1The two novels this paper focuses on, Remembering Babylon1 and The Conversations at Curlow Creek,2 testify to David Malouf’s ongoing ‘dialogue with Australia’.3 Published in 1993 and 1996, two centuries after the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts,4 they engage with crucial issues in a postcolonial5 Australia which still has to negotiate its existential uncertainty.6 By returning to the first half of the nineteenth century, the narratives face the ghosts of the past which have haunted Australia, notably the stain of its origins as a penal colony: a sense of exile to the edge of the world is combined with the legacy of historical wrongs, the atrocities of the convict system and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal peoples—from dispossession to massacre or assimilationist policies which have engendered social alienation and spiritual dislocation.

2Malouf’s fiction is permeated with the notion of exile: Malouf himself is the descendant of migrants who have experienced the difficulty of making sense of the unfamiliar.7 In An Imaginary Life, published in 1978,8 behind the imagined experience of the Roman poet Ovid’s banishment to ‘the ends of the earth’ (7), looms an allegory of the (post)colonial condition in an Australia which has been regarded as belonging to the margins of the British Empire, and is referred to as ‘this godforsaken place’ (Malouf 1993: 5).

3Such representations of Australia run throughout Malouf’s fiction, and many characters are depicted as being haunted by visions of ‘home’, such as young Janet McIvor in Remembering Babylon: ‘Scotland, home, was sacred to her’ (55). The filiastic bond is thus emphasized and, by contrast, the sense of alienation in Australia, evoking the ‘ideal of an undifferentiated relation with the Imperial Mother’ which, as Chris Prentice argues, is associated with ‘ [c]olonial status’.9 Janet’s attachment to, and admiration for a mother-country where she did not even grow up is opposed to the reality of her parents’ living conditions there: as a matter of fact, Australia seems to have offered the McIvors more opportunities—‘here they were with twenty acres’ (53)—whereas Scotland was synonymous with a difficult life—work at the mine, and very little space as symbolized by ‘ [t]he house with the little backyard not big enough for a cat to jump in’ (53). Janet’s perception derives from an idealized vision of Scotland, from a myth: ‘ [s]he was in love with this other life her parents had lived; with Scotland at a time before they came to Australia, before she was born that was her time too, ... giving reality to a world she had need of’ (54). Janet’s vision of Scotland is articulated around the opposition between the (superior) centre and the (inferior) margins, which is one of haunting representations of Australia. And in Janet’s representation of it, Scotland is attributed superior qualities as suggested by the comparatives: it was ‘a world... more alive and interesting, more crowded with things, with people too, than the one she was in’ (Malouf 1993: 54-55). It also relies on the idea of a remote, parochial Australia, geographically and culturally alienated from the rest of the world—and from the centre of things on the other side of the earth—, offering only a constricted life: ‘the world was larger, more passionate, crueller—even that would be a comfort—than the one she was bound to’ (58).

4It could be argued that by choosing a young character to voice such feelings, and by highlighting how unrealistic Janet’s position is, Malouf meant to question the ingrained notion of Australia’s inferiority and cultural alienation deriving from its location. The status of nineteenth-century Britain is indeed undermined in the two novels: the settlers portrayed in Remembering Babylon fled to Australia in order to escape the difficult living conditions in Britain.10 Such a negative view pervades The Conversations at Curlow Creek with the image given of Ireland11—under English rule—through the characters’ memories. Social injustice,12 wealth for some and dire poverty for so many others, is combined with harsh treatment as exemplified by the fate of one character—O’Riordan—who was transported to New South Wales for dubious reasons: ‘he had been accused of belonging to a band of sheep-stealers’ (Malouf 1996: 157).

5Adair, the protagonist of The Conversations at Curlow Creek, is an Irish officer in charge of Carney, a convict/bushranger on the night before his execution. In fact, Adair, on the request of the woman he loves, but who loves his foster-brother, Fergus, has crossed the earth in search of the romantic, idealistic Fergus who, from Ireland to Australia, fights for the poor and the oppressed. In the hut where they spend that last night, the two characters mentally go back to Ireland, and Adair is haunted by memories of a graceful nature, as exemplified by ‘honeysuckle’ and ‘lily-of-the-valley’ (6),13 and the refinements of a culture inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. And yet, in that rough place on the other side of the globe, Adair is made to discover fellow-feeling, a form of sympathy which underpins the evolution of Adair’s attitude to Carney. First reified—‘an agglomeration of rags’ (2)—the man is perceived as a body—‘a hulk of flesh’ (2)—, a mass deprived of humanness, a humanness that Adair discovers later, as part of the messages granted by his geographical exile which is a spiritual retreat, ‘a side of his soul [... being...] in recession’ (203) in Australia.

6Just before the execution, Adair allows the man to go by the river and wash. And rumour has it that Adair let the man go free and even escaped with him. The creation of the legend presented in the novel evokes the ‘national mystique’14 which has been elaborated in an attempt to construct a distinctive Australian culture and identity. The (fictional) legend is made up of a combination of archetypes, such as the runaway convict15 or the rebellious natives, associated with the myth of a paradisiacal inland sea. At the same time, Adair is elevated to the rank of a hero, an elevation conveyed by the flamboyance in the distortion of his name O’Dare. The deed and the name call to mind the bushranger Ned Kelly, who became famous for his ‘daring’, and who was ‘in a tradition of Irish protest’:16 he is regarded as a folk-hero, inspiring artists like Sidney Nolan with his Ned Kelly series,17 and Peter Carey who in 2000 published True History of the Kelly Gang. Nevertheless, the celebration of O’Dare, this ‘folk hero’ (205), hints at the secondary status of Australian society, a representation of Australia which has penetrated the Australian collective unconscious, and evokes the ‘cultural cringe’, a term coined by A. A. Phillips,18 a critic and writer in the fifties. It has come to express the Australian cultural inferiority complex, an obsessive self-denigration that Malouf refutes: ‘Far from being a “cultural desert” (a phrase that seems meaningless to me) Australia, like most other places these days, has more “high culture” than even the hungriest of us can absorb’.19

7This name represents Adair’s hidden self, as his friend puts it: ‘Didn’t you know that O’Dare was one of your names? The name of this other you that the story has knocked up?’ (205). But with it, the figure of Fergus the rebel, the champion of justice, re-emerges: as though he were reincarnated in his foster-brother. A brother who comes to question the established order—‘this lesser law I do not and cannot accept’, he says (182)—in the name of an intimate, heartfelt higher truth:

What is it worth, if all it achieves is the breaking of a man in good health who might, if the world were kinder and more just, be of some use to it, and whose dignity, I do believe, is the equal of those who have judged and will deprive him, in an hour from now, of his one unconditional right in the world, breath... (182-183).

8With this form of rebellion against the established order, Adair establishes a continuity with Fergus’s generous ideals.20 This special communion seems to have developed Adair’s insight and in his questioning (‘Were I to follow my inclinations I would have him escape... Are we not free? [184]) can be recognized traces of Fergus’s own words and ideas. Adair thus duplicates his brother’s principles, re-enacts his fights for justice, his rebellion against British order, as if he were the physical embodiment of Fergus’s spirit. A recurrent motif in Malouf’s fiction, this kind of metamorphosis21 coincides with a strange, extreme experience. In the hut, Adair’s search for Fergus reaches its climax with Adair’s encounter with his lost (foster) brother,22 an encounter with an invisible Fergus which is mediated through Adair’s senses. It is an eerie encounter as Fergus’s ghostly presence is endowed with traces of physical and physiological attributes, in Adair’s perception of it:

He had found nothing. Only the conviction that in coming close to Daniel Carney he had at moments been close to Fergus, that the shadow that stepped between them had been his, so near that he could hear... an easy breathing he knew..., and so materially present that he could smell him, if shadows can be smelled and ghosts retain some essence of their former heat and sweat. (181)

9Adapting Marc Delrez’s words to the scene, Malouf can be said to be a ‘wizard of the word, a linguist demiurge capable of conjuring [the dead] into existence’.23 Such a central moment of revelation relying on one’s senses and imagination defies factual knowledge and rational knowledge, seen as conventional Western modes of cognition. In this experience of ‘a shadow thrown on the heart, of what was as alive in his senses as anything he had ever known, as the man hunched opposite’ (181-2), the frontier between life and death is blurred, and life and death are intertwined. The scene is set in a symbolic place and time: in the hut where Carney is in company with Adair on that last night before his execution. The scene in the hut functions as a mise en abyme of the underworld represented by Australia in the novel. The episode constitutes a crucial stage: the last stage before death, on the edge of death, the apt moment for the discovery of essential truths. In this hut, in the (metaphorical) darkness of the night Adair experiences an epiphany, which brings illumination: ‘they were under a night... that was not the opposite of day but, for those who had entered its rich depths, the simultaneous underside of day, the swarming underside of life as it is lived and would live it again, up there on the other side of the globe’ (210). This is the message of wholeness conveyed to Adair: just like night and day, death and life are part of the same continuum, death does not mean the end of life but another form of life.

10What Adair is thus offered is a form of rebirth. It is from his passage through the underworld of Australia and the hut that Adair’s ‘new self’ (211) emerges: ‘a self that has journeyed into the underworld and come back more surely itself and changed’ (211-212). The new Adair figuratively rises from the dead after Fergus is symbolically put to rest. Adair’s haunting torments engendered by his fascination for the woman who loves Fergus are ‘deeply buried’ (210), he is ‘the layer of [his] own ghost’ (209), of the guilty part of himself and the limitations of his rational self.24 The revelation of wholeness has brought a metamorphosis in the form of an acceptance of life and of its constituent—death—, and in the form of a liberation from a haunting past, allowing happiness with Virgilia: ‘He is free. There is, at last, just the two of them. Free both, with their lives before them’ (212).

11Malouf thus inverts the trope of antipodean alienation: Australia is not ‘ [a]n Ireland that has gone bad’ (51). It is not a spiritual ‘desert’25 for, instead of the traumatic dislocation created by displacement, here Australia comes to offer healing, regeneration— signalled by ‘a lightness in his blood’ (212)—and a new departure. This spiritual new departure is materialized by a geographical one, by Adair’s return to the other side of the earth, to Virgilia, to life (Adair discovers ‘durability’ [182]26) and love. Ireland will not stand in his mind as nostalgic and constricting memories of the past but as the site of his present and future.

12As for Carney, he also experiences a kind of rebirth. He is allowed by Adair to leave the hut and, significantly, goes to the river. The symbolic dimension of ‘this long ritual of washing and standing clean in the sunlight’ (200) is emphasized in the text. By getting rid of ‘the grime, the caked mud, the dried blood of his wounds’ (198), he is cleansing himself of the stains of the past. Although he is not literally saved from death—he returns to ‘ [t]he insufficient law’ (201)—, Carney is granted a form of salvation with this ritual cleansing, which, if not literally, symbolically conforms to the legend. With this symbolic baptism, he is cleansed of the marks of the coarse sides of human nature—‘dirt and sweat and blood, ... the heaviness of the flesh’ (198)—and re-born as a man, purified, recovering innocence as suggested by the image of the child and the new colour of his feet: ‘ [s]lowly the man turned and stood with lowered head, observing with a child’s interest the paleness of his feet’ (198). The ‘sunlight’ (199) of that symbolic dawn of rebirth may echo a divine halo, but the episode also depicts Carney’s immersion in the joy of nature as he is shown ‘ [i]n touch with that live element that on all sides was at play about him’ (199). What seems to be signified with this fusion is that the convict is accepted by nature whereas he is excluded from, punished and eventually killed by society. This points at the harshness of man’s law, and more particularly in this context, at the harshness and unnaturalness of imperial order, which is part of an ongoing Australian trauma.27

13Australia’s geographical location functions in a symbolic way, and the journey to the underworld can be seen as a metaphor for the exploration of one’s subconscious mind, and also for the hell the individual has to go through to make peace with his ghosts. The novel could also be read as an allegory of Australia. The ‘extensions [which] are being made’ in the settlement are underlined as being ‘ [h]opeful, ... forward-looking’ (211). They symbolize Australia’s emergence from the limbo of alienation, they signify that Australia is rising up, striving to liberate itself from its ghosts, from the stain of its origins. This hint at the search for redemption is metaphorically conveyed by the history of Janet’s convent in Remembering Babylon: formerly the mansion of a corrupt magnate, it was donated to nuns so that the ‘family name... would be relieved of the stain of Early Days in the South Seas’ (Malouf 1993: 184). Significantly, The Conversations at Curlow Creek ends on the offering of bread: ‘It’s all right, sir.... Good luck to you’ (213), a young baker says, refusing Adair’s money. It is a new-found sense of brotherhood which is here signified.

14This symbol of brotherhood, and the spiritual regeneration Adair is offered are redemptive signs for Australia. The Conversations at Curlow Creek thus seems to suggest that Australia could exorcize the trauma of exile and alienation, the trauma of its origins. However, Remembering Babylon intimates that the ghosts of history’s wounds weigh heavily on Australia. Set in the mid-nineteenth century with an epilogue in the First World War, it is centred on a group of settlers who are meant to embody the colonizer’s prejudiced perception of this land at the bottom of the world.

15 Remembering Babylon was published in 1993, after Aboriginal protest at the celebration of Australia’s Bicentenary in 1988, which marked for the indigenous peoples two centuries of dispossession and decimation.28 The novel also appeared in a decade associated with the reconciliation process, aiming at better understanding and better relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Besides, the title seems at the same time to point at the past and at the notion of exile. The Babylon referred to in the Bible was a place of exile for the Jewish people, and was also doomed to become a kind of hell. It evokes Australia with the colonists’ sense of exile in the southern hemisphere, and perhaps even more particularly with the alienation of Aborigines in their own land. The title suggests that Australia has been hell on earth.

16The members of the white settlement are characterized by a sense of alienation which is made manifest by a rejection of otherness, of the land and the people. It is illustrated in the novel by Lachlan’s dismissal of the quintessentially Australian landscape on his arrival in the southern hemisphere: ‘the bush—it wasn’t even country—was of no interest to him’ (55), ‘ [t]hat’s no’ them. That’s no’ the real wans’, he said when shown ‘bacon and eggs bushes’ (57). It echoes the rejection by the British white colonizer of the indigenous inhabitants perceived as sub-human. Simon Ryan observes that ‘ [t]he antipodal positioning of Australia had set up a number of paradigms into which the land, the animals and the inhabitants could be placed’,29 such as ‘oddity’, ‘perversity’, ‘anomalousness’ (Ryan 1994: 120-121). Such theories have justified, Simon Ryan argues, ‘the “corrective” imperial enterprise’ (Ryan: 121). It may be worth noting that, in the twentieth century, absorptionist policies were still based on a similar position, as shown by the comparison of the ‘absorption of the native Australian black race by the white’ to ‘a small stream of dirty water entering a large clear stream’.30

17A few characters, like Ned Corcoran, are made to voice the prejudices against Aboriginal people, and the whites’ behaviour recalls the exclusion and massacres the indigenous inhabitants were submitted to: ‘We ought to go out... and get rid of ‘em, once and for all’ (62). Such reactions betray the fear inspired by the unknown, and the subsequent feeling of threat.31 Malouf chooses a special temporal setting, the mid-nineteenth century, a period marked by the belief in the superiority of the West, of Western knowledge and of whiteness. The images of ‘dark’ (25) ‘darkness’ (24),32 employed to refer to the white boy’s perception of the Aborigines’ place,33 are underlain by the opposition between the darkness of the frightening unknown—‘Absolute Dark’ (3)—and the light of civilization. They are reminiscent of nineteenth-century representations of Africa as opposed to Europe in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.34

18Malouf’s novel engages with the assumption of the supremacy of Britain: ‘we are the first race in the world’ and ‘the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race’, Cecil Rhodes claimed.35 And it also addresses its corollary: the supremacy of whiteness. These notions are questioned with the arrival in the white settlement of Gemmy who, ‘leaping up onto the top rail of the fence, hung there’ (3). This position symbolizes the in-betweenness of a character, a British boy who, after being thrown overboard by British sailors was taken care of by an Aboriginal community. The settlers’ perception of Gemmy is informed by the prejudices of the times: Gemmy’s smell, ‘the smell he came with, which was the smell of the myall, half-meat, half-mud, a reminder, a depressing one, of what there might be in him that could not be reclaimed’ (41). This perception of Gemmy’s smell—associated with his difficulty in speaking English, this sign of ‘un-remembering’36—is underlain by the notion that this Other has become a ‘savage’, that with this ‘lapse back “into the native”’ (Boehmer 1995: 87) he may have lost his whiteness (‘had he remained white?’ [40]) and with it his humanness.

19These haunting questions reveal the whites’ rejection of the Other, of the black Other connected with barbarity and animality, an idea deriving from the concept of the Chain of Beings and the interpretation of Social Darwinism ‘whereby Europeans [were] defined as the fittest of all humanity’ (Boehmer 1995: 84-85). They also bespeak the whites’ fear of ‘contamination’ (Boehmer 1995: 69) and regression: ‘Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It’ (40). At the same time, this very questioning reveals the essential instability of Western representations, and the supremacy of the West is undermined by the emphasis on the inability of the English language to capture the reality of Australia: ‘a good deal of what they were after he could not have told... for the simple reason that there were no words for it in their tongue: yet when, as sometimes happened, he37 fell back on the native word, the only one that could express it, their eyes went hard’ (65). Conversely, the adequacy and, at the same time, the depth of the Aboriginal language—the ‘dealing between name and spirit’ (67)—are brought into relief. It should be noted that the spirituality of Aboriginal culture insisting on the bonds between people and a surrounding world full of meaning has now been recognized, which is a crucial reversal of the past, when Aborigenes were thought to be degraded and—through assimilationist policies and even physical and cultural genocide—doomed to ‘extinction’.38

20The novel offers intimations of understanding between the two worlds, between the whites and the Aborigenes. Gemmy, the white man who is also black, the hybrid, is shown as bridging the gap between the two communities, the two cultures, as enabling non-Aboriginal Australians to understand, to know the land with Mr Frazer as ‘the agency for translating it out of that dimension, which was all effort... into these outlines on the page’ (66). This interaction is presented in spiritual terms—‘their silent communing’ (65)— as a precious move towards peaceful and fruitful relations between the Aborigenes and non-Aboriginal Australians. Some of the messages of Malouf’s novel seem to be that hybridity and goodwill, sympathy, fellow-feeling are means to lay the ghosts of history. And Bill Ashcroft writes:

The return of Gemmy across the borders of imperial discourse opens the door to a future beyond boundaries, a future in which the hybridity of human life is fully embraced and the discourse of Australian place constructed differently. But although the future offered by Gemmy is rejected it represents in radical form what must take place gradually and painfully; a transformation into the hybridity of post-colonial life of which these novels are themselves both representative and formative.39

21 Remembering Babylon intimates a necessary transcendence of differences leading not only to reconciliation but unity between all creatures and nature. It is symbolically shown by the bees’ ‘power ... of communicating’ beyond words (192). It is introduced by Mrs Hutchence’s lesson in ‘sympathy’ (192) and is stressed by Janet’s vision years later. The crucial first sight of Gemmy has been imprinted in her mind for ever as the discovery of an Other who has brought essential revelations about themselves and humanness: ‘in a stilled moment that has lasted for years’ she still sees vividly

Gemmy as she saw him, once and for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall, and Flash slicing the air with its yelps in clear dog-language, and his arms flung out, never to lift him clear; overbalancing now, drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives—love, again love (199).

22Nonetheless, this is made to belong to the realm of dreams: and significantly, Janet has retreated from society and lives in a convent.40 Years before, Gemmy was excluded from the white settlement, the victim of a punitive expedition which reveals the whites’ barbarity41 and also recalls the horrors entailed by British colonization. The ‘formal apology to the members of the Stolen Generations’ delivered in the Australian Parliament on 13 February 2008 by the new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd may be a seen as a first step towards an acknowledgement of history’s wrongs: but given the disaster inflicted by white Australia on Aboriginal Australians, will it be possible to exorcize Australia’s ghosts?42

23The epilogue of the novel is set at the beginning of the twentieth century and seen from a contemporary perspective: the novel underlines history’s trauma, however it also suggests a path which may be long and difficult, towards better days, towards reconciliation.