On Robyn Davidson by Richard Cooke

Author:Richard Cooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

without a word to us, he dived in, page after page, in rapt silence, while the mailman unpacked some papers and a package of patent medicine. Once he threw back his head and laughed heartily. The Great Australian Loneliness sobered him up for a moment, but he answered us absently. His heart was in England.

Other hearts would sustain this pretence for decades. In A Town Like Alice, published in 1950, a character newly arrived in Alice Springs acclimatises by pretending she is somewhere else: ‘In spite of its tropical surroundings and the bungalow nature of its houses there was a faint suggestion of an English suburb in Alice Springs which made her feel at home.’ Nevil Shute describes hedged gardens framing ‘English streets’. The Australianness of the natural landscape must be blocked out to preserve this fiction of belonging: ‘Shutting her eyes to the MacDonnell Ranges, she could almost imagine she was back in Bassett as a child. She could now see well what everybody meant by saying Alice was a bonza place.’ Such was the colonial re-imagining of Central Australia in the 1950s: to ‘see well’, you had to shut your eyes.

Compare this to the opening paragraph of Tracks. It is a similar scene: Robyn Davidson, just disembarked from the train at Alice Springs, turns against the wind to look at the same MacDonnell Ranges. This ‘line of mountains at the edge of town’ gives rise to a reckoning: ‘There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns, small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track.’ The ranges orientate her, not only physically but also spiritually.

Davidson soon discovers this act of seeing makes her an outlier. In the eyes of other townsfolk, the ranges are a ‘prehistoric monster’ that has ‘a profound psychological effect on the folk below. It sends them troppo. It reminds them of incomprehensible dimensions of time which they almost successfully block out with brick veneer houses and wilted English-style gardens.’ Davidson does not comprehend this incomprehensible dimension, but she does acknowledge it, and so begins a process of re-engagement with the ‘dead heart’. This turning represents a restitution for Australian literature as well.

There had been earlier literary challenges to the conception of the interior as a ‘dead heart’. Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss captures the Australian dread of the desert, but repositions it as a kind of holy awe:

‘Everyone is still afraid, or most of us, of this country, and will not say it. We are not yet possessed of understanding.’

The Lieutenant snorted, to whom there was nothing to understand.

‘I would not like to ride very far into it,’ admitted Belle, ‘and meet a lot of blacks, and deserts, and rocks, and skeletons, they say, of men that have died.’

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