cultural studies
Robert Drewe
Roslynn D. Haynes
Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film.
CUP $39.95hb, 347pp, 0 521 57111 1
AS SEEKING THE CENTRE makes clear, there are deserts and deserts.
But while deserts vary enormously, you could say that
desert-seekers are more of a type. Most desert-seekers of the
past century or so bring to mind the words of Peter O'Toole's
T.E. Lawrence to Claude Rains' Mr Dryden when accepting a certain
mission in Arabia: 'Of course I'm the man for the job...What is
the job, by the way?'
In my school history classes, filling all those maps of Australia
with dotted, criss-crossing lines in different coloured pens, I
was left with a similar impression of most, if not all, of our
dismal desert explorers.
The actual deserts first revealed in geography class, however,and later in films and fiction, seemed more varied and complex and, furthermore, to affect and reflect -- in their very extremes of climate and topography -- the national characteristics and culture of their continents.
The Sahara, for example, evoked images both romantic and violent. There was no doubt this was a desert of Boys' Own adventures. And what was it about the American desert that even its most violent reaches assumed a gritty glamour -- a sort of outback noir -- not granted to many other pieces of real estate?
Take the Badlands, an arid region of south-west South Dakota and north-west Nebraska. An area of barren landscapes and fossil deposits east of the Black Hills, it was originally called the Badlands not because it harboured outlaws, as westerns and cowboy comics led you to believe, but (who would've guessed it?) because the land was terrible.
The Badlands is largely made up of what Australians call bulldust: loose, blowing dust -- boggy when wet. A defining difference between our two countries is that to optimistic Americans it was still a landscape representing a chance of personal renewal, a dream of a brave and hopeful civilisation. To us, bulldust is bulldust.
The foundering of the Badlands agricultural dream, like so many failures in America, gave rise to considerable myth. Thanks to film, music and photography, the dusty prairies, arid buttes and dry creek beds, while sign-posting this innocence gone sour also came to stand for loss, regret, betrayal and a sort of subdued, sly, just-out-of-sight, violence.
It was a small step, once western movies had forged the way, to see this landscape as quintessentially American, a place where the culture was clarified. It begat the road-movie, and it has retained the road-movie genre within its arid reaches.
The American desert became an unbeatable backdrop for terse lyricism. Just think of it for a few seconds and you start hearing guitar music: probably Ry Cooder and the Paris, Texas theme. It also became perfect anti-hero territory.
Not so the Australian desert. Even though some of us might have actually experienced it, too, as a place of subdued, sly, just-out-of-sight violence, from the outset it was portrayed as a place for heroes. A very Australian sort of hero: the heroic failure.
Our desert-seekers, our explorers, failures almost to a man, nevertheless succeeded in convincing themselves, their contemporaries and successive generations of writers, that they were heroic in defeat, and that their endurance was of more lasting importance than the original goals of their expeditions.
It's interesting that when we think of the American desert in literature, film or painting we think of the present as much as the past. The American desert is continually adapted to the present. When we think of the Australian desert, however, we tend to think of the past. We think of the explorers, we think of the original inhabitants, we think of geology and pre-history. When we think of the past, we're really thinking of myth.
We are all inheritors of the Myth of Landscape. Despite massive cultural inroads from America and Europe, the idea of ourselves we late-twentieth century urbanites carry in our heads is still based on, or reacting against, attitudes to the desert, water and fire held by outback stoics in the nineteenth century.
It's still a variation on the Australian Legend of Russel Ward. When we think of the past we really mean the outback. When we think of the present, we mean the city and the coast. Further, when we think of the past and the outback we're thinking Moral Notions, and when we think of the present and the city-coast we're thinking Problems: politics, crime, race, sex, drugs. City people are all shonky; country people are all nice. Give me a break.
In literary and media circles we've come to understand that the present is crude, unstable and postmodern, and probably produces ethnic serial killers. The past, on the other hand, is stable, comfy, modernist, Anglo-Saxon and more likely to win the Miles Franklin.
We know that many paintings and novels, especially Voss, fixed the inland desert in the literary imagination as a place of redemptive suffering, where sacrifices of individual lives were made for the greater good. It was an easy step to make to associate the outback with the Anzac spirit of struggle and perseverance against hopeless odds.
This romantic, nostalgic, idealised view of the outback, and corresponding bad-mouthing of the city, have given rise to all sorts of interesting wrinkles in the contemporary Australian character, from the urgent need for Land-Rovers in Paddington to the agrarian sanctity of Les Murray.
The success of Roslynn Haynes' book (and forgive me for taking almost as long as Burke and Wills to reach this point) is that it encompasses and crystallises this dichotomy. It begins from the unsentimental, even sacrilegious position that the Centre is distant, unknown, even repellent, to many of us. And then it acknowledges that we can't escape its hypnotic and constant influence on our identity and our senses.
Back in her schooldays, says Roslynn Haynes (now associate professor of English at the University of New South Wales), Australian literature and history and art was all a 'sandy blur'. It only snapped into focus when she read contemporary Australian women writers and was subsequently lured to reconsider their predecessors through a contemporary lens.
Seeking the Centre should make Australian culture snap into focus for many people. Any book whose reach encompasses Robert O'Hara Burke and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert could hardly be less than epic. The research and scholarship are awe-inspiring but the writing is so elegant, pithy and tough-minded that non-academic readers will be quickly engaged.