Hyland House

Cat Tracks was originally intended as a novel for young people. It has, however, attracted a wider audience, partly because of its well-constructed story and partly because of its excellent presentation of an important conservation problem.

I was given these books for review just as I was finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Its combination of fictional characters, information about language, architecture and war, and visual images reminded me that reading has so many functions. We read in order to imagine, to learn, to make discoveries. My admiration for Austerlitz also put me in mind of national differences. On the cover is a photograph of a child dressed as a pageboy and holding a feathered hat. His serious gaze and self-conscious posture mark him as a product of a culture where the intellect has precedence over the physical. Pale hair and a gently rounded face indicate his European origins, but otherwise it is almost impossible to relate him to any Australian child.

When Baldwin Spencer, the eminent Professor of Biology at Melbourne University, arrived in Alice Springs in 1894 as a member of the Horn party, the first scientific expedition to Central Australia, he knew very little anthropology. Edward Stirling, South Australia’s Museum Director who would write their chapter on anthropology, was not much better off. The man who was in the know was the man on the ground: Frank Gillen, the local Telegraph Officer, Magistrate, and sub-Protector of Aborigines. A genial, curious, open-minded fellow of Irish Catholic faith, Gillen had been in the region for nearly twenty years.

‘Byron!’, said Max Beerbohm ‘– he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Com Laws.’ As we know, things turned out otherwise, and Byron lives on, in the hallowed phrase, as flash as a rat with a gold tooth.

Dorothy Porter has been called an audacious poet. She has been called a sexy read. Doug Anderson described her as ‘One of our most exuberant and perceptive purveyors of passion.’ With the publication of her latest book, The Monkey’s Mask, Porter’s reputation stands firm.

In 1981 the historian Peter Gardner wrote a moving article in the Victorian Historical Journal on the fate of the Gippsland aboriginal leader Bunjilene, who was thought to be holding a lost white woman supposedly captured by aboriginals in the early 1840s. Bunjilene was first taken into custody by Commissioner Tyers at Eagle Point near Bairnsdale in 1847, but while escaping, his son drowned in the lakes. This was the first in a series of tragedies which was to eliminate the Bunjilene family. When he couldn’t produce the white woman, he was taken as punishment to the Native Police station near Dandenong, even though the authorities knew he could not legally be kept prisoner. Here he was chained to a gumtree for long periods. His wife soon died, and after 18 months of illegal detention Bunjilene himself passed away from ‘grief’. Their two sons were taken away to be educated like whites and displayed around Melbourne. One died early, and the other, after some tragic incidents which revealed his disorientation, succumbed to fever and consumption in 1865. He was only eighteen-years-old.

‘What do you reckon this is? Some kind of joke’ This final ironic cadence to Bill Reed’s sixth novel, with its upbeat question asked of death and the literary establishment, is never resolved; that isn’t Reed’s way. In a grand guignol of a novel, ostensibly about the repercussions of publishing an expose of crime bosses in New South Wales (which Reed actually did as the publisher of Australian books for Macmillan), he sets out to linguistically conceal the agony of caring for an elusive humanity he finds alien and macabre.

The functions of literature in a society are many and varied and often there is a good correlation between what a people’s literature says about them and what they say about themselves. This is certainly true of the traditional literature of the Aborigines of Australia as exemplified in their myths and legends and of the traditional pattern of life which, laid down in The Dreaming, was followed so well until the European settlement and the resultant culture clash.