by Alex Miller
‘If the Bigges was here there’d be white-faced cattle all over this pasture. I don’t like to see good pasture empty of beasts.’
‘That’s just what my dad would have said.’
‘It don’t seem right. All this feed falling down onto itself and not a track through it.’
They drove on slowly towards the station buildings through the strangely trackless grass, silent with each other. Bo drew up at the main house. The old homestead sat solid and unmarked, apparently still intact within its perimeter of fence and wildgrown European shrubs and trees. Some of the less substantial outbuildings were in a state of partial collapse. One structure engulfed entirely, its timbers and ripple-iron ridden flat by a giant bougainvillea, the violet blossoms glowing and intense in the failing light.
As Milan Kundera says in his Jerusalem address of 1985, ‘The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth … but where everyone has the right to be understood.’ The novel is always about the intimate lives of individuals. About us. And if it is any good and is doing its job, as well as entertaining us the novel also says something about the moral and spiritual worth of the lives of its characters. In other words, it explores the relationship of its characters not only to each other but also to the values of the culture they inhabit. ‘Every novel,’ Kundera tells us, ‘offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie?’ There are three principal characters in Journey to the Stone Country: Annabelle Beck, Bo Rennie and the landscape of the Jangga homeland, the Urannah Valley. These are not simply fictions, they are not only imaginative inventions. I didn’t make them up. Each of them has its counterpart in our reality. The real Annabelle and Bo live in Townsville and the real landscape of the Jangga homeland is in North Queensland.
An assumption driving the great diaspora of European culture for at least the past five hundred years has been that the acquisition of land and knowledge is a sacred duty. Colonialism and European culture are not separable but are aspects of the same urgent meditation. We will not be in a post-colonial age until we are in a post-European age. The great German philosopher Edmund Husserl identified the passion to know as the central axiom of the European identity. There were a couple of politicians recently recommending something they called the knowledge nation, as if they had discovered a new challenge for us to meet. But really they were reiterating the age old colonial mantra of Western culture: know it all, own it all, consume it all. That the acquisition of knowledge is really a project of ownership is not a new idea. Adrian Desmond and James Moore in their great 1991 biography of Charles Darwin remind us of it: ‘Even this project [insect collecting] had its imperial ramifications. Naming is possessing, said the old insect specialist William Kirby. Science was a sort of metaphoric appropriation.’
Despite the disclaimer of something we like to call pure research, the problem with the passion to know is that the freedom of scientific inquiry is conflated with the right not only to know everything but also the right to own everything and to put it to use in the service of our own wellbeing. No knowledge is out of bounds to the European mind. There are no limits on scientific inquiry. For scientific inquiry no aspect of existence is secret or sacred. The whole of created nature is its subject. On a practical day-to-day level, this is often interpreted to mean that the natural features of our landscape can be utilised to supply the growing needs of our cities: in other words, landscape as natural resource.
The vast and ever-growing bodies of our cities represent an exemplary paradigm of the vast and ever-growing body of our knowledge. In this project we ignore our past and drive confidently towards a future in which everything is to be known and everything is to be consumed. We have abandoned our past in favour of a dream of the future. Tomorrow, not yesterday, is where our hopes reside: with the manipulation of the genetic codes of being, with designer offspring, designer parents, the ‘cure’ for ageing, the ‘cure’, indeed, for nature itself. We are engaged on a cultural project in which we define human existence as something that is in need of a cure and we retain a deeply ambivalent love/hate tension with the land we occupy—both our resource and victim, the ancient dark of our spiritual wellbeing:
… that first morning they walked down the rise to the river Indian file, Bo in the lead trampling a track through the ribbon grass, Annabelle and Trace staying close behind him for fear of brown snakes. The air was filled with a moving tide of living creatures. Grasshoppers, beetles, clouds of small chocolate moths flickered in the sunlight around them. Arner was back some way wearing shorts and thongs and seemingly untroubled by the possibility of venomous serpents in the grass. After a hundred metres they came out of the tall grass onto a cropped greensward of soft ankle-high couch grass, black wattles standing like park trees. Closer to the river the shade of the old casuarinas and bluegums, a coolness in the sweet air, brightly coloured butterflies and birds feeding on the insects and nectar among the drooping foliage and blossoms. The warm air vibrating with the shrilling of millions of insects.
Annabelle and Trace came up and stood beside Bo on the smooth benchrock at the edge of an open stretch of sunlit water. They stood gazing on the scene at their feet, the flow of the river green and clear in its depths, the water golden and rippling with sunlight where it slipped over the shallow bottom sands.
I believe there are profound moral and spiritual consequences for us in pursuing knowledge at all costs. One enormous impoverishment that European culture has suffered because of the unbridled passion to know is a loss of the idea of the sacred. This loss is experienced by growing numbers of people as a deepening divide between themselves and their sense of belonging. It is surely a paradox at the heart of our European culture that each technological advance in the race to possess the future brings with it this sense of failed private experience.
The fate of the Urannah Valley is not a simple matter of European interests versus Indigenous interests. The fate of the Urannah is not a nineteenth- or even a twentieth-century colonial issue of black versus white possession or ownership. It is a contemporary question involving a complex cultural mix of the interests of innumerable groups and sub-groups in our entire society.
I believe that the preservation of the Urannah Valley is as important to our sense of who we are as Australians and as citizens of the world as the fate of the Franklin or the physical existence of Mount Everest. The complexity of interests competing in the determination of the Urannah’s fate, the fact that no simple line can be drawn between Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests in this conflict, is emblematic of where Australian culture has shifted in its struggle to move beyond a colonial mindset of exploitation and ownership. In this conflict it is not a question simply of reconciliation, important as that is, but is the far more difficult question of the acknowledgment of difference: difference between cultures, between two dreamings, the European dreaming discarding the past and struggling to possess the future, the Indigenous dreaming the struggle of remaining morally true to the ongoing ancestral project, a project that is inseparable from the sacred moral duty to care for the land.
Some critics assure us that our novels are irrelevant in discussions of the important issues facing our society. I don’t share that view. As well as entertaining us, our novels have always explored the individual’s relationship to the great moral questions of the day. Not answers, but an awareness of the questions we need to face. Something, dare I say it, such as an image of the Urannah Valley out there in our landscape, intact as yet and just as filled with mystery as the deepest and most hidden part of the great Amazonian forest. A fragile and precious reality of ours that we are about to destroy in order to provide water for coalmines and crop irrigation. As a wilderness, Urannah has nothing to do with the knowledge nation or productivity outcomes, but is something that calls to the ineffable and the inexplicable in our souls. If we Australians cannot find a way to preserve the Urannah Valley as a place sacred to both Indi
genous and European dreaming alike, then we will soon join those civilisations that failed. Two hundred years, after all, is little more than a moment in time when it is held against the measure of forty thousand years.
Let’s hope we yet learn from the great Indigenous cultures of this country that not everything is to be consumed but that some things are to be cherished and preserved. And if we do learn this, we may yet come to see that we are also embedded within the story of our own past, the story of our ancestors, the story of our old people, and that there is an ongoing moral obligation for us in this sacred association that will eventually make the land our own; an association that has something to do with our worth as human beings. For it is ourselves, after all, who are the figures in this landscape and it is for us to decide whether it is to be a landscape of ruins or the paradise of our dreams.
Annabelle observed the two young people gathering firewood together, their graceful forms moving among the drooping foliage of the trees, back and forth between shadows and sunbeams, their voices sudden and brief, a quick uncertain laugh then silence, and she thought how easy it was for them, their existence uncluttered and without ambivalence. Out in the sunlight beyond them, Mathew Hearn’s mare trailed her rains and lipped the sweet green couch grass. At the crack of a stick she raised her head and gazed into the shadows at the young man and the girl, her ears working. They came back with armfuls of kindling and firewood and chose for their hearth a natural hollow in the rock. They crouched together to set their fire, he sitting back on his heels when they had arranged the sticks and watching while Trace bent low and touched the flame to the silky grass heads. Together they watched the curl of blue smoke rise through the sticks and ascend into the trees, the smell of burning gumleaves suddenly in the still air. A yellow flame leaping up through the laid sticks. ‘It’s going!’ Trace exclaimed with delight. ‘I lit it!’ The young man and woman looked at each other and laughed. And in their laughter it seemed to Annabelle it was to be enough for them that they had struck this fire, and for the moment they would ask for no more, but would be content. As if they could believe their actions served some more worthy power than their own desires.
So Trace Gnapun, a modern young woman and a Jangga, and Mathew Hearn, the son of a white settler, build their fire together in their doomed paradise and fall in love with each other as young people will. Such optimism of the young and the will to build our dreams together, not the knowledge nation, is the hope of our civilisation.
2004
The Black Mirror
To understand art, we must know artists.
Rilke
He moved about in front of the chair, perhaps two metres from me, nervously adjusting the set of the canvas on the easel, then the position of his stool. Every few moments he looked up at me. His look disconcerted me, for it was not the look of the friend I knew, but was the look of a man who examines an object. He had invited me to sit for him and I had been flattered that such a great artist as he, an artist whose work I had long admired and had considered among the greatest of all our artists, should wish to paint my portrait. When he had adjusted the easel, the canvas and the stool to his satisfaction, he examined me in silence, searching my features, as if he searched a landscape for some familiar feature; then, suddenly, evidently locating the feature he searched for, he began to paint. I remained still, as I had been instructed, my hands folded on my knees, my gaze focused on the reverse of the canvas—a vacancy in which no likeness was ever going to appear.
But it was more than flattery. To be admitted to his studio, to see him engaged in the privacy of his endeavour, to watch his eyes and his hands at work—to be a part of this—that is what interested me. When we took a break from the sittings, I wondered if he would show me his drawings. Would I be permitted to open the drawers of the great plan press that stood against the wall under the window and browse through the archives of his art, the small and the intimate drawings and gouaches, the ideas that had flooded through his hands and his mind for years, the unfinished sketches that had never blossomed into major works but had remained secret and alive and alone, perhaps even forgotten? It was all there, in the ordered clutter of his studio. Years, decades, of labour, the accumulation of a lifetime of dedication to his art, his search for something.
On the aeroplane flying back to Australia from New York, I slept through the long leg from Los Angeles to Sydney and woke with the story written in my head. I had dreamed the solution to my novel, The Sitters. It was the artist in his studio and he was painting a portrait of his lost sister. While he painted he talked with himself. His sister was not in front of him, as I had been in front of my artist friend, not in the flesh, for she was dead long ago, but she was there in his mind’s eye. He struggled to remember her onto his canvas. The struggle was great. To paint the portrait of an absent loved one. Like Giacometti, he failed many times to reach the modelled illusion he strove for and, like Giacometti, he scraped back his painting to the canvas and began again many times. But he did not begin again each time from the place from which he had begun before. Each time he began, he did so from a more elaborated familiarity with the problem confronting him, and each of his new beginnings was based upon a more highly achieved failure than the previous failure—each time he built his new illusion on the black mirror of his memory it more closely resembled the thing he was looking for.
Rick Amor in 1997 with his portrait of Alex
The painting he produced, however, was not of his sister but concerned his lover, for that was the direction in which his memory had taken him. It was a painting not so much finished as abandoned. He left it there, leaning against the wall, where it would confront him with the mystery of his work, the mystery of his failure. It contained no likeness of his lover, but only her bed, the door to her room open, the light from the window driving shadows and presences from the room until it seemed her figure had only that moment departed from it. It was a portrait of absence and longing, and there was no likeness in it but the one he recollected each time he looked on that scene of lost intimacy.
When Rick Amor—the real artist, my friend and not my fiction—finished the portrait of me, he invited me to look at it for the first time. He had not let me see it while it was in progress. We stood side by side looking at the sombre likeness of me gazing back at us from within that black mirror of his art, and I began to consider the story that I would dream a year later on the plane home from America, the idea for it seeded in that moment of uncertain recognition in his studio.
2006
EXCERPT FROM
Prochownik’s Dream
He set up The Other Family and mixed a glaze and, within a few minutes of beginning work, Teresa and the rest of the world had gone out of his mind—the rest of the world, that is, except for Marina, with whom every now and then he enjoyed a brief imaginary exchange; the perfect companion of his solitary hours. He worked without a break through what was left of the night and on through the dawn and into the day, until the naked male figure stood boldly to the left of the principal group in the big painting, poised side on to the viewer. It was a figure that was strangely familiar to Toni, one which in some essential way represented himself, even though its features—or such of them as could be made out, for it stood within a puzzling array of shadows—were those of an old man. As he stood in front of the painting, seeing the figure with a feeling of surprise, he had little recollection of the hours he had spent painting it. He felt that he had at last taken root in his own work, and the possibilities for his art seemed to him to be endless. With the inclusion of himself, he had stepped through a doorway and the field of his future endeavour lay open to him.
2005
A Circle of Kindred Spirits
I’d rather not be doing this. It feels strange and unreal for me to be standing here about to give something called the Hazel Rowley Memorial Lecture. Hazel should be here with us herself at this festival talking about her latest book, Franklin and Eleanor, which was brought out in an Au
stralian edition by Hazel’s great supporter, Louise Adler, in 2011 and is still fresh in all our minds. That Hazel is not here in person is a tragedy. It is also such a recent tragedy for her friends and family that her absence still seems puzzling and unreal and has not yet become an accepted fact of reality. Perhaps it never will. Hazel was so powerfully alive until almost the last days of her life it is not possible to imagine her dead. I’ve titled this talk A Circle of Kindred Spirits. It’s a quote from Marguerite Yourcenar’s reflections on the composition of her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian, the most impressive melding of biography and fiction I know, and one of the greatest portraits of a man I have ever read.
I’ve had a great admiration for biographers at least since the time I met John La Nauze, which was in 1963. I make that half a century. La Nauze was one of my tutors at Melbourne University in the early sixties in a subject which honours history students were required to take and which was titled The Theory and Method of History. It was one of the most interesting subjects on the curriculum and proposed a comparison of historical treatments at different periods of the same historical subject. The conquest of Mexico and Peru was at the centre of this study, but the work of E.H. Carr, and particularly his book What is History?, was also critical to the ideas we were asked to ponder. The subject, I believe, was essentially designed to rid us of any residual naivety about history writing that we might have had and to alert us to the fact that there can be no such thing as objective history. It may just as well have been designed to enlighten us about the impossibility of something we might have imagined to be objective biography.
At the time I had the very great privilege of knowing him—and I doubt I would have made much of an impression on him, as I wasn’t a student who ever had much to say—John La Nauze was writing his ground-breaking two-volume biography of Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin. One morning La Nauze came into the tutorial room, sat in his usual place, and laid his head on his folded arms on the table in front of him. It was Monday morning. I was sitting immediately to his left and I remember thinking he was probably suffering from a hangover as vicious as the one I was suffering from myself and I felt sorry for him and thought him brave to have made it in to work. After a minute or two he raised his head and looked me directly in the eye, as if he had read my thoughts, and said, ‘Whatever you do, never take on the writing of a major work of biography.’ He then went on to tell us what an octopus his own subject, Deakin, had become for him. It was consuming his whole existence and he had no way of escaping its clutches. I think he called it an octopus. It was too late, he was in the tank with the creature and had to wrestle it to death or fail.