Wandering with Intent by Kim Mahood

Author:Kim Mahood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO010000, SOC062000, NAT000000, SOC015000, HIS052000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2022-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

Lost and found in translation

The vast continent is really void of speech … this speechless, aimless solitariness was in the air. It was natural to the country.

— D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo

Unlike many city-dwelling Australians, the desert holds no terrors for me. Instead, like D.H. Lawrence, I find the cathedral forests of the coastal regions oppressive and disquieting. Lawrence brought to his descriptions of the Australian bush the same overwrought sensitivity that created the claustrophobic emotional landscape of Sons and Lovers and the appalling, majestic insularity of the Italian mountain village in The Lost Girl. He was the writer who made explicit an intimation of some non-human presence in the Antipodean landscape, and while I have a different interpretation of the ‘speechless, aimless solitariness’ he attributed to the country 100 years ago, his instincts were good.

In his depictions of Australia in the 1923 novel Kangaroo, Lawrence expresses the ambivalence of many visiting Europeans and settler Australians. For Somers, who stands in for Lawrence as the novel’s central protagonist, the Australian bush is host to a watchful, menacing presence:

But the horrid thing in the bush! … It must be the spirit of the place. Something fully evoked to-night, perhaps provoked, by that unnatural West-Australian moon … He felt it was watching, and waiting … It was biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men.

By the end of the novel, Somers has fallen in love with the landscape. It is no longer silent or watchful, but mysterious and enchanted, and he can hear its muted, incomprehensible call:

Meanwhile he wandered round in the Australian spring. Already he loved it. He loved the country he had railed at so loudly a few months ago … it had a deep mystery for him, and a dusky, far-off call that he knew would go on calling for long ages before it got any adequate response, in human beings.

By the time Lawrence visited Australia in 1922, the remnants of the coastal tribes in the southern part of Australia had been incarcerated in missions or driven inland, and their languages mostly silenced. What Somers/Lawrence heard, I think, was the fading murmur of those languages.

Because English is not the first language of the Australian continent, many early writers about the landscape heard only an echo of their own anxieties. These anxieties arose from their perception that the land was empty, inimical to people, or inhabited by ghosts and savages.

This cognitive unease about the land and our relation to it, the suggestion of the uncanny so powerfully articulated by Lawrence, continues to haunt much Australian writing. Much of Kangaroo is set on the south-east coast, the part of Australia now largely tamed by habitation, although traces of the uncanny still linger among the scarred sandstone cliffs and light-fractured forests of the Hawkesbury and the South Coast. But the genre of the hostile and haunted landscape reached its zenith in Voss, Patrick White’s re-imagining of the explorer narratives. Based loosely on the

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