environment: “She felt herself taking on an identity dependent on who she was with” (135). This attitude negates her mother’s belief that cultural displacement and hybridity are incurable conditions although she realises when she is bearing her own child that there is “in the end, something deadly about trying to belong” (218). Lian is able to enter her mother’s history psychologically and understand the ordeals she had to endure as a migrant through her own challenges as an Australian expatriate living in a foreign culture and immersing herself in other stories and lives. It is only when she herself undergoes the condition of the exile that she is able to sense the gaps and silences in her mother’s history, the never-ending “wet slap slap slap of Vietnam, the spaces and faces she had never let in” (176), that she is able to shake off her European heritage and place herself as an outsider in Yemeni society: She stared upward in her sepulchral room, trying to flick over external objects and trying to prevent the inward rolling eye. So beautiful, this

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nonspace, this impossible place. Why had she come here? She was finding she had never had anything other than this nothing. Something murky cleared in Lian’s vision and for a moment she thought she was inside Phi-Van’s cupboard, one of the frozen talismanic fragments shoring up her mother’s ruins. Three big green leaves slap slap slap She floated through the dusty streets. The connection with Australia rattled, dry and fragile. Australia was becoming rich in her dreams and too remote to be real in the remembered insect voices on the phone and the insect spoor on the page. She felt transparent and was grateful for her enveloping cloak. (180)

Lian’s mind constructs metaphorical understandings by bridging mental spaces together, blending them and creating openings into situations, experiences, memories, cultural configurations and the self. Through subjective experience, processes of hybrid identities work together to be constantly reinterpreted and reconfigured from different subject-positions and within different spaces so that new knowledge emerges. As a matter of fact, by becoming a scholar in Arabic and entering Yemeni culture, Lian challenges the arbitrary construction of common definitions of Australian identity and multiculturalism. She is then able to reconcile with and embrace her mother’s Asian difference through her multiple self-identifications: Lian was enmeshed in a web of histories, thrashing hopelessly. Thinking that she was escaping her mother’s story once and for all, she had entered a strange land, strange people, a new and forever crippling tongue, and disconnected herself from her family. She has felt brave but her mother’s story had cast its shadow far longer than her own and, without her knowing it, had chosen for her the path her feet would take. The path was luminous because her mother’s story had made it so. Perhaps it was clear from the beginning that Lian, in running, would have to follow. Perhaps it is clear that if you have no story of your own, you fall prey to others. (174)

As the passage shows, Lian discovers that all identities are embedded but not fixed in specific locations and cultural frames, and that each individual carries within him/her different voices. Her awareness that cultural identity stems from complex negotiations and is not opposed to new syncretic, transnational or fluid identities allows her to confront her personal history and embrace her diversity, either within or outside the borders of Australia. The “web of stories” she is enmeshed in naturally comprises sea-images of the ocean, the marine species and, as stated in the title, the sealions – all of them symbolic signifiers of her own self and otherness, of her subjective space and memory/history.

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In her writing, Sallis suggests that the relationship between history and literature is intimate, that narrative and history are multiform and bound, respectively acting upon one another, redefining the boundaries of nations and identities. Her work clearly advocates a syncretic vision, suggesting an underlying unity or reconciliation between mainstream Australia and its many cultural and non-Anglo-Celtic worlds, calling for an inclusive approach to otherness as the essence of an Australian ideal. The City of Sealions suggests that history is never objectively stored, all the more so since stories take on a world of their own and have the power to influence history. Not only does Lian’s immersion in Yemeni culture illustrate the relationship between personal memory and history but it also serves as a discourse on cultural encounters and Australia’s multicultural reality through the combination of geographic, linguistic and cultural borders. Henceforth, Lian’s identity is inextricably tied into her experience as an outsider – an experience that is actualised in her position as an exile both at home and abroad, and which is compared to the experience of the marginalised others, caught in an environment loaded with intolerance and being prevented from living an “authentic” life. Yemen gradually becomes a “Foster Mother Country” while Arabic is the “Foster Mother Tongue”, a language that Lian learns and associates with her memory of the water and the sea in Australia – a medium that interpolates with her personal history and transforms her perspective and vision (79). The choice of the phrase and chapter heading “Foster Mother Tongue” is in fact expressed by Sallis as the combination of antonymic forces: I like the phrase ‘foster mother-tongue’. A foster mother-tongue might love you as much as a real mother and then again might not. A foster mother brings an uncertain fate, and might not. A foster mother brings an uncertain fate and might reject you. (Besemeres and Wierzbicka 2007: 158)

Thus, Arabic, like English, becomes the medium through which authority is perpetuated, especially through the reading and telling of stories. It is also the medium through which conceptions of “truth”, “order” and “reality” become established. Lian’s access to meaning and understanding occurs because language encodes the reciprocity of her experiences in Yemen and Australia. The use and appropriation of Arabic as a foster mother-tongue propels the character in a world where oneness and multiplicity are inseparable; such a world operates as the space of origins, a real and mental space where Lian is able to redefine who she is, to question and reveal everything, even the most hidden thoughts and acts. In this novel, experience and history are enacted through the prism of oriental culture and stories, bringing to mind, with their encroaching in the

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movements of the imagined ocean, the idea of the sea of stories from Salman Rushdie’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Indeed, Sallis incorporates popular cultural markers, combining them with traditional Arabic folklore, The Arabian Nights, to create the character’s imaginary world (free from the constraints of her personal history), a world infused with cultural references and histories originating from the East and the West, and the southern hemisphere. Lian’s dream in the prologue, when she has just landed in Yemen, beautifully operates as the blending of reality and fragments from stories in Arabian Nights and western histories of shipwrecks and air crashes: On the first night in Yemen, Lian dreamed of the beach. A wind was up, blowing in from the Arctic seasummer which shimmered on the horizon. […] The puffed and murky sand in the shallows swirled like genies back into bottles, calming into smooth, clear ripples around her soles. […] She wanted to swim but the sea was belching up rotten ships and repairing them. The Norma shot up stern first from the shipping channel, spilling silver whiting like fireworks. The ships looked like old crones. Not all their parts and components could be found. Bits of the John Robb huddled together in a shiply shape. The horizon was jagged with black hulks, swarming with seaweed-draped people dancing on the decks. The beautiful Zanoni, the Perth. The Sydney. The Lusitania and the Titanic arm in arm, listing. Korean airbus 007. The sea was becoming very crowded. Trumpets played and singing voices floated in on the hot wind. The sand rushed to calm all disturbances. (1–2)

The ocean as a central metaphor is an agent of reconciliation between the inner space of the character and the external world. The sea and the land both produce a wealth of stories, veering between reality and the world of fairy-tales so that the Manichean boundary that is often constructed to separate Anglo-Australian settler identities from migrant diasporic identities is blurred. The recurrent references to the sea elements create a sense of journey through language and consciousness – a journey that traverses and transcends worlds so that identity “always presupposes a sense of location and a relationship with others”, and “attention to place does not presuppose closure, for the representation of identity most often occurs precisely at the point when there has been a displacement” (Bhabha 1994: 185). The story of Phi-Van and the experience of Lian as a child and an Australian outsider in Yemen expose the physical and psychological damage caused by the past, the tyranny of colonialism, imperialism and fundamentalism, in an environment that ironically reflects global and transnational spaces:

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Part II Europeans and Americans came to Sanaa: on business for the aid companies, for the engineering companies, for Kentucky Fried Chicken (briefly). They came for pleasure, mainly from Germany. The came as military, only from America. They came as students from universities in Denmark, Holland, England, Scotland, France, all the states of the USA, even Alaska. Europeans sought out the quaint, ancient, thick-walled houses of the old city and the Jewish and Turkish quarters, […] To an outsider, to the many migratory visitors, to those with money to restore, repair and admire, these houses were exquisite. […] Predictably, those Yemenis and resident ajnabis who ran language schools and hotels, restored tower houses in the old city for their students to live in. Students settled sometimes for many years into an old-city lifestyle, the larger newer suburbs of Sanaa forming only an evanescent part of their impression of the country, forming the dreamlike corridor between the airport and their real Yemen; some kind of servo-studded, modernised half-way land, scattered with rusted car bodies and detritus, in which the Sheraton was to be found, glittering in Western glory, transnational. At the poolside, young Yemeni men stood serving and not looking, at least not overtly. This was modern Sanaa, its hopes and dreams wrapped up in the new service stations and the dinged Pajeros, its suburbs stretching to the circling crown of mountains, unfurled and suckering. (42–43)

The gradual interweaving of past and present experiences extends to the associations that Lian makes between Australia and Yemen, the West and the East – experiences that design a transnational or cosmopolitan space superseding the “home and away” binary common in diaspora discourse. Indeed, Lian’s encounters with the familiar but frightening, whether at home or in the world, draw on Homi Bhabha’s theorisation of the “unhomely” understood not as a state of lacking a home, or the opposite of having a home, but rather as the recognition that the frontier between the world and the home is breaking down. As Bhabha (1992:9) puts it, in “displacement the border between the home and the world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting”. In fact, Sallis’s novel deals with the uncanny according to Bhabha’s interpretation of the term in the Freudian sense as the result of repression, since to “un-speak”, as Lian manages to do in the end, is to release oneself from erasure and repression and to reconstruct missing elements. Lian’s sense of the unhomely consequently surfaces through the gaps in the fabric of reality – her reality and the reality of the worlds she travels through, in the space of the unsaid and where identity is always split and surfacing on the edge of the knowable.

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Thus, the novel constantly associates divergent elements as the natural course of the character’s development, starting with the learning of Arabic and discovery/experience of Arabic and Yemeni culture through the reading of a sea-story from the canonical literary work, Arabian Nights, and its tangent broadening into the history and story of Lian (202). Lian only begins to understand cultural displacement and the difficulties of cross-cultural relationships when she decides to study Arabic in a small town in Yemen. Her transformation into a cosmopolitan heroine involves her learning and understanding of Yemeni society and culture, a deep reading of the Koran and Arabian myths, but also, and above all, the gradual entering into her mother’s experience and history as a war refugee. As matter of fact, the character undergoes a drastic physical and mental transformation, which amounts to a transcultural experience of change. Such a change is signified in her involvement with Ibrahim, the Yemeni lover who leaves to fulfil his own version of the American dream, and by her pregnancy – a biological state that operates as the physical psychological embodiment of hybridity. Lian’s pregnancy symbolically marks the moment she realises her connection not only to her body but also to her mother’s body, and her connection to the bodies of the Yemenis through her unborn child and her love affair with Ibrahim. She carries the hybrid future inside her, a dialectic translation of the blurring or fusing of binary manifestations: She held all their histories and broken stories scrolled in her palm. She felt like a matriarch or a witch. She could cast her lines and she would weave Ibrahim’s and Phi-Vans’ worlds with her body. She was Phi-Van’s mother, grandmother, and time had not yet begun. She was lit up until all around her reappeared, illuminated, picked out of the shadows. She was phosphorescent. (225)

Eva Sallis’s character interestingly shares some of the features displayed by Beth Yahp’s main character in The Crocodile Fury. Indeed, beyond their complex relationship with an omnipresent and oppressive mother, Sallis’s and Yahp’s characters strive to forge links across radical cultural and historical differences; they are cultural interlopers and interlocutors who can speak from the apertures of diverse cultures and knowledge systems. Both novelists conceptualise “an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” so that “it is the “inter” — the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween, the space of the entre that Derrida has opened up in writing itself—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha 1988:

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22). In so doing, Sallis and Yahp envisage national, and antinationalist, histories of the “people” in a narrative space where individuals can embrace the nation as the space of cultural diversity rather than cultural difference. Both design, in fact, the space of the radicant, a new modernity and global world stemming from flux and “setting their roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts”, “denying them the power to completely define one’s identity, exchanging rather than imposing” (Bourriaud: 22). In Sallis’s novel, Vietnamese-Australian Lian moves from a position of assimilation into Anglo-whiteness and the obliteration of her Vietnamese legacy to a position that seems to be culturally more complex and newer. Through her immersion into foreign culture, Lian becomes herself a migrant whose cultural belonging is manifold and whose aspirations for a national culture can never be fulfilled or are simply relinquished for the sake of non-affiliation, mobility and cosmopolitanism. The City of Sealions thus clearly advocates a deconstruction of the very notions of “Australian identity” and “Australian multiculturalism” as old paradigms of the diasporic and non-Anglo subject enclosed in the bonds with a “country of origin” rather than “a foster-country”. The main character’s story endeavours to show that the sense of belonging and the search for cultural roots hinder individual development and inclusion in a world that, because it has become global, can no longer be the ground or site for fixity, assimilation or integration. Lian’s rootlessness is naturally transcended by her acceptance that “it is roots that make individuals suffer; in our globalised world, they persist like phantom limbs after amputation, causing pain impossible to treat, since they affect something that no longer exists” (Bourriaud: 21).

2. Historical Reincarnations Discussing Australian culture and trade at an international level, in Chinese Whispers, a collection of cultural essays published in 1995, Nicholas Jose argued that culture was becoming something of a vanity exercise, the packaging and not the package. Jose added that a broader conception was needed, one that might encompass all kinds of imaginative interactions between people, both individually and collectively (Jose 1995). Jose integrates such claims in his novel, The Red Thread released in 2000, a story that connects Asia with Australia and overlays Chinese concepts of space onto Western ones in a process of creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone of encounters between the past and the present. Jose’s novel is a hybrid construct interweaving a modern

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narrative, the love story between Shen Fuling (a Chinese art dealer educated in the US) and Ruth Garret (an Anglo-Australian artist), in 21stcentury China, and an ancient tale titled “Six Chapters of a Floating Life”, the autobiography of Shen Fu, a young Chinese poet and painter, and his beloved wife, Yun, in 18th-century imperial China. Jose’s influences stem from his experience in Beijing as a cultural counsellor in the late 1980s, at a critical moment in the history of China, and he shows a deep understanding of place and culture. His novel takes the Bakhtinian idea of the novel, with “a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organised. It is this form of the novel that enables the rational blending of different styles, dialects and ideas making it essentially hybrid” (Bakhtin 1987: 262). Jose adapts his own translation of the story of Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life to write out both the missing last two chapters of the tale and complete the story of his own fictional characters. The two stories break through one another so that a process of mimicry and extension from the past to the present operates through the reincarnation of the main male characters, Shen Fu from ancient times and Shen Fuling in modern days, and through their respective desire to cut across the boundaries of time and space and perform the role of the other. The characters’ convergent stories construct the hybrid narrative of decentred subjects, who seem to be out of place within their time but in place in their geographic location. Time is subtly encapsulated in the very title as “the red thread” holding the stories together and weaving an ancient-modern history of individual experience. Thus, the double entendre of the “red thread” is all the more significant as it is the true root of a rhizomic structure, generating what Edouard Glissant calls “a prophetic vision of the past” in the present (preface to Mr Toussaint 1961). Moreover, the extension of Shen Fu’s history in the present of Shen Fuling is signified in the added syllable and the progressive “ing” grammatical structure conceiving history as a past that is obsessively present – a past that operates as a necessary condition to enter the allegorical narrative and then revision the future as a present: It was a painting of the Old Man of the Moon drawing a red thread between his fingers. Sun Da explained that it symbolised the passionate attachment of lovers in this life, and the assembled company clapped. “I believe we will be together not only in this life but in the next life too,” the groom whispered to his bride so that no one else could hear. “We will experience in the next life all the joys we were unable to experience in this life,” Yun replied from under the veil. “Man and wife in

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The painting, like the book’s title, refers to the myth of the Old Man of the Moon who, in Chinese folklore, is believed to arrange marriages using a red silk cord to bind the hearts and souls of a man and a woman together. Speaking on the form of writing, Jose said that breaking through history was a way “to find the traces of alternative trajectories and lineages” and then reinterpret fiction: Historians rightly share a professional suspicion of fiction. Novelists, I think, are respectful of historians. Yet in our quest for new narratives we are compelled at a certain point to kick away the scaffolding and enter an imaginative domain where the facts, always open to multiple interpretations, may not answer every question.

In the novel, a never-ending process of appropriation, interaction and change between the two stories subtly sustains a potential quest for perfection and bliss in an incomplete story and a blurred narrative. The first-person unidentified narrator addresses the story as an artefact that operates on two kinds of realities – the grand narrative of ancient times and the modern story – and in so doing forges a dialogue from above space and time so that everything is reversible: One should try to show the small in the big, and the big in the small, and provide for the real in the unreal and for the unreal in the real. One reveals and conceals alternately, making it sometimes apparent and sometimes hidden. (53)

In this particular novel, Jose adapts his own translation of the story of Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life and endeavours to write out the missing last two chapters so that both narratives are connected in the act of writing as much as in the act of telling, allowing both to convey a syncretic vision of reality. Jose, in fact, comments on his adaptation of Shen Fu’s memoir and his own translation, laying emphasis on the discursive role translation plays on the varying definitions one has of “history”: …translation plays a mutual role because the old text of Fu Sheng Liu Ji has to be translated so that the English readership can understand it. I chose to use Lin Yutang’s translation because it is a beautiful translation but it was translated in the 1930s, so it sounds old fashioned. For English readers, it sounds like something happened long ago, so the readers know that they are reading something that comes from translation from the past,

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another world. And then in a broader sense, I am translating that story but adapting it into the present time. So that’s a kind of cultural translation, time travel translation. I employed different ways of translation in this novel. It’s a game because readers don’t know where the translation starts and stops. (Zhang 2014)

The novel explores the ways life and art may reveal or disguise truth, probing cultural and political issues through the love stories of the four main characters. Modern-day Shanghai is a developing economic empire, integrating globalisation and yet still consumed by its past and presently monitored by an authoritarian regime – being at once a terrible threat and a wonderful (economic) opportunity. The main character, Shen Fuling, is concerned by the growing influence of economics and politics but also by the government expropriation of the family house for real-estate development and the loss of social and ancestral values. He shares Old Weng’s interest in old things and strives to resist the pangs of a market economy. The opening pages of the novel focus on Weng stepping off a ferry and walking through the “labyrinth of barriers that leads the way out” (1), setting the stage for a daily life of an alienated subject but nonetheless a free spirit: For the greater part of a century Weng has carried himself with the demeanour of a scholar, bowing his head to the task at hand, sticking to tedious clerical work in the back room – copying down records, sorting files—while political tumult howled fire and ice outside. This way he has survived with his wits about him to become Old Weng. He has lived to indulge his deepest impulse, the understanding of old things—to handle them, collect them, deal in them. It’s the passion that runs in his veins and defines his life. (1)

Old Weng is the holder of the unfinished ancient manuscript and he strives to save remnants from the past against the effect of modernity. The description of his daily routine exposes the underlying truth about the regime and its dire consequences on people’s lives. It also indicates that the character’s sense of survival relies on his ability to imitate, to pretend, to play the role given by an authority. In the same way, Shen Fuling, the modern adaptation of the ancestral Shen Fu, alternates between worlds; being born in China and educated in the United States, he is the westernised oriental other, an art historian working at Shanghai Art Auctions International, dealing with and commercialising rare, precious objects of great beauty, and is both a pragmatic and an idealist. Jose utilises cross-cultural encounters as part of the rewriting of conventional tropes with the foreign female cultural other in the exotic but no longer

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exotic place, China, and a love-story triangle that intensifies the beauty of the tragic dénouement. The love story is thus also a means to explore the transcultural movements between China and Australia, bridging the gap that so often prevails in Australian-Chinese relations and examining the situation of the alien other from the perspective of the westernised Chinese and the Australian artist abroad. The main female character, Ruth Garrett, assimilates with the culture of the non-Anglo-Celtic other, and has the ability to move between cultures and combine two supposedly divergent worlds (this assimilation and entering into otherness strikes a note with Nikki Gemmell’s novel Cleave as the female character displays similar features). Ruth Garrett, Shen Fuling’s lover, artistically absorbs other cultures; she is an AngloAustralian artist who paints in “exquisite brush style” combining modern with ancient techniques (25). She is, like Shen, at the centre of the reincarnation of the tale and compelled to enter Chinese aesthetics. Ruth literally mimics the character of Yun, her female double from beyond time and place; she designs her own version of Yun’s embroidered slippers before she inherits the originals so that, like most art objects, they outlive their sequential owners. Her fascination for the ancient tale is such that she is thrust into her own imagined reality, a multifaceted story that simultaneously surfaces from the past and the present. The development of the story shows that Ruth is not only the sensitive romantic other but that she embodies the postcolonial paradigm of the historical void whereby the individual is caught in the aporia of time: “She wondered at the connection between this body of hers and the cycles of time, this body and the other forms of existence that could be lived” (66). Past and present, fiction and reality, operate through a mimetic process so the ancient tale directs the modern story as much as the modern story directs the ancient tale: He [Shen] had completed a circuit of the gallery and had reached the first painting again ʊ a dragonfly on the rotor blade of a helicopter – when he heard a woman’s voice from the centre of the room. When I was a child, I loved to observe the patterns of small things, from which I derived a romantic, unworldly pleasure. When mosquitoes were humming around in summer, I transformed them in my imagination into a company of storks dancing in the air, which delighted me intensely. He swung around at the words he heard and looked more closely at the speaker. He recognized her [Ruth] from the auction. (40)

The novel’s blending of (auto) biography and history suggests that similarity and dissimilarity are interdependent, generating a hybrid construct, a process clearly marked by visual and typographic signs, the use of italics (or red

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ink in the original edition by Chronicles Book) to refer to the ancient tale. Moreover, the allegorical mode stems respectively from the Chinese literary and aesthetic tradition (following the rise and fall of dynasties, the characters’ blooming and fading love stories) and designs an interface for the modern tale, signifying “the ideological substance” and the “semiological value of reality” (Barthes 1957: 137). Gail Jones also plays with writing forms and theories to address issues of displacement and belonging through the questioning of reality, art and modernity. Her novel, Dreams of Speaking (2006), engages with aspects of reality in a global context, delving into the cross-cultural relations between Australia and Japan. The story features the encounter of Alice Black, an Australian scholar who intends to write a book titled The Poetics of Modernity, with Mr Sakomoto, an elderly Japanese man who is working on a biography of Alexander Graham Bell – looking at the personal stories of Bell through the history of modern inventions. A layering of images and stories from the present to the past, conveyed alternately by Alice Black and Mr Sakomoto, suggests that one is caught in a constant present tense yet thrust into history in a discourse that articulates poetry and imagination with material inventions. The novel rests upon fragments – the exchanging of emails between the two protagonists, their stories about families and friends, their romantic reveries in foreign places – as a way to explore the tenuous binding of communication and loss, elation and depression: In what happens between people, she [Alice] reflected, there are these transmigrations, these episodes of smudged experience, in which the containers of memory and story become weak and permeable. Images leak like smoke. Emotions. Chance utterances. Rudimentary threads of being float outwards, and reattach. Fibres of some counterlife, that which we make through others, join like the ganglia of an unlocatable, interstitial intelligence. We confederate. We are many. We carry others’ stories. (52)

Jones’s writing proceeds through time and space, images and stories that seem to feed on one another and are so tenuously woven that they even rely on their respective shifts and changes – constantly displacing and replacing meaning. Feeling isolated and disorientated by the growing physical and cultural distance from her working-class family and her failed relationship with her lover Stephen, Alice attempts to overcome her loneliness thanks to her friendly encounter with Mr Sakamoto on a train journey to Paris. The latter is a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb and is, like Alice, fascinated by technology and modernity. Mr Sakomoto rightly insists that the difficulty with celebrating modernity is that people live with so many persistently unmodern things (65). He embodies the Asian

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other who suffered the atrocities of the Second World War (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings) and is trying to make sense of things. His life hinges on losses (the loss of his beloved wife and his former love story with a Scottish woman in Edinburgh) and gains (friendship and intellectual fulfilment). Often called “Mr Sakamoto”, the character’s first name, “Hiroshi”, and inner thoughts establish a connection with the real character “Hamaya Hiroshi”, the photographer and native of Tokyo, who began to photograph the isolated “snow country” of north-eastern Japan in the midst of the war and whose empathetic images of village life expressed an aching nostalgia for the rural past widely shared by the urban Japanese. By telling his amazing stories of 21st-century inventions, Mr Sakomoto thus clearly does in fiction what the real Hiroshi did –establish distance from his immediate surroundings temporally and geographically to gain some perspective on the world’s rapidly changing societies. Moreover, like the real character, Mr Sakomoto has an allegorical vision of the world and individual lives, a capacity to make time and space malleable, to see the present in the past and find a cultural interest in peripheral stories. He is looking, as much as Alice Black, for a way of articulating the poetry that may reside in the invented machine and experiments, associating the disembodiment of magnetic resonance imaging to the haiku, the traditional form of Japanese poetry. Like Alice, Mr Sakomoto engages with the aesthetics of modernist technology, interrogating the nature of artistic, social and cultural practices. In a radio interview, Gail Jones asserts that she is deliberately colliding “very traditional notions of the beautiful, the image as it’s represented in haiku which is an absolutely concentrated and compacted meditation on the beautiful moment, with something that is far more diffuse, complicated and omnipresent […]”, like television or the radio, “[…] to play those things off against each other, to have the poetics infiltrate the technology” (Gallacher 2005). In her novel, the main characters understand modernity as the cultural condition characterised by constant change in the pursuit of progress and meaning. Their respective interest in the history of inventions nonetheless suggests a desire to escape and make sense of their postmodern human condition. Concepts such as anxiety and alienation are displaced by the fragmentation of the subject while experience no longer seems to encapsulate personal stories, considering that memory is constantly replaced by the artificial repositories of technological devices, by objects that alter the meaning and structure of memory itself. Both Alice and Mr Sakomoto evolve in a universe where technological communication is the privileged medium of information and knowledge; they are led to ponder how memory and technology subvert the experience

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of time and space, realising that a reflected image is a moving mirror in the world of unlimited production – a world where the subject is a permanent exile. The journey motif initiates a dialogue and reverie between the two characters, questioning the inner dimensions of modernity and their implications for individual understanding of the self. Moreover, time and place interact, shift, and change, altering their meanings and our understanding of them: Alice dreamed that night that she was lost in a sandy desert that was Japan. She struggled through dense, impending dunes, feeling her legs massively heavy and her heart heaving with effort. Her skin was encrusted all over with tiny grains of sand. Her eyes were full of grit, her vision was blurred. Ahead she saw, miraculously, the edge of a wheatfield. She hurried towards it and found Mr Sakamoto there, lying on his back, looking at the sky. […] Alice saw the blue sky reflected in his eyes. It looked like water. It looked to Alice like Mr Sakamoto was filling up with water. And then in the distance Leo appeared. He wore earphones and was mutely nodding to his music, swaying a little, tapping his sneakered feet. Alice wondered in dream-land if he was dead or alive, if he had reached a drop-zone somewhere, of limbo, perdition, or if this dumb show to futile, unprotected sound was the condition, after all, of every soul: something is missing, something is always missing. (178)

In this passage, Alice’s stream of consciousness attributes the geographic characteristics of the Australian environment to the Japanese setting, combining locations and dreams in such a dishevelled manner that connecting, sharing and crossing the boundaries bind individuals. The novel’s examination of modern designs, ranging from the 16th century to the early 20th century, envisages modernity as displacement, as an antinomian construct of disruption and order, allowing the characters to embrace their postmodern and postcolonial condition as part of a hybrid and performative space. Dreams of Speaking thus indicates that what is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out’, … - where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between …, highlighting that differences find their agency in a form of the ‘future’ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, […], an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present. (Bhabha 1994: 219)

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The sense of dislocation and dual discourse, which Jones argues is a feature of modern life and postmodern culture, is then part of a dialectics that envisages hybridity as the trope through which the postmodern and the postcolonial overlap. Besides, the polyphony prevalent in the epistolary news from Mr Sakamoto seems to refill the space, which has been emptied by modernity, through interpolation and the syncretic vision: He took Alice’s hand and kissed her fingertips. Then he turned with his heavy luggage and did not pause or look back. Alice watched him step onto the escalator, like a man sucked upwards, a man who had entered a sinister wartime movie, something by Orson Welles, or Kubrick, perhaps and disappear into the vast steel cavern of the terminal. She was left there, by herself, as if she was the spurned one. […] The history of the mechanised hearts, wrote Mr Sakamoto, is a melancholy history. The heart is an organ not easily governed at the best of times. William Harvey, who was born in Kent, England in 1578 and studied at the universities of Cambridge and Padua, conducted enough dissections of human and animal corpses to refute the common idea that food was converted into blood by the liver. He suggested instead – somewhat scandalously at the time – that blood was pumped through the heart throughout the body and then returned and recirculated. (54)

The transition from Alice’s reality, and her matters of the heart, to the biography of William Harvey and his scientific discovery of the functioning of the heart and human organs establishes a dialectical relation between two worlds, distant yet connected. Hence, the dialectical relation is set up, between utterances and contexts, through the delineation between the main discourse and the peripheral discourse, clearly visible in bold print, so that all narrations are contingent spaces. Emotions and thoughts intersect, inviting the reader through paratextual devices, as stated in the epigraph, to “sculpt in hopeless silence all … dreams of speaking” because there are “‘no beginnings,’ […] ‘only fragments. Only stories’” (41). Alice’s experience and inner thoughts ascribe emotions to technological devices, monologues to philosophical discussions and the interest in technology, initiating a reversible movement between correlative spaces and states: Her body was strung out, in another time zone, still operating in the reverse logic of a cross-planetary biology, but she felt alert, excited. Travel, rush through space, was her self-enchantment. Relocation into new co-

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ordinates. Forfeited certainties. The erotics of strangeness. She couldn’t bear the persistence of the known into stale habituation. (27)

In her discussion of Gail Jones’s writing, Lyn Jacobs (2006) insists on the novel’s “postmodern awareness of history and its evolving inscriptions” but it seems that Dreams of Speaking also displays a postcolonial feature of counter-discursive interpolation exceeding the boundaries of discourse. Indeed, dislocation and a sense of nothingness illustrate the experience of Alice Black as she travels through divergent geographic places and is cast adrift in a machine age of miscommunications. The story of Alexander Bell, along with that of other inventors, symbolically surfaces through the story of Alice as part of the characters’ development and positioning in a global and technological world – a world that surfaces as an artefact. It is therefore ironic that the story establishes a tenuous connection between communication and loss, the human and the inhuman, within the biography of Alexander Bell, along with the haunting fact of his mother’s deafness, which influenced his invention of the telephone. Jones thus exposes traces of non-spoken events or acts beneath the surface of aesthetic modernism, and in so doing, shows through a deconstructionist discourse that the direct relationship between signifier and signified takes over and operates infinite shifts in meaning from one signifier to another. In his article “Signature Event and Context”, Jacques Derrida suggests that all forms of speech, gestures and written acts can be placed under the general category called telecommunication, where all these different acts of communication are intrinsically unstable. Derrida insists that speech and writing are themselves series of supplements, of signs that become themselves intermediaries of what is considered the “reality” behind the text, which is always being deferred by these signs. The novel certainly encompasses these ideas, suggesting that complete meaning is always postponed in language and meaning is never fully attained. As a matter of fact, Jones subtly resorts to the personal stories of inventors (Bell, Marconi, the Lumière brothers) to illustrate the disparity of relationships between the use of the invention and the circumstances that led to creation and broken connections: In the wires of the telephone, in the windy space between mouths, they became father and son; they spoke the truth; they expressed their love. Their voices floated into each other, in a disincarnate embrace. Each time he put down the telephone receiver, Hiroshi felt he had been kissed. (75)

As the novel shows, hybridity is a transgressive trope challenging the “canonical” strategic and rhetorical practices of postmodernist discourse

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and exploring the implications of intellectual and cultural authority. Alice’s decision to abandon her research on the poetics of modernity in order to reflect upon the last unmodern things gives precedence to life experience and human relations over theory and poetics. A literature scholar, Alice suggests, as Roland Barthes did in his essay S/Z (1970), that textuality is reversible or open to the greatest variety of independent interpretations, that it cannot be restrictive in meaning. Thus, the inability to occupy the historical gaps generates new forms of speech so that truth and meaning are constructed as “a superimposition and fusing of images […] so that the passenger would see outside the window a ‘plastic’ cinema, a spectacle of odd beauty and dislocated enchantment” (163). In this passage, Gail Jones’s direct reference to French poet Henri Michaux is all the more significant to her writing since it enhances the novel’s aphoristic statement that “what is true is indeed false” (Michaux 2001). In fact, Jones’s writing suggests that the word “writing” is invariably polysemous, designating by turn or even simultaneously a graphic, plastic, linguistic or poetic act, as well as conveying the ability to invent various forms of meaning: Alice wandered around her apartment, unloosened from things. The clockface kept staring at her. She tried to revise the manuscript of her book on poetics and modernity, but everywhere, on every page, she met Mr Sakamoto. There are texts, she thought, even one’s own, full of surprising and unexpected personifications. Texts that summon known faces to fit unknown stories. Novels that split open to reveal one’s family. Tales that appear exotic, but drive one home. Recognitions. Returns. Ineluctable associations. (202)

Alice’s discourse on the dislocation and insubstantial subjectivity of contemporary life becomes a lament rather than a lyrical celebration of modernity. The story unfolds in a fluid movement, operating transitions between discourses, narrative and stylistic shifts, combining philosophy and poetics. Moreover, Jones shows that modernity alters the sense of perspective so that the two characters live in a constant present tense but are nonetheless thrust back in the “folded time” of the photograph, the time of history and the time of the biography. Discussing the structure of her novel and narrative tension, the novelist (2006) said: I wanted lots of mini-narratives so there was a sense of the many lives and stories that contribute to our own. I’m not really interested in the linear plot and the idea that there is a classic arc of building up tension and then resolving it. I’m more interested in a structure that gives a particular “texture” to reading, so that there are intellectual and emotional tensions

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operating at many levels in the text. The order of episodes was rather random; I wanted some things at the beginning of the friendship the cinema, the telephone, the forms that connect Alice and Mr Sakamoto – and I wanted more complex (even more painful) kinds of technology – like the MRI imaging machine – to come at the end. But I had no fixed sequence and tried to find my way intuitively.

Jones’s writing conveys the particulars of subjective experience in a way that accounts for the geometries of language and the subjectivity to combine them in an alternate and less linear logic. The novel fuses many different discourses relating to various areas such as philosophy, science, ethnography, psychoanalysis, feminism, narratology, narrative and the lyric so that the form of the narrative – like the content – entices mediation on how memory and technology alter the experience of space and time. By engaging with postmodernist discourse on spatial orders, the novel uncovers a narrative history of individuals but subverts those very postmodernist claims of a dilution of historicity and the shifting hybrid nature of identity. Jones displays, in the Bhabhaen sense, the spectacle of the simulacral, the corrosive craft of modernist inventions laying bare the limits and borders of the sustaining project of postmodernist mimesis so that in her work: Culture becomes as much an uncomfortable, disturbing practice of survival and supplementary – between art and politics, past and present, the public and the private – as its resplendent being is a moment of pleasure, enlightenment or liberation. It is from such narrative positions that the postcolonial prerogative seeks to affirm and extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and peoples. (Bhabha 1994, 175)

Alice’s project, which is to write a book called “The Poetics of Modernity”, paradoxically acknowledges as much as contests modern theory. Jones seems to use hybridity to refute modernism’s anxiety that it is itself a threat to cultural integrity and purity but at the same time also sustains the postmodernist view of plurality and identity, casting identity as the effect of a fragmented cultural imagination. Indeed, the narrative form designs a map of interrelated dynamic wholes, reconceiving the modernist’s and postmodernist’s dualistic concepts of hybridity and collage so that art and poetics are reconceived in metonymic terms, through presence and absence, enhancing the recognition of cultural difference and integrity through dynamic agency, interdependence and transcultural connections:

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Dreams of Speaking shows that across a divided-up space, “a globalized cultural stratum is developing with stunning rapidity, nourished by the Internet and the networking of major media outlets, while local or national particularisms find themselves sentenced to “protected” status.” Indeed, in the story, the telephone, like other technological and modern devices, is the privileged medium of communication between individuals; it is the “material symbol of the atomisation of information and knowledge into multiple specialised and interdependent niches” (Bourriaud: 19–20). Yet, while people dream alone in the subterranean spaces of their consciousness, the impulse to connect, share a common language and cross the boundaries of separateness is what bind individuals in a global environment. Jones’s writing plays with the appropriation of various discourses, mixing and juxtaposing antipodal modes and registers so that her hybrid narratives refute the imposition of centre/canon over margins and construct an identity out of emptiness within an altermodern space that naturally surfaces “like theatre, like art” (153). By entering discourses of otherness and engaging with the interrelatedness of stories, Nicolas Jose and Gail Jones subvert the space of texts and histories to construct a reality through the act of translation. Both novelists call into question the modes of representation and narration of postcolonial Australia and in so doing tend to reposition Asia within Australia.

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3. Textual Politics “The committed writer knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and one can reveal only by planning to change.” JeanPaul Sartre’s quote in his What is Literature? refers to a discussion on the nature of writing and its implication for both the writer and the readers. Rather than enquiring into the author’s political intentions, Sartre argues that the very nature of prose implies that it is inherently committed, engaged with something, and a product of human freedom considering that the writer deals first and foremost with meanings (Sartre: 1950). The French philosopher’s comments illustrate the ways some Australian writers engage with domestic (and international) issues in an attempt to “reconfigure the future” in a key period of their political, cultural and personal history. Indeed, the 21st century and the post-reconciliation period generated a variety of works of fiction that contributed to the expansion of Australia on the cultural map and to the integration of notions that shift the focus from the national issue to the examination of Australia in a context that foregrounds the post-national and the cosmopolitan. As a matter of fact, Australian writers have been even more outspoken on political, social and cultural issues since the beginning of the 21st century as the federal government was steering further to the right on issues such as land ownership, migration and Australia’s destiny in a global environment, verging on the xenophobic discourse of One Nation. Thus, an increase in the politicisation of culture was noticeable under the government of John Howard, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, and was running counter to a political alignment of Australia with the Bush administration in foreign affairs. The so-called “culture wars” sparked nationalistic debates on international issues, immigration, multiculturalism and national identity, family values and religion. Issues dealing with egalitarianism, justice, reconciliation, land rights, migration and asylum seekers have often prompted a response by writers, artists and intellectuals in their attempt to inform the collective national consciousness and remind the nation of the country’s history and values. For some authors, questions related to the dynamic of contemporary Australian cultural politics is then a means to examine the nation and global issues and mark the end of nationalist (and in the process multicultural) discourse to configure the concept of a post-national identity, of a “post-national literature” illustrating the interconnections of art, ideology and politics.

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A. Writing back to “Nation” In her essay, “Speaking Shadows”, Gail Jones openly expresses a desire for some form of justice, social and cultural, now that Australia is debating Indigenous issues. Jones argues that the admission of mourning into history is also about the inclusion of time in one’s imagining of other people’s sufferings; she says: “The wish for justice to prevail is linked with time past and time future, with imagining reparation for wrongs and the instauration of rights”. Her novel Sorry addresses the reconciliation issue in multicultural Australia at a time when the Liberal government of John Howard was dismissing any attempt to address a national apology to the Stolen Generations. The utterance of the word “sorry” in the title and in the text attests to the novel’s political and allegorical aspect and, as Jones suggests, to her role and responsibility as a writer and an intellectual: Refusing even the utterance, the government failed to honour the power of the word to initiate restorative justice, to effect redress for wrongdoing at an initial, symbolic level, and to understand the forms of recognition and affirmation that can occur within words. And it refused, in Agamben’s terms, to acknowledge the damage done to the possible futures of others. My own novel, Sorry, was written with some trepidation. It has a politicalallegorical aspect – as one would expect, claiming such a title – but it is not centrally concerned with representing the Stolen Generations. (Brennan 2008)

Jones’s reference to Giorgio Agamben suggests that not only does the nation or the world need to imagine backwards to confront historical mistakes but they also need to imagine forward to construct a fairer future. The writer’s wish for justice to prevail is linked with the past and the future, with the reparation for wrongdoings and the restoration of human rights: Sorry deals with culpability and the refusal to say sorry, the characteristics, as we now know, of a certain type of (persisting) dispossession. Forgetting, or guilty amnesia, is at the core of the text, yet so too is a loving friendship between an Aboriginal girl and a white girl, one which intimates a kind of ideal of community and reconciliation. Children are both more and less wise than we remember or suppose. The Aboriginal girl is not the ‘shadow’ of the white girl; rather she is a ‘surer presence.’ It is also an anti-war novel, concerned with what children witness and the multiplication of levels of violence. In writing such a narrative I rehearsed my own concern that the reconciliation process not be forgotten – since it has certainly faded from the political agenda since the bridge walk of 2000; and also that the

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role of language, of what is said and unsaid, must be understood as contributing to the ethical life of individuals and of nations. (Brennan 2008)

In her previous novel, Dreams of Speaking, Jones already levels a criticism against Australian politics when, in the story, Alice’s sister, Norah, writes from Australia and speaks against the current state of domestic and foreign affairs under the leadership of John Howard’s Liberal government: – and then there is all this talk of going to war with Iraq, which seems madness on almost any pretext. I fear – what do they call it, – the ‘collateral damage’ of women and children and the ghastly sense that superpowers will once again play out their posturing antipathies by bombing the shit out of people they can’t see. And that it will go on for years and years, worth poor and powerless people invisibly suffering. […] The other upsetting issue at the moment is the treatment of refugees. Bloody “border protection” is what they’re calling it. The detention centres are nightmarish and there are still children in there, held behind razor wire. We are lobbying for the release of the children – since neither party, as you know, will close down the centres—but getting nowhere fast. […] Australia distresses me, this barricade mentality, this fear of the ‘illegal’ refugees, this rightist neo-nationalism. Perhaps you’re sensible to be away, overseas, thinking of other things. (62)

The novel illustrates the idea that literature can (and should) be a guide to ethical behaviour and that fiction has the power to express what other forms of art or inquiry cannot possibly approach. Thus, in raising sensible issues and questions, Jones entices readers to penetrate an imaginary realm and make meaning via their relation to the world. Jones’s writing somehow operates in the Sartrean sense that meaning is essentially unfixed, considering that it stems from individual consciousness. Dreams of Speaking develops through a time frame that can be manipulated and surfaces through transitory spaces, worlds of transportable images, moving mirrors, where the destiny of the subject is that of permanent exile. The novel’s main themes (displacement, alienation, mourning) operate through a fleeting narrative that is ironically suggested by Alice Black’s research project, which is described as the “study of unremarked beauty of modern things” (18), as the examination of a world of modern contraptions and the virtual space of the familiar. Such a project on the poetics of modernity hereby demonstrates in ironic ways the historicity of modernism in postmodernity. As she is checking her emails in an Internet café, the character seems to be overrun by an army of technological and marketing devices, all of which simultaneously form illimitable networks and a confining nexus, all of which are active agents

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of a capitalist society of simulacra, a society where mechanical and scientific objects become godly and spiritual items: When she looked along the row Alice saw Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, pornography, chat-sites and something that appeared to be an online casino: it flashed ‘Money! Money! Money!’ in a circle of rotating lights. This was an odd form of consumption, or play, or technological subservience, to be seated at the receptive nexus of so many intervening sites. There were galaxies of information in there, illimitable networks more complex than neural pathways, zapping multidirectionally. There were people to be met and gods to be bought. There were bodies to see and information to be known. Any book was there, to be sped towards you. Any crazy notion or marginal subgroup, any egoistic individual or antiquarian hobby. The mind of God. Cluttered, schismatic, astronomical, microscopic. (136)

As the passage shows, information, history and time, just like modernity and postmodernity, associate disparate elements so that the narrative structure moves in a circle, associating the dreams of technology and technological power to historical darkness and warfare or to ancient oral storytelling. Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of Nagasaki, insists that nothing is ever lost or vanishes, that individual and humanistic history can never be erased (139), that the advent of modernity, with its signs, gadgetry, robotics and futuristic inventions, creates dreams of power, destruction and (re)construction. Thus, the composite histories of the two characters suggests that modernity initiates imperialistic designs and encapsulates a Foucauldian model for control, for “power/knowledge” that combines into a unified whole “the deployment of force and the establishment of truth” (Foucault 1975: 184). Such an idea is best signified in the opening pages of the book by Alice’s memory of the sad movements of astronauts on television, of scientific missionaries with an engineered umbilical cord binding man to the monitoring machine and the machine to the earth. The central themes of displacement and modernisation that illustrate Jones’s novel also operate in Tim Winton’s novel Eyrie (2013) to correlate a sense of boredom in modern society with individual enclosure in the virtual realities of cyber-space, Google, TV, networks, economics and finance. The story’s main character, Keely, is trapped in a world of objects rather than subjects, of technological and material networks rather than human interconnectedness. The story highlights the tensions between the natural world and human exploitation and in so doing designs a place that under the imperatives of mining exploitation and economic greed has become a land of emptiness and individualism, a space for gadgetry and glittering fashion. In this novel, Winton pursues his exploration of the

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social landscape through the figure of the alienated and marginal other but in a more global perspective, no longer simply reminiscing on the past, the golden years of egalitarianism and the Australian suburban dream. He thus provides a sharp social criticism of the nation and the community, showing that complex identities are strategic repertoires of symbolic resources, mobilised in response to a socio-economic context. The plot revolves around the shabby existence of Tom Keely, a former leading environmental activist for Wild Force, who lost his job and his former life when he accused a member of parliament of corruption. It starts in medias res with the coordinating conjunction “so” and the voice of the omniscient narrator providing direct access to Keely’s stream of consciousness and setting the scene and tone of a gloomy and dark story. In Eyrie, Winton returns to the space of the suburb and Fremantle city, the historic location and seaport within the Perth metropolitan area, and again uses the figure of the drifter and “down on his luck bloke” to delve into the lowest impulses of humanity and Australia’s postcoloniality. In so doing, the novelist, rather than being simply nostalgic about the past and the world of his childhood, the 1960s and 1970s, endeavours to subvert and deconstruct the national myths and ideologies by placing Western Australia not on the margin but in the midst of a global space – a space where he documents the physical and cultural postcolonial transformations of Australia. In the story, the main characters are trapped in a society that manufactures the illusion of abundance and displaces those who cannot afford to keep up with the culture of money. Fremantle, the once workingclass and multicultural city, has become a “caféland”, a “boho theme park perched on a real estate bubble” while the past and the remnants of the 19th-century goldrush no longer symbolise social progression but regression: After all that he’d finally totter onto the little avenue of self-congratulation that everyone called the Cappuccino Strip. Fifty umbrellas around which a certain civic pride once rallied. In the seventies the Strip had been a beacon of homely cosmopolitanism, a refuge from the desolate franchise dispensation stretching from sea to hazy hills. But that was before it calcified into smugness. […] behind every neglected goldrush façade and vacant shopfront was a slum landlord counting pennies, lording it over family and bitching about refugees. (19)

The depiction of the underclass that lives off the crumbs of the resource boom in Western Australia – Winton’s literary territory – is part of the novelist’s plea for a return to the values that forged Australia as the land where nature abounds and the spirit of egalitarianism prevails. Moreover, the narrator’s criticism of the economic boom and the ensuing

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environmental damage (141) is appended by an ironic stance to expose the complicity between miners and environmentalists for the sake of wealth rather than welfare: Miners employed more ecologists, marine scientists and geology graduates than six governments. In order to smooth the way, before they literally scraped the place bare. All that harmless data owned and warehoused. It was brilliant. (191)

Winton balances his attack on economics and politics with his own nostalgia for post-war Australia and the working class’s hard work, its morality and the iconic community it once formed. A commitment to the land as the spiritual and umbilical nurturer is again expressed through the main protagonist’s observation of landscape: Up ahead, the ancient marri upon which all his hopes rested began to emerge from the shadows, more skeleton these days than living tree, a barkless grey column topped by contorted white limbs that towered out across undergrowth, rocks, shadow, water. He’d come here a lot with Harriet, then alone sometimes when he visited Doris. Back when he actually bothered. You could hike down the scree-slope from the road, but the view from the water beat everything. That tree, he thought. It stood before whitefellas even dreamt of this place. It was here when the river was teeming, when cook-fires and dances stitched the banks into coherent song, proper country. Just to see it was mental correction, a recalibration. (86)

Tom Keely’s gaze on the landscape and his current perception that the land has been emptied of its core substance both draw a parallel with the imposition of the legal and colonial doctrine of terra nullius that negated any Indigenous mark on the land. Thus, the ironic stance that verges on derision hints at colonial history and postcolonial times, suggesting that the natural environment is “country” (in the Indigenous sense) and reality while the urban or “modern” space translates as “the country”, which then is a colonial substrate. Keely’s experience and encounters expand as an incursion into ethics, modern morality and the imperative to move away from the rhetoric of fear and exclusion for the sake of acceptance and redemption. Thus, the discrepancy between the underclass and the lucky few that enjoy the comfort of material wealth is signified through the ironic statement that life is regulated by the “angelic logic of trickledown economy” (60). In the novel, Winton castigates contemporary Australia, its rush towards wealth and the marginalisation of otherness, suggesting that those Australians, like Keely, committed to environmental issues are ultimately weakened or crushed when confronted by the imposition of the market and the grasping

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corruption of developers and politicians. Speaking on the release of the novel, the novelist argued that anyone with a prophetic calling to speak up on behalf of the poor, the mentally ill or weak today would find themselves swimming upstream in a society that was looking elsewhere, having sold its soul to the machinery of economic progress (Smart 2013). His Palm Sunday plea, delivered in March 2015, even adds to the attack on the state of Australian society and the country’s lost ideals: So what’s happened to this country? I’m confused. I read the news. But as events unfold, I don’t always recognise my own people. This still looks like the country I was brought up in but it doesn’t always feel like it. You think mining royalties have had a dip? Well, spare a thought for the Fair Go. Because that currency has taken a flogging. There’s a punitive spirit abroad, something closer to Victorian England than the modern, secular, egalitarian country I love.

The reference to Victorian England not as the epitome of progress but as regress in its exploitation of the poor harks back to the Dickensian days when Britain was putting in place the most punitive and socially segregationist system. In his scathing attack of the current Australian situation, Winton speaks up against the social and economic model of a postcolonial society made global yet has become even more individualistic. Eyrie combines reality and fiction, depicting Fremantle as a local economic dystopia and a global settlement built on social segregation and the fear of otherness. The seedy Mirador apartments, a Fremantle high-rise for the down-at-heel and down-on-their-luck, form a natural haven for violence, social degradation, assault, thieving and drugs. As Tom Keely is naturally drawn into the life of a former girlfriend, Gemma, and her 6year-old grandson Kai, he feels compelled to endorse his late father’s social role in defence of the destitute. Verging on crime fiction, the book depicts a new Australian generation inhabited by violence and caught up in a grim reality. Such reality includes a father on parole, a mother (Gemma’s daughter) serving prison time for drugs, assault and thieving, loan sharks and drug barons operating in plain sight, people struggling against economic conditions in the post-Howard era – all scenes that somehow recall a Ken Loach universe, with its social and political critique and its depiction of the struggle of individuals scarred by the past and caught in the apparatus of economic liberalism. Visual and typographic elements also participate in the narrative framework and the novel’s main ideas. Thus, Winton’s use of symbolic elements, like the printed dollar signs on the page, not only refer to the female character, Gemma, as the signified subject but also work as

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signifiers of the character’s financial ordeal – an ordeal which is ironically iterated in her family name “Buck” (293–294). Moreover, the typographic dollar signs highlighted in yellow on the page, along with other signs such as a drawn pair of eyes, a firearm and then a cross (329–330), suggest that “writing” has the ability to invent forms and meanings, that “writing” is invariably polysemic, designating alternately and simultaneously the graphic, the linguistic and the poetic act. In his novel, Winton further engages the reader in a political discussion about the current state of affairs and the way politics subvert the core values of Australian ideals, the narrator suggesting that such a process is operated through the depiction of urban planning and then through the ensuing social and cultural remapping of places. As Tom Keely drives along the Great Eastern Highway and is reaching the northern and working-class suburbs, he reminisces on a past long gone, a time when community spirit and egalitarianism prevailed, when the “world made sense”, and as he next reaches the West Coast Highway, driving south, he realises that he is entering the sacred and malevolent land of wealth and fake representations – a fragmented space that is configured on the spatial organisation of the page and syntactic structure of the passage: He drove down the coast feeling buzzed. Another salvo gone. Every card a mind-bomb. From all points of the compass. Encirclement. And he yelled through the open windows. Blowing down West Coast Highway, lane to lane, light to light, light from true light. Our name is legion. Stewie! For we are many. (347)

Despite the biblical reference to Mark in this passage (a reference also used and adapted in another novel by Winton, In the Winter Dark, published in 1988) to insist on the demonic nature of economic fallout, Eyrie delves into the lives of the characters to recall that individuals often tend to forget their need to unite, to give meaning to the world and restore the lost “Australian Dream”. Thus, in his new dark novel, Winton focuses on the shabby life of a protagonist who never stops wondering about time and place, often cannot remember his own past and sometimes loses focus. Indeed, even if Keely appears to be just a figure among the crowd, the narrative shows that he is paralysed by his own doubt and subjectivity, being in place and out of place: “Isn’t it weird, the way you look out there and you feel yourself going out at the same moment?” (166). In the story, events evolve and create a grid with missing elements, blurring the lines between the character’s visions, dreams and the present reality yet conveying a political message on the community and society. Hence, the past gradually flows into the present either through visions or

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dreams while the scope of the present is bleak, overshadowed by gaps and imprecisions, purporting the idea that Australia is an anxious white nation defined by borders. Western Australia is described as being big like Texas and characterised by the Mirador tower block “a classic shitbox: beige bricks, raw concrete galleries, iron bar railings, doors and windows like prison slots” (21). The Mirador is also symbolically situated in Fremantle, home to the (in)famous Fremantle prison, dating back to the 19th century, bearer of colonial and postcolonial penal degradation and moral decline. Eyrie, like all stories by Winton, brings forth current Australian issues through the wanderings of the main character, attesting to the writer’s commitment for social and environmental issues in a nation once isolated and “innocent”, and currently confronted with the pressure of the global and exterior space. As a matter of fact, international and domestic politics are raised at the turn of a conversation as random or casual news, increasing the novel’s social and ethical function (55) while allowing the story to oscillate between politics and literature. Winton’s writing encapsulates the memory of individual histories but also reflects the novelist’s sense of rootedness in his West Australian environment and his voice as a doxa of difference. Winton depicts Keely as a discredited environmental activist, a defeated idealist who selfmedicates with pills and alcohol and suffers from blackouts, and, ironically, voices concern for the loss of ideals and social injustice. The character is unable to see things properly and tends to look down from the top of his apartment block, reminiscing on the past (222), hoping to measure up to the memory of his father Nev, who stood for the little bloke, the reject and the no-hoper. The more Keely is drawn into the life and violent world of Gemma, his former childhood friend, the more the story diverges from the social macrocosm to become a tense and claustrophobic study of family life and the various changes that operate in the family microcosm under the pressures of global economics and the rise of nationalist discourse. For instance, Keely mainly surveys his neighbourhood and city from above, staring down at the locals – moping pensioners, drunks, unruly kids, unemployed residents – who compose his (new) community of indigents. Looking down from his apartment, he imagines their stories and lives, mingling appearances and reality, wondering about who they really are but at the same time granting them a real presence, which is accounted for by their urban background and respective interactions: […] he felt the twinge of loss, despite himself. He eased down the hill in first, struggling to get his bearings. The road was the same; he remembered when this too had been limestone. The crescent curved down towards the

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The narrative subtly reflects the discursive heteroglossia that resonates in the texture of the urban space, at the core of which lies a void that determines Keely’s daily experience as a fringe-dweller. Urbanism encapsulates social chaos and political disorder while Keely’s gaze uncovers the underlying binary opposition operating between the vile city and the original neighbourhood. The Mirador surfaces as a natural milieu for the socially deprived but at the same time it embodies the place where resistant and oppositional voices emerge. Moreover, the character’s depiction of a postcolonial Australia in a global perspective brings to the fore a paradox for the settler-country and its multiculturalism, reflecting somehow Paul Gilroy’s comments on the British situation, especially when he argued that the “country [Britain] is baffled by the demand to adjust itself to the challenging presence of racially different people, and this confusion, in turn, magically encapsulates the other conflicts evident in this transitional moment. Intrusions by immigrants, incompatible blacks, and fascinating, threatening strangers have come to symbolise all the difficulties involved in the country’s grudging modernization” (Gilroy 2005: 119). In Eyrie, Winton tackles the issue of diversity in all its forms, insisting that in a society like Australia, people and places have many “faces” since they are read in many different ways and they happen to look at or reflect themselves from various angles. The epigraph to the novel, from Isaiah 40:31, plays a role in decoding the novel’s main purpose and theme since it can be read as a meditation on the destiny of Australia and the restoration of human values, speaking out against corrupt leaders for the powerless others. Such ideas are, in fact, expressed in the novelist’s main address to the public in support of refugee rights: The face is the window of the soul. It’s the means by which we make ourselves known. To those of us of religious faith, it’s the means by which we recognise the Divine spark in each other, the presence of God. To those who aren’t religious, it’s the way we apprehend the sacred dignity of the individual. We present ourselves to one another face-to-face, as equals.

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When you rob someone of their face, of their humanity, you render them an object. When the first boat people arrived in the late ’70s, we looked into their traumatised faces on the TV and took pity despite our misgivings. Now, of course, we don’t see faces. And that’s no accident. The government hides them from us. In case we feel the pity that's only natural. Asylum seekers are rendered as objects, creatures, cargo, contraband, and criminals. And so, quite deliberately, the old common sense of human decency is supplanted by a new consensus. (Winton 2015)

In his Palm Sunday plea, Winton says that even though he does not claim to be an expert on politics, he is appalled by the treatment of refugees. He argues that Australians have let the fear of otherness take over their lives and urges Australians to engage in genuine, deep soulsearching rather than marvelling at their “big, brash wealthy country”. Eyrie illustrates his claims, bringing to the fore the dehumanisation of Australian society, social decline and violence, drawing attention to sensitive issues such as the environment, politics, economics and ethics to suggest that if unaddressed, such issues could push the nation to the brink of dystopia. Winton’s pessimistic view and depiction of the nation as a potential dystopia have been the subjects of novels by other authors. Andrew McGahan and Richard Flanagan, for instance, deal with the idea of the dystopian society in their respective works, both published in 2006. McGahan’s Underground is set in a near future and extremely right-wing Australia while Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist takes place in a post9/11 world. McGahan and Flanagan use the rhetoric of fear instilled in political discourse during the terms of John Howard, especially the years when Australia was steering further towards the right and the neoconservative approach of the US government. Both novelists use the panopticon as the structure out of which the life and experience of the characters emerge, designing an environment that is socially and culturally rotten to the core, a nation where the fear and rejection of non-Anglo-Australians, refugees and Muslims have become commonplace and an essential part of political discourse. McGahan’s and Flanagan’s criticism of the Howard government focuses on the “war on terror” and in so doing subverts the “Us and Them” dichotomy by placing an Anglo-Australian character in the position of the pariah, on the margin like any other migrant and refugee. Underground depicts, for instance, the escape of the main protagonists and their encounter with the underground nation below the surface of the political and artificial space created by shady fishy individuals. At the core of McGahan’s and Flanagan’s concern are media manipulation and the

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political lies dividing the multicultural nation through the rhetoric of fear and false alarms. The two novelists depict the ordeal of two madefugitives, respectively a former real-estate investor and a pole-dancer, who are compelled to escape, being branded as terrorists in their own country. They show that the political situation, domestically and internationally, with the increasing security measures and the breaching of human rights, has reached such a climax that it becomes almost surreal. McGahan and Flanagan respectively address the nation and its multicultural policy by displacing their main characters from the mainstream and making them experience the life of “those cultural others” viewed as second-class citizens and posing a potential threat to a white nation sticking to its Anglo-centric values. The novelists’ critical view of politics and their use of cultural issues extend to the exposure of materialism through a symbolic imagery that reifies the subject. Indeed, Flanagan’s main character, Gina, also ironically called “the Doll”, is an embodiment of a superficial society – she evolves in a Sodom and Gomorrah set in multicultural Sydney, content with her shallow world of brand names and designer logos, with her world of emptiness and her primary racism towards those she discriminates as “Oriental others”: The Doll abruptly turned to leave. A woman in a black burkah walked straight into her, her elbow hitting the Doll. The Doll’s mind leapt back to the police with their guns and black uniforms looking like death, to the television report the day before about the Homebush bombs, and then the woman appeared to the Doll as another woman, but as something terrifying and unknown, an evil spectre she had seen so often in films, a short, a stubby Darth Vader. The woman, for her part, seemed to be saying it was the Doll’s fault, though exactly what she was saying the Doll couldn’t understand because she was talking in a strange language. […] “Fuck off!” the Doll yelled. “Just fuck off to wherever you’re from.” A few people halted to watch what might happen next, but nothing did. The woman in the black burkah stopped talking, turned and hurried away. “Good on you,” a middle-aged man in a canary yellow shirt said in a slightly trembling but loud voice. “They won’t integrate you know,” he said even more loudly, perhaps intended for the woman in the burkah to hear, though she had already vanished. A large woman clapped. A kid in a Microsoft baseball cap yelled. (93–94)

Gina scorns those cultural others and incoming strangers who, as Paul Gilroy suggests, “are trapped in the perverse logic of race, nation and

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ethnic absolutism”, who either “represent the vanished empire” or are not “connected with the history of empire” but “experience the misfortune of being caught up in a pattern of hostility and conflict that belong emphatically to the empire’s lingering aftermath” (Gilroy 2005: 101). Flanagan’s story openly presents a sustained condemnation of contemporary Australian politics and its effects on civil liberties through the chilling development of plot. Moreover, the novel is dedicated to David Hicks, an Australian who spent six years confined in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, after the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan turned him over to the US in late 2001, and whose case fuelled intense political debate in Australia over procedural fairness and the Australian government’s support of the US in the treatment of an Australian citizen outside Australian jurisdiction. The novelist then seems to transpose the experience of Hicks on Australian soil in a narrative that becomes doubly subversive, putting an Anglo-Australian female in the same position but from the perspective of home and the inside, confronting the character with her own world so that she has to assume the role of the refugee she in fact scorns and rejects. Gina, the Doll, becomes the puppet of media frenzy and political madness, the culprit and “unknown terrorist” in a place that surfaces as the shallow land of inequalities. The urban space and the city are depicted as non-places that take control of the individual, who has become a contemporary figure threatened and unsettled by the artificial society. The multicultural society represents a panopticon monitored by a neoconservative ideology and the discourse inherited by the “war on terror”, while the egalitarian society is shattered by privatisation and marketisation. As a matter of fact, the urban environment no longer reflects history but transforms it into a media spectacle, either circumscribing history to a memorial or replacing it with a present defined by an Anglo-centric domination that does not enable disparate elements or different cultural backgrounds to function together. Flanagan’s novel thus suggests that the resurgent imperial hold of America on Australia has made multiculturalism the main trigger of the clash of civilisations and freedom fighters enemies of the state. Underground by Andrew McGahan also interrogates the ideologies of the nation and the place of non-Anglo-Australians in post-9/11 Australia, using irony and the deconstruction of notions such as “culture”, “civilisation” and “imperialism”. Like Flanagan, McGahan explores the anxieties of the nation under a somewhat totalitarian state, using dark humour and subversion to depict a journey into the underworld of an Australia gone dystopian. McGahan’s stories as a whole address a variety of genres and themes ranging from personal experience to the social

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imperatives of work and unemployment, placing characters within an ideological and political backdrop embodied by government corruption, neo-white Australian movements, Indigenous identity and land rights, empires and fantasy stories. His works include various genres, with the “grunge” novels Praise and 1988; the political crime novel Last Drinks, set in post-Fitzgerald Inquiry Queensland; the political satire Underground; the Miles Franklin Award-winning meditation on land, belonging and possession, The White Earth; the realm of science-based fantasy in Wonders of a Godless World; and the ocean world of monsters, storms and embattled empires in The Ship Kings. Speaking about his use of a variety of literary genres, McGahan says: “With the exception of Last Drinks, where I very consciously decided to write a crime novel, the style of each new book seems to emerge organically along with the characters and the plot, and without any deliberate decision about genre on my part” (Case 2009). In Underground, the novelist certainly plays with genre as he incorporates elements from reality, especially the media and public statements on security measures and migration, and the increased resentment and hostility towards Muslims and the Middle-Eastern people, which culminated in the major race riot in Sydney in 2005. When asked whether, as an Australian novelist, he had an obligation to voice his opinion, that is to speak out, McGahan suggested that writing was a means to address particular issues and deliver a message to an audience. He added that commitment operated through the reader’s response to the book: I have less an obligation as an opportunity. It’s useless to sit around, get drunk and rant and rave. You’ve got to do something. What do you do? Do you join a party? I have the option of writing a book and some people might read it. This book – some people will love it, and some people will think it’s crap. That’ll pretty much be the political divide I think. (Condon 2006)

Thus, Underground triggers a political response on the reader’s part by balancing two distinct viewpoints, the perception of Leo James and the vision of Bernard James, to depict a country divided between the proponents of freedom and cultural diversity and the advocates of terror and nationalist extremism. The narrator and main character is Leo, the prime minister’s twin brother. Unlike Bernard, Leo is an “Australian Everyman” who likes to think of himself as an ordinary bloke in an Australia of battlers run by the nationalistic views of former and yet real PM, John Howard. Swerving from the past to the present, the narration relies on Leo’s autobiographic account as he is awaiting his death penalty,

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when the real John Howard is no longer prime minister and the serving PM is Bernard James, a parody and realistic extension of Howard. The political situation and rhetoric are inscribed on the topography of place: Canberra, the capital city and hub of federal politics, is said to have been wiped off the map following an apparent nuclear attack, society is caught in a permanent state of emergency, a place of security checkpoints, citizenship tests, identity cards and detention without trial. Thus, such is the state of the nation that the political situation, both domestically and abroad, has deteriorated. The war on terrorism is politically justified by an unspecified number of overseas conflicts but increased security measures and the gradual annihilation of personal freedoms have reached such a point that Australia has become a police state – a nation in which the prime minister wields unchecked executive power from Sydney and no longer from federal Canberra while an impotent parliament symbolically languishes in Melbourne, the city that had hoped to become the capital of Australia during Federation. In this Guantánamo-like Australia, Muslims are herded into ghettos or singled out as terrorists while Anglo-Australians can be just as easily targeted as those posing a threat to the nation and to the police state; Indigenous people have retreated to the bush and the deserted areas, growing and marketing marijuana, developing their own underground economy with the blessing of the local authorities and the surrounding army corps. McGahan’s novel, through its dark humour and derision, suggests that a nation that so fiercely stands for its protection and freedom at any cost may somehow sacrifice that very freedom due to the loss of human integrity and the trampling on human rights for a cause that is totally unjustified. The comment on the “war on terror” and criticism of the Howard government, and again the “culture wars”, operate through satire and an almost surreal atmosphere, depicting the terrorist and abductor of Leo as a white Australian female named Nancy Campbell, who goes under the alias of “Aisha” and defines herself as a “new Muslim”, as well as reconstructing Canberra as a convention centre for rogue business mates, fishy and corrupt politicians, terrorists like Bin Laden, and US-Australia military meetings. The symbolic focus on a place like Canberra is highly subversive considering that the place of federal politics and national institutions, home to international representation and embassies, marks the shift of Australia from the colonial nightmare to the postcolonial dystopia – a shift which is indeed significant since prisoners of the imperial state are ironically detained in the House of Representatives, made of “sharp edges and steel and glass” (279). The descriptive frame is all the more ironic as

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the Australian Parliament is a castle of glass and perfect architecture for surveillance, while the old Parliament House, one of the remains of Federation days, is a meeting place for the domineering rogues and real terrorists, reflecting the dark reality of the world. Indeed, as the narrator says, it is “more like a well-worn gentlemen’s club. All scuffed polished wood and crackled leather. The sort of surrounds that world dominators have gravitated to ever since Britannia ruled the waves. Poring over the maps with brandy and cigars.” (279) The narrator’s reference to history, late prime ministers (273) and his memory of their attempts to forge an Australian identity shows that history surfaces as an object in itself and a never-ending discursive field, that under the surface, Australia is still an extension of imperial Britain and as well as a postcolonial nation under the grip of US imperialism. Thus, the Inarrator, who happens to be Leo James but at times also seems to be an unknown other, insists that the parliamentary structures serve both as simulacra and mirror to the real, and in the process of reflection nonetheless alter certain aspects of the real. In fact, the narrator hints at the idea that “the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again…” (Baudrillard 1994: 1). At this stage McGahan indeed subverts the current role and function of the federal parliament to suggest that Australia’s constitutional identity is still colonial, that the parliament of 21st-century Australia is nothing but a reflection of the old parliament and just as provisional. Hence, the narrator’s statements on the symbolic value attached to place again hark back to Baudrillard’s definition of the creation of the hyperreal as “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine…” (2) The main character beautifully describes the House of Representatives as a construct of the hyperreal – a place where ethics and national destiny no longer prevail but are reconfigured, inverted, perverted and otherwise altered, just like the logical process of the old Parliament House can only be understood in terms of its cultural and political value dating back to the settlement of Australia and the imposition of a British model and terra nullius. Canberra, like the building sites, has become a political and criminal machine, a space where the hyperreal again tragically works wonders to annihilate human rights and construct a fake reality. At the end of the story, the I-narrator dares to speak up and address his captors and likens the Australian situation to the fall of the Roman Empire as a warning about the consequences that the present might have on the future:

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I look at the changes in Australia that made these events possible, the changes in us, all in the name of protecting ourselves, of fending off the threat beyond our borders. And I can’t help but think of Rome, its decline and its fall, and whether or not we in this age share any similarity with it. […] After all, to most people, the Empire must have looked as strong as it ever had, and the city of Rome as supreme and untouchable. The barbarians loomed on all sides, true, but they were still being held beyond the frontiers. […] And did they imagine, in their darkest dreams, that it was all in vain? That by the time the barbarians did break through, the Empire would already be dead? […] I have no idea what the future holds. […] But I’ll say one thing. If – in this blind pursuit of security above all else – we poison our own society, and so decline, and fall, then we will be more culpable than even the Romans were before us. And such a fall, I suspect, would be followed by an Age so terrible, compared with the knowledge and the light which preceded it, that it wouldn’t merely be called dark. It would be called Black. (293–294)

The narrator’s reference to the Romans and the barbarians encompasses some of the elements found in J. M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, which questions the legitimacy of imperialism, depicting the Empire’s declaration of a state of emergency and the deployment of the Third Bureau – special forces of the Empire – due to rumours that the area’s Indigenous people, called “barbarians” by the colonists, might be preparing to attack the town. McGahan’s character, like Coetzee’s Magistrate, has then accepted the fact that all human beings and all empires are transient. He infers what the future has in store for him and so is able to accept the fact that the Empire too might either already be dead or might pass, might become a moment in history before another darker artificial structure takes over. Like Coetzee’s narrator, Leo James serves two purposes –the eye that sees the action and the voice that comments: I see the rise of the new nationalism. I see the declaration of the war on terror. I see the outlawing of refugees. I see security laws passed time and time again, each regime more oppressive than the last. I see dozens of organisations banned. Protesters locked away. Freedoms disappear. Coercion legalised. I see new standards being set almost every day and how a western democracy should operate. And every single one of those standards is lower. And then lower again. (275)

From such a perspective, history operates as the peculiar, informing narrative of the Empire itself, partly constituting and partly legitimising the Empire’s own terrorist ploys, preserving the sovereignty and the transcendence of the subject through historical continuity. Such historical continuity, and colonial extension, is then made explicit in the Foucauldian

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sense that it is not only the “indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded [the subject] may be restored” but also a pledge “that one day the subject – in the form of historical consciousness – will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference and find in them what might be called his abode.” (Foucault 1972: 12). Moreover, it is through the Foucauldian focus on “difference” that the reader apprehends Leo James’s encounters with the dissidents and amateur terrorists (Aisha) so that incongruous encounters and mutual experiences are spectrums of consciousness and current realities, uncovering the neoconservative system put in place and the imposition of US imperialism in post-9/11, along with its impending brutal and barbarian methods. The contemporary age of globalisation, with its population movements, and increasing economic and political challenges, clearly inspires authors who do not identify with the era of detention centres and border-patrol, and whose writing aims at subverting established hegemonies, portraying Australia as a dynamic and politicised space which is nonetheless contested, always cast in another contingent space and constantly reconfigured. Migration and cultural issues have, in fact, always provided a rich source of myths and stories throughout the history of all Australians, engendering dreams, memories and/or fear of difference in both migrant and resident populations while also foreshadowing a desire for new beginnings. Feelings of exile and alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction have been raised in novels and essays, suggesting that racial discourse relies on the complexity and fluidity of identity so that power relationships may shape bodies and construct subjectivities. Christos Tsiolkas, for instance, approaches the politics of home and belonging in displacement to expose the ambivalence of the postcolonial situation, the polyvalent nature of cultural identities and histories, and the affiliation of cultural cartographies. In his essay “Strangers at the Gate”, Tsiolkas (2013) addresses the refugee issue, castigating the social and cultural divide at the heart of nationhood: The last 15 years of political history in Australia have shown that the electorate is not convinced of globalisation’s benefits. It is why asylum seeker policy has been at the centre of the Coalition’s attempts to undermine both the Rudd and Gillard governments. It dare not be upfront about the effects of neoliberalism. […] Yet all of us, no matter which side of the asylum seeker debate we fall on, know that even if all the bloody boats were stopped, if they were all sent back into Indonesian waters, if we

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put all those on board into camps in a deprived satellite nation, if we exterminated the whole fucking lot of them – every blighted man, woman and child – none of this would speed up the two-hour drive on choked roads that we take to and from work, boost the numbers of nurses and doctors in our public hospitals, make our education system any better, or increase wages, the dole or our pension payments. We all know this. […] Asylum seeker rights are easily understood and supported by cosmopolitan Australians. We are well-travelled, we are not suspicious of multiculturalism and we are confident of processing and adjusting to change. At the same time, we rubbish their McMansions while gentrification makes the inner city unaffordable, and we castigate them for their cashed-up lack of generosity while it is in fact their kids mixing with the children of refugees.

In his novels, Tsolkias depicts the postcolonial city and suburbs of Melbourne as places reflecting the disconnection of individuals from the country’s nationalist ideology and the increasing global movements of peoples. His characters epitomise the movements between various nations, questioning the quintessential value of Australian culture and the structures of the nation yet suggesting that in the process of exclusion and displacement, one is free from the constraints of the cultural mainstream. The space of the nation relates to what Bill Ashcroft (2010) coined “transnation”, tracing the diasporic movement of people within, around and between nations, between the structures of the state – a movement that subverts the primacy of the nation and suggests some sort of liberation in the very process of exclusion and displacement. Furthermore, since he started writing, Tsiolkas has explored how the non-Anglo-Australian character becomes an object constructed by the postcolonial and mainstream Australian culture, suggesting that the views on migrants and refugees have colonial undertones. His common associations with other nations, regions, continents or world-historical forces (religion and cultures) add up to the claims against an oppressive national Anglo-Celtic hegemony. Indeed, the illustration of popular and subversive cultural formations within the nation-state retell the migrant/diasporic “experience as versions, not of official history of the nation – which is hegemonic and exclusionary – but of dynamic, multidirectional, and revolutionary histories of the national people that are in constitutive tension with both the nation-state and the assimilationist ideologies” (Simatei 2011: 57). In so doing, Tsiolkas defies the current political view on nation, identity and ethnicity, showing a simultaneous interest in multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, which, he says, need to be combined:

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Part II I would say that inside the policy of the multicultural is always an ideal that is bigger than the management of this so-called diversity. It’s also a gesture about how you live in the world as a whole. Rather than confining multiculturalism to the particular claim you make for your specific community, I would see it as the basis for a wider worldview. Hence, my interest in the Greek community is not just as a Greek, but as a platform for being in the world. In that sense I am as cosmopolitan as Socrates who said: I live in the polis but I live as a citizen of the world. Similarly I am multicultural in the sense that I feel that I also start from a very specific position. What gives us hope is that this specific position is not interpreted as a destiny – a closed door from which no-one can escape and through which nobody else can enter. I suspect that what we’re struggling with is the need to resuscitate this bigger vision of belonging to the world as a whole. (Papastergiadis 2013)

Tsiolkas highlights the ways multicultural discourse seems to be traversed by the Orientalist view so much decried by Edward Said – a view that positions and inscribes the migrant as other, as an eternal fringedweller on the margins of the nation-space. His stories encompass a discourse on the state of multiculturalism and locate the subject in an inbetween space, the city and the suburb, which is a marker of the local and global culture. His characters – migrants, exiles, tourists and urban wanderers – are the dominant figures of contemporary culture; they emerge as those subjects that Nicolas Bourriaud calls “radicants”, that is, individuals of the 21st century who are like “plants that do not depend on single roots, like the rhizome, but advance in all directions on whatever surfaces present themselves by attaching multiple hooks to them, as ivy does” (Bourriaud: 51). Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of the radicant can most certainly apply to Tsolkias’s work and more broadly to most Australian writings published during the late 20th and early 21st century. In his book Bourriaud argues that the radicant develops according to the surface and geological feature of its soil and territory, “translates itself into the terms of the space in which it moves”, and reflects the contemporary subject “caught between the need for a connection with its environment and the forces of uprooting, between globalisation and singularity, between identity and opening to the other”, that it thus “defines the subject as an object of negotiation” (51). Thus, the way Tsolkias raises the issue of identity from within the very structures of multiculturalism to examine the Anglo-Australian mainstream from the outside is clearly an example of negotiation between cultures. Furthermore, since his dark and quite gory tale, Dead Europe, Tsiolkas has addressed the very core values of Australian culture in relation to the

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other migrant groups who are still stranded on the margins of the AngloAustralian mainstream, highlighting the various ramifications of migrant voices within the space of the colonial nation. His novel Barracuda, published in 2008, extends the themes raised in the previous novel The Slap, examining the interaction between Anglo and non-Anglo Australia and focusing on issues of class and the egalitarian society. The story illustrates the underlying racism in the so-called multicultural community and the inaccuracy of the idea of a classless society, showing that Australians from different social backgrounds have, from the beginning of Federation to the present, all tended to live in separate locations and show patterns of social and educational differentiation. The novel, like all the previous works, seems to convey the idea that “the myth that Australia is a classless society is one of the most damaging of all the legends that Australians hold close to their hearts” (Mc Gregor 2001: 2). Barracuda, for instance, deconstructs the idea that Australia is a place of opportunity where anyone, regardless of origin, can climb up the social ladder and take part in the Australian destiny in the southern hemisphere. Through the development of the main character, Daniel Kelly, from high-school years to adulthood, Tsolkias extends the thematic of migration, cultural and social tensions in order to point to “an ethical horizon oriented to a productive engagement with a social habitus in which characters can choose to remake themselves on the basis of a politics of care, charity, inclusion and selfless surrender to the claims of the other. This not only constitutes Tsiolkas’s most optimistic statement but also suggests perhaps his most tangible engagement with the political realities that have become increasingly clear since the rise of the New Right in the mid-1990s” (McCann 2015: 133). In his study of Tsiolkas, Andrew McCann draws an interesting parallel between the bildungsroman and the form of the novel, arguing that the model of Bildung that he perceives in Barracuda is a means to address the structures of biopolitics. Tsolkias’s novel does so and the novelist never shies away from asserting his political engagement: I’m a political person, and I think my writing reflects my interest in politics. I think in relationship to the literary world I work in, in Australia, I am a political writer, but I think that tag is only applied to a writer who works from oppositional positions, or from the positions of the Left. I think all writing is political, because all writing deals with culture, all writing is words, so all writing has to deal with ideas, it has to deal with politics. In that sense everything that is writing is political, but I think for someone who writes from within the tradition and within a culture that is the Left, it can often be a troublesome term precisely because of those things you were talking about. I think if you come from an oppositional politics, or from a

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Part II left-wing politics, you can be labelled with the term ‘political writer’ in a way conservative writers don’t have to think about. (Cornelius 2005)

The epigraph to Barracuda, a poem by Miroslav Holub, the Czech poet and immunologist known for his ironic wit, his impatience with irrationality and his use of scientific imagery, attests to Tsiolkas’s use of wit and refusal to accept the reality in his attempt, like the fly in Holub’s poem, “to break through the window-pane”. In the novel, politics and migrancy are approached through the cultural and social experiences of the main character. The narration of the life of Daniel Kelly, from his highschool days to his life as a working-class adult, epitomises the life of “wogs”, the ethnic others, and asks whether a nation can be constituted by difference, by variations of unity and diversity, and whether there can be community without unity. Indeed, the conflicting attitude of Daniel, a young Greek-Australian who obtains a scholarship to attend a private school because of his swimming skills, stems from his being between worlds, the space of home and the space of college, working-class Australia and middle/upper-class Australia, Anglo Australia and the Australia of those “newcomers”, meaning non-British migrants. Daniel Kelly, who is commonly known as Danny and regularly taunted as a “psycho”, looks at the Anglo-Australian others from his own perspective as the Greek-Australian outsider and “wog”. His immersion in the private high school, which he ironically nicknames “Cunts College”, marks his social displacement and cultural transformation and his gradual alienation from his original surroundings, family and friends, a change that is signified in the end by his simply becoming “Kelly” (19). The focus on class and multiculturalism operates through conflicting views and attitudes about national identity and cohesion. Danny’s assertion that swimming and being in water is belonging here (8) is to be understood as the inclusion in society through swimming but also as his simultaneous feeling of exclusion from the very new social world he has integrated. Thus, the character’s perception of belonging relies on the need to become a swimming champion, outdo his rich college mates and become one of them, while his closer friends or family have a much more realistic view of what Australian society has to offer. Danny’s family is proudly working class – he is the son of a truck driver and a hairdresser – and his friends speak openly against a nation pretending to be diverse and united but which, in fact, discriminates against cultural otherness and Indigeneity: … it is hard not to be conscious of how hypocritical we all are. You know, we all believe in reconciliation, we all believe in Aboriginal statehood, we

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all believe in social justice, but here we are on the day (Australia Day) that should be acknowledging how this land was stolen from its original owners and we’re living it up on one of the most expensive coastal strips in Australia. That’s all. (399)

The novel highlights Australia’s inclusion of sport as an icon of identity but is critical of the underlying violence often expressed on national occasions or in debates about reconciliation and multiculturalism. Even though Danny considers that his friends’ and family’s views on the refugee and human rights issues are irrelevant and somehow arrogant, he is also aware that his new college mates are trapped in their own little world of whiteness and materialism, at odds with the quintessential notions that Australia is working class and ordinary. Tsiolkas designs characters that tend to shift in a world based on the Deleuzian concepts of space and evolution, between the space of the state and the space of the nomad – the former being homogenous and marked by enclosure while the latter is heterogeneous, fluid and open. In the Deleuzian sense, the state/nation assumes the dramatic role of annihilating anything that may threaten its codifications and political restrictions while the space of the nomadic individual, just like the migrant other’s, creates territory and reality. Barracuda, like Tsiolkas’s previous works Dead Europe and The Slap, suggests that the non-Anglo-Australian and the “new migrant” must be made part of Australia’s history rather than its contemporary geography, that the postcolonial migrant needs to be understood as the anachronistic figure bound to the lost imperial past. In an interview (2013), the novelist refers to an essay he wrote as a scathing attack on Australia’s approach to the refugee question, referring to history and space: I think one of the histories of migration is that every immigrant group turns on the other. It’s part of how we defend our space in this country. But I also think that if you - whatever position my relatives may take about asylum seekers, if you actually sat down and explain the situation to them and explained - conveyed the exile of that individual, of that family, of that child, that woman, that man - I have heard it again and again from Greek immigrants, from Vietnamese immigrants, from Italian immigrants - it doesn’t matter where they come from - we have so much space here. We have more space. With that article in particular, I wanted to say that we don’t need to be frightened of talking about racism. Maybe it goes back to that thing I said about this - our insecurity as Australians about who we are. Racism is part of who we are. Racism is part of the history of this country. Racism is inevitable in a colonial nation.

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Thus, Tsiolkas focuses on intergenerational and intercultural relations to dismantle essentialist notions of social and national cohesion. His writing suggests that Australia needs to conjure up a future in which nonAnglo-Australians are no longer seen as “those other and new migrants”, insisting, for instance in Barracuda, that culture spreads like water, in open spaces and through the visible gaps in the mainstream, shaking the foundations of the imagined community and creating other spaces for new forms of enrootings. In his examination of culture, the novelist designs, in fact, the space of radicant aesthetics, which is “a mode of thought based on translation: precarious enrooting entails coming into contact with a host soil, a terra incognita” (Bourriaud: 54). Tsiolkas certainly explores Australia’s terra incognita and writes against the cultural and “racial-geographical exceptionalism” (Perera 2009: 11) that has shaped the identity of the nation since the beginning of settlement, for instance, the White Australia Policy or Australian Border Force. His stories, set in Melbourne’s multicultural suburbs, with their focus on the Greek diaspora and their interaction with other cultural communities, create a counter-geography to the insular Anglo-formation, the so-called “island girt by sea” celebrated in the national anthem, that expelled any subject deemed “foreign” or Indigenous. Thus, writing provides an alternative and ethical form of action to break through the space of the nation so the nation is reconfigured through a new affective mapping of interconnections that elide the geographies of insular Australia and its racialised filiations of citizenship and belonging. Speaking on the way the concept of “nation” may or may not reflect the reality of Australia, Julieanne Lamond argues against John Marr’s call (in his Boyer Lecture in 2003) for Australian authors to write about the way Australians live, that is, for mainstream literature. She thus insists that Australians: […] need to be wary of this emphasis on our literary descriptions as representative of ‘Australian life’. Nation as ‘brand’ will never be able to adequately reflect Australians in all their diversity. Concepts of our ‘national character’ have often been exclusionary, unable to adequately account for Australians who are, for example, urban, non-Anglo or women. In the same way, ‘national identity’ is no longer a useful or desirable way of talking about our common interests, precisely because it is seen to attempt some cheery synthesis of diverse communities. (Lamond 2007)

Lamond refers to the fact that in a nation that has failed to make reparation for the wrong done to Indigenous people, which still tolerates racism, externalises and incarcerates illegal migrants and political refugees, worships its border protection scheme and still manufactures its

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history through an Anglo-Australian angle, Australians are invariably caught in a future that can never be completely apprehended and fulfilled. Her ideas resonate in Tsiolkas’s writing considering that the novelist writes against a literature that some (conservative) critics think should represent the nation – a literature that could yet operate as “white blindfold fiction”. Tsiolkas exposes the flaws of the nation by subverting the norms; he exposes the nation’s repressed histories and the many forms of violence they encompass. Kim Scott’s writings seem to encompass Tsiolkas’s desire to construct the reality and histories of the nation with a view on colonialism, as far as he is concerned, often labelled “positive”. Yet, Scott’s approach when depicting intercultural relations between Black and White Australia shares the concerns of much of the current Australian literature, which is committed to bridging the past and the present through the inclusion of difference and the act of reconciliation. Speaking about That Deadman Dance and its tragic undertones, Kim Scott argues that such a choice serves the political nature of the story and rather than signifying closure, initiates openings and interrogations, conditions for Scott to move forward and incorporate the realities of the past into a multicultural present, which is in fact unreal: Originally my intentions were to end the novel on the upbeat. But I’m not convinced that that is the best way to use literature as political ammunition. It’s too reductionist, and you don’t get the strengths of it. So with this novel I wanted ambivalence and a lot of generosity. No real strong baddies in there. So the story itself, until the end, doesn’t fit the conventional narratives we have of our shared history. Ending it like I did, I thought might be a way of setting up all sorts of resonances to do with possibility and loss. […] My interest was in a positive story and to talk about Noongar people as very impressive. They were a little bit naïve and silly in some ways, because they were not being strategic enough, but I wanted to turn that into a strength. And then the possibility that I could finish it in a way that allowed it to resonate in really interesting ways with the overwhelming well-known narrative of defeat, and the discordances, means that it becomes political in a way that works with the strengths of story. That's the whole new bit for me you know. Can I do this? Can I make a positive yarn and still make it political? Using the stuff of fiction to do what nothing else can do ... (Brewster 2011)

Scott’s writing aims at disrupting colonial history and reaching for openness and understanding cultural otherness. In dealing with history, the novelist suggests that the fluidity of cultural encounters poses no threat

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and that the negation of such fluidity is in fact what gave colonialism its darkest motives. Moreover, in interviews, Scott often argues for a reconfiguration of politics and a national space that needs to be more inclusive of difference and give its true voice to non-white and reified subjects. Writing against the reification of otherness by relocating the silenced or ignored voices at the heart of Australian discourse is a common feature of fiction published in the post-reconciliation years. Alexis Wright, for instance, highlights her desire to subvert the discourse of whiteness and an Anglo-Australian mainstream in her essay on the writing of Carpentaria. Wright (2007) asserts her need to write against misconstrued images and ideas on Indigenous culture and in so doing endeavours to show that writing can articulate concerns of justice, enlighten the broader community and encourage all Australians to act against the current social and cultural paradigms: I wanted to reach above the extremities of our capture by trying to portray our humanity as people who are capable of having great and little thoughts that are constantly being analysed and internalised in the Indigenous state of mind. I thought by writing in this way, I might contribute something to disrupting the stagnating impulse that visualises the world of Aboriginal people as little more than program upon countless program for ‘fixing up problems’. Surely, we are more than that.

However, Alexis Wright’s commitment and deconstruction of the imagined colonial and postcolonial subject is not only a major concern in Indigenous writing but also perceptible in migrant writing and 21stcentury Australian fiction as a whole. Stories of exile often focus on “departures” and “returns”, showing that departures and returns often operate as provisional states and reflectors of the character’s mind and spirit as well as of a society hemmed in by a state of transition, still unable to confront its cultural reality. Thus, the depiction of Australia within an Asia-Pacific environment commonly revolves around the acts of “going away” and “coming home” as intermediary states that interact in a circular movement between the mind and the spirit so that the idea of “home” is a shifting concept (and the nation an abstraction), a matter of debate and a space for the migrant or alien other to create various connections with the real and imagined worlds that emerge outside the worlds and spaces they currently live in.

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B. De-orientalising Asia Some stories about Asia or stories dealing with the inclusion of otherness and/or strangeness depict the migrant character as an object constructed from an Anglo-Australian and oriental perspective – and as another version of a colonial subject – suggesting that “multiculturalism has failed to invent an alternative to modernist universalism” for it “has recreated cultural anchorages or ethnic” integration locating, registering or nailing everyone “to a locus of enunciation, and locking the subject into the tradition in which he or she was born” (Bourriaud: 34). In her novel The Last Time I saw Mother, Arlene Chai explores political issues and history through the personal and family story of the main character, Caridad, a woman who uncovers her family’s secrets and realises that even though she has been denied her real story, she remains caught in her fake personal history. Chai, who migrated to Australia with her parents in 1982, explores the displacement one feels when leaving the home country behind and integrating into the culture of the host-country. However, while the novel is connected to the writer’s Asian ancestry and experience of migration, it is nonetheless situated in the larger histories relevant to multicultural societies. The plot revolves around the idea that family history is a lie and moving forward through constant displacements and successive enrootings can only restore truth, reality and subjectivity. As a matter of fact, the story is structured around the return of Caridad to her ancestral home in the Philippines, where she uncovers her family’s secrets and must confront the challenging notions of identity and belonging: I have come home to learn to talk again and to listen. I have been given a gift. The gift of my past. And with it has come a lesson. I have learned that the telling of truth – the act – is where the answer lied. It is what I need to do in my own life. It is no easy thing to do. It is an act of courage. (402)

Caridad, who currently lives in Sydney with her teenage daughter, discovers on the trip home to Manila that her elderly mother, Thelma, is actually her aunt and that her aunt Emma is her real mother. The multiple and shifting first-person perspectives of the three characters, as well as the first-person narrative of Ligaya, the cousin, weave the long story of why the adoption took place and how the secret was kept, exposing the interconnected lives and histories of socially deterritorialised subjects and suggesting, from the main character’s viewpoint, that rhizomic history can easily be prone to becoming radicant:

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The character’s ethnic identity and Australian belonging are then part of a formative space that relies on the political ideal of multiculturalism and encapsulates the confluence of the complex pressures within society and culture. In her discovery of truth, Caridad needs to regain her natural position in the family tree but finds herself caught in a shifting space where identity is flexible and open to divergent interpretations – a space where the deracinated subject attempts to negotiate between her divergent identities, among which is her Australian integration, and where the character realises, as Nicolas Bourriaud (21) notes, that: It is roots that make individuals suffer; in our globalized world, they persist like phantom limbs after amputation, causing pain impossible to treat, since they affect something that no longer exists.

So, when Caridad’s mother-in-law tells her that she must unlearn her old ways (327), referring to her potential social interactions with the house servants, Caridad realises that her “unlearning” is such that it ironically translates into her recognition that she no longer entirely belongs in Manila, that she is caught between the familiar and the foreign. The character’s sense of un-belonging obviously stems from the instability of personal family identity and the realisation that “home” is an unstable and problematic concept – just like time and reality, space or place: In my mind, I have two homes. Manila, where my past is. And Sydney, where Jaime and I came to live in search of better opportunities and a safer place to raise our child. So no matter which home I am going home to, I am always leaving another one behind. Some part of me is always absent. Missing the sights and smells of one as I go rushing to the other. Migrants, I think, are people who are never whole, never completely in one place. Ours is a fractured existence. (20)

Torn between the worlds of “home” and the multicultural worlds of the “host-country” i.e., Australia, the character’s feeling of alienation extends to estrangement from her own daughter, Marla, whom she says is a “crazy

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mixed-up kid” (9) – not a hybrid but rather a radicant, an object of negotiation and subject, “one that is not reducible to a stable, closed, and self-contained identity”, existing “exclusively in the dynamic form of its wandering and the contours of the circuit it describes, which are its two modes of visibility” (Bourriaud: 51–55). While Caridad is, in Bourriaud’s sense, located, registered, nailed to a locus of enunciation and locked into a postmodern multiculturalism that recreated anchorages and ethnic rootedness, Marla does not in fact have a single origin as she evolves through successive and simultaneous acts of enrooting: I read somewhere that we may change our path, choose our future. But our beginnings stay with us forever. I had Marla while Jaimie and I still lived in the Philippines. She was eight before we brought her to live in Sydney. And like every migrant, her country of birth has left its mark on her. ‘To confuse the issue,’ she often says, ‘I’m not only Manila-born, conventschool-educated, speak English and Tagalog plus a bit of Chinese and curse in Spanish, but now I reside in Australia as well.’ Crazy mixed-up kid. (9)

Furthermore, Caridad insists that although multicultural Australia has become her host-country, she is often asked about her belonging (19) and singled out as a migrant, that in fact she is viewed through a contradictory and complex process of inclusion that invariably relies on being other. Her otherness is even more acute when the revelation of her adoption emphasises the difficulty of recovering what has been lost and/or left behind: “The past defines us as much as the present. […] Because mine was missing, I never felt whole” (68). A cultural disjunction between “home” and “the host-country” abruptly surfaces as soon as the character is confronted by the family secret so that “home” is no longer familiar but rather strange, all the more so since the home country is a fragmented space. Thus, the social concept of “home” extends to the political nature of the home country, especially as the characters’ respective narrations often emphasise the idea that Manila is marred with social, cultural and temporal divisions (37), and that it encapsulates the fragmented family stories and personal narratives. These divergent stories then tend to operate as vistas onto the outside, for instance, on the political developments in the Philippines and South-East Asia, on historical realities and their implications on individual lives, on belonging and cultural identity. Spanning 50 years of history in the Philippines, from the WWII Japanese invasion and its brutalities through the battle for liberation (with a reference to American bombing) to the Marcoses’ 20-year rule and the

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subsequent People’s Power revolution, the novel confronts divergent viewpoints on the present and allows some characters, like Alfonso, the real father, to speak openly about the war and colonial rule, the annihilation of cultural otherness, robberies and crimes: The Japanese had set up a puppet government. They told us Asia must be for the Asians. But deep down the people despised them. Cursed them. Another hundred years of American rule would have been better than this. Even the Spaniards had not been as cruel. When Alfonso heard people say such things he would reply that they were all foolish to think this way. He said, ‘We have short memories. The Japanese rule now so it is their actions we remember. But the Spaniards were just as bad. And the Americans too. You all look surprised but really they are all the same. Why should one country rule over another? The Spaniards, the Americans and the Japanese have no business here. This is not a Filipino war. Did you ever think about that? What has this war got to do with us?’ (154)

Emma’s account and reporting of Alfonso’s statements respectively debunk the idea of “Asia” as a monocultural space with a singular identity, the place where people from various countries must necessarily identify as Asian despite their extreme diversity in terms of language, ethnicity, religion, culture and social structures. Indeed, Emma’s statement that the Japanese justified their colonial grip on the Philippines on the grounds that Asia was for Asians recalls the discourse about Australia and its noninclusion of Asia. Chai’s novel is a good example that “culture essentially constitutes a mobile entity, unconnected to any particular soil”, that “people’s environments no longer reflect history; rather, they transform it into a spectacle or a memorial” (Bourriaud: 33). The retelling of stories and histories inserts into the present elements that were excluded, pointing out the limits of such histories and the existence of other coterminous spaces. Thus, Chai’s explorations of the complex and fluid identities subvert established hegemonies and the way subaltern peoples are placed outside modernity and perceived as “primitives”. The theme of the journey back home addresses the feeling of unhomeliness experienced by the nonwestern/Asian migrants who have moved to the western place and are caught in the process of becoming integrated and losing some of their “authenticity”. Marla, the main character’s teenage daughter, embodies the dilemma of being both Asian and Western (Anglo-Australian) without contradiction; she is caught between different worlds in an ambiguous process of differing elements:

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‘Now Marla,’ Raoul said as he held on to her hand, ‘you must not forget all you know, you must remember your Tagalog, and the Chinese words you’ve learned, and how you count in Spanish, and by no means must you speak English like an Australian or your poor lolo and lola will not be able to understand you.’ (56)

Marla’s ability to move between different cultures, despite occasional collisions, is part of her radicantcy as she is in constant dialogue with the surfaces she traverses, to which she temporarily relates to during a process of translation and negotiation. The concept of being “Asian-Australian” is felt in her case as empowerment and as a crisis of identity, as a source of bewilderment and contestation. The affirmation of cultural otherness and inclusion in the space of the mainstream also surfaces in stories that deal with the inclusion of “Asia” within the grander scope of multiculturalism and then write against the imagined political community and the apparent communion heralded in Australian discourse on identity and diversity. Works published in the first decade of the 21st century by Australian authors of Asian background, Nam Le, Hsu-Ming Teo, Michelle De Krester or Alice Pung, demonstrate that even though these authors are too often marginalised in the category of “ethnic literature”, they do not simply write about migration and alienation. Indeed, like their non-Asian-Australian peers, Nicholas Jose, Christos Tsiolkas, Tim Winton, Gail Jones, or Eva Sallis, these authors tackle social issues and popular culture in an Australia that still abounds with images inherited from colonial history and the constructed white nation. Their stories, in fact, engage with universal themes and issues and thus build bridges between people and cultures through the binding of divergent visions characters may have. Nam Le, for instance, extends the issues of “Asianess”, cultural alienation, migrancy, dual citizenship and identity in his short-story collection, The Boat (2008), which he dedicates to his parents and siblings, with whom he came to Australia, travelling from Vietnam in 1979 as a boat refugee. The short-story collection designs plots inspired in part by his life and set across the globe in former colonised places, including the Americas. The focus on displaced subjects, who are always on the move both mentally and physically, intertwine the properties of space and time – turning the latter into a territory – and refer to the movement and the dynamism of forms, characterising reality as a conglomeration of transitory surfaces and forms that are potentially movable. Indeed, the first story, “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”, titled in reference to William Faulkner’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, examines the relationship between the main narrator, a

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young Nam, living in the US, and his Vietnamese father visiting from Australia. Family issues and cultural identities surface through the characters’ respective geo-physical isolation and palpable exclusion from their current environment. The first-person narrator realises that cultural belonging and choices are options that can be combined and superimposed, that nothing in the postmodern world really matters since nothing really binds people or requires them to really commit themselves. Living in a small town in Iowa, Nam is trying to write his final story towards the completion of his semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when his father turns up for a visit. Not only does the relationship between the father and the son bring past and personal events to the surface but it also breaks through the narrator’s dealing with his own cultural heritage and the conflict within himself when a friend suggests that he “just write a story about Vietnam” (7). Thus, urged to retell his father’s experiences in Vietnam and his family’s as boat people fleeing oppression, the narrator delves into his father’s past and his own personal history, between the home country of his forebears and the host -country of his present reality. As the narration develops, the idea of the nation as an imagined community is envisaged through its own limitations because the boundaries are simply flexible, volatile, and thus prone to open onto other national spaces – and subvert the quintessential idea that nations encompass unity. The main character’s pondering of his life and relationship with his parents, especially his father, brings to the fore the issue of the Australianness of refugees, especially Asian and Vietnamese refugees, which is always questioned, along with the ambivalent hospitality extended to them in the settler-country. In this story, Nam’s lack of literary inspiration is bound to his difficulty negotiating his Australianness, or Australian identity, while overcoming the complexities of cross-cultural exchanges and differences. The character must also confront the stereotypical and biased view of his friends and relations that he should exploit his ethnic background and life experience to secure a writing career. However, the character’s stream of thought about the value of words subtly and beautifully stems from the Faulknerian view that words have power to create a reality but that they also have the power to displace or destroy it. The word, in fact, is such a volatile catalyst that it may change the course of history and story: That’s all I’ve ever done, traffic in words. Sometimes I still think about word counts the way a general must think about casualties. I’d been in Iowa more than a year – days passed in weeks, then months, more than a year of days – and I’d written three and a half stories. About seventeen thousand words. When I was working at the law firm, I would have written

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that many words in a couple of weeks. And they would have been useful to someone. (6)

The main character’s statements rely on intertextuality as they subtly refer to William Faulkner’s work As I lay Dying, in which Faulkner’s character, Addie Bundren, reflects on love and says: He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear. [...] One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too. (Faulkner: 172)

Indeed, the question of what words are and what they do or mean is also a major theme of Nam Le’s short story, this as much as the Faulknerian idea that a person is the actual words he or she speaks. In the story, the fictional Nam is desperate to find the words that will fill the lack of inspiration and his sense of emptiness, and it is only by showing an interest in his father’s personal history that Nam is able to feel a sense of being and reconstruct his own family story. Yet, it is also through the act of writing the so-called “ethnic story” that reality is annihilated (his father burns the story after reading it) and he is able to realise that the “poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail” (Faulkner 1950). Furthermore, beyond its intertextual nature, the story also subtly refers to the other short stories in the same collection, for instance, “Cartagena”, “Meeting Elise”, “The Boat”, so that the autobiographic rooting of The Boat and the tenuous border between fiction and reality are even more perceptible. Such a border then becomes the subject of writing and reality: ‘Faulkner, you know,’ my friend said over the squeals, ‘he said he should write about the old verities. Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’ A sudden sharp crack behind us, like the shrieking of a giant typewriter hammer, followed by some muffled shrieks. ‘I know I’m not a bad person for saying this,’ my friend said, ‘but that’s why I don’t mind your work, Nam. Because you could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time. Like in your third story.’ […] ‘You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans – and New York painters with haemorrhoids.’ (9)

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In this passage, Nam’s friend points to the status of writing as being metafictional and as a space where reality and history are provisional, “no longer a world of external verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures” (Waugh 1984: 7). Le’s writing thus works against the idea of territorial assignment that stems from a modernist approach and tends to view (and explain) a work of fiction or art by the origin of its author. Hence, with their specific focus on cosmopolitan places set in different countries, ranging from the US and Colombia, to Iran and Australia, the stories explore individual conflict and trauma in postcolonial environments, individual hardships resulting either from militarised agency, unprecedented social and cultural victimisation or from solitude in a modern and global world that is not strictly constricted to Australia or the space of ethnicity. “Tehran Calling”, for instance, explores the religious fervour and the friendship between two women, Sarah and Parvin, during a time of war, terror and political repression. In this story, Nam Le provides a compelling vision of a troubled society scarred by paradoxes of all kinds – political, religious, and sexual – from the outside voice of the “extraneous” American and the westernised Iranian other. A US lawyer, Sarah, travels to Iran on a short visit to her Iranian friend, Parvin, herself formerly a US-based activist for Iranian women’s rights, who is back in her native country and committed to confronting a masculine and fundamentalist society. The focus on the immersion of the foreign other in the space of the non-western nation somehow recalls Eva Sallis’s novel, City of Sealions, which illustrates the encounter of an Australian female character with Yemeni culture, also tackling the intercultural relations between antipodean cultures, even if in Le’s case such intercultural relations take place between American and Iranian cultures, between geographic spaces that embody the confrontation between the West and the East. As a matter of fact, Le’s story develops as a political review on the effects of imperialism and fundamentalism right from the opening lines when the main character, Sarah, is confronted with the hypocrisy of a system that relies on artifice and lies, just like the US or any other modern society living off myths and symbols. The character, for instance, sees dark-eyed women dabbing off their make-up and wearing their head scarves as soon as the plane lands in Tehran, donning the Islamic mask to cover their western penchant and thus negotiating between two poles of a world, two poles in perpetual conflict that concur to seal the individual in pretence, in a world scarred by paradoxes of all kinds. Tehran is not only the dark space of fundamentalism, fanaticism and war but also the space of the underground freedom fighters and dissidents. Besides, the exposure of

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cultural tensions, ethnicity and subjectivity take place in environments that no longer stem from binary representations but rather advocate universal concerns. Nam Le, for instance, marginalises constructed (and national) identities through the voice of those other individuals, migrants and cultures that are cast away to the margins of multicultural spaces. He designs a space where the characters surface as individuals and radicant subjects, individuals that set their roots in motion, “staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the power to completely define [one’s identity], translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing” (Bourriaud: 22). Speaking to fellow-writer Cate Kennedy, Le refers to the use of place and the understanding individuals have of place, the way they apprehend and move through place, saying: “Looking back now, I will say that by switching from place to place … I was in some way formalising the idea that there’s no place that’s not strange to us. Fiction makes strange even the places we think we know”, and adding that the stories in their ambitious scope “are all over the map in more than just the geographical sense” (Kennedy 2008). Le’s statement thus sustains the idea that his narrations subtly elaborate a map of the unconscious, of displaced individuals within global contexts. The last story of The Boat, also titled “The Boat”, for instance, depicts the journey through China’s south seas of asylum seekers hoping to reach Australia. In the story, the main character, a young woman called Mai, is confined like all the other boat people into what seems to be the pit of despair, a foul space reduced to the smells of urine, vomit and sweat, a space crammed with bodies of the wretched of the earth and roaming on the black swells of the ocean (284–285). The narrative’s exploration of the ordeals undergone by boat people seeking asylum as the most basic of human rights extends to the ideas of “escape” and “hospitality” through the dismissing of national identity inherited from the birth-nation and the suggestion that hospitality will always be compromised and incomplete; also that the migrant and/or refugee-subject will always be confronted by an absence or emptiness lying at the heart of the concept of hospitality and integration – a difficulty, as the character says, at going through “the gate” and entering the host-country (284, 299). While the story may have autobiographic undertones, Le argues that the role of fiction is to tell a “greater truth” than non-fiction, that authenticity is an incredibly loaded and complex idea and there is no “simple nexus between lived experience and autobiographical narration in writing” (Massola 2008). As The Boat shows, Le’s writing certainly

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extends beyond autobiography to depict the reality and the questionings of average individuals caught in a dramatic and tragic role. Individuals struggling with an environment marked by the power history, international conflicts and politics, places that embody suffering, deprivation, conflicts and imperialist designs; spaces that annihilate any sense of time, place and subjectivity, and where history is but the endless repetitive pattern of shattered hopes or dreams, of social, cultural and political disorientation. Le, alongside authors such as Tsiolkas, Winton and Flanagan, shows that the otherness within Australianness is subject to a nationalism that rests upon exclusion rather than integration, and that in such discourse the languages of “race” and “multiculturalism” ensure that a natural hierarchy, which is social and cultural, cannot be renegotiated. Furthermore, his depiction of otherness from different geographical perspectives suggests that a reborn imperial power is permeating the global space and the dictates of economic and nationalistic designs shatter the very principle of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. In his writing, the novelist describes places as dynamic and politicised and sets the plots in elastic and resilient spaces where things are never deeply rooted. Indeed, even if in all stories the element that links the characters is “the root”, it paradoxically “becomes the very core of the imaginary universe of globalisation at the very moment when its living reality is fading in favour of its symbolic value and artificial character” (Bourriaud: 50). Le naturally proceeds between spaces that interact but never entirely connect. He thus positions himself as a writer outside the strict literary categories and genres, arguing that he is attracted by those stories that are in fact never told (Devarrieux 2010). In saying so, Le hints at the idea that he writes beyond ethnicity and asserts, even if some stories refer to his parents’ struggle, for instance, in The Boat’s opening and closing narratives, that his stories are clearly devoted to spaces beyond the personal and the spaces of Asia and home: … why I write: to challenge old understandings, or consolidate them, or try out new ones – whilst actively misbelieving the very processes and principles of such understanding. It puts me in mind of a description of writing I heard somewhere: that what we writers do is create, every day, the very ground we need to stand on. (D’Ambrosio 2009) As with many writers I know, I find myself pretty wary of identifying myself as a writer at all. The designation seems impossibly abject and highfalutin at the same time. To me, you’re a writer if and when you write – a characterisation that verges almost immediately on self-collapse; the idea of further loading that instability with the weight of other appellations – ethnic or otherwise – seems ill-conceived, irresponsible. I’ve written a

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book of seven stories. I hope to write more books in the future. My hope is that any project of categorisation – which, at its best, is a noble and intellectually rigorous project – will take account, first and foremost, of the stories I’ve written and the books I hope yet to write. (Pham 2009)

Le’s comments against writing labels, and his claim that writing is about experimenting with form and narrative space, are perceptible in the story “Halflead Bay”, in which he adopts a style and technique reminiscent of Tim Winton’s writing and addresses quintessential Australian values, employing the Wintonian use of the vernacular and symbolic bond with the coastal environment. Set in a fishing hamlet on the coast, the narrative revolves around the passage from adolescence to adulthood, with an emphasis laid on the tangible tensions that surface through such an evolution and yet a rite of passage. The depiction of the main character’s anxiety and ordeals has links with Tim Winton’s very first novel An Open Swimmer (1982). Le’s main character, Jamie, shares Winton’s main character’s (Jerra Nilsam) painful experiences of friendship and love as he struggles with his fate and experiences, in his case, his mother’s serious illness. Through his Anglo-Australian character, Le enters the discourse of whiteness, the space of rurality and the archetypes of “Australianness” commonly associated with the white, male and heterosexual figure. The values of tenacity, stoicism and loyalty, inherent in the identity of the “pioneer”, “battler” and “mate”, are seen neither from an Anglo nor an Asian-Australian perspective but from the outside or the edge of the mainstream. Since “Halflead Bay” depicts the transitions in life and the ordinary drama of a character who seems to be immersed in a narrative of survival in small-town life and his initiation through football and not surfing, Le’s focus seems to lie solely on the themes of confusion and youth, longing and boredom in rural places, the coming of a new stage in life and death. Yet, the story extends to other issues, for instance, the experience of all individuals in various places – individuals who seem to be losers rather than winners, who are caught on the margins of a dominant class or society and sometimes exposed to racism or any other form of segregation (119–120). Le’s collection of stories depicts insecure and anxious nations built on cultural discrepancies rather than true multiculturalism, insisting that the politics of nationalism and belonging have since the end of the 20th century been dominated by a post-imperial nostalgia inherited from unresolved pasts. In “The Boat”, the main character’s observation and memories symbolically extend beyond the circumscribed world of Asia to the ocean and its bearing of histories. The central image of the sea embodies, again with a Wintonian strain, the characters’ stories, the flotsam and jetsam of

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histories and experiences, also attesting to the writer’s fascination with the body of water and its vastness, its interconnected systems and drifting nature. In the following passage, Le advocates an interest in the sea, which is as strong as Tim Winton’s own interest in the ocean: … the sea is an obsession with me and as such, to invoke prior statement, I don’t think I’ll ever understand why. All I know is that for me it taps into something deep and true, it draws from the dimension on which I’d like all my fiction to exist. For me it transcends both beauty and terror, or, rather, it somehow enables that asymptotic endpoint where they meet and cancel each other out, and that seems to me the most loaded point of all. […] I could say my temperament is compelled by how the sea, like the sun, is the source from which all life flows, but because it’s here, within touch, we continually exert ourselves upon it; we bang up against it though we come off worse every time; we skate and pullulate on its sheer membrane and yet claim mastery over it—and I’m drawn to the romance and the absurdity and futility of this. […] I’m obsessed with the irresistible, if facile, parallel between the physical sea and the body of mystery it could be posited as protecting. Such that to plumb the physical depths of the sea – as to plumb the psychic, philosophical, epistemological depths in writing (or thinking, or living) – is to be crushed, not as a matter of conjecture or possibility but as a matter of mathematical certainty. And isn’t this an apt description of what we do? Stand on the shore, facing figments, throwing words into the water? (D’Ambrosio 2009)

In Le’s work, questions of identity, culture and politics seem to operate as the flow of the sea and its many features, as spaces marked by a series of paradoxes. Yet, while the need and desire for identity and recognition among humans seem almost universal, Le suggests that their forms and practices are diverse, often discordant, alienating and detrimental to society. Thus, the conception and ideological construction of identity in relation to difference is a cause of division – as much as the way “diversity” is negotiated or understood through a unified model (of the self or even the nation) that may serve to justify social, cultural and political action. Le, just like other Australian authors, obviously questions the multiculturalist version of diversity and ethnicity in the context of “a new modern moment based on generalised translation, the form of wandering, an ethics of precariousness, and a heterochronic vision of history” (Bourriaud: 184). His writing designs characters whose identity is constructed in motion – a fragile identity stemming from a psycho-geography that is no longer the only solid foundation of individual and social existence. Le thus suggests that identity is a space which is at once local and global, fixed and fluid, deep and contingent, constraining yet resistible.

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The Boat shows that the very idea of wandering along the cultural territory of the other does not presuppose that such an “other” is a marginal figure. Indeed, each story seems to design a space for the radicant character, “the quintessential inhabitant” of an “imaginary universe of spatial precariousness, a practitioner of unsticking of affiliations” (Bourriaud 57), and in so doing responds to the living conditions brought about by globalisation. Thus the postcolonial nature of Australia is no longer dependent on an extension from Britain or colonial history but has rather become the “altermodern space” of individuals who no longer depend on a root but “advance in all directions on whatever surfaces present themselves by attaching multiple hooks to them” (Bourriaud: 51). Nam Le, like other Australian authors, is indeed a “globalectic writer, who facilitates new relations between national cultures and the global” (Gunew 2014).

CONCLUSION

Recent Australian fiction establishes a dialogue with various contexts to show that the idea of the nation is an abstraction and culture is a shifting concept. 21st-century writing certainly takes its roots from the 1970s literary movement, with an interest in ecological issues and the postcolonial nature of Australia, creating new ramifications and new approaches to social, cultural and political issues. The pre- and postreconciliation periods, with discourses on the sense of belonging and moving past colonial history, have encouraged new approaches in writing and new representations that reposition the space of the nation beyond the post-colonial space, formally envisioned as an extension of Europe. Thus, the anxiety and trauma generated by territorial loss and fragmentation are recurrent phenomena in Australian contemporary writing. For some authors (Kim Scott, Alexis Wright), it is a way of excavating the dark episodes of history, of reclaiming a lost heritage and bringing stories back into a postcolonial reality. For others (T. Winton, R. Flanagan, G. Jones), it can be interpreted as the (desperate) attempt to heal the anxieties of (un) belonging that haunt settler culture. The analysis of novels and essays that relate to issues of land, Indigeneity and multiculturalism shows that in their examination of otherness and belonging within a local or global environment, Australian writers are engaged with the geography they traverse, and illustrate, with a keen sense of observation, the popular and subversive cultural formations within historical and political environments. The official history of the nation is depicted as an exclusionary and hegemonic concept that complexifies the tenet of multiculturalism and the postcolonial nature of Australia. Even if the concept of terra nullius is overrated, the meaning of “country” nonetheless seems difficult to trace. Moreover, as shown in stories that examine the encounter of diasporic subjects, or new migrants, with the interior geographic spaces, some authors connect one’s otherness with an “other’s otherness” to suggest that the migrant has become an object constructed by Australian culture, and that such construction is but another version of colonialism. Eva Sallis, for instance, uses the same themes and techniques, relying on metaphors of disjuncture, hybridity, migrancy, liminality and border crossings. Influenced by her international upbringing and experience, she meets Abdul R. Jan Mohamed’s typology

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of the “specular border intellectual” and the “syncretic border intellectual” (Jan Mohamed: 97), writing in a post-migratory perspective. She endeavours to combine cultural elements experienced in many places in order to articulate new syncretic forms and stories, and shows that the characters move between antagonistic national spaces, between Arabic and Australian cultures, probing the relationship to the home nation and its periphery (the birth-nation), the history that precedes and threatens their present. Furthermore, the ambivalence of the postcolonial situation is encapsulated in the polyvalent nature of cultural identities and histories. Stories by C. Tsiolkas, N. Le, B. Yahp, E. Sallis and A. Chai, often set in foreign places, tend to suggest that cultural spaces coexist in the nationspace and they design a dishevelled whole, no longer on the margins of Europe but within the Asia-Pacific space. Henceforth, the way these authors fictionalise encounters with Europe, Asia or the Middle-East (whether the story is set in an Australian context or in foreign places) clearly reconfigures the politics of hybridity and identity. By signifying difference between self and other, a “traditional” foreign place (Asia and the Middle-East) and the “modern” West, hybridity not only highlights the various meanings derived from encounters but also allows the characters to negotiate agency and freedom from disparate structures of authority. Landscape associations and memories are then translocalised in the process of migration and displacement to become the major components of contemporary identity making. In some works, for instance, memory is a space of reflection that relocates the subject and senses of “home” in shifting locations. Thus, it is in their decentring of Australia’s postcolonial nature and wondering about the genealogies of cultures (diasporas, settler, migration, Indigenous) – whether these genealogies design a real or mythical territory – that Australian writers manage to show that culture constitutes a mobile entity, unconnected to any soil, and subjectivity can never be circumscribed to enrootedness and integration. Besides, while Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors create their own fictional world, they nonetheless interrogate and construct the histories of individuals labelled either “marginal” or “other”. These authors address the country and their time, placing the non-Anglo-Celtic migrant at the heart of Australian history; a history marked with silences and dots, where the “other” always surfaces as a “postcolonial other”, decolonising the mind, the space and the culture of the mainstream. Hence, the various approaches to the themes and issues that refer to social space, within or outside Australia, suggest an evolution in the way such authors perceive

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the environment and engage with national discourse on multiculturalism and migration. The re-telling of the migrant and diasporic experience as versions of dynamic, multidirectional and revolutionary histories of individuals explicitly contends that postmodern multiculturalism has recreated cultural and ethnic enrootedness and has failed to transcend modernist and universalist claims. Thus, Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of the radicant operates in the work of Australian authors whose focus on intercultural relations and encounters with Europe, Asia or the Middle-East creates the context of a new form of modernity based on translation and the fluidity of identity. These authors subvert hegemonic images by portraying not only Australia but also the rest of the world as dynamic and politicised spaces, always contested, always cast into other spaces and reconfigured. Taking into account the global and the local, these writers design stories that resist neo-imperial discourse and construct transcultural encounters, some of which result in an expressive hybrid form. Hybridity is then, and in the Bhabhaean sense, a way of addressing the intertwining of cultural signs and practices reflected in the polyglot, diasporic and multivalent cultural sites marked by their constant transgression of the original. Recent Australian fiction demonstrates that the post-colonial culture of Australia, often presented as a hybridised phenomenon involving a dialectical relationship between European culture and Indigenous ontology, no longer operates as a dynamic interaction between a centre and a periphery. The capacity of authors to move beyond post-colonial constructions to design an alternative space of multiplicity where nothing holds but constantly moves sustains Nicolas Bourriaud’s argument that to “move within the “post” of post-colonialism (also of postmodernism) implies that one had first to declare where one came from and then had to situate oneself in relation to an earlier historical situation” (Bourriaud: 183). Thus, as the book shows, recent fiction illustrates popular and subversive cultural formations within the nation-state in order to retell the migrant/diasporic experience as a dynamic and multidirectional history of all Australians, wondering whether the paradigm of migration is not superseded or even undermined by a diasporic space, in a global perspective. Australian authors imagine new trajectories between signs and in so doing facilitate the interaction between local, national and international environments. Their stories question the ability of art and fiction to define and inhabit a globalised culture and resist either standardisation or compartmentalisation. Not only are such authors “globalectic writers” (Gunew 2014), part of a global space of exchange, but they are also

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engaged in the counter-movement of altermodernity, “the space of negotiation going beyond postmodern multiculturalism” and postcolonialism; the altermodern space which is “attached to the dynamics of discourses” rather than their origins (Bourriaud, 40). On the eve of the Commonwealth Games in 2002, Richard Flanagan wrote an essay titled “A Ghostly Memory of a Master Race” for The Guardian. The newspaper had asked a panel of writers from Commonwealth countries to describe what they thought the Commonwealth was and meant. In his essay, Flanagan refers to his daughters and says: I asked each of my three daughters what they think of the Commonwealth. None of them knows what it is. They are largely Irish on my side and Slovenian on their mother’s. They are related to Flanagans who are Aboriginal, Filipino and Lithuanian. They learn Indonesian and Chinese at school. They are taught Aboriginal dances and mythology. They listen to Australian bands and rappers. Follow Australian football. Read Australian books. They are children not of the Commonwealth, but of a vast and troubled country called Australia. (Flanagan 2002)

Flanagan’s remarks sum up what Australia has become, a space that situates past the post of “post-colonialism”, haunted by the colonial past yet well and truly positioned in radicantcy, setting its many roots in motion, in the space of translation and negotiation. On Harmony Day, 21 March 2017, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull released a new statement redefining what being Australian meant. The document, titled Releasing Multicultural Australia: United, Strong, Successful, marks a new step since it includes British and Irish settlers in the definition of multicultural Australia, not just the other migrant groups or the Indigenous people. This new and recent definition of multiculturalism seems to call for a reconfiguring of the nation and modes of representations, integrating otherness from non-European or non-British backgrounds, and, to a certain extent, also seems to envisage multicultural Australia as an altermodern space. Yet, one may wonder whether this new political ideal and redefinition of the nation will or will not affect the post-colonial nature of Australia along with literary and cultural discourse.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Literary Works CHAI Arlene, The Last Time I Saw Mother, Sydney, Random House, 1995. FLANAGAN Richard, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, North Sydney: Random House, 2013. —. Wanting, North Sydney: Random House, 2008. —. The Unknown Terrorist, New York: Grove Press, 2006. —. Death of a River Guide (1994), Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2004. —. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish, (2001), London: Atlantic Books, 2003. GEMMELL Nikki, Lovesong, London: Picador, 2001 —. Shiver (1997), Sydney: Random House, 1999. —. Cleave, Sydney: Random House, 1998. GRENVILLE Kate, The Secret River (2005), Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2006. JONES Gail, Sorry (2007), London: Vintage, 2008. —. Dreams of Speaking (2006), London: Vintage, 2007. JOSE Nicholas, The Red Thread, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000. KENNEDY Cate, Dark Roots (2006), Brunswick: Scribe, 2012. —. The World Beneath (2009), North Carlton: Scribe, 2010. LE Nam, The Boat (2008), Camberwell: Penguin, 2009. MALOUF David, A First Place, North Sydney: Random House, 2014. —. A Spirit of Play (1998), Sydney: ABC Books, 1999. —. Remembering Babylon (1993), New York, Vintage, 1994. MCGAHAN Andrew, Wonders of a Godless World (2009), London: Harper Collins, 2010. —. Underground, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2006. —. The White Earth (2004), Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005. NOONUCCAL Oodgeroo, We Are Going, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1964. PARRETT Favel, Past the Shallows, Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2011. SALLIS Eva, The City of Sealions, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. —. Hiam, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998. SCOTT Kim, That Deadman Dance (2010), Sydney: Picador, 2011. —. Benang, Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 1999. —. True Country, South Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993.

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KOVAL Ramona, “Kate Grenville”, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National 2007, www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm. O’BRIEN Kerry, “Wright Wins Miles Franklin for Story of Homeland”, Interview, http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1958594.htm PHAM Hoa, “Interview with Nam Le”, www.peril.com.au/back-editions/edition06/interview-with-nam-le/ SALES Leigh, “Christos Tsolkias Joins Lateline”, ABC Radio 21/05/2009. http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2577694.htm ZHANG Lily, “Transnational Writings: An Interview with Australian Writer Nicholas Jose”, https://www.library.uq.edu.au/ojs/index.php/asc/index.

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York and London, 1994. DIPROSE Roselyn, “Belonging to Race, Gender, and Place Beneath Clouds”, Differences 19, 3, 2008. DODGSON-KATIYO Pauline and Wisker Gina, Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing, Amsterdam: Brill-Rodopi, 2010. DREW Julie, “Cultural Composition: Stuart Hall on Ethnicity and the Discursive Turn”, JAC 18, 1998: 171–196. DREW Philip, Verandah, Embracing Place, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1992. DURING Simon, The Cultural Studies Reader, Second Edition, London and New York: Routledge, (1993 & 1999), 2001. ELIADE Mircea, Aspects du Mythe, Paris: Gallimard, 1988 (1963). FLANAGAN, Richard. “Wilderness and History” Public History Review 1: 103–117, 1992. FLANAGAN Richard and Pybus Cassandra, The Rest of the World is Watching, Sydney: Pan, 1990. FORMAN Richard T.T and Godron Michel, Landscape Ecology, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1986. FOUCAULT Michel, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 ,1984: 46–49. —. The Order of Discourse, trans. Ian McLeod, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, Robert J.C. Young (ed), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981: 51–76. —. Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon, 1977. —. Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Vintage, 1973, i–x. —. Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. GAMAL Ahmed, “The Global and the Postcolonial in Post-migratory Literature”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49, 5, 2013: 596–608. GANTER Regina, “Turn the Map Upside Down”, Griffith REVIEW, Edition 9 – Up North: Myths, Threats & Enchantment, 2005. GEE Helen, “Social and Cultural Grounds for the Restoration of Lake Pedder”; in Sharples, C., (ed.), Lake Pedder: Values and Restoration, Occasional Paper No. 27, Centre for Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania, 2001: 109–116. GELDER Ken, “When the Imaginary Australian is Not Uncanny: Nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian Cultural Criticism and History”, Journal of Australian Studies 86, 2006: 163–173.

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