Death and the Outback
by Mark Levon Byrne
Note: This article – a shameless polemic – is written from an Oz-centric (Australian) perspective. Given the subject matter, I hope you'll forgive me. -- MLB
The outback is where Australians go to die. From Burke and Wills, the story of whose 1860 expedition from Melbourne to the north coast reads like a French farce and sent the then colony into shock and mourning, to Azaria Chamberlain, whose apparent death in the jaws of a dingo at Uluru (Ayers Rock) in 1980 polarised the nation and became the subject of Fred Schepsi's film Evil Angels, the journey to the outback has been suffused with the aura of death. Impending or averted, fated or random, it is as omnipresent as the heat, flies and red dirt. If the outback is (as Robyn Davidson suggests) Australia's "mythological crucible" – our equivalent of the underworld-like unconscious of Europe, or the frontier spirit that Americans carry around the world with them – then death is its quicksilver, the royal road to its Plutonian riches.
This isn't what you want to hear. Tourists, especially foreigners, often come to the outback in search of a pure, unsullied desert spirituality supposedly in the custody of Aboriginal people. (Marlo Morgan fantasised this ideal in Mutant Message Down Under.) Maybe some find it, too. But if your outback experience hasn't involved disappointment or death of some kind – if only because the Aborigines you met were drunk, or didn't want to talk to you, or there were too many flies, or the dot painting on your living room wall is fading, or you can't relate to the "Seven Sisters Dreaming" anyway, or you got sick, or you're running away from something – then you haven't really been there.
So it has been for nearly two centuries. Charles Sturt is the paradigm of the tragic explorer. It was he who first left Sydney in 1829 with whaling boat in tow, in the hope of discovering an inland sea; but he who returned sick, empty-handed and broken, to his poor patient wife in Adelaide in 1845, having finally come to the conclusion, after four expeditions - the last of them again with whaling boat in tow - that there was no inland sea to be found in central Australia. Before Sturt, there was hope that the interior of Australia was a rich place. After him (but even more so after John Macdouall Stuart's third south to north transcontinental trek in 1860) it became the "dead heart" – at least until entrepreneurs like Sir Sidney Kidman tried their hand at playing a different kind of conquering hero half a century later. But sticking cattle in a wilderness is not the same as finding paradise, and by then the damage had been done. In Australia, the hero of European civilization, whose motto was Tennyson's dictum "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield", came to grief. This was a land that would not be conquered.
I used to think that the European encounter with this flat, dry old land, with its strange animals and burning bush, had had such a profound impact on our collective psyche that we were a people apart, with an outlook on life more healthy than our European and American cousins for our lack of heroic hubris. As broadcaster Philip Adams is fond of reminding us, "Australia rhymes with failure", and our national icons reveal an obsession with death that must seem perverse in a go-gettem culture like America's. This is a country which came of age not with its formal Federation in 1901 but with military defeat at Gallipoli in 1915; whose national (anti-)hero is the Irish-bred bushranger (outlaw) Ned Kelly, hanged in 1880 for killing police; and whose real national anthem is not the anodyne, pompous Advance Australia Fair but Waltzing Matilda, the haunting ballad of a sheep thief who drowns himself rather than face capture. (Two bars of this song heard anywhere from Auckland to Athens can reduce the most well-educated, rationalist Aussie to tears in seconds.) The tall poppy syndrome (which makes us cut down anyone who raises their head above the parapet of common humanity) and our dry, self-deprecating sense of humour might also be related to the collective experience of the outback as a place of disappointment and death. Perhaps this had also made us more tolerant, less domineering, as we had the experience of being profoundly humbled by the implacability of a land as old as time, and by exposure to an indigenous culture half as old as the land. However, the election and actions of the reactionary Howard government in 1996 have made me think again. Australians now seem no better (or worse) than anyone else: fearful of outsiders, especially the weakest of the weak; petulant when challenged, yet still kowtowing to stronger nations; reluctant to face, let alone make amends for, our past mistreatment of Aborigines.
In any case, postmodernists tells us that the explorer-hero is long dead, and that today we are telling new stories about the outback: stories reflecting intimate knowledge instead of the conqueror's distant gaze; stories of land rights struggles and reconciliation; of the farmer's battles with drought and flood; of women who have survived and prospered in the bush, or escaped to brilliant careers. Today we are also telling more stories about the places where most of us live and play - the cities and the coast. Feminists remind us that the myth of the outback was forged and perpetuated by men, and that women feel the pull more of the liquid sensuality of the coast and the promised intimacy of the suburbs. Meanwhile, TV travel shows pour us a glass of chardonnay by the pool at sunset with Uluru as backdrop, or grill us a barramundi on a deserted tropical beach. The great swathe of desert that was for a century called the "dead heart" is now very much alive with tourists and mining companies, television crews and Aboriginal artists.
But life is only sporadically rational, and myth is stronger than fashion. The success of films like the Mad Max (Road Warrior in the US) trilogy and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and books like Davidson's Tracks and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines – even the cliched Crocodile Dundee – remind us that the outback continues to haunt, challenge and inspire not only our most creative minds but the general populace, too.
Why? The late poet and environmentalist Judith Wright knew the answer:
"Are all these dead men in our literature a kind of sacrifice? And just what is being sacrificed? Is it perhaps the European consciousness - dominating, puritanical, analytical - that D.H.Lawrence saw as negated by this landscape? Reconciliation with the place is a matter of death; the death of the European mind, its absorption into the soil it has struggled against."
Wright is saying that white Australians won't really belong here until they surrender into the place. This is happening, but our narratives are better at death than rebirth. Take Patrick White's Voss, often lauded as the Great Australian Novel. The hero's "death by torture in the country of the mind" involves a slow sacrifice to the power of the land and its indigenous owners. But the novel ends twenty years later with Voss's legacy being carried by his anima/ghostly lover Laura, who is living a dull, passionless life back in Sydney, while the other surviving members of his party are similarly isolated and beaten.
However, in literature and film, an awareness continues, however dimly, that this archetypal process must be lived through. The latest successful film featuring death in the outback, Japanese Story, once again pits the outsider (this time in Japanese guise) against the alien outback, though this time with a white female geologist as the guide or medium, rather than the usual Aborigine. (Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want the plot revealed.) Our heroine, frustrated and unhappy with her life, is initiated into a deeper sense of self by her encounter with death. We don’t know what fruit this process will bear, as the film leaves us in the midst of her grief. (I imagine her returning to the scene of death to make peace with its spirits, and then travelling to Japan to bury her lover's soul in his home soil.)
This is appropriate, as it reflects where we are as a culture. To “dream the myth onwards” would require not only that we keep telling stories about the land that speak to us, but also that we continue to loudly challenge old attitudes to the land and Aborigines, instead of dismissing talk of the past (as conservative politicians and commentators do) as “black armband history”.
The other face of death is, of course, love. Our geologist's grief is the product of her love, and we sense that a different kind of love – of herself, of the land – will emerge from her grief. In time. Australian time.
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Next: K. A. Laity - Sinikka Journeys North
© copyright 2004, Mythic Imagination Institute
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