Voices From The Edge Of The World

Thus spake white Australia, an infant just weaned from the immediate demands of existence to contemplate life. The baby is learning to speak now, still groping for a voice in which to articulate its sense of rejection at being shunted to the edge of the world.

Three Australian voices, very sensitive to their context, and yet, somewhere, still groping to find meaning in what seems a vacuous existence. David Malouf: a middle-aged male voice graceful, poetic, hopeful and confident. Gillian Mears: a young female voice throbbing with life, sensuous, struggling, displaying a compassion tinged with sorrow at something lost, or maybe, something never known but missed. Libby Hathorn: a mother trying to explore the mysterious caverns of adolescent minds their feelings, their desires, their fears. But like a good mother, she cannot stop there. Even as she defines, she must circumscribe.

 

Australian literature is coming into its own a long way down the historical journey that began centuries ago with Beowulf. The medium might be the English language, but what is communicated is the very Australian sense of angst.

Malouf, Mears and Hathorn are in India as part of an initiative to give the Indian peoples a taste of Australian culture. There is a sad irony underlying the post-colonial literary scenario though the only access Indians and Australians have to each others texts is through works published in the United Kingdom or the United States. The Australians have only read the big expat Indian names like Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai... And also V S Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, they suggest, tentatively.

Like a lot of their Indian counterparts, the writers from Down Under too tend to believe they have made it only when they have been published in England or the States. Its sad from the point of view of the ego, but I guess we still suffer what you might call the cultural cringe, says Mears.

Two books by each of the writers are being published by Penguin India to commemorate this cultural event. The selection was left to the individual writers.

David Maloufs An Imaginary Life, a metaphysical work, tells the story of a poet in exile. The protagonist is Publius Ovidius Nasu, exiled to a wilderness where the people know neither Greek nor Latin. It is an exile from language; Ovid is left bereft of the power to communicate. The poet meets a wild boy (Ovid was always interested in the theme of metamorphosis) growing up among the wolves. The boy (Ovid's alter ego?) embodies the more elemental and natural forces in him, smothered en route to civilised living.

A text often says a lot more than it was meant to say, and this book turned out to be quite a revelation to me, says Malouf. Critics believe the subject would have been handled very differently by a non-Australian. They see in it the Australian solitariness, and the attempt to imaginatively reshape the world with itself at the centre!

For Malouf, the book suggests the Greek psychopomp the figure who gathers himself into the oneness of things. And in some ways An Imaginary Life has become a cult piece an optimistic testament that is spiritual without being religious, speaking of the unity and wholeness that makes for life.

If Malouf speaks a universal language through allegory set in a virtual no-mans land, Gillian Mears comes at the other end of the spectrum. Her world is encapsulated in the small township of Fineflour, also the name of her collection of short stories and the setting for her novel, The Mint Lawn.

Fineflour is really Grafton, but I just loved the name. It makes for such a poignant symbol white settlers were fording the river when this flour wagon tipped over and the river was a gauze of white. The river was conquered and then the aborigines began to be herded into the missions, says Mears.

There are three houses still standing in the real Fineflour. But Mears draws her characters from the town she grew up in, Grafton. Her stories are told with an intensity that leaves the reader gasping for air. Thats how I appraise the world I have a long nose, big ears... I hate myself for it, but I cant help myself. Its a world playing out a soap opera there is adultery, death, the works. I did tend to get too close to the bone but now I am more careful about camouflaging my characters, says Mears. All said, Grafton is proud of me.

The short stories have interconnected narratives with characters and events looping in and out it is Virginia Woolf in the raw. Thats what gives it a certain resonance, she says enthusiastically. The work captures a time that was precious to her. The stories revolve around the death of her best friend: It was my way of paying homage to her.

India is so laden with stories, Mears says, like the aborigines who have an oral narrative history going back a thousand years. But for us Australians, there is only an emptiness. Our stories communicate that emptiness domestic life begins to be a frightening experience when confronted with that kind of a void... She cites an example from her childhood memories: Grafton was famous for its jacaranda trees, planted there by an American. Every year a festival commemorated the occasion. I used to hate the festival, it was so banal. Today, looking back, I know why I hated it so much. It was all so hollow, there was really no rich history to back it.

Mears hopes the larger picture emerges from the microcosm she so vividly paints. But her next work will more overtly deal with larger concerns. The rights of the aborigines, the multinational takeover of the cash crop segment, the mutilation of rivers to satiate immediate industrial appetites, the protection of rain forests... are all passionate concerns. My writing is going to turn political where environment is concerned, she says determinedly.

Malouf would never approve. Political comment is anathema to his style. Opinion spells the death of writing and thinking. Writing is the process of discovering something, he says.

It is the voice of the adolescent that emerges in Libby Hathorns works. She is very clear about what she is not trying to do. Im not setting out to change the world or teach the kids anything, she says categorically. Here the reader meets the confused, questioning adolescent, trying to learn the ropes of survival. Hathorns attempt is to reach the child emotionally. The Climb, her latest work, looks at the world from the point of view of the growing male child, obsessed with his physique, his sexuality, unable to free himself from the pincer-grip of peer pressure. It brings out the adolescents very vivid, intense internal life. The whole world of perception is combed to find an answer to the one question that haunts him: Who am I. The young protagonist never really reaches the top, the emphasis is on the struggle to get there.

Withthunderwiththunder... becomes Thunderwith, the second book she brings to India. The book is a bestseller in Australia. It is unashamedly Australian, Australian bush, to be more precise, with aborigines singing about the bush a very spiritual place. The book speaks to the urban child of the beauty and wonder of nature.

The best writing will always be very regional it relates to specific places, specific lives. And the reader enters this world imaginatively, says Malouf. Thats white Australia for you. As the three writers themselves will tell you, the aborigines speak a very different language. And they speak as one, with one voice. But their language, like that of natures boy, may already have passed beyond the understanding of civilised man.