Seven was the easiest person to be with I had ever met. He was like someone who fit perfectly in his own skin, someone entirely at home in the world. He was tolerant of others and nonjudgmental and he honestly didn’t care what anyone else thought. His calm was something new to me, a lack of striving, an imperturbability that I found curious but magnetic, and I sometimes wondered if it was this quality that lay behind all those eighteenth-century stories about the gentle, easygoing Polynesians.
The days passed in a haze. When we wanted a shower, we borrowed the key to the shower block at the marae. When we wanted to go swimming, we caught a lift up the road to the other side of the peninsula where the open ocean crashed on a white sand beach and a handful of offshore islands floated on the sea.
One day the whole family crammed into a couple of cars and made the trek to a little cove where there was a colony of sea urchins. I went, as usual, slathered in sunscreen, with dark glasses and a hat and a long-sleeved shirt and the ubiquitous sarong, now keeping my legs from sunburn, now covering my head. Everyone else was in bathing suits and shorts, their skin almost black from exposure by this time of the year. I waded out with Seven’s mother, knee-deep in the water, searching for the spiky, well-camouflaged shells. The idea was to reach in quickly and twist them off the rocks, but the spines were sharp and I was afraid of them and clumsy in my approach. Invariably the creatures felt me and sucked themselves closer to the rock. Once they’d done that, it was impossible to loosen them; you might as well have tried to pry a brick from a finished wall.
Eventually, I wandered up to the top of the beach and installed myself under a large pohutukawa tree. They say that the first Maoris to reach New Zealand, sailing there in canoes from the islands to the north, were so excited by the sight of a pohutukawa that they threw their sacred red feathers into the sea, only to discover that what they had mistaken for flocks of bright birds were, in fact, the tree’s red blossoms. It is a story about false appearances and precipitate acts, and if I had known it then perhaps I would have given it some thought. But by then I was more or less caught in a spell woven by the sun and the sea and the strangeness of everything around me.
When I finally shook myself awake and realized I had to get back to Australia, Seven hitchhiked down to Auckland to see me off. We said good-bye at the airport awkwardly, neither of us having any clear idea of what, if anything, might be next. I gave him my address and phone number, though I somehow doubted that he’d call. He gave me a number in Whangarei where he said he could be reached.
I was back in Melbourne within hours, but for weeks I felt as though I’d left some piece of me behind. I wandered around in a fog, finding it impossible to settle down. I wanted to talk about what had happened and, at the same time, I wanted to keep it to myself. Actually, I wasn’t quite sure what had happened.
One of my friends, a professor of politics, once told me jokingly that it had come to him in a blinding flash that he was trapped in the body of a European when, in truth, he was actually Bengali. This, I thought, was a little like what had just happened to me. It wasn’t that I thought I was a Maori trapped in the skin of a New Englander, but something about the place and the people, something about Seven and the inlet and the sea, made me feel as though I had discovered something new and marvelous, as though I had arrived at wherever I was meant to be.
At first, I just sat and wondered what, if anything, I should do. I knew that if I did nothing, the power of these impressions would inevitably fade. But I couldn’t stand the prospect of just letting everything go back to the way it had been before. I felt as though I’d been shown something, taught something, offered something, and I wasn’t ready to let it go.
After a couple of weeks, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and put a call through to the boardinghouse where Seven said I might find him. It was hard to get through, and when I finally reached him, he sounded kind of surprised.
“So,” I said, without too much preamble, “why don’t you come to Australia?”
He said he’d been thinking about it. He had in mind to go to Brisbane, where a couple of his cousins lived.
“Brisbane!” I nearly shouted. “What do you want to go to Brisbane for? Come to Melbourne. Just call and let me know which plane you’re on. I’ll meet you at the airport.”
He arrived in Melbourne a month later with a gym bag that he carried on the plane. I wasn’t entirely sure I would recognize him and almost called out to another Maori of about his size who was among the first passengers off. When he finally came through the doors, almost the last to disembark, I was seriously considering the possibility that he had decided not to come at all.
In the gym bag he had one pair of shorts, three T-shirts, some socks, underwear, and two little wooden-handled trowels that were the tools of his trade. This, plus the jeans, shirt, and jacket that he had on his back, was the sum of his worldly possessions, or at least everything he thought he needed to move to another country. It was the flip side, as I later discovered, of his irresponsibility, but I think it was this that clinched it for me. Even though I quickly burdened him with all the trappings of ordinary life, he never lost the lightness of touch that that gym bag represented.
4
Terra Incognita
At the time of this, my first visit to New Zealand, I was about halfway through my doctoral dissertation on the European literature of the Pacific. A dissertation is a demonstration of scholarship, an account of what is already known about a subject to which one adds a contribution of original research. It is a project in which one’s own experience, that is, one’s personal experience, plays no proper part. And yet, although I read and read, it struck me forcibly that it was only when I experienced things firsthand that they acquired real meaning for me.
I mentioned this to the chairman of my department at our first meeting of the new year. I was just back from my trip and the intense impressions it had made on me were uppermost in my mind. I had brought a chapter of my thesis with me. It was a section in which I was trying to explain why the writers I was studying routinely made a point of referring to the events of their own lives, building their stories around what had happened to them. “You know that great line of Conrad’s,” I said. “A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind. Melville, Conrad, Malinowski, what would they have been without ships and tents?”
The chairman, an extremely tall deconstructionist, looked displeased. Still, he agreed to look over my chapter, and at the end of the week there was a note in my mailbox saying I could come and pick it up.
The door to his office was shut when I got there. I knocked and heard a voice say, “Come in.” He was sitting at a desk piled high with papers, every wall from floor to ceiling was filled with books. He turned in his chair and, without rising, held out the paper for me to take. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t think there’s anything in this you can use.”
“You really think it’s that bad?” I asked him.
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
Attached to the front of my paper was a one-page critique, which I read as soon as the office door had closed behind me. The piece, the chairman noted, was pleasantly written, but this was, unfortunately, its only virtue. On the downside, there were theoretical difficulties. I had failed to say anything new not only about the authors or their writings, but about “the intertextual processes of establishment of authority via discourses of experience or empirical observation.” I had also made the mistake of presenting empiricism “as a form of simplicity,” rather than “as a metaphysically complex mode of representation,” and of validating the “authority-effect” that writers like Conrad and Melville had tried to achieve at the expense of “exploring the empirical as a reality-projecting mode of textuality.”
I had, in other words, taken my writers at face value, naively accepting what they had to say and secretly, though obviously transparently, hoping to peer through their words to the world
as it had been—or not even as it had been, but as they had experienced it—a world that they had actually lived in but that I could only read about in books.
I knew it was unsophisticated. I knew that I had effectively abandoned the critical project in favor of a hopeless attempt to grasp what it had actually been like to be there on the beach. I had been a graduate student long enough to know how this kind of unreconstructed romanticism would be greeted within the academy. But I also knew that I was a romantic—not in the ordinary sense of being preoccupied with love affairs and triangles—but in the more specialized, even technical sense of possessing a Romantic sensibility. What I liked was adventure and excitement; I liked Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Walter Scott. I was incurably drawn to heroism and melancholy and anything that smacked of the mysterious, the exotic, or remote. It was what I was doing there in the first place—not in the office of the English department chairman, but in this far-flung corner of the world.
The Pacific was not, on the surface, an obvious place for me to be. I had grown up in Boston and knew almost nothing of islands or the sea, having spent the summers of my youth in Europe visiting museums with my mother while my father taught, and reading a great deal, especially Victorian novels. I imagined myself as little Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden or Sara Crewe, and my mind was filled with cavernous and drafty English manor houses and half-formed images of moors.
But if you are raised on a steady diet of Frances Hodgson Burnett, you can hardly come away from it without some feeling for the colonies. The England of my imagination was one that belonged, strictly speaking, to my mother’s childhood: a great, sprawling empire that covered most of the map—India and Ceylon, Shanghai and Cape Town, Burma, Barbados, Guyana, Brunei. A world of vast riches and utter squalor, it was where, in the sorts of stories I liked, people went to make their fortunes or to disappear if they were in disgrace. It was where they returned from, if they returned, and where, if they didn’t, they had either gone native or contracted the cholera and died.
It was all long gone in reality, but even in my own life there were occasional odd eruptions of Europe’s imperial past. The visits, for example, of my mother’s maiden aunt, who had taken a Grand Tour in the 1920s and who periodically descended upon us in a cloud of tea rose and camphor tar. She was quite deaf and rather strange and I dreaded her arrival, but she always brought me curious things: stiff little boots made of reindeer hide with curled-up toes and woolen tassels, or aromatic cigarette boxes inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. It was enough to make one nostalgic for the days of ocean travel, for deck chairs and steamer trunks and the idea of going abroad.
“Abroad” had mostly meant Europe and the mysterious East, but for me it turned out to be Australia. I had been working as a secretary since leaving college and I was desperate to get away. On impulse I applied for a fellowship to study in Australia. I was not going to study mining and metallurgy, or marine biology, or veterinary science, or any of the fields for which Australia is known, however. I was going to read Australian literature.
“Hah,” said my brother. “That won’t take long.”
But the novelty of it must have struck someone on the fellowship committee, because they awarded me a grant.
The whole process took almost a year of planning, and for much of that time I slept in a room with a map of Australia pinned to the sloping ceiling above my bed. The land on the map was yellow and the sea was blue. A tracery of red lines indicating roads and a scattering of thin blue rivers stretched inland from the coasts for a few inches and petered out. There was a network of large lakes in the interior, depicted, interestingly, not in the blue of water but in the white of salt. Not really lakes at all, they represented huge salt pans, the crystalline dregs of an ancient inland sea. Across the open expanse of the map’s middle were scattered a handful of names: the Great Sandy Desert, the Little Sandy Desert, the Stony Desert, the Nullarbor Plain.
I had heard about the Nullarbor from my father, who had done a stint in Australia during World War II. It was not a name like so many others—Wagga Wagga, Wollongong, Moranbah, Kalgoorlie—not an Aboriginal name at all. “Nulla arbor,” he told me, “Latin for no tree.”
My father was in the submarine service and he spent the early part of the war training crews in Chicago until, finally, he could no longer stand it and asked to be transferred to active duty. He was sent out to the U.S. naval base in Brisbane, Australia, as a relieving officer for one of the Pacific fleet’s submarine crews. From there, the men were transported by rail to Fremantle, just south of Perth. This meant crossing from one side of Australia to the other, a distance, as the crow flies, of some 2,300 miles. On the ground, though, it was much longer. They followed a route that hugged the coast—all the way down through New South Wales, around Victoria, up through South Australia, and across the western desert—a journey of over 4,000 miles. At Port Augusta, about halfway, they left what passed for civilization. The land around them was broken and stony, the clouds were thin and high.
It was hot along the Nullarbor and the train periodically stopped to water. The men would get out to stretch and smoke and eat a meal of the mutton stew that my father grew to hate with an enduring passion. When they had finished, the mess crew would take the big cooking pots and dump what was left on the ground beside the tracks. One time, my father told me, as the train was pulling away, he looked back and saw a group of people—men, children, women, dogs—materialize out of the bush and gather up the remnants of the food. “They must have been there all the time,” he said, “watching, waiting for us to go away.”
During that year leading up to my departure, I kept a book on my bedside table. It was the only book I had actually read about Australia, and I had found it quite by chance in a secondhand bookshop near where I worked. It was called Voss and it had been written by Australia’s Nobel laureate, Patrick White. The cover showed a detail from a nineteenth-century painting by Frederick McCubbin called Down on His Luck. In it a bearded man in moleskins and a battered hat sits looking despondently at a small fire. Behind him the bush looms, not dense and dark like the forests of a German fairy tale, but thin and dappled and disorienting. It was easy to imagine thin, brown people standing perfectly still with their tall, thin spears, half-hidden in the spindly trees.
Voss is the story of an explorer who walks out into the blazing Australian desert and dies. The novel, which was first published in 1958, is based on a famous nineteenth-century overland expedition. In 1848 a German scientist named Ludwig Leichhardt attempted a direct route from Brisbane to Perth—the same route my father would have taken had there been a railway or a road—across a landscape dotted with names like Mount Hopeless, the Moon Desert, and Lake Blanche. But it was no more possible to travel straight across the parched interior of Australia in 1944 than it had been a century earlier.
Leichhardt’s party consisted of seven white men mounted on horses and two Aboriginal guides who walked. Last seen leaving a sheep station on the Darling Downs, the entire expedition vanished without a trace. Nothing was ever found of them, not a stirrup, not a button, not a bit of leather strap. Various theories surfaced: that they were washed away in a flash flood, or burned up in a bushfire, or speared by hostile Aborigines. But the most likely scenario is that they simply struggled on, farther and farther into country that proved increasingly inhospitable, through spinifex and stunted forest and a maze of dry creek beds, hoping always for higher ground and for water until, finally, it was too late to turn back.
Voss, the Leichhardt-figure in the novel, similarly sets off on a long slog toward death. “He is going on this great expedition,” says one of the characters. “You know, to find an inland sea. Or is it gold?” In fact, Voss’s quest is not for wealth or power or even information about the height of Australia’s mountain ranges or which way the rivers run. He is a Romantic hero driven by some internal need to cross great tracts of difficult land, to expose himself to risks and dangers, to suffer, and ultimately to die.
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The sensibility was familiar to me but the setting was entirely new. Exploration was not something we thought much about in Boston, where our stories were of Pilgrims and Minutemen and hanging lanterns in the church. I myself was descended from settlers, who were not the same as explorers, and although there must have been explorers who came before them, I had no idea who they were. Of course, there were American explorers who had crossed the plains and the Rockies and discovered the source of the Mississippi and the Great Salt Lake. But that was all in the West and had little to do with New England. The only other explorers I knew of were Spaniards (well, Italians, actually) whose names we dutifully chanted at school—In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue—and a handful of Norsemen who had, purportedly, set foot somewhere in Canada in the exceedingly distant past.
But something about White’s operatic treatment of the quest—a journey, as one of the characters puts it, “of dust, and flies, and dying horses”—struck a chord in me. I was all of twenty-three and White’s themes of alienation and longing, of risk taking and rebellion, were like music to my ears. I identified, above all, with White’s fixation on the unattainable. “Places yet unvisited,” writes White, “can become an obsession, promising final peace, all goodness.” This was something I thought I understood.
Perhaps the effect on me of this novel would have been less profound had it not dovetailed so neatly with the handful of Australian films that were playing in American cinemas at the time. These movies—films like Breaker Morant and Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock—were mostly set in the nineteenth century and featured girls in frocks and men on horses and children who got lost in the bush. The stories were bleak and unresolved: crimes were committed and the wrong man punished; the children who got lost were never found. But the settings were spectacularly beautiful and the films made me want to set out immediately for a place that was, as I understood it, mysterious, empty, and exotic in a hot, dry sort of way.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 5
