This book, by Alex Miller, won the Miles Franklin in 2003 - the second time Miller has won it, but the first time I've read any of his work. The author is English by birth, though he has lived in Australia (mainly Melbourne) for over half a century. The story is set in north Queensland inland of Townsville and Bowen. I'm not sure how to think of it. The main character is female, I suppose because Miller thought it would be easier to see the story through the eyes of a white female than through those of an Aboriginal male. That's all she is really, a device to tell a story. She just walks out of her academic job in Melbourne and goes back to the place of her youth. There she meets an Aboriginal stockman who remembers her, though she doesn't remember him. They go on a journey together, back into the places of his past rather than hers. She is really a receptacle for his story and she slowly works out that the things she feels and sees in these places are often "wrong" (symbolised by the mysterious stone that she picks up and carries back to Townsville). But there's a reason for all this, because the story seems really to be about how white people and black people can coexist (or if they can) in this land where murder happened within living memory.

On the one hand I really enjoyed reading it and on the other hand it all struck me as unreal - a bit too much of a romantic fairy tale set in a part of the world that we southerners call the 'Deep North' and 'red-neck country'. On the one hand the story canvassed a range of possible realities and on the other hand it seemed not to want to confront the actual reality of racism and de facto apartheid. I want to believe in their story, but can't quite.

The descriptions of the landscape are wonderful. That part was just pure escapism!

I finished Timeless Land, the first volume in Eleanor Dark's trilogy of early Australian settlement. Of the three, I still like Storm of Time, the second volume, best. Possibly it is because I read them in the wrong order - 2, 3, 1 - but I'm more inclined to think that the real reason is the subject matter.

The subject of the first vol. is by far the most challenging and I do admire her for tackling it at all. The book was published in 1941, long before most people had come to any sort of sensible understanding of Aboriginal culture and the disaster that European arrival was for it. Half a century later, the subject is discussed with a fair amount of sophistication by a lot of people. But back then I suspect Dark's voice was out of the wilderness. The book has achieved some sort of position in the Australian literary canon - which means that if you look her up, it's the one most commonly mentioned. But works of fiction about Aboriginal-European relations in the early days of settlement are remarkably scarce.  I'm no expert on this, but in addition to the three that I've read recently, by Dark, Malouf and Grenville, the only other one I've read is Coonardoo, by Katherine Susannah Pritchard and published circa 1928.

I was quite shocked by the attitudes expressed in Coonardoo. Pritchard, like Dark, was a Communist, but it expressed attitudes towards Aborigines that my 1970s consciousness (I read it that long ago) found very racist. It was a story of a so common phenomenon in the early days, a relationship between a white station owner and one of the black women of the people who worked for him. I should read it again. I'd probably see it in a different light. I think that the problem with these early works (by Pritchard and Dark) is that they seriously tried to understand the minds of the Aborigines they wrote about. I don't think that Dark did a bad job of it - she did a lot of research - but if she'd restricted herself to describing the outcomes, instead of trying to provide a psychological rationale, she'd have done better. Recent writers are more successful because they don't try to get into Aboriginal minds so much. They restrict themselves to examining what goes on at the surface - the way the relationships developed in practice (Aborigines accommodate or get killed, whites whip themselves up into a terror-induced rage, kill and take more). Anyway, I have to give Dark credit for doing a good job or portraying a case of total misunderstanding brought on by each side making the assumption of its own superiority.

The biggest weakness of Timeless Land is the portrayal of the governor, Arthur Phillip. In the interest of relating her own point of view Dark gives him too many insights and too much vision. The guy was a naval officer put in charge of a prison camp. He was quite successful in establishing it, seeing it through several periods of starvation and, after 5 years, handing it on to his successor in a not-quite-self-sustaining state.

One does get some sense of the bewilderment of the Aborigines, particularly through the character of Bennelong, who never understood that he was taken to England as an exhibit rather than for his own edification. But the catastrophe that befell Aboriginal society really only operates as a background to the construction of a new 'nation'. The book begins in Bennelong's imagined youth (since actually nothing is known about him before the whites arrived) in which he looks forward to the return of the 'canoe with wings' that his father saw on Cook's visit in 1770. By the end he's an alcoholic, discarded by his wives and a nobody among his people. But this is not the end of the book. The end of this book and the end of the entire trilogy is about the new society being built by the English, it's gradual emergence as a nation different from England. And this difference has nothing to do with Aborigines, it has to do with the mingling of classes (convicts, officers and free settlers) in contrast to the rigidity of the Motherland.

There are two characters in the book who seem to represent an alternative history of Australia. These two are uniquely able to live together with the Aborigines. They are father and son - the father takes the first step and the son the next (the son features more in vols 2 and 3). But like the Aborigines, these two are constantly retreating before the advance of European domination.

In short, the Aborigines end up being irrelevant to Dark's overall plot. While it's true that they have been irrelevant to the real life plot in the history of Australia, this fictional story is too positive, too accepting of what did happen. It's a bit like guerrilla warfare waged by the weak - full of barbs that prick the conscience of the victor, but not imagining a way forward.

Also in my entry on that book meme, I mentioned that I quite enjoy Kate Grenville's writing. That comment was actually based on only one book An Idea of Perfection which won the Orange Prize. It fell into my category of 'inner lives in a harsh landscape' that I rather tire of in Australian fiction, but her descriptions of that landscape were superb. I probably wouldn't have bothered to read this one except that I heard an excerpt on the radio and was intrigued.

It's on the same theme as the Dark novels - early colonial history and relations between blacks and whites (a little less in this case on the politics of the white society). It is also based on the history of Grenville's own family. Her ancestor was transported, but ended up wealthy (the family home in North Sydney where she spent her childhood was eventually bulldozed to make way for the Warringah Expressway). The man was a petty thief in London, but a thief on a large scale in New South Wales. In the book she tries, with reasonable success I think, to imagine the encounter between the emancipated convict who imagines himself 'taking up' empty land on the Hawkesbury, but who in reality is 'taking' land from the Dharug people. You know at the outset of this part of the story what the outcome will be, must be indeed because no other outcome would make sense to those of us who live in present-day Australia. She takes you through the full horror of it. But she also gives her main character some insight into what's happening - how he realizes that there's no going back to a life in London for somebody of his class, how he slowly understands why the Aborigines won't just move aside, even though they are obviously prepared to tolerate the whites and their farms. Nevertheless, in the end, the depredations of the whites produce resistance and so he also realizes that if he wants to stay he has to take sides. The blurb on the book says that it changes his life forever, but that's not what happens. Instead there is just this knot in the wood that his life grows around - something that a few people these days occasionally try to remember.

The Secret River is much more satisfying to read than Idea of Perfection. I would actually recommend it. I think it deals with the subject better than the Malouf book too.

The Dharug are still around. My university is also on their land and has made a formal acknowledgement of their previous ownership. We fly the Aboriginal flag next to the national emblem and have a special unit for Aboriginal education. I have no idea whether they consider this to be sufficient recognition or compensation.

After that so uninspiring meme that went around about books, I've been having an Australian literature binge. I say to myself that I can read novels in bed at night and it won't interfere with my work, but that's a lie because I sit up reading until 3 or 4 in the morning and then can't get any work done before midday!

Last week I read the third volume in Eleanor Dark's trilogy about early Australia, No Barrier. Unlike Storm of Time, I found it easy going and I'm not sure whether that is because the characters were more familiar or the story was less complicated. Anyway it was less satisfying. Was it because the 'villain' Macarthur was in exile in England, the politics weren't there, it was more of a straight narrative 'romantic' novel? Not sure. The climax of the story was the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth and the subsequent construction of a road that would lead to a stream of settlers on the inland plains and further destruction of Aboriginal society. But the Aboriginal characters themselves had disappeared - become part of the background. Mrs Macarthur, who spent 7 years running and building up her husband's business while he was in exile was depicted as 'fatigued' by the work. Well perhaps she was, since she had so many kids (though the boys were all away too, at school in England). I did learn something about Governor Macquarie (after whom many things in Sydney are named - including my university). He was certainly a visionary, and therefore a constant drain on the "colonial expences". His idea, somewhat at odds with that of the British government, was to build a real colony instead of an open air prison. He built roads, a hospital, churches. He invited emancipated convicts (still in prison in a sense, but no longer slave labourers) to dine at Government House and hired them as magistrates, doctors, architects, etc. He therefore invited opposition from the old gang who'd been behind the Rum Rebellion, since he disturbed their privileges. But compared with the previous book in the series, it was all a bit too peaceful. At the very end, as Cox completed his road-building endeavours, I really wanted another book to tell me how all the suppressed conflict in this book panned out. In real history the story certainly wasn't over, but the way Dark ended her story of the first 26 years was as if everything was now 'normalized'.

One thing that I enjoyed, however, was that due to my bushwalking in the Blue Mountains, I was able to pinpoint the locations. I have actually walked to the farm that fictional Johnny Prentice established as a hideaway with his stolen sheep and cattle. When I went there, there was a ruined cottage on the flats where a creek joins Cox's River and a sign saying that it had been one of the earliest farms in the area. Obviously Ms Dark had also walked the Six Foot Track. Bushwalking is a very here and now sort of thing. I met a few people on that track and even spent some time talking to some of them, but mostly it's just a question of sensations of the body and of the things around you. I never imagined that somebody 50 years ago had made it the setting of a novel!

To cap off my pleasant day yesterday, I went to bed at a reasonable hour and finished David Malouf's book. It tells the story of Gemmy who, having been washed up on a beach as a child and raised to adulthood in an Aboriginal community, attempts to return to white society. Most of the whites treat him with suspicion and brutality because he thinks like an Aborigine. Only a few people befriend him, including the minister who wanders about the countryside with him doing botanical drawings and writing down the names of edible and medicinal plants and then tries to sell a plan for the cultivation of these things to the Governor. One day he receives a visit from two blacks. Nothing happens on this visit, but the whites are thrown into a paranoid frenzy, Gemmy is attacked and forced to leave the community. The whites are bent on transforming the country into a European outpost. The minister's plans for cultivation of native species are simply ignored - not even given a second thought. Gemmy's fate is unknown, but in the final chapter the "dispersals" - killings "too slight an affair to be called a massacre" are alluded to. Everything that contradicts the importance and organization of European civilisation is pushed aside. But Gemmy himself is English and his story, which he barely remembers, of an orphaned London childhood shows how willing the English are to push their own aside as well.