DAVID MALOUF A First Place. Reviewed by Kathy Gollan
David Malouf’s absorbing essays, full of erudition and with his trademark lucid prose, engage with the troubled issue of Australian identity.
In this fascinating collection of essays, written between 1984 and 2010, David Malouf circles around that Australian preoccupation: what is our identity and who are we? Questions that can’t ever be answered.
But over the course of this book, full of erudition, you do get some clues, given in Malouf’s trademark lucid prose.
In one of the essays, a contribution to Beth Yahp’s collection Family Pictures, we learn a little about David Malouf’s family background. His father, the son of Lebanese immigrants, left school at the age of 12 – a self-made man who thought of himself as working-class. Born here, he was enthusiastically Australian, and therefore very attached to Britain, a place he called the Old Country even though he had never visited it and had no links there. He admired Mr Menzies, and was good friends with a Communist Party bigwig. He was Catholic, while Malouf’s mother was English and Jewish. The religious divide was almost insuperable and his parents courted for 13 years. Once married they never spent a night apart.
You sense that this background imbued Malouf with an understanding of how accidental life is, and that being so, judging others too harshly is not an option. Because what comes across in these essays is Malouf’s special brand of mildness, his genuine fondness for the ordinary, his dislike of posturing. He knows that what seems mundane can be special.
Take the Queenslander, the raised timber house with its deep verandahs, in which he spent his childhood in 1930s and 1940s Brisbane. Through a child’s eyes he takes us on a tour of the house, its creaking timbers, flowing rooms and doors that were never closed, much less locked. An open and breezy house with strict conventions that children understood, of not-seeing and not-hearing, so as to avoid learning what shouldn’t be known.
And by contrast the dark mystery and freedom of under-the-house – where children went to sulk, or to explore the broken objects that accumulated there. And that’s not all: ‘There can be few Brisbane children who do not associate under-the-house, guiltily or as a great break-out of themselves, with their first touch or taste of sex.’
He doesn’t elaborate further.
In an essay about travelling to far north Queensland in the 1950s, Malouf writes lyrically about the frontier towns, the mobs of kangaroos, and great flocks of birds. But, typically, he resists the temptation to claim that the far north was better off in that pre-tourism, pre-mining time. Though he admits to being pleased that the attempt to tidy up the region, make it presentable, has not been very successful:
How could it be when the elements are so extreme, the energy with which things push up and grow so excessive, the air and the smells, especially the sweetish smell of rotting vegetation, so heavy, the dampness so intrusive as it gets in and causes rust and covers boots and leather belts in a wardrobe with mould, and there are so many Aborigines in the streets and under trees along the Esplanade who are unwilling to disappear into the landscape, and undisposed to present themselves as happily industrious or indolently picturesque. There are many elements in the North that remain outside control.
Two contributions make up half the book – the Boyer Lectures of 1998, ‘The Making of the Australian Consciousness’, and the Quarterly Essay of 2003, ‘Made In England’ – both of them about identity, about what was involved in becoming nothing but ourselves.
Malouf charts the successive post-settlement periods of cultural self-confidence and insecurity as the colony came to terms with the strange new land – represented in art, poetry, gardens, architecture. Overarching it all is a tension, which he sees as a useful one, between geography and culture, our inherited European culture and the antipodean environment. Or as he sometimes calls it, between Time and Space.
In colonial poetry, there were no descriptions of the environment at first, and then it was action-oriented, colloquial, outward looking. Not until the generation of Kenneth Slessor and Judith Wright did artists develop a vocabulary to explore our sensibility of the bush and its relation to our interior lives.
In architecture, the airy weatherboard Queenslander style in Brisbane contrasted with the big stone and brick public buildings, Government House, the Treasury Building, Customs House, all built in the late 1800s. As much as the Queenslanders were suited to the tropical landscape, these grand Victorian buildings imposed themselves upon it.
We could see this as cultural cringe, a misplaced attempt to conjure up a faraway country, but Malouf doesn’t see it that way.
He takes us back to the fashion for classical themes such as arcades, loggias and domes in country houses in early 18th-century England. It was a folly to try and recreate an architecture suitable for the warm Mediterranean in England’s misty dales. But an heroic one, to try to transcend the landscape.
So it is with Brisbane’s government buildings, which are also quite out of place. For Malouf they are another magnificent folly, interacting and at play with the landscape, making the sites more complex, ‘adding to climate and vegetation a cultural dimension’, promising a confidence in a city that as yet barely existed.
Because this was a time when ‘Australia saw itself not as a primitive outpost of the known world but as a participant in all that was happening in an exciting and expansive age’. Remote, yes, but still up with the times – not colonial but confidently provincial.
What went wrong? We grew up, we traded confident provincialism for insecure identity seeking. We withdrew behind defensive walls, sulking, as he puts it, feeling anxious and neglected – ‘one of those turn-abouts that are so common a feature in our history, when all that seems given is abruptly taken back’.
Malouf canvasses a range of interesting ‘what-ifs’, most of them going to prove how lucky we are – it could have been the Dutch, the French, Spanish or Portuguese who made the European claim to this land rather than the British – none of whom would have had the resources to provision the colony properly. Nor would we have had the Westminster system, and the quarantining of the military from civilian life. We could have had slaves brought here to establish the colony rather than convicts – look at the US to see how much more destructive the stain of slavery would have been.
But returning to the troubled issue of Australian identity, Malouf has some final, reassuring thoughts – all nations are composed of migrants, some recent, some of long standing. We are an open and continuing experiment, with the freedom that entails. We have been the recipients of large doses of peace and good fortune. Our national identity is experiential, centred around shared symbolic events, and, thankfully, intermittent. No worries, mate, would be a simplistic way of putting it, but rest assured, nothing in this absorbing book is simplistic.
David Malouf A First Place Knopf Australia 2014 HB 368pp $29.99
Kathy Gollan is a former executive producer and editor for ABC Radio National.
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