Readers Place

David Malouf interview/review

Australian Book Review Remembering Babylon takes a kind of mythic, iconic figure, that is, the white man who has been living among Aborigines.

In Curlow Creek, the bushranger — a figure who immediately summons up all sorts of cultural associations and expectations, which the novel steadily subverts. I like very much, for example, to begin with characters who look like stereotypes, and then slowly, as the novel goes on, complicate those characters or make them so contradictory that not only do they escape from the stereotype they appear to be in but they question altogether whether the notion of stereotype has any existence except in the way in which we read or misread or lazily misread what’s there. In the same kind of way I do quite like setting up expectations which are not going to be fulfilled.

I don’t think that people often talk about my work in terms of its playfulness. I see myself as being much more playful than readers or reviewers sometimes see me as being. That’s certainly one of my interests in the writing, to keep it turning in directions where the readers don’t necessarily expect it to go. You spoke once of ‘that fall which is peculiar to Australia, in which the landscape and the language are not one’. Can you elaborate on that gap between language and landscape — and indeed, the fall?

I suppose by fall I meant a sense of dislocation, a sense of one’s being outside the garden, say. It’s true that everything about the English language derives from a particular place, a particular landscape. Everything in the language has its origin in a fact of place. That’s not true here. We’ve brought this language here, and we’ve made it apply to a world which is very different. It makes us more self-conscious about language and the uses of language, and the way language fits, than a speaker in England might need to be, and ought to make us more conscious of language as something which is partly willed rather than simply natural. Insofar as we are a people here, and insomuch as we have a culture, it is absolutely rooted in that language. That language is what holds us together.

You know when people are always looking around for what defines our Australian identity, or defines us as a community, or a nation or whatever it is, it seems to me to reside less in particular characteristics than in the fact that we share that language with one another and have changed that language in ways that fit us, but fit us socially rather than fit the land. That seems to me to make the way language exists here something both more precious, because it is the source of our cohesion as a people, but also something that we are self-conscious about in a way that a speaker of the language in England may not have to be.

I’m struck by the idea of both Remembering Babylon and Curlow Creek taking their place in a kind of rival history, a fictive history collectively being written by contemporary writers now. Are you conscious of this fictive history, a history being collectively written by today’s writers — and for some readers a serious competitor with ‘real’ history?

I’m less aware of the particular examples and the particular dates, but certainly very aware of the fact that it’s happening. That’s all work which is bound to come into existence in Australia, because our only way of grasping our history — and by history I really mean what has happened to us, and what determines what we are now and where we are now — the only way of really coming to terms with that is by people’s entering into it in their imagination, not by the world of facts, but by being there. And the only thing really which puts you there in that kind of way is fiction.

Poetry may do so, drama may do so, but it’s mostly going to be fiction. It’s when you have actually been there and become a character again in that world. Of course it’s not the real world, it’s not the way it was in 1827, it’s a way that 1827 appears in the significance it has in 1996. The readers are then able to take all of that into their consciousness and their imaginations so that it’s moved out of the world of fact into something like the world of experience — but more like dream experience than real experience.