MAPPING WORLDS:
FLY AWAY PETER
Myths of History and Nation
In an interview with Jim Davidson, when talking about the contrast between places that recurs in his writing, David Malouf comments: 'We are never at the centre because we never know where the centre is' (Davidson interview, 278). His comment recalls something deeply embedded in the settlerAustralian consciousness: a longstanding preoccupation with the nature of white Australia's relationship to its European source culture. However, Malouf's comment also has a much broader relevance to the processes by which 'place' is mapped out and understood. As we have seen, the evaluation of geographical centre/edge or cultural normality/abnormality has less to do with absolute truths than with the relationship that exists between cultures. For Australia no longer a colonial country yet still powerfully influenced by its European inheritance the relationship to Europe, and to Europe's social and political codes, is a complex one requiring further scrutiny.
Malouf's novel Fly Away Peter deals with this relationship, primarily through its concern with the processes of mapping and with the codes of knowledge through which the world is read. In engaging with these issues, Malouf draws on some very powerful mythologies in the Australian consciousness: those of nation and history and their creation through war. In setting Fly Away Peter during the First World War, Malouf takes up the national myth of this war as a turning point in Australia's history. According to this national myth, Australia's participation in World War I marked a loss of innocence, an arrival to a world not just of violence, but of international experience and national selfawareness. In a sense, Australia's participation in a largely European war became a claim to a new form of independence, a landmark of our own place within the international arena of History. Yet ironically the First World War also holds mythic relevance, not so much as the markers of Australia's independence from Britain, as the markers of its reacceptance by ancestral Britain: an invitation, as Malouf has put it, to play with 'the big boys in the playground' ('Australian Literature and War', 266).
In the following chapter I look, among other things, at the extent to which the mythology surrounding World War 1 is revised in Fly Away Peter. What might such revisions mean for Australia's understanding of its own historical map? To what extent, at the end of the novel, are the bonds of the past relinquished? I begin here by taking up the mythic idea of Australia's coming into being through the First World War. Australia's participation in the war certainly gave rise to a new kind of national heroism, but in fact it was not until well after the war that the experience of war could be incorporated into a distinct idea of new national identity. Society might have been irrevocably altered, but as yet no language existed with which to express the changes. Speaking of his own childhood in a time of war, Malouf writes:
I had a powerful sense of my storytellers' telling me nothing in the end of what they had really seen and felt ... they were expressing themselves out of my world. Or perhaps they had reduced the thing, even in their own minds, to the purely conventional terms in which they could most acceptably relate their experiences to themselves. ('Australian Literature and War', 226)
At the time, the experience of war probably did little to resolve the nature of national identity at least until that experience was taken up by the imagination of following generations and reworked into a shared history. In effect, Australia's involvement was perhaps riot so much a mark of newfound independence as it was the sign of an ongoing and ambivalent connection to Britain: a connection which Australians both pulled away from and clung to.
The extent of Australia's dependence on inherited (English) social codes is apparent in Fly Away Peter in the dynamics of prewar Queensland society. Malouf depicts a world which, despite its grassroots community, is invisibly bound to the conventions of class. In depicting this world, Malouf implicitly addresses another national mythology about the coming into being of Australia: that is, that the English principle of social hierarchy was replaced by an Australian principle of egalitarianism, in which each man and (if the mythmakers had thought of it) each woman enjoys equal status under a shared sky. However, even within the natural and idyllic world of the Sanctuary the haven for birdlife which is owned by Ashley Crowther, the young landowner freshly returned from Cambridge, and managed by Jim Saddler, the local farmer's son the boundaries of class still prevail. Seeing Ashley for the first time, Jim recognises him instantly as a kind of soulmate, as someone familiar because intrinsically similar to himself. But for all that, he cannot approach Ashley because he knows '[it] wasn't his place to make an opening' (4). The responsibility for making contact fails to Ashley who, despite his natural sensitivity and his sense of the limitations of landownership, is nonetheless bound to the responsibility of social power. Ashley is introduced in contrasting images of childish helplessness and social authority: he stoops under the Weight of his grandfather's watchchain and stumbles over his words as well as over his boots. Nevertheless, 'he had said, "Well then, you're my man," having that sort of power, and Jim was made' (5). It is his own awareness of 'having that sort of power', in fact, that makes Ashley passable 'on that side of the world for an English gentleman (8):
He spoke like one; he wore the clothes he was much addicted to waistcoats and watchchains, an affectation he might have to give up, he saw, in the new climate; he knew how to handle waiters, porters, commissionaires etc. with just the right mixture of authority, condescension and jolly good humour. (8)
Their roles are only reversed during a boating expedition for Ashley and his friends in Chapter 4 . Here, Jim is the guide and is in control. His power lies in his knowledge of the birds and particularly in his capacity to name them. Although Ashley appreciates and respects the landscape, Jim’s affinity with it is perceived by both young men to be natural and innate. His claims to the land, the novel suggests, are 'ancient and deep'. They lie 'in his having a vision of the place and the power to give that vision breath; in his having, most of all, the names for things and in that way possessing them. It went beyond mere convention or the law' (7). The visitors from the big house would be subdued, tense ... held on Jim's breath` as he would whisper the names of the birds in a way that wrapped the bird in mystery, beyond even the brilliance of its colouring and the strange light the place touched it with' (2930). However, as soon as the group leaves the swamp to picnic on hard ground, things revert 'back to reality' (32). Jim sits apart beneath a tree to eat his homebrought sandwich while the others consume their picnic spread, and at the end of the afternoon the gentlemen tip him, Jim accepting the shillings out of respect to an established set of social rules.
The arrival of war, with its firm sense of hierarchy, does not dissolve such rules; in fact it affirms them with added authority When Jim and Ashley join up, Jim enters the army as a private while Ashley enters 'as an officer, and in another division (57). Within the hierarchy of the military machine, the soldiers fulfil their given roles despite deep instincts which struggle against those roles. Huddling together in an abandoned trench, for instance, Jim and his companions find themselves under the command of a young officer. Like Ashley, the officer is described in terms which are naturally incongruent with his authority. A picture of youthful innocence, he is scarcely more than a boy: roundfaced, blueeyed and, despite the mud, freshly scrubbed. However, when he orders the men forward into battle, they obey:
'It's a mistake,' Jim thought, whose own youth lay so far back now that he could barely recall it. 'This kid can't be more than twelve years old.' But when the voice said 'Right men, now!' he rose up out of the ditch and followed. (94)
The Role of Language
The authority of these kinds of social codes, which determine one's understanding of how the world must work (even against the grain of common sense), is not simply the effect of societies traditions. It is also, in a related way, the effect of language itself Language is the means of articulating the transformation of 'the farmer’s son into 'the soldier hard, reliable, efficient' (111). In the language of war, such soldiers become '"troops" who were about to be "thrown in', "men" in some general's larger plan, "reenforcement’s", and would soon be "casualties"' (112). In other words, language is not neutral or natural in the way that it describes the world: there is not one world 'as it is' to describe but rather a series of worlds, each of which is coloured by the perspectives and beliefs of a particular community or group. In this instance, language works to justify the machinery of war.
However, as much as it articulates certain kinds of rules, the war also works to alter each soldier's mental map of the world. Those alterations might be shocking, but they also allow for new maps to emerge. In this sense war works in this novel, not just as a literal event, but also as a catalyst of change. And like the war, language has the capacity to work in different, even opposing, kinds of ways. On the one hand, it can work to affirm the rules and make them palatable (for instance in smoothing over the deaths of men as the dispensability of 'troops' and 'reenforce merits'). On the other hand, language can work to reconceive those rules, to forge new definitions for a transforming world. For instance, finding themselves in a new landscape (which in an ironic reversal of perspective is the old world of Europe) and confronted with their new identity as soldiers, the men invent new definitions for things which are meaningful in terms of their own experience. In effect the world, through words, is in constant process of being renamed and therefore remapped:
Crossing Halfpast Eleven Square (it was called that because the Town Hall clock had stopped at that hour during an early bombardment; everything here had been renamed and then named again, as places and streets, a copse, a farmhouse, yielded up their old history and entered the new) you turned left and went on across Barbedwire Square ... and from there, via Lunatic Lane, into the lines. (7677)
Living out such a peculiar existence, the soldiers come to realise the extent to which their understanding of reality is not stable but is rather a process of definition which requires perpetual redefinition. With each definition a new map is formed, each of which offers a model of a changing world and one's own place within it. Accordingly, each soldier possesses a nickname in addition to an army title. Ashley, surprised to find himself also endowed with a nickname, is given a new identity suitable to his strange circumstances. He considers that they all may have been 'reenforcements' and 'casualties', but:
[they] were also Spud, Snow, Skeeter, Blue, Tommo. Even he had a nickname. It had emerged to surprise him with its correspondence to something deep within that he hadn't known was there till some wit, endowed with native cheek and a rare folk wisdom, had offered it to him as a gift. He was grateful. It was like a new identity. The war had remade him as it had remade these others. (112)
The naming of Parapet Joe, a German sniper from the other side of the trenches, is an act which breaks through the boundaries of conflict to affirm, the humanity of the unseen enemy, and which establishes a ground of common circumstance that runs deeper than national conscience. The process of naming also serves as a means of reassurance for men about to go into battle. Language here takes on a magical, ritualistic quality which is located in the words of prayers or nursery rhymes remembered from childhood, and it works to hold off death, which is 'that other form of words, the antibreath of a backwardspelled charm, the noname of extinction' (11415).
In effect, these different languages work to illustrate that change (here in the form of war) is neither wholly destructive nor constructive, but rather that each understanding or map of history can only ever be partly accurate and will always hold within itself the possibility of alternative perspective. In other words the assertion of one particular map or vision of things is dependent upon the nonassertion of others. What such a reading of history suggests is that, for Australia, the sense of being either at the edge of the world or innocent of worldly events is not so much true as relative to perspective.
In this sense, although it carries many of the stereotypes of Australia at war, Fly Away Peter does not simply concede to the familiar national mythology of Australia coming into being through the violence of a European war. Instead, we might read the novel as offering a revisioning of that myth, whereby innocence and violence, edge and centre are seen not so much as absolute facts but as interdependent and overlapping concepts. This is demonstrated by Jim’s experience. For Jim, the experience of war ultimately has two outcomes, both of which affect his own sense of place. Firstly, the war makes the world seem to tilt in a way that renders his previous understanding of it irrelevant. While he had felt himself to be at the centre of his own world he had felt Australia to be at the edge of events, but with the war those orientations seem to collapse into one another. Secondly, his experiences make him realise that the peace and stability of his life in the Sanctuary had always been underlain by the impermanence and even the violence which now surrounds him. His belief in the unchanging harmony of his world, in short, had only been possible because of the narrowness of his perspective.