A bridge too far

This is a fascinating publication. The first book by Wiradjuri author John Muk Muk Burke, Bridge of Triangles, is really free-form short fiction than a novel proper. Novella length, it is episodic, impressionistic, often poetic and open&shy;ended. And, while it has many strengths, this 1993 winner of the David Unaipon Award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors is ultimately a disquieting piece of work. The Unaipon Award has already given us a huge range of impressive texts: Graeme Dixon’s powerful collection of poetry, Holocaust Island, Philip McLaren’s riveting historical novel Sweet Water – Stolen Land, Doris Pilkington’s moving life story Caprice and Herb Wharton’s unforgettable story of the outback, Unbranded. I believe that in Bridge of Triangles Burke tries hard to surpass all of these. At times he succeeds; unfortunately, elsewhere, the effort is just too obvious. Burke’s book charts the search for identity – for belonging in both land, place and family – of Christopher Mickey Leeton. Born in a small town in western New South Wales, the protagonist’s mother, Sissy, is ‘Wiradjuri and of the rivers’. His father, Jack, is the dourest Irish Protestant in the region with the possible exception of his grandmother Leeton, who is one of the great intolerants of the book: ‘There were two things the Leetons would never forgive – marrying an Abo and marrying a Catholic. Sissy was both’. In fact, never forgiving seems to be a hallmark of the entire novel. Jack never seems to be able to get over the fact that Sissy had two children by other men while he was fighting in the jungles in New Guinea; Grandfather Leeton does not even kiss his wife good&shy;bye when she packs him off to an old person’s home in Sydney at the end of the book: even Sissy’s unheeded warning to her husband about imminent flood-waters causes untold resentment on both sides. As Burke writes: ‘Sissy knew then that she would leave Jack ... Sissy did not curse the river. She cursed the man’. As a result Sissy packs up her four children and, in the middle section of the novel (for me, the most successful portion of the text) tries her luck in post-war Sydney. In the midst of this, Christopher Leeton never really belongs anywhere. He misses the sense of extended Aboriginal family which he enjoyed as a young child and there is nothing in Sydney to replace it. Death keeps coming on too: his Aunt Rose is brutally raped and murdered in the national park: a ‘strange’ neighbouring boy hangs himself; all of the children in the tenement try to shanghai birds or lizards at the local quarry. Even Barry, Christopher’s best friend, boasts ‘I can kill enough for everyone – I can kill everything. You stick with me’. The contrast is clear. Though he is separated from his Koori people, Christopher still detests unmotivated violence: ‘Chris hated it when the kids shot at the animals ... He never once wantonly killed a thing that flew or ran or crawled’. But he is still a victim of those who kill and reject: as Burke puts it, ‘the invaders’. The triangles in the book’s title thus come to represent not only the bridges which Chris crosses – always searching for his identity – but also the symbolic noose-scaffolds with which both whites and blacks do them themselves in. It’s a pretty bleak picture. Throughout the entire novel there’s not a single character who truly finds what she is looking for. Even at the end of the book, when Christopher finally makes a decision to return to Sydney to seek out his mother, there is only the thinnest veil of hope that he will locate her; even less that there will be some sort of rapprochement between them. So, what do we do with this? Is Bridge of Triangles an existential story of the human condition or is it an overwhelmingly pessimistic literary gestalt? Even more: where and how does Burke place Aboriginality in all of this maelstrom? The answer seems to be that the author has gone for a flicker of Black Australian optimism, but little else. The Aborigines are said to have a certainty that there is: more than this sad sad world where people hated and killed one another, where little children were left hungry and lonely and reaching out to be loved, where everyone died and that was that. According to Burke, all non&shy;Aborigines are tainted with anger and despair, while indigenous Australians hold onto something more; as he puts it, ‘At least the blacks could believe that happiness was attainable’. It’s a pity, though, that with so much interesting material and a clear poetic skill, Burke has succumbed to the temptation to overwrite the last section of his novel. The final thirty pages of Bridge of Triangles overbalance into a style which is at times positively excessive. Part III of the book begins with references to ‘the chiasma’ of ‘the great bulk of Paula’ and finishes with Christopher’s brother Keith thinking that the deaths of two of his mates were ‘contextualised in the brutish environment of his prison’ and the sententious phrase, ‘Fleetingly he felt the is-ness of it all’. I’m afraid the author lost me at this point. Bridge of Triangles proves that John Muk Muk Burke is a writer with obvious talent. He has produced an extremely ambitious novel with some memorably distilled images. My view is that the author’s approach is far more comfortably that of a short story writer but here, the text has been lengthened out into a novella. Unfortunately, like a span which collapses under the weight of its own superstructure, this literary bridge has been extended just a little too far. Adam Shoemaker has just finished editing Oodgeroo: A Tribute, an international collection of essays and reminiscences about the life of Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Adam Shoemaker

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