Walker November 07

Agamemon's edict

Shirley Walker

Alex Miller
Landscape of Farewell
Allen & Unwin, $35 hb, 221 pp, 9781741750898

Alext Miller, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award for Journey to the Stone Country (2003) and The Ancestor Game (1992), is one of our most profound and interesting writers. His latest novel, Landscape of Farewell, tells the story of Max Otto, an aged and disillusioned German professor of history, devastated by the death of his beloved wife. He knows now that he will never write the historical study of massacre that was to have been his crowning achievement. Instead, paralysed by a sense of guilt-by-association – he has good reason to think that his father took part in the atrocities of World War II – he has retreated to a remote and bloodless historical study, that of intellectual upheaval during the twelfth century.

Nevertheless, he plans one last gesture – a valedictory conference paper on ‘The Persistence of the Phenomenon of Massacre in Human Society’ – at an international conference in Hamburg. Then he intends to return home and kill himself. Otto knows that his paper is second-rate, out of date, its arguments patched together from a mouldering heap of old notes. But he begins with a stirring Homeric quotation in which Agamemnon urges his brother Menelaus to destroy the Trojans, to leave not a single one alive:

This is quoted again at a crucial point in the narrative, suggesting, as do several later references to Cain, that wholesale cruelty, the massacre of whole populations, is a continuing phenomenon in human history. The book is, in fact, the dramatisation of a fundamental question: how does the good and just person come to terms with the obscenities of history without being complicit in them?

Max Otto is challenged immediately. An Aboriginal academic, Vita McLelland, springs to her feet. She is like a ‘bright, exotic raptor spreading her gorgeous plumage in the midst of the ranks of these drab fowls’. She tears his argument to shreds, enraged that he has ignored the massacres of her people. In a calmer mood, she invites Otto to Australia to visit her Uncle Dougald Gnapun, an Aboriginal elder. So, stripped of all comfort – having lost both his wife and his sense of professional integrity – Otto begins his journey to Mt Nebo in North Queensland and his initiation into the reality of massacre.

The mythic pattern is clear and has perhaps been overused in modern fiction. There is the journey into the wilderness (to the resting place of an Aboriginal warrior), the guidance of a wise elder, and the confrontation with the darker aspects of both self and race. However, in Miller’s hands, the application is far from formulaic. The three characters, all in one sense or another historians, are vividly drawn, their interactions dynamic. Max Otto is the product of the old world and its sanitising methodologies. He has averted his eyes from the Holocaust and refused to investigate his father’s part in it. Vita is incandescent in her insistence on the truth, the immediate, her version of it. For her, ‘the wheel of history evidently no longer turned, but had come to stop at her generation’. She will challenge Max again and again, often violently. Dougald is determined to recover the ‘broken realities’ of his race. He alone knows the story of a massacre in which his great-grandfather Gnapun, a warrior famous among the tribes, played the leading role. It must be written down before he dies, lest ‘none be left to think of them and shed a tear’. He will entrust this task to Otto.

Miller’s atmospheric landscapes are one of the strengths of this novel: the dimly lit, wintry streets of Hamburg; Dougald’s fibro cottage in a desolate and abandoned town on the edge of the silent, featureless scrub; the brigalow-haunted billabongs and escarpments of the Expedition Range. But the sense of a deep and spiritual connection with the land, beyond mere landscape, exists across all racial divisions. The passion of Otto’s uncle for his land approaches mania. It is ‘an indissoluble aspect of his innermost sense of who he was; that source from whence he had his origins’. Dougald’s attachment to his Country is ‘an ancestral knowing grappled into the roots of his being ... a bondage that went beyond mere familiarity and a knowledge of things’. The notion of Country, the land, something worth dying or killing for, is passionately asserted. It is then dramatised in a crucial chapter in Landscape of Farewell: Max Otto’s written account of the massacre, as told to him by Dougald.

This account, Miller tells us, is based on the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre, said to have been the largest ever massacre of white settlers by indigenous Australians. Instead of being victims, the Aborigines led by Gnapun are warriors avenging the desecration of their sacred sites, and Otto’s account is written, appropriately, as heroic epic. For the first time, one senses, he is writing history with personal passion and involvement. Gnapun’s ability, in a trance-like state before the massacre, to identify with, to enter the very being of, the white leader and experience his coming death, enables Otto to narrate both sides of the story. The white settlers have committed a great crime but, because of cultural ignorance, have no conception of it. The settlement they have established is peaceful, domestic and, to them, blameless. The massacre is sudden, treacherous, savage and complete. Not even ‘the child in the womb’ is spared.

Such are Miller’s storytelling skills that it is only in retrospect that we, and Otto, realise the ambivalence of this account. Can a massacre ever be justified? Can history ever be objective? Is it possible for the historian to enter into the passion of the event yet maintain his or her objectivity? Otto eventually sees his account as ‘fiction’. And who owns the story now? It has passed through many oral tellings before Otto writes his version. Does he, who has put so much of himself into it, now own it? It has possessed him; does he now possess it?

Landscape of Farewell has a rare level of wisdom and profundity. Few writers since Joseph Conrad have had so fine an appreciation of the equivocations of the individual conscience and their relationship to the long processes of history. But perhaps I am over-intellectualising what is, after all, a very human story, passionately told. There are, as an antidote, the pleasures of irony and the many and complex parallels in the story. Just one of many: in the Expedition Range, Dougald and Max Otto are retracing the footsteps of Ludwig Leichardt, that earlier German explorer. Leichardt’s Journal is Dougald’s one book, his most treasured possession, simply because it is his only reliable guide to the original state of the Aboriginal lands. It is significant that he passes it on to Max Otto.

As a further counter to all this profundity, the reader should turn to Max Otto’s long meditation on his love for his wife. It is tender, moving and erotic: ‘Naked in bed at night together we are released from the real world of the everyday and become the subjects of a power that we do not understand ... the greatest power we know ... the source of our joy ... our most sacred place.’ This, Otto’s final ‘long farewell’ to his dead wife, certainly merits rereading.

Shirley Walker is a Past President of ASAL and the Founding Director of the Centre for Australian Literature and Language Study (as it was then called) at the University of Sydney.