The Boy Behind the Curtain

by Tim Winton

  And the eagles? Well, from year to year and draft to draft there was a scene I could never bring myself to part with, a sequence in my little landscape romance when a man and a woman, driving down a coast road in hostile silence, hit a wedgetail that blunders against the windscreen. The shock causes the driver to veer off the road and almost roll the vehicle. For a few moments they sit dumb as the bird recovers, gathers its great wings, and in a scramble of talons and feathers takes to the sky. It had always been a pivotal point in the story, a fraught moment of change between the two characters. And then one night in summer, like a man bulldozing his home paddock to keep the fire front at bay, I bladed the scene off without hesitation. Too melodramatic, implausible; nobody’s going to hit a wedgetail eagle with their car. So, in an instant, at the slash of a pencil, it was gone, another couple of pages out – on to the next thing. And in my besieged state, having found the ruthlessness required to save the book, I thought the scene was gone for good.

  But now, as the hours passed and the sun overtook me, I began to see that it was only gone from the novel. I hadn’t been able to expunge it from memory. Because I had it all there again, pressing against me: the room I was in when I first wrote it, the rank smell of the carpet, the bobbing heads of pigeons at the crud-smeared window, the rusty rooftops below. I could still see the clean white page and feel the excitement of knowing I had something good to fill it with. Not that the scene was easy to get right. The pains I went to in trying to describe the way the bird struggled for purchase on the duco, its tawny feathers blurred against the glass. I laboured over the moment of collapsing resistance between the man and the woman, the way the natural world corrals and inflames and inspires them. I’d been there; I’d inhabited that moment. By sheer force of work I’d made it so real to myself it resonated as an experience. And now, having consigned it to the rubbish bin, I was overcome with regret. All these wedgies, they had me going now; I was thinking of all the other good pages I’d chucked in the bin, the years of labour I couldn’t just shrug off with a purgative road trip.

  I’d never had qualms like these before. A feeling of bereavement over a turning point in a book – it was ridiculous. Look, I told myself, you got lucky: you found the novel in the manuscript. You clawed back out of a pit and spared yourself a lot of embarrassment. And, okay, you’re a little shaky, talking to yourself out here on the open plain, but at least you’ve got some sort of book coming out at Christmas; you get to keep the advance – think of the breathing space. Besides, the eagle business probably was a bit florid; you’re better off without it. So buck up!

  And I did what I could to talk myself down, but the raptors didn’t let up.

  In the middle of the afternoon, before the Nullarbor began to give way to the first woodlands of the gold country, I saw in the distance a pair of eagles fighting over the remains of something at the roadside. They had the unhurried authority and the sloping shoulders of bankers. As I rushed onward something dark fluttered up between them. The land beyond was piled green with trees like treasures these birds stood guard before. Hell, I was sick of them now. As I bore down upon them I saw the two wedgetails had the body of a third eagle between them. A little unlikely, but there it was. Probably mown down by a truck. They were struggling over the carcass, each bird with a wingtip in its beak so that in the midst of this tug of war the dead raptor rose from the gravel to its full span, dancing upright, feathers bristling in the wind. I was tired and slightly loopy, it’s true, but it looked to me as if that eagle were taunting me, capering at the roadside as if to say, Here I am, not gone yet!

  I flew by. I drove on long after I should have pulled over and I thundered through the salmon gums into the wheatbelt and out toward the coast. I did 1300 kilometres that day. In the final hours I felt every bump in the road. I wondered what it was, this mixture of sadness and exhilaration I was coming home with.

  Stones for Bread

  Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  ‘If a child asks you for bread,’ Jesus of Nazareth said, ‘will you give him a stone?’ He seems to have been a man of many awkward questions. On the face of it, this one is a no-brainer. Yet it continues to trouble us. In contemporary Australia, the so-called Lucky Country, when children arrive on our shores pleading for bread – what do we give them?

  To those inspired by Jesus’ teachings, Palm Sunday is profoundly important. It’s a reminder that we walk in his footsteps. We try to carry his liberating impulse with us, to honour it and keep it alive. In communities all over the globe, people walk together for peace and reconciliation. And not just Christians, people of every faith and of no faith at all unite to express shared values and yearnings, a common humanity, the things that bind us rather than those that separate us.

  Some of us remember this day particularly as one on which an itinerant prophet spoke truth to power. The Nazarene arrived at the gates of Jerusalem in a calculated parody of imperial pomp: instead of a stallion he rode a borrowed donkey, in place of an army he’d brought along a bunch of holy fools who threw cloaks and palm leaves in his path as if he were some kind of big shot. This was a peaceful act of dissent, a passive provocation, and it was the beginning of a sequence of events that got him executed a week later. Christ’s ideas, the teaching his followers came to call The Way, were an affront to the common sense of the time. They were so offensive they could not be tolerated.

  And many of us who mark Palm Sunday are the same sort of lily-livered specimens who made up the rabbi’s hapless entourage two thousand years ago; we are their echoes. Our purpose is not to praise the conventions of the day, but to dissent from them. We’re here to call a spade a spade, to declare that what has become political common sense in Australia over the past fifteen years is actually nonsense, and not just harmless nonsense – it’s vicious, despicable nonsense. Something is festering in the heart of our community, something shameful and rotten. It’s born of a secret, one we don’t like to acknowledge, which we hide at a terrible cost.

  You see, we’re afraid of strangers. We’re even scared of their traumatized children. Yes, this big brash rich nation trembles. When people arrive with nothing but the sweat on their backs and a crying need for safe refuge, we’re terrified. Especially if they arrive by boat. It seems the boat makes all the difference. So great and so wild is our fear of maritime arrivals, we can no longer see victims of war and persecution as fellow humans. This fear has deranged us. It overturns all our civic standards, our pity, our tradition of decency, to the extent that we do everything in our power to deny these people their legal right to seek asylum. They’re vilified as ‘illegals’ and their suffering is scoffed at or obscured. Our moral and legal obligations to help them are minimized, contested, or traduced entirely.

  Our leaders have taught us we need to harden our hearts against these folk. The political slogans have done their work, the mantras of fear have been internalized. We can sleep at night because these creatures, these objects are gone. We didn’t just turn them away, we put stones in their empty pockets and made them disappear.

  But will we sleep easy? I wonder.

  We weren’t always this scared. I was a young man when we opened our arms and hearts to tens of thousands of fleeing Vietnamese in the 1970s. We looked into their traumatized faces and took pity. We didn’t resort to cages or gulags. We took these strangers into our homes and halls and community centres. They became our neighbours, our schoolmates, our colleagues at work, and their calm, humane reception reflected the decency of this country. Malcolm Fraser asked the best of us, and despite our misgivings we rose to the challenge.

  Fifteen years ago the nation’s leaders began to pander to our fears, and now they are at the mercy of them. Fear has turned us. In our own time we have seen what is plainly wrong, what is demonstrably immoral, celebrated as not simply pragmatic but right and fair. Both mainstream political parties pursue asylum-seeker policies based on cruelty and secrecy. A hard-h
earted response to the anguish of others is popular; it’s the common sense of our day.

  In the time of Charles Dickens child labour was common sense, too. So was the routine degradation of impoverished women. Charity was punitive and the suffering of children inconsequential. The poor of Victorian England were human garbage. Common sense saw them exported, offshored in chains to a gulag out of sight. For many of us, these despised objects are our forebears.

  My convict ancestor was a little boy when he was transported, what is now known as an unaccompanied minor. I’ve been thinking of him lately, this child consigned to oblivion; public events make it unavoidable. And after reading of the sexual abuse of defenceless women on Nauru and Manus Island, the instances of assault by guards, the epidemic of self-harm, I’ve been wondering how it could be that these things have happened in our time, on our watch, with our taxes, in our name.

  From a grisly past, from brutish conventions, Australia emerged to build something better than Victorian England. We distinguished ourselves with a tradition of equality, humanity, solidarity. Until recently we thought it low and cowardly to avert our gaze from someone in need, to turn our face from them as though they didn’t exist. That’s where our tradition of mateship comes from. Not from closing ranks against the outsider, but from lifting someone up, helping them out, resisting the craven urge to walk by.

  Nowadays we don’t see refugees’ faces at all, and that’s no acci­dent. The government hides them from us, in case we feel natural human sympathy. Pity is no longer a virtue but a form of weakness. Asylum seekers have been turned into cargo, contraband, criminals. Quite deliberately, human decency has been supplanted by a consensus built on hidden suffering, maintained by secrecy, cordoned at every turn by institutional deception. This, my friends, is the new common sense.

  According to this new dispensation Australia does not belong to the wider world. We’re nobody’s fool. We have no obligations to our fellow humans, unless it suits us. Why? Because we are exceptional and therefore beyond reproach. What makes us so special is not clear but we are determined, it seems, to distinguish ourselves in the world by our callousness, by our unwavering hardness of heart. We will not be lectured to by outsiders – or, come to think of it, by insiders either – about human rights, torture, or the incarceration of children. We’ll bluster at critics and bully whistleblowers into silence. We’ll smear their reputations. In the diplomatic language of Tony Abbott, we’ll shirtfront them.

  But to live as hostages to our lowest fears we must surrender things that are sacred: our human decency, our morality, our self-respect, our inner peace. To passively assent to this new convention is to set out together on a road that leads to horrors. To exile and cage children ‘for their own good’, to prolong misery ‘in order to save life’, to declare that the means will justify the end is to echo the lies of tyrants.

  If this is common sense I refuse to accept it. I dissent. I have no special moral powers. And I say these things in sorrow. But I know when something’s wrong, and what my country is doing is wrong.

  Prime Minister, turn us back from this path to brutality. Restore us to our best selves. Turn back from piling trauma upon the traumatized. It grinds innocent people to despair and self-harm and suicide. It ruins the lives of children. It shames us and it poisons the future. Give these people back their faces, their humanity. Do not avert your gaze and do not hide them from us.

  In another time, perhaps soon, our common sense will be seen as nonsense. And we’ll have to ask ourselves, Was it worth it? This false piece of mind – was it worth the price paid in human suffering? How will we account for ourselves?

  Jesus said: ‘What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world only to lose his soul?’ And I wonder: What does it profit a people to do likewise, to shun the weak and punish the oppressed, to cage children, and make criminals of refugees?

  Children have asked us for bread and we have given them stones. We filled their pockets with rocks and pushed them back upon the deep.

  So turn back, my country. While there’s still time. Truly, we are better than this.

  Remembering Elizabeth Jolley

  I was eighteen when I met the novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Jolley. Fresh out of high school I enrolled at Curtin University, then known as the Western Australian Institute of Technology, and found myself in one of her writing classes. I’d never heard of her or her work, but she was the first published writer I ever encountered. She was fifty-five years old and after years of rejection she was in the process of becoming famous.

  God knows what I expected, but I hadn’t anticipated this genteel old lady in the hippie dress and sandals. She had a lovely soft, hesitant voice, a posh English accent that brought the hairs up on the back of my defensive working-class neck, and she seemed to think that the best way to win over a roomful of kids in op-shop suits and lime-green hair (or in my case, flannel shirt and Adidas Rome joggers) was to begin the class with a few Lieder, courtesy of the trusty cassette player she set up on the sill of the non-opening window. I was fascinated by her windswept English teeth. And those granny glasses she wore might have given even Janis Joplin second thoughts.

  To be honest, my initial impression of Elizabeth was in keeping with my general disenchantment as a writing student. At that time WAIT was the only Australian university offering a degree in creative writing and I had hopelessly unrealistic expectations of it. I must have confused this fledgling enterprise with the sorts of graduate programs available at Iowa or Stanford, courses I couldn’t hope to afford or even qualify for academically. Those famed departments were staffed by major poets and novelists, writers even an eighteen-year-old from Karrinyup might have heard of. But after some early excitement I found myself enrolled in a bog-ordinary BA course with a trendy seventies media bent. Sure, there was writerly stuff on offer, but up close it looked a bit naff. The staff heavyweights taught the real units – the academic end of the deal – but creative writing was mostly left to writers of very modest reputation and experience who wielded no power in the department. As I saw it, WAIT made a big noise about creative writing but never hired accordingly. I imagine things have changed considerably with the years, but back then this institutional imbalance really rankled. In retrospect it would appear the English department preferred to make heavyweights of their own rather than recruiting them from outside.

  Of course it was hardly fair of me to expect a Wallace Stegner or Malcolm Bradbury to be teaching in a provincial undergraduate course such as this. I was a kid who knew nothing. But I stayed in the course until I got a degree, and even did a postgrad year. I’m grateful for those four years, but there were times when I felt I’d been sold a pup. During that first class with Elizabeth, as Germans warbled away in glorious monaural from the windowsill, mine wasn’t the only face that fell just a little.

  When you’re a kid you assume you’re the only work in progress, that everyone above you, those you look to, have evolved to a level of angelic achievement. But the WAIT writing course, like the department and the literary culture beyond it, was still finding its way, making itself up as it went along. In her publishing career, Elizabeth was likewise still finding her way. She’d published a book of stories with a local press and had some radio plays broadcast. Having written for years, she was struggling to break through all kinds of cultural, gender, geographical and generational barriers. This was several years before Penguin published Mr Scobie’s Riddle and Woman in a Lampshade, almost simultaneously in 1983, when Elizabeth became an unlikely Perth hero in a national literary scene run from Sydney and Melbourne.

  At the time it was a significant achievement for a West Australian. It wasn’t just that the odds were against you, it took quite a bit of steel to leave the western fold. Writers from Perth felt a burden of loyalty to the Fremantle Arts Centre Press, which did so much to nurture local work, and many were nervous about forsaking its hospitality in the hope of a wider audience and the chance to actually earn royalties.
But finding a bigger publisher made a massive difference to Elizabeth’s career, and probably her life, and the timing of the move was fortunate; those two books, the strongest of her early period, found their way into the homes and consciousness of many new readers, and other books soon followed to cement her reputation.

  Those of us who knew Elizabeth a little could only marvel and cheer as her career blossomed. In the small world of Australian letters it looked as if the eighties belonged to her; she was everywhere. Impossible as it seemed, she was fashionable. And although she appeared baffled by the perennial affirmation, she rose to meet it graciously, and to some certain extent knowingly. She became, in the words of The Guardian, ‘the laureate of the dotty’. And the work came so quickly, ten books in as many years. I was still a student when it struck me that she was drawing upon a stock of unpublished material going back years, perhaps decades, and it was true – when she arrived in Australia from Glasgow in 1959 she brought with her a trunk full of letters and manuscripts. Some of that material may have been too painful to bring to light then, and some seemed to have been reworked in and for the moment.

  At the peak of her fame she published the novels Foxybaby (1985) and The Well (1986). They were lesser works but they were greeted with near universal acclaim from the critical establishment. By this time she’d been groomed as an eminence and a character by the university, and become nearly indispensable to its reputation. She was, despite her public persona, a worldlier person by then, and perhaps more calculated. But she eventually returned to work that was less performative, and considerably more personal. To my mind My Father’s Moon (1989) and Cabin Fever (1990) are her greatest works, freighted with loneliness, bereavement and desire. Here she seems to have broken free of the grotesqueries and masking humour that sometimes looked like a sly form of crowd-pleasing. These novels leave an afterglow. I can remember where I was when I read them. After years of being contemptuously dismissed by editors and publishers, it must have been no small thing for her to risk the adulation she’d come to enjoy, but in her late novels and novellas there is little of the antic daffiness that brought her work to attention. Instead something more austere and raw emerges.