Landscape Of Desire
Their joint statue towers above the passers-by in
Swanston Street, but their story has been a cause of mockery since
as long ago as Joseph Furphy’s novel Such is Life (1903).
They are usually known as Burke and Wills, respectively the
Irish-born leader of the expedition aiming to cross the continent
from south to north (returning proved to be the problem) and his
young surveyor. The order was derisively reversed in the would-be
movie comedy Wills and Burke (1985) where the acting of the camels
was more expressive and certainly more doleful than the principals
- Garry McDonald as Burke, Kym Gyngell as Wills and Nicole Kidman
as the actress Julia Matthews. The tale of the doomed explorers was
recently revisited in Alan Attwood’s novel, Burke’s
Soldier (2005). Now their turn has come again, and strangely,
in the first novel by Kevin Rabalais, The Landscape of
Desire.
Born in Louisiana, Rabalais now lives in Melbourne, but his
American origins may have led to the jarring descriptions of
ranchers and rustlers with whom Burke deals while Police Inspector
at Beechworth in the 1850s. Its title a dreamy blend of concrete
and abstract, the novel is an extended imagining of sketchy periods
in Burke’s life.
Beechworth, for instance, was more secure employment than the
prospects of finding gold for the young man “who sailed to exhume
his fortune from the tainted land” - Australia. Nevertheless Burke
chafes, eager for glory, but infatuated as well with Matthews, who
teasingly signs her letters as C for Cupid, and whom Burke
obsessively watches on stage. He understands that “He has reached
the point in life where there is no return”.
Rabalais’ method is to approach this once-familiar episode in
the national drama from a number of oblique angles. He starts with
a brief, portentous passage: “Other items lie scattered, wreckage
across the primal earth.” This is all that is left of the baggage
of the venturers who reached as far as the wetlands around what is
now Normanton.
One of them survived, John King, “a white man, orphan of the
desert sea”. He tells the rescuers led by Alfred Howitt “I am all
that is left”. King has been succoured by Aborigines, who remain in
this book, as perhaps they were for King, apparitions, appearing
and disappearing in the landscape. Howitt dominates the early part
of The Landscape of Desire, before our attention is
shifted to the troubled life of Burke, the longings of Wills.
The boldest invention that Rabalais undertakes is to depict
Burke’s European life, as a lieutenant in the Austrian army. This
is one of those episodes that seems (not least for Burke) hard to
credit. For desertion on the eve of the invasion of Sardinia, and
for his gambling debts, Burke is dishonourably discharged. After
drifting back to Ireland, he heads for Australia.
Rabalais elides Burke’s later brief return to Britain in an
attempt to enlist for the Crimean War in which his brother was the
first British soldier to be killed. It is then with Burke in
Beechworth that Rabalais engages us. But before now we have been
inclined to wonder what is the larger import of the novel, vivid
and unexpected as are its vignettes?
Sometimes the prose is staccato, like the ominous voice-over in
a motion picture: “What will they find? Who will be alive? Who will
have been maddened by the desert silence?” At other moments
Rabalais searches characters’ preoccupations about how they will be
remembered. After the official photograph of the party as it
prepares to set off: “We are preserved for the record before we
fall outside of history.”
More intriguingly, King is made to ponder what legends the
Aborigines might make of these white men in their midst: “How long
would it take before they recited stories of the ghosts who came to
live behind them on the creek . . . We might become a tale they
could pass up to future generations like buckets raised from a
well.”
Or not. Rabalais leaves the Aborigines as silent, admonitory
figures. Tracing his own course, backwards and forwards in time,
rather than onward in space, his debut is carefully wrought, a work
of glimpses rather than dramatic revelations. Finally it chooses to
rest in enigma, leaving us no more sure of where we have been than
were the doomed explorers.
Peter Pierce is a former professor of Australian literature
at James Cook University.
