by Alex Miller
‘Oh yes,’ Voltaire said of Michel de Montaigne, ‘he does indeed confess his faults, but only his endearing ones.’ We are human and we love ourselves. When writing about ourselves the inclination for a self-portrait in an endearing light is not to be resisted. Oscar Wilde famously said of it, ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.’ It is the mask that enables detachment from self. All fiction, after all, is self-portraiture and truth is ever an elusive tiger. It is best to take an indirect approach. The obvious is never the true goal. One needs to don a mask in order to become the other, to get behind the mirror image of self and see what is truly there. It is no wonder it was flaws that concentrated Patrick White’s attention when he abandoned fiction for a moment in order to gaze directly into the glass of self-portraiture in Flaws in the Glass. White’s determination to confess himself, to confess that his fear of the devil of vanity was going to mislead him. If the unconscious is to be our guide it can’t be self-consciously so. First we must see ourselves as the other. It is by this path that fiction seeks its truth. For me it is a sacred path. For better or worse I have devoted my life to it.
I’ll try to say something here about the place of my novels in my life, and to speak of their interconnectedness with each other. My writing life began in Melbourne when I was twenty-six, after I graduated in English and history from Melbourne University, having entered the university as a mature-age student. Writing became my way of locating connections in a life which up until then had been characterised by a series of disconnections. The earliest of these disconnections occurred when I was two and a half years of age and was sent to a children’s home for a week while my mother went into hospital to give birth to my younger sister. The child did not know his exile was to be for a week. For the child the terrifying abandonment was forever. The experience left a mark on me that has never completely faded, and it is disconnection and detachment that have been my minor gods.
From occasional verse and entries in day books, soon after university my writing began to develop into an attempt to make sense of my worlds through reflections on my various selves and on the cultures I had lived within, and they were plural, selves, worlds and cultures. As a result of this self-absorption, this lack of external subject matter, my writing was far too introspective to appeal to either publishers or readers. I was trying to mend something in myself and looked inward in my search for the broken ends that I might fit them together. In this preoccupation with self I was mistaken, however, and it was not until I ceased writing directly about myself and began to write imaginatively of the people and the places most dear to me that my writing began to appeal to publishers and subsequently to gain me a readership. It was also with this change that writing ceased to be a kind of self-inflicted torture and I began to experience the joy of it.
The person most directly responsible for this change of direction in my writing was my friend and mentor, Max Blatt. My novel The Ancestor Game is dedicated to Max and his wife, Ruth, and Prochownik’s Dream is dedicated to my wife, Stephanie, and to the memory of Max Blatt. My friendship with Max was the single most important influence on the development of my writing. To this day I write with the question before my mind: Would Max find this interesting? I ask that question of myself at this very moment. It is the challenge, the accompaniment, and the inspiration of my work. Max was a richly cultivated and highly intelligent Central European, and his standards in literature were the most exacting I have met with.
Max Blatt with Alex’s first wife, Anne, Araluen, c. 1970
I came out of the bush when I was twenty-one and went to Melbourne University when I was twenty-three and did not return to Queensland until after I had begun teaching at Holmesglen TAFE, around 1987. For more than twenty years I thought my Queensland days would never be part of my life again. My life as a stockman was foreign to my friends and teachers at Melbourne University, and to my colleagues and acquaintances in Melbourne, who all looked towards England or Ireland or Europe for their literary antecedents and the sources of their inspiration. In writing about my early days as a stockman in Queensland I felt the inner truth of John Butler Yeats’s saying that ‘a work of art is the social act of a solitary [person]’.
I wasn’t aware of any Australian literature being taught at Melbourne in the early sixties. There seemed to be no connection between my world of ringing in Queensland (even the term had a different meaning in Victoria) and the life of writing in Melbourne. They were mutually unvisited landscapes and were unknown to each other. There was no common language of cultural memory or association for me to deal in and I carried the precious memory of my days in Queensland with me secretly for more than twenty years. Watching the Climbers on the Mountain was my second attempt, after The Tivington Nott, to reclaim an important period of my past and to make something meaningful of it in the social context of my present.
The Tivington Nott, my first novel, was conceived initially in two parts, the first part to be set on Exmoor, where I had worked as a farmer’s boy for two years, and the second part in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where I had worked as a stockman. It was to be called Jimmy Diamond, after a tribal Aboriginal friend of those days. Jimmy and I had worked side by side as friends just as Morris and I had worked side by side on Exmoor. This book was going to bridge the two lives, the two worlds, and their apparently unconnected realities. My intention was to connect these experiences and hopefully to arrive at some sort of sense of wholeness about myself.
I had loved my Exmoor days and my Gulf Country days and possessed a vivid memory of them. I not only wished to celebrate them but was enticed by the fine ironies between my position on the bottom of the social scale as a labourer on Exmoor and my elevated status on the cattle station in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where I, the newcomer, was paid ten times as much as the expert Aboriginal stockmen. I understood that this social reversal expressed something of the essential reality of the deeply troubled white Australian culture in which I lived; something of the injustice and unease with which white Australians live, or which we push aside and try to forget about; migrants and invaders all, valuing the title of native born, counting our precious generations, longing for the confidence of an authenticity that can never be ours until it is bestowed on us by the first people of this land. I wanted to explore all this, to review it, to revisit it, and to examine the quality of its humanity and its inhumanity, and to see, hopefully, how it had affected me and my own humanity.
The Tivington Nott was, in its original conception, an unwieldy and far too ambitious project. When I got to the end of the Exmoor part of the book I knew the story was complete and would bear no further additions. Much of Jimmy Diamond had been written by then but it would never be published. The original plan had been flawed and my ambition for the book had to give way before the integrity of the story. I learned that it is the story that is master of the author, not the author who is master of the story. I learned something of the subordinate role in the making of story that is the conscious performance of the storyteller. The secret of the story is that it serves a purpose unknown to the writer, and responds to its own mysterious tides. In every story ever told it is the unconscious that has spoken. A story’s power to beguile lies in what has been left unsaid. The manifest content of the story is an artful carapace for its silent meaning, that place into which the reader’s imagination is enticed.
My third novel, The Ancestor Game, explores the ambiguous liberties bestowed on artists and writers by cultural displacement. The book began as a celebration of the life of a Chinese Australian friend who was defeated by Melbourne’s racism and cultural elitism in the 1980s and who despaired and shot himself. The Ancestor Game was my attempt to make sense of my friend’s life and death, to see his alienation from his community and culture as something of exceptional value, and to bring him back into my own life and into the lives of his other friends, those who missed him and had believed in him as fiercely as I had.
The success of The Ancestor Game came as a surprise and the subsequent international travel was a diversion from the steady daily task of writing. It was five years before I published my next book, The Sitters. I wrote The Sitters while I was trying to write the novel that eventually became Conditions of Faith. The impulse for Conditions of Faith came to me when my brother sent me my mother’s early diaries after her death. As I read my mother’s tiny girlish handwritten notes in a small pocket book I seemed to peer into the shadows of her past and to glimpse her life when she was a young woman and was not yet my mother or the wife of my father, but was looking at her own future as a place of possibility. I saw in my mother’s youthful longings the same longings to escape that had preoccupied my own youth, and which had fired my decision to get away from the grey landscape of a council estate in post-war London and go to the charmed rural landscape of Exmoor.
When I left home at the age of fifteen I did not understand the depth of my mother’s suffering at the loss of her oldest son. It was not until my brother told me after her death that she had always spoken of the day when I would return, and when she was dying said to him, ‘Everything will be all right when Alex gets home.’ In writing Conditions of Faith I imagined myself to be rescuing my mother’s memory and giving her the independent life she had dreamed of as a young woman, whereas I may have in fact been dealing indirectly with her loss of her favoured child and how she might have come to terms with it. I knew she would not have agreed with my sense that she had been oppressed by marriage and family, and consequently the book resisted me for a long time.
It was at last in the landscape of Tunisia, in the filthy cell beneath the ruined amphitheatre of Carthage, once occupied by the grieving mother Vibia Perpetua, that I found the key to the conundrum and the story began to unfold, like a carpet suddenly unrolling ahead of me as I moved across its patterned surface in pursuit of my mother’s youthful dreams. What I had found in that filthy cell in the ruins of Carthage was in fact my own story disguised by my love for my mother. I began to see this only after I had finished the book. While I wrote it I did so with my love of my mother foremost in my mind, masking the deeper impulse to tell my own story, indeed to conflate her story and my own, as if we two were one person. Conditions of Faith contains my own private truth of my youthful struggle to find a way to become a serious novelist from a beginning where such an ambition was laughable and unheard of. In fiction, as in the telling of our dreams, we reveal more than we imagine.
The Sitters distracted me while I was writing Conditions of Faith. It was partly my preoccupation with The Sitters that inhibited my progress with Conditions of Faith—our impulses are rarely the result of one simple cause, but are fibrous and collective in their force, and consequently nearly impossible to resist. Once again I failed to see what I was doing while I was doing it. I thought, with this little book, that I was writing about a working-class Australian woman who had gone from Australia to England and had become a professor and had now returned to visit her aged mother in the country (country where I’d had a farm for several years while writing my prenovels). The Sitters was to offer a kind of reverse version of my own history. Except that I had not returned. I now know The Sitters wasn’t about that at all but was about my relationship with my father and my lost sister. It was about the way my family, through my father’s emotional and physical wounding during the war, became a distant silence for me: a painful absence that was forever present to me. That wound remained as a permanent shadow on my life.
I have a self-portrait in pastels that I did fifty years ago in which I am struggling to free myself from that shadow. It was my writing that eventually freed me. The Sitters is a haunted book. A book haunted by my father’s wounding and by my inarticulate despair at losing him. Towards the end of the war, when my father returned wounded in mind and body, we did not know him. He was changed. The Sitters was my faltering approach to the loss of my beloved father, the man who had taught me to paint and to fish and to enjoy the beauties of nature and music. He had been the childhood storyteller in my life. My dad. He disappeared into the horror of war for four years and another crueller man, wearing his tortured mask, returned in his place.
It wasn’t until ten years after I wrote The Tivington Nott that I recovered the impulse to write about the Gulf experience. Journey to the Stone Country, though not set in the Gulf, nevertheless embodies the spirit of that first book, but transformed and elaborated in ways I could not have foreseen or imagined. Journey to the Stone Country also came to me through friendships; and, once again, it was a book about people and places that are dear to me. It is a reflection of my own realities and the realities of these friends heightened, simplified and transmuted into the organic whole of story. My own displacement from one side of the world to the other, my loss of culture and home, is dealt with silently in my empathy with the displacement and dispossession experienced by the book’s principal characters, black and white. It is a book about friends, people who, in their lives and experiences, connect aspects of my own past experience that had remained until then mysterious and intractable for me.
My friends Liz Hatte and Col McLennan gave me the bones of the story and blessed the project with their enthusiasm to see it come to completion. Without them that book would not have been written, and those connections would have remained unmade for me. It was when I was writing Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, my first published book and my first book set in Queensland, that I met Liz Hatte and began, through my friendship with her, to reconnect my Melbourne life to my Queensland past. Liz, it turned out, was born on a cattle station in the Central Highlands of Queensland and was intimately familiar with the culture of the people and the place on which I had based my novel. Meeting Liz felt like meeting a long-lost sister. As with all great friendships we each had an effect on the other’s life. When Liz told me she hated teaching and wanted to be an archaeologist, I said she must risk everything for her dream and have the courage to get out of teaching and go and become an archaeologist—I knew by then that the first step in realising one’s dream was to make oneself vulnerable to failure. Liz returned to Townsville not long after this and set up her business. Col and the Jangga became her most important clients (and Col her life partner).
When I visited them in Townsville, Col and I shared stories of our days as Queensland ringers. We understood each other and became friends. It was the first time I had spoken with a ringer from the old days and there was for me in my meeting with Col a poignant sense of homecoming; a return to the familiar place of my first boyhood dream. A vital connection was made for me through Col and his story between the two worlds of my early years in North Queensland and my subsequent university and writing life in Melbourne.
To encourage me, Col showed me the country of his people, the Jangga. He gave me the history of black and white betrayal that lies at the heart of this book. He also placed in my trust the spirit of Grandma Rennie, a spirit that lifts the story above the level of race conflict and endows it with the human dimensions of a love story; love for country, that is, black and white. I saw Stone Country as the original impulse of Jimmy Diamond finding its time.
It was Col who told me I would write Stone Country and it was Stephanie, my wife, who told me I should write The Ancestor Game. We do nothing alone. I hadn’t seen either book coming, but once they were suggested to me I fell in love with both projects and began to understand how important they were to be for me. In writing these books I was aware that they were expressions of communal realities and longings that we share with each other, and were not simply explorations of self. They made my fragile sense of connectedness more real. When Col first took me on the journey to see his country, he introduced me to his friend and old droving and mustering partner, Frank Budby, elder of the Barada people. It soon became obvious to me that in Frank I had met a heroic and selfless man. A quiet, unassuming and deeply intelligent man, Frank rescued his people from the depredations of white culture—from alcohol, pr
ison, drugs, despair and the dole, the terrible loss of self-esteem, the loss of aim and the will to live well—and reclaimed for them, and with them, by the force of his character and his inspired leadership, an ordered and purposeful life. It was Frank’s remarkable example, and meeting the writer Anita Heiss in Hamburg, that led me to write Landscape of Farewell. Near Springsure (the location of my first published novel, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain) there is the site of the largest massacre of white people by Aborigines in Australia’s history, the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre. I was haunted by local accounts of the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre, which I’d first heard when I was a stockman on a cattle station near Springsure, my first real job in Australia. I had also carried since my childhood an unexamined sense of guilt by association with the events of the Holocaust. As a primary school kid I had sat among the assembled students in the school hall while we watched in frozen silence the horrifying black-and-white films of the Allies entering the death camps of Belsen and Buchenwald. The overwhelming impression left on us young children by these nightmare images was that we (human beings) do this to each other. A sense of guilt by association was inescapable. I had never dealt with it.
In Hamburg, meeting Anita Heiss and witnessing her fiercely honest defence of her people’s rights made the connection for me. I found young Germans as eager to speak with me about the unspeakable as their elders were reluctant. The elements came together for me in Hamburg, my own unvisited guilt by association for both our treatment of the Aborigines and the images of Belsen and Buchenwald, the Germans’ own intractable sense of guilt by association, the silence in Australian history about the massacre at Cullin-la-Ringo, and the inspiration of Frank’s heroic reclaiming of the dignity of his people. In my hotel room in Hamburg, I began with great excitement to sketch these lines of intersection and to see how they fitted together into a whole; not an Australian or a European whole, but a human whole.