Thea Astley’s novel, It’s Raining in Mango, first published in 1987, and David Malouf’s novel, The Great World, first published in 1990, create retrospective views of Australia in the world by telling the stories of Australian families. Written by authors born in Queensland, both novels look back over major international events of the twentieth century, one from the perspective of tropical Queensland and the other from that of “Keen’s Crossing” thirty miles north-west of Sydney. Both novels offer insights into Australia’s complex interconnectedness with the international community especially Asia.

PART ONE: THEA ASTLEY

LITERARY REPUTATION

Thea Astley won more than twenty major awards for fiction, and is a leading twentieth-century Australian novelist. Comparatively little criticism of her work has been published. As a starting point for research, we recommend the essays, timeline, and bibliography in Susan Sheridan and Paul Genoni, ed. Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds. Newcastle-upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. More recent major publications are Karen Lamb’s biography, Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather. St Lucia: University of Queensland P, 2015, and Susan Sheridan’s book-length study, The Fiction of Thea Astley. Amherst, New York: Cambria P, 2016. You can explore further publications about Astley’s life and writings through AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource: http://www.austlit.edu.au

Thea Astley’s fiction is distinguished by its Queensland tropical and sub-tropical settings, which challenge the expectation that most Australian literature originates in temperate southern parts. Her essay, “Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit” (Sheridan and Genoni: 7-20), is one of several discussions of Astley’s Queensland origins and orientation. In a paper given in Townsville in August 1980, she refers to “the long-standing love affair I have had with the geography of this state” (“Writing in North Queensland.” LiNQ 9/1 (1981):2-10). Indeed, a love for the fecundity of North Queensland and the opportunity for human renewal that it brings characterises some of Astley’s novels and short stories. Others examine small-town life in the state’s hot and dry interior. Astley’s fiction nevertheless maintains a critical approach to Queensland’s history and politics. She delights in exposing what she sees as people’s lack of care for one another, which in her fiction often escalates into violence, and she deplores such traits not just as local or regional, but as common to humanity: “Most of our lives are made up of accretions of venial sins—and the meanness of tiny crimes committed against others is what often stirs writers” (“Writing in North Queensland” 9).

KEY TO PLACE NAMES IN THEA ASTLEY’S TROPICAL QUEENSLAND

Bauxiteville: Townsville

Byerstown: Byerstown, mining camp on the Palmer

Charco: Cooktown

Flystrike: A town with a jail, far west of Charters Towers

Mango: Kuranda, on the Atherton Tableland just north of Cairns

Maytown: Maytown, historical mining camp on the Palmer

Port of Call: Port Douglas

Reeftown: Cairns

Sugarville: Mackay

Swiper’s Creek: Mossman, on the coast north of Cairns

The Cape: Connie’s home, possibly Cape Tribulation

The Taws: Charters Towers, a town seventy miles inland from Townsville

Tinwon: Herberton on the Atherton Tableland: “Herberton’s main claim to fame was tin mining.”

Tobaccotown: Mareeba on the Atherton Tableland.

ASTLEY’S LIFE AND WRITINGS

Thea Astley was born in Brisbane, the second child of Catholic parents, on 25 August, 1925. Her father, who was a sub-editor on Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, encouraged what was to become her life-long love of literature. During World War II Thea attended All Hallows convent in Brisbane as a day pupil.Her brother Philip, who was five years older, entered the Jesuit order as a novice in 1940, and from then on lived mostly in Melbourne. Family letters in the University of Queensland’s Fryer Library suggest that though devoted Philip was far from happy in his vocation. Philip’s and Thea’s own experience affected her fiction’s depiction of the Catholic Church. In 1942, her senior year, she was evacuated with her class to Warwick, west of Brisbane, for fear of air raids. After leaving school and training at the then Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College, Astley taught in Brisbane schools, Townsville, and Imbil and Pomona, small towns inland from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. hea completed her University of Queensland Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948.

In 1948 Astley completed her University of Queensland Bachelor of Arts degree and married Jack Gregson. The young couple moved the following year to Sydney, where Astley continued to teach in high schools, and where her son Edmund was born in 1955. In 1958 Angus & Robertson published her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, based on Astley’s life as a teacher in Townsville. Six prize-winning novels followed in the 1960s and 1970s, including The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), The Acolyte (1972), and A Kindness Cup (1974). The last named fictionalises a massacre of Aborigines that took place in the 1860s at The Leap, near Mackay  in central Queensland.

In 1978, Astley was appointed Fellow in Literature and Creative Writing at Macquarie University, and in the following year published a collection of stories, Hunting the Wild Pineapple, which was set in and around Kuranda, a rain-forest town near Cairns. In 1980 Thea and Jack moved to Kuranda and Astley took up full-time writing, publishing An Item from the Late News in 1982. Three years later they moved back to New South Wales, purchasing a property at Cambewarra on the south coast. Here Astley published Beachmasters, a novel based on the 1976 rebellion in Vanuatu against British and French colonial interests. It’s Raining in Mango followed in 1987. By 1999, Astley had published Collected Stories and five more novels, four set in tropical Queensland. Drylands, published in 1999, was the third of her novels to win the Miles Franklin Prize, Australia’s most prestigious literary award. The same year, Astley and Jack moved to Berrara, also on the NSW south coast. Jack died on 1 January, 2003, and Thea from heart failure on 17 August, 2004, at the Gold Coast Hospital, Queensland.

Some themes recur throughout Astley’s fiction, while others develop and change over time. Her depictions of human relationships expose greed, indifference and cruelty and plead for sensitivity, awareness and compassion. A longing for social justice is a constant in Astley’s fiction which broadens over her forty-year writing career, to encompass racial, colonial, gender and environmental issues. Violent episodes in the novels aim at awakening readers to unpalatable truths about both their society and themselves. Catholic doctrine, ethics, the Church as an institution, and nuns and priests are frequent subjects, and Astley’s treatment covers a wide spectrum, being by turns satiric and witty, bitterly sarcastic, tragic and idealistic. Her novels are erudite, deeply interested in education, and refer frequently to music, painting and poetry. Drylands, subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, satirises the decline in reading and writing skills that as early as 1999 Astley deplored as a consequence of advances in computing, media and communication.

IT’S RAINING IN MANGO

An unabridged audio version of the novel, read by Jane Friedl in 1998, is available. For information go to: http://ebooks.library.act.gov.au/B81D2850-F570-4AC0-B52E-C41B8927001F/10/376/en/ContentDetails.htm?ID=5A20E40C-2EE9-444E-9D33-2D775732FC7A

Thea Astley wrote nearly thirty short stories and about sixteen novels (depending on definition) throughout her career. Some of the latter, such as The Genteel Poverty Bus Company and Inventing the Weather, published together in 1992 under the single title, Vanishing Points, and Coda, published separately in 1994, are short enough to be considered novellas. It’s Raining in Mango, composed of a series of closely interrelated short stories, is an early example of the form which came to typify her late novels, including Reaching Tin River (1990), The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), and Drylands (1999).

The perspective of Connie, aged sixty-three, frames the narrative, as she worries about her middle-aged son Reever, and reminisces over her family’s known or imagined past. In the novel’s italicised opening section, Reever is up a tree protesting the destruction of the rain forest; in the closing section Reever heads back to the Palmer River and the far north, where “anything can happen,” and where the Laffey family’s history in tropical Queensland began.

The Laffey generations, with dates, are set out in short statements in the novel’s preface. This is a simplified table:

LAFFEY FAMILY TREE:

Narration in It’s Raining in Mango is in third person, but the perspective shifts frequently to so as include the viewpoints and experience of Laffey family members and others. The Laffeys are ordinary people, with strengths and weaknesses that are usually predictable but sometimes extraordinary. Like the witty and ironic prose that Astley deploys as a weapon against  personal, social and economic injustices, the Laffeys exist on the narrow edge that separates comedy and boredom from tragedy. Astley’s characteristic vision of human life as an intertwining of triviality with heartbreak is summed up in one of the novel’s prefaced character summaries: “Jessica Olive, wife of Cornelius, born 1847, died 1927 reaching for the Rosella jam.” For humans, death is as commonplace as breakfast.

The linear narrative of It’s Raining in Mango begins when newspaper man Cornelius arrives in tropical Queensland in April 1861, the month when Bowen (then called Port Denison) was first proclaimed a town. Cornelius is a Canadian of Irish extraction. He retreats to Sydney after staying only a few weeks in the north, but later returns with his wife Jessica and children Nadine and George to Cooktown, which in 1873 was the arrival port for the Palmer River gold rush.The novel draws on the documented mutual slaughter of Aboriginal people and of white and Chinese miners on the track from Cooktown to Maytown and Byerstown. The presence of Chinese miners on the tropical Queensland mining fields is a reminder of Australia’s connections to the global economy and international politics.

The four generations of Laffeys from Cornelius to Reever, whose stories make up the novel’s main strand, span the settlement history of tropical Queensland into the 1980s, when It’s Raining in Mango was written. The dove-tailed narratives interweave family with regional history, and allude to both local and global events. These include the cyclone that struck Cairns in 1879, the global flu pandemic at the end of World War I that killed as many people as the fighting had done, the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, World War II, the hippie incursion into tropical Queensland in the 1970s, and the environmental protests of the 1980s. The latter took place when Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who came to power on 8 August 1968, was still Premier of Queensland. Joh’s longevity in office–he finally retired on 1 December 1987–explains the urgency and vigour of Astley’s satire in It’s Raining in Mango; as Connie complains: “I can’t stand living in a dictatorship that poses as a democracy” (154).

Connie and Reever recognise that their identities flow from their family’s first arrival in North Queensland, and that they are a recognisable reincarnation of their forebears:

“I am Jessica Olive,” he heard her say absent-mindedly over breakfast. “I am Cornelius and Nadine and George.”

“So am I,” Reever says as he flings muscle about the house. “So am I.” (239).

Like history in general, family history repays study because the past not only helps to shape the present, but also offers insights that are applicable to the future. Compared with longer-settled Australian regions further south, the short settler history of tropical Queensland brings the past and present into close association. As the descendants of relatively recent settlers, Connie and Reever (like other Queenslanders perhaps) feel that they have a responsibility to make amends for the not-so-distant appropriations of their predecessors. Yet It’s Raining in Mango suggests that family history, like all history, tends to repeat itself. For example, the tragic outcomes of the 1960s and ‘70s Vietnam War wasn’t enough to deter disastrous military incursions into the Middle East in the 1990s and 2000s. Similarly, in the 1870s Cornelius and Jessica protested the oppression of northern Aboriginal people, and a century later Cornelius’ grandson Will is doing the same. Scenes of protest and acts of violence thus repeat themselves from generation to generation. The reader is left wondering what, if anything, can break history’s vicious cycles?

 INDIGENOUS FAMILY TREE:

It’s Raining in Mango interleaves the narratives of four generations of Laffeys with the narratives of four generations of an Aboriginal family. The novel begins its disclosure of white violence against blacks by viewing it from the perspectives of Cornelius’ young son George and twelve-year-old Bidiggi, who has been newly initiated into manhood by the rites of his tribe.

First and Second Generation inter-Racial Encounters: Cornelius and Jessica Laffey, Bidiggi and George

Cornelius’ most admirable recorded action is his attempt to rouse the conscience of the settler community by publicising the massacre of Indigenous warriors armed with spears by miners armed with modern Snider rifles. His sacking for writing this story, the horrific results of which he witnessed at first hand, broadens Astley’s satire into a bitter condemnation of racist attitudes and hypocrisy, by implication present in Queensland from the earliest European settlement. Cornelius’ concern for racial justice, which is shared by his wife Jessica, surfaces again and again in his descendants, and is a redeeming quality of the Laffey family.

In his loneliness following the massacre of his family and tribe, Bidiggi makes friends with Cornelius and Jessica’s son George, who may be the best of the Laffeys. His mother thinks of him as “big gentle George….If he weren’t my son, she told herself, generous and reliable as he is, I’d have to admit he is boring. At twenty-three he was very nearly middle-aged” (68). Biddigi survives on the fringes of the white settlements and is given the name Bidgi Mumbler. Later he works on a fishing trawler and as a yardman at Jessica’s hotel at Port.

Second and Third Generation Inter-Racial Encounters: Jackie and Nelly Mumbler, George and Mag Laffey

Jackie is Bidiggi’s son, and Jackie’s wife Nelly is Bidiggi’s daughter-in-law. The Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act of 1897 legalised the abduction of Aboriginal children from their families to orphanages, where the girls were trained as domestic servants and the boys as farm and station workers. In the story, “Heart Is Where the Home Is” (83-90), dated to about 1915, George and his wife Mag prevent the abduction by white policemen of Nelly’s baby Charley, who is of a similar age to their daughter Connie.

Third and Fourth Generation Inter-Racial Encounters: Will Laffey, Charley and Billy Mumbler

Aboriginal family history in tropical Queensland, as told in It’s Raining in Mango, ends in the 1980s as it began in the 1870s, with oppression, exclusion, violence and injustice. In the story titled “It’s Raining in Mango,” narrated from the perspective of Billy, son of Charley Mumbler, and great grandson of Bidiggi, the reader comes to understand the symbolism of the novel’s title. We learn of Charley’s marriage (195) and of Billy’s imprisonment in the western town of Flystrike, ironically for tax evasion! This section also introduces Will Laffey’s friendship for Charley and Billy, Billy’s defence of his wife and children in the Mango pub, the temporary triumph of the Aboriginal group, and the blood-thirsty revenge taken by Block and the other “big bruisers from the building site” (197). The story narrates many petty and not-so-petty acts of oppression, accumulating suspense until the suppressed violence erupts: “Suddenly, chaos. Block headed the pack….” (202). As a final irony Billy is re-arrested for “disturbing the peace and inciting to riot” (204).

The horrors of the internal story, “It’s Raining in Mango” escalate to include the likelihood that old Charley Mumbler will lose an eye; Billy’s and Will’s bloody wounds; the barman’s discreet withdrawal from the scene; the hippies’ lukewarm concern for justice; and the indifference and/or racial discrimination of the police. Extreme events and descriptions of this kind are the basis of the grotesque in literature, and an important satiric technique. This key section of Astley’s novel has the satiric purpose of awakening readers to racist attitudes prevalent throughout the settler history of tropical Queensland. (Such events as the 2004 death in custody on Palm Island suggests that these are still an issue.) Astley’s satire invites the reader to consider whether the brutalities described are after all literary exaggerations.

STUDY QUESTIONS:

How successful are the four generations of Laffeys in securing justice for Aboriginal people and for saving the environment?

What kinds of human action, if any, does the novel present as effective in alleviating suffering and injustice?

SYMBOLS AND MOTIFS:

Trace the occurrence through It’s Raining in Mango of the following symbols or motifs relevant to the depiction of Aboriginal characters:

• Fingers, finger bones, Will’s, Connie’s (see pp. 227-228), Billie’s damaged fingers
• Mud, of Charco and Mango
• Rain
• Grass

Suggest possible interpretations for these symbols, and explain their recurrence as motifs.

GENDER AND MARRIAGE THEME

I said to someone in an interview once that I grew up believing women weren’t really people, and didn’t matter in the scheme of things. You’ve got to remember my age. Men didn’t listen to women when they expressed an opinion. I always felt that they wouldn’t read books written by women, because it would be like listening to a woman for three hours, which would be intolerable….I felt I’d been spiritually neutered by society….

So when I came to write, I thought, well, no one’s going to listen to me, or read me, or be interested anyway, but maybe there’ll be a chance of being read if I concentrate on the male characters in my book, or write as I did in The Acolyte, using a male character’s point of view rather than a female’s. And I can’t say I felt particularly comfortable doing this, but I suddenly realised, at fifty-plus, when I came to write An Item from the Late News, and I had a female voice talking throughout the whole book, that I didn’t know how women thought.   (Thea Astley, interviewed by Jennifer Ellison, in Jennifer Ellison. Rooms of Their Own. Australia: Penguin Books, 1986, pp. 56-57)

Thea Astley has often been accused being a male-oriented writer. Her early novels adopt a masculine narrative persona or narrative focaliser:

With each work, Astley turns up the heat in her critique of masculine ways of behaving and the abuse of institutional power, while women tend to stay in the background as shadowy figures right up to It’s Raining in Mango. (Susan Sheridan, “Thea Astley: A Woman among the Satirists of Post-War Modernity.” Australian Feminist Studies 18/42 (2003): 268)

Indeed, It’s Raining in Mango uses strong Laffey women as focalisers:

• Jessica Olive, who builds the family fortune by managing hotels after Cornelius flees south; who is an affectionate and loving mother—see her dialogue urging George to marry; who defends Bidiggi her yardman against racist attack; who rebels against the confining female clothes of the late Victorian era (72-73); who launches a scalding feminist attack on the red-faced and lumpy Father Madigan (75-78);
• Mag, “a woman who never knew her place, always airing an idea of some sort” (86), who stands up to the police intent on stealing Nelly’s baby (86-90), and who has a happy marriage to George;
• Clytie, who takes care of Connie and Will after George’s death, and who survives forty years of marriage to the faithless Harry, taking her revenge after he “commits sideways” in another fusion of the comic and the tragic (129-130);
• Connie, who resists regimentation at her convent school in Reeftown; who in a reliving of Jessica’s attack on Father Madigan ousts Father Rassini (155-157); and who suffers a fall while trying to get Reever down from his protest tree.

Of the male characters in It’s Raining in Mango, Cornelius and Harry are superficially attractive, but lack substance.

Cornelius is based on Astley’s maternal grandfather Cornelius, who deserted her grandmother and left her to bring up three daughters alone (Lamb, Inventing Her Own Weather 8). Cornelius’s charm is linked with his Irish blarney, his rum-drinking, his journalistic eloquence, and his love of striking a pose: “Overdressed as usual, an adventuring dandy” (26). He is so vain that he pays the prostitutes in Charco not for sex but for admiration. Like his namesake, he finally skips out on Jessica and his children, a dereliction of responsibility that the novel judges harshly.

STUDY QUESTIONS:

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE: “The Kiss, The Fade Out, The Credits” (pp.113-126)

1. What thoughts on gender relations and marriage in Australia does the story of Harry’s and Clytie’s marriage invite? (For example, explain the irony of the section’s title.)
2. Interpret the symbolism of the sewing machine and the flowers.
3. What can be said in defence of Harry as a husband and lover?

In the same article quoted above, Susan Sheridan writes:

There is no danger, even in her recent fiction, of Thea Astley endorsing any feminism with a domestic focus, any defence of the traditionally feminine. My sense of her is of a woman deeply formed by the misogynist era in which she grew up and came to maturity as a writer. Feminism later became a possible frame of reference for her, but it is—of necessity—a feminism whose business is to mock the elaborate apparatus of gender, not to celebrate the feminine. (“Thea Astley: A Woman among the Satirists…” 269)

Susan Lever, another critic who is not always favourably disposed to Astley’s fiction, rejects Astley’s view of herself as having been “neutered” by a Catholic upbringing:

Astley writes like woman, but a woman, I would suggest, who fears unruly female sexuality and the social outcasting which inevitably resulted from it in Australia of the 1960s….Over time, Astley’s problematic attitude to female sexuality emerges as one of the most consistent aspects of her fiction—in her latest books she creates women characters seeking release from their bodies and their sexuality…..

Astley’s bleak depiction of the unwanted or extraneous nature of women’s bodies deserves more attention from feminists; to categorise it as somehow a result of ‘male’ conditioning or ‘neutering’ is to dismiss a dark side of her vision. (“Changing Times, Changing Stories.” Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds: 129-130)

You may like to measure Sheridan’s and Lever’s comments against the section, “Across the Wide Missouri” in It’s Raining in Mango (49-64). This tale of cyclonic winds and floods, which detach Kitty’s house from its foundations and float it with its occupants out into Reeftown bay, seems exaggerated–until you compare it with photos and films of Queensland weather events, some quite recent! It’s certainly an engaging and imaginative narrative–comedy with a sharp edge–loosely based on the cyclone of 8 March 1878 which nearly wiped out the infant settlement of Cairns, and sank with no survivors four ships that had looked for shelter in Trinity Inlet. Astley’s account reflects one aspect of her view of the region, as she explained in a published talk:

Queensland isn’t the home of the tall yarn. It’s where the tall yarn happens, acted out on a stage where, despite its vastness, the oddballs see and recognise each other across the no-miles and wave their understanding. (Thea Astley. “Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit.” Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds 19).

As a feature of the plot, the fourteen-year-old Nadine’s drowning in this cyclone reads like moral retribution for having sex with her bushman lover and (above all) for abandoning her baby son, Harry. A Christian frame of reference appears in the narrative in the form of Bible quotes, and in the Catholicism that resurfaces in Nadine’s mind as the dangers escalate. Adding to the moral lesson is the revelation that Nadine hasn’t enjoyed her new life as a prostitute, undertaken to achieve a freedom that proves spurious: “The endless procession of hurried and unskilled lovers sickened her” (55).

The political message of “Across the Wide Missouri” is nevertheless much stronger than the moral one. It demonstrates that in late nineteenth-century Queensland female refugees from family control and social conventions had nowhere to go, and that patriarchal and capitalist domination was even stronger in a brothel. Furthermore Astley here seizes an opportunity to satirise the (dirty) male body, male sexuality and male sexual hypocrisy—for example through Sylvia’s account of her childhood abuse by her outwardly respectable banker father. The working girls’ conversation shows that they are honest and comradely when together, and that, unlike women in families, they enjoy the mental and emotional freedom of being themselves. In opposition to Sheridan’s view, surely a “celebration of the feminine” is present in Kitty’s and Sylvia’s cheerful realism, and in the dauntless Sylvia’s singing and playing, while their house of ill fame “begins its slow-turning waltz out to the waters of the bay” (64).

ODDBALLS AND OUTSIDERS

Mavericks and fringe dwellers often attain a clearer understanding of the operations of power in society than those who participate centrally. This makes them people of special interest to social satirists like Astley. Perhaps the deepest irony of It’s Raining in Mango  is that the novel’s most obvious outsiders are the land’s first people. Reeftown’s working girls make up a second group, excluded from normal life because they commercialise an experience–sex–that mainstream society pretends to regard as sacred, or at least wants to limit and control. Yet provided they are not caught in the act, the girls’ paying clients remain socially acceptable!  Finally, Will Laffey, a character of major importance in this novel, is also a member of the oddball-outsider group.

At school Will refuses to conform to gender expectations of “manliness”. Though a good scholar and football player, he renounces football when his fingers are deliberately “bent back and snapped” “in the boyish enthusiasm and heat of the game” (122), an injury that reminds Will of his father George’s boyhood trauma at the sight of the finger bones of slaughtered Aborigines (124). As a violinist with an “unmanly” love of music, Will further violates gender expectations. Furthermore, from a young age his gay sexuality is evident to others: “He knew. Harry knew he knew. And the head brother knew he knew he knew” (123).

Deployed with the Australian army on the Bougainville campaign of World War II, Will regards the carnage he witnesses as pointless (132), but responds with compassion when a close friend and lover dies. Ironically, he goes on to earn a medal for bravery as a stretcher-bearer. Emotionally traumatised and physically drained after the war, Will works at nondescript jobs in Brisbane, until Cassidy’s courtship again reminds him of his sexual orientation and needs. (To understand Will’s difficulty in “coming out” in the late 1940s it’s necessary to keep Australian attitudes in mind: in Queensland homosexual acts, even between consenting adults in private, were punishable by imprisonment until legislation finally changed this in 1990.) Will flees from the self-knowledge that his friendship with Cassidy provides by retreating to his origins in tropical Queensland. Here his sister Connie comforts him with a single act of incestuous union (141-44). They separate, Will to live on their parents’, George and Mag’s, old property near Mango, while Connie moves further north to Swiper’s Creek. Here she supports Reever and herself financially by nursing at the Canecutters Hospital (154).

For more than thirty years, Will lives a narrow, isolated existence as a refugee from life. He takes care of the property and enjoys the beauty of its gardens and lawns, and the classical music that he plays every evening on his tape deck. Finally, in his late fifties Will begins to find the mowing of the immense lawns a burden. He follows Reever’s advice and invites a family of hippies to live on his land in exchange for mowing. This leads to the great passion, humiliation and tragedy of Will’s life—the novel’s most moving story, and the one most distressing to read.

STUDY QUESTIONS:

You might like to consider the following questions about the two sections which tell the later stages of Will’s story: “Grass” (167-185) and “An Old Man in a Dry Month” (205-230).

1. What do the pervasive references to grass suggest? Explain the pun, but the depiction of grass goes well beyond that. See Will’s dreams, p. 172.
2. Find the poem from which the quote, “An old man in a dry month” is taken. What light does this poem cast on Will’s older age?
3. How far do these two sections imply a negative judgment of hippies? If so, what are the grounds for this negative judgment is based? Why, in the world of the novel, are hippies treated less sympathetically than other outsiders such as Will and Aborigines?
4. How tolerant does the novel seem to be of homosexual love? How tolerant of incestuous love? Is the narrative interest mainly in the nature of the sex? Or is it mainly in the quality of the love? Or is it in the lovers’ mutual need for love, affirmation and acceptance?

THEOLOGY AND ETHICS: KINDNESS

At the end of his interview with Astley, Ray Willbanks asked, “What do you think matters most?” She replied: “Being kind. I’m not saying I am. I’m not. I wish I were. I think being kind is probably what matters more than anything in the world” (Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds 35).

We can use the section “Build Up” in It’s Raining in Mango (145-164) as a basis for thinking about kindness, which I consider to be the pivotal concept of all Astley’s fiction.

1. What view of the Catholic Church is stated or implied in this section?
2. What view of religious cults, such as the Marian cult led by Chant, is stated or implied in this section?
3. What changes occur in the relationship between Reever and Connie in this section?
4. Discuss the weather symbolism that gives this section its name.
5. Explain the significance of Reever’s comment on the saving of the drowned man: “Prayer isn’t simply words. Con’s been praying non-stop for exactly forty-eight minutes, do you hear? That’s what I call prayer” (165).
6. What do you conclude about the value of life from the drowned man’s response to his rescue: “Thanks for nothing,” the man was gasping, eyes shuttered to everything. “For nothing. Nothing.” (165)
7. How does this section distinguish itself from the popular literary and cinema genre of “exciting rescue”?
8. Who are the kind characters in It’s Raining in Mango? What acts of kindness do they perform? How successful or futile is each of these acts? If an act of kindness fails in its immediate objective, does it still have an intrinsic value? (Refer, of course, to the novel.)

IT’S RAINING IN MANGO: FURTHER QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

1. Aboriginal family history, as told in It’s Raining in Mango, ends in the 1980s as it began in the 1870s, with oppression, exclusion, violence and injustice. Discuss tragedy and satire in Astley’s representation of race relations in tropical Queensland.
2. In It’s Raining in Mango, how does Astley present the women in the Laffey family? Focus your answer on Jessica, Nadine, Meg, Clytie and Connie. What obstacles do these women face in their lives, and how successful are they in overcoming them?
3. How does It’s Raining in Mango judge, or fail to judge, female characters who break the rules?
4. In general, how successful are marriages and heterosexual relationships in It’s Raining in Mango? What conclusions about Australian gender relationships does the novel invite”?
5. Who are the outsiders in It’s Raining in Mango? What do the viewpoints of Astley’s outsiders reveal about the priorities of tropical Queensland culture and society?

PART TWO: DAVID MALOUF

This simplified time-scheme of the fictional family histories narrated in It’s Raining in Mango and The Great World shows the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century international events that these novels depict retrospectively and from Australian places and perspectives:

EVENT	LAFFEYS	KEENS	CURRANS
1873 Palmer River Gold Rush	Laffey family in Cooktown, Maytown	Not recorded	Not recorded
1879 Cairns cyclone	Nadine drowns	Not recorded	Not recorded
1914-1918 WWI	Not recorded	Billy Keen fights in France	Dan Curran is Pa Warrender’s batman
1918-20 Flu pandemic	Mag Laffey dies	Not recorded	Meggsie’s twin sister dies.
1929-1939 Great Depression	Harry and Clytie care for “lash-thin man”	Digger Keen joins boxing troupe	Vic  Curran is “haunted” by  the unemployed men
1939-45 WWII	Will Laffey fights in Bougainville; Connie meets Reever’s American father, later killed	Digger POW in Singapore and Burma Railway; Jenny loses baby at All Hallows, Brisbane	Vic POW in Singapore and Burma Railway
Postwar	Will returns to Brisbane; later moves to Mango; Hippie culture 1970s; suicides 1983.	After a spell working in King’s Cross, Digger returns to Keen’s Crossing, brings Jenny home, and works as an odd-jobs man.	After a spell in a Surry Hills boarding house, Vic returns to his Warrender home; marries and makes a fortune in Sydney; Hippie culture, post Vietnam War, King’s Cross.

Critic Andrew Taylor writes:

Furthermore, three [Malouf] novels—Fly Away Peter [1981], Harland’s Half Acre [1984] and The Great World [1990]—map some of the salient aspects of this country’s history from the first decade of the century to the late 1980s. Any novelist who has written so persuasively about both World Wars, the intervening Depression and the more recent economic or entrepreneurial Boom, is clearly no dabbler in historical colour. (“The Great World, History, and Two or One other Things.” Provisional Maps: Critical Essays on David Malouf. Ed. Amanda Nettelbeck (CSAL, Nedlands, Western Australia, 1994): 35)

DAVID MALOUF: LITERARY REPUTATION

David Malouf is widely recognised as a major Australian writer, comparable in reputation with Patrick White, Thomas Kenneally and Peter Carey. He is the winner of many awards for fiction and poetry. In 1991, The Great World won the Miles Franklin Literary Award; the Commonwealth Writers Prize; the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South-East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book from the Region Award; and the Prix Femina (France), Best Foreign Novel.

“[The Great World] has certainly had a much wider general readership than any of my books, and that surprised me.”
(David Malouf, Interview with Beate Josephi, Provisional Maps 31)

MALOUF’S LIFE AND WRITINGS

See AustLit for a biography and photos of David Malouf, together with a complete list of his writings: http://www.austlit.edu.au/run?ex=FederatedSearch&type=simple&defaultfed=y&styleSheet=fedsearch%2FFedSearchWorkSummary&searchWhere=author&generalSearchString=David+Malouf

See The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, ed. William H. White, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews. Second Edition. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994, for a more detailed biography of Malouf and a plot summary of The Great World.

THE GREAT WORLD

The Great World explores the place of Australia and Australians in the world, primarily by contrasting the place-based security of Australia before and after World War II, with the danger, hardship and death that confronted Australian soldiers—“Diggers”—during the Pacific war against Japan. The surrender of Singapore to Japanese forces took place on 15 February 1942. About 100,000 Allied troops, including nearly 15,000 Australians, became prisoners of the Japanese. These events shook the foundations of the national consciousness, as Australians gained a new realism about their place in the “great world.” The Fall of Singapore overturned previously unquestioned colonial and imperial assumptions of white superiority over Asians and other races.

Malouf’s novel tells the stories of two Sydney families, the Keens and the Currans. Layers of meaning are superimposed over the title, “the great world,” but the primary reference is to “The Great World” amusement park in Singapore (118), where the central episode, the murder of Mac by Japanese guards, takes place (119-127). This tragedy encapsulates the novel’s wider concern with the vulnerability of nations and of people to fate, that is, to “what the world can do to you,” and the resources (or lack of resources) that you can use defend yourself and to recover after trauma.

The Great World is neatly structured, told by a third-person omniscient narrator, with frequent shifts in perspective, as follows:

I.  Keen’s Crossing on the Hawkesbury, 1980s: Jenny, Digger and Vic, with analepsis to Jenny’s and Digger’s parents and childhood

II.  Analepsis to Vic’s childhood and adoption by the Warrenders

III.  Forward movement WWII: Digger and Vic POWs in Singapore and Thailand

IV.  Forward movement post-war: Digger in King’s Cross, to the moment he arrives home at the Crossing

V. Forward movement post-war: Vic in Surry Hills, to the moment when he takes Ellie Warrender’s hand

VI. Forward movement into the post-war decades: the dying out of the older generation, Marge Keen, Pa Warrender, Iris and finally Vic; the 1980s economic boom. At Vic’s death the narrative has moved full circle, returning to Jenny’s, Vic’s and Digger’s relationship at Keen’s Crossing in the 1980s.

ASTLEY AND MALOUF: COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS

The structure of The Great World is more smooth-flowing, interconnected and organic than the short powerful narratives that comprise It’s Raining in Mango.

Like Astley’s novel, The Great World deals with the impacts of historical events on individuals, but Malouf’s interests are personal rather than political. As Ivor Indyk puts it: “David Malouf’s public reputation rests on the most private grounds of all, the achievement of intimacy” (1). The Great World is not a satirical novel, driven by a passion like Astley’s for moral reformation and for social, racial, environmental and gender justice—all obvious themes in It’s Raining in Mango. Instead, The Great World explores subtleties of character and human relations; it looks for the reasons behind deep experiences. Malouf recognises the multiple causes and consequences of events; he presents the world as layered and mysterious. Digger Keen’s insight summarises the philosophical perspective of The Great World:

Even the least event had lines, all tangled, going back into the past, and beyond that into the unknown past, and other lines leading out, also tangled, into the future. Every moment was dense with causes, possibilities, consequences; too many, even in the simplest case, to grasp. Every moment was dense too with lives, all crossing and interconnecting or exerting pressure on one another, and not just human lives either; the narrowest patch of earth at the Crossing, as he had known since he was two years old, was crowded with little centres of activity, visible or invisible, that made up a web so intricate that your mind, if you went into it, was immediately stuck—fierce cannibalistic occasions without number, each one of which could deafen you if you had ears to hear what was going on there. And beyond that were what you could not even call lives or existences: they were mere processes—the slow burning of gases for example in the veins of leaves—that were invisibly and forever changing the state of things; heat, sunlight, electric charges to which everything alive enough responded and held itself erect, hairs and fibres that were very nearly invisible but subtly vibrating, nerve ends touched and stroked.

This was how he saw things unless he deliberately held back and shut himself off. (The Great World VI.13, p. 296)

This passage demonstrates Malouf’s command of poetic language. His path to a deeper understanding of reality, relationships and the self is by way of the physical world, the body and all modes of sensory experience, as these are recreated through language. The concrete but imaginative realisation of the physical world in The Great World is a major pleasure that this novel offers its readers. (See p. 28 for an earlier evocation of Digger’s view of the world.)

QUESTION: Compare and contrast the attitudes to the natural environment that are stated or implied in It’s Raining in Mango with those stated or implied in The Great World. How do the contrasting representations of nature contribute to each novel’s unique meaning?

CHARACTERS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS

Characterisation provides a further contrast with It’s Raining in Mango. Whereas Astley specialises in striking cameo portraits which fix characters at defining moments as in a photograph, The Great World follows its major characters closely for decades, charting their changes and relationships.

The two authors have a fundamentally different view of humanity. Astley has a Catholic sense of original sin and inherent human corruption; she presents kind and righteous actions as intrinsically valuable, but also as rare and usually futile, at least in their visible outcomes: the selfish forces in society—i.e. of people in the mass—are too strong to be overcome. Astley delights in exposing hypocrisy. By contrast, Malouf acknowledges and values human talents and moral striving; he sees some good in everyone. Most, if not all, of the major characters in The Great World win our respect, because we understand them at a deep level.

The consequences for their fiction of Astley’s and Malouf’s contrasting judgments of humanity are considerable. However, It’s Raining in Mango and The Great World share a feeling of compassion for the inevitable tensions in human relationships and the sufferings and struggles of each individual life.

MARGE KEEN

Digger’s mother, Marge Gibbons, later Keen, illustrates the intensity and skill with which The Great World explores the “causes, possibilities, consequences,” and the “lines, all tangled, going back into the past,” even for a character of secondary importance.

Marge’s childhood was one of loss: abandoned by her parents in England, and separated from her younger brother Bert, she comes to Australia as a child immigrant. (Malouf draws here on his own experience as the son of a Lebanese father and an English mother.) While working as a barmaid in Sydney’s Rocks area, Marge meets the eighteen-year-old Billy Keen, newly returned from the fighting in France. Being English, she is impressed by the status and stability implied by Billy’s family’s ownership of Keen’s Crossing, which bears their name. Ironically, she discovers when she arrives at the Crossing as a bride that Billy and his few relations have no interest at all in the family name, history, or status. Marge’s decision in the face of this disillusionment to build the Crossing into a home and business confirms the strength of character that she demonstrated in controlling Sydney’s drinkers. Her motivation–“this spirit of making and gathering, this dedication to the religion of getting” (20-21)—is an understandable reaction to her childhood losses and the disappointments of her marriage. The losses that follow–the early deaths of all her children except Jenny and Digger, and Billy’s departure for successive wars—confirm her in her way of life.

Marge Keen’s fierceness in possession affects her relationships with her children. She christens her surviving son Albert, and plans him as a replacement for her lost brother, but “Digger,” Billy’s name for his son, is the one that sticks. Father and son develop a close relationship, based on Billy’s masculine view of “real” life as change, excitement and adventure, but the closeness between mother and son continues:

And the miracle was that for all his loyalty to his father she hadn’t lost him after all; that was the sweetness of him. He stuck to the father, but he stuck to her as well. They were bonded. They had their own codes and passwords that others did not recognise, even when they were at the same table. They talked in silence. (24)

Marge’s fierceness in possession and subliminal communications with her son, especially during his bouts of malaria, are an important factor in Digger’s survival as a POW in Thailand (see p. 136).

In the months before her death, Marge comes to see how her devotion to accumulating possessions, which she has adopted as a defence against loss, has narrowed her life and crippled her identity. On a windy afternoon in August she escapes from the house and climbs to up to where, for the first time in thirty-three years, she looks across to distant Sydney. Too late she comes to a devastating realisation: “the gathering around her of the objects of her life, she did not want it, any of it” (p. 245). (Read the moving account of Marge’s death (VI. 3).)

The Great World therefore gives the reader a deep understanding of this secondary character’s changing circumstances, motives, reactions and discoveries, without once implying a moral judgment. At the same time the novel concedes that the whole story of Marge Keen’s life has not been told. Like all human lives, Marge’s story could never be told in full.

QUESTION: The Great World suggests more than once that Digger and his mother are similar: “the law she had lived by was so like his own” (282). But in what ways does Digger’s world view differ from his mother’s?

STUDY EXERCISE: SECONDARY CHARACTERS

Using the foregoing analysis of Marge Keen as a sample, trace the complex lines of development in the lives of the following secondary characters in The Great World.

Focus especially on what you regard as key events in the depictions of these characters, and on their positive qualities—which of them do you like or dislike, and why?

• Vic’s mother, Till Curran
• Dan Curran
• Josie
• Billy Keen (Digger’s father)
• Pa (Hugh) Warrender
• Ma Warrender
• Lucille Warrender
• Ellie Warrender
• Meggsie
• Iris
• Greg Curran

DIGGER KEEN AND VIC CURRAN

The stories of these two characters determine the alternating structure of The Great World (See the outline above: Digger’s story, Sections I and IV; Vic’s story, II and V; both together, III and VI). The twists and changes in their relationship, their deep but never fully captured affinity, and the contrasts between them are the central narrative concern.

Malouf’s abundant depiction of Digger and Vic mimics the mysterious complexity of living people. However, we can begin our analysis by suggesting some simple contrasts for you to consider:

• Vic is driven to achieve, but, given the opportunity, Digger finds contentment in physical work and relationships.
• Vic’s ambition and striving end in the loss of his son, Greg, but life brings Digger unexpected gifts in his relationships with others.
• Vic prospers as a member of the social and economic elite, but Digger is an ordinary bloke.
• Digger is fundamentally happy, but Vic is tormented.

QUESTION: Consider the significance of the names, Digger (miner, soldier, Australian) and Vic (victor, victim).

In the light of your own reading and thinking about The Great World, you may also like to consider how far you agree with the following analysis:

Malouf quietly celebrates Digger’s creative gifts—his talent for carpentry and for mending machines (23); his exceptional memory for words and stories; his openness to and acceptance of the world; and his desire, which is embodied in his name “keen digger,” to get to the bottom of things, and which is the essence of a philosophical temperament. In addition, from the beginning, Digger displays a talent for intuitive relationship with others: with his mother and father, with Jenny, with the dog Ralphie, with his tiny dead brothers and sisters, and with the Islanders and other black men in the boxing troupe. He joins the army on the spur of the moment, because he feels “the warmth of being, in the easiest way, one of a mob” (58). When we meet him again in Changi, he has already formed a close friendship with Mac and with Doug Bramson. Vic intrudes into the group as an uncomfortable fourth member: “Digger couldn’t stand him” (113).

From the narrative of Vic’s childhood, we have learned that Vic’s gifts are just as impressive as Digger’s, but they are designed to operate in the contrasting fields of people management and manipulation, entrepreneurship, financial acumen, risk-taking and organisation. Vic’s life begins tragically: he cares for his mother through an agonising death, and suffers with his mother from Dan Curran’s alcoholism, abjection, scrounging, and violence. The family’s one-room shack, threatened by ever-moving sand, takes on a symbolic meaning, perhaps suggesting Australians’ bitter struggles during the Depression, or even the inevitability of annihilation. Vic’s basic temperament is sunny: “He should have moved easily in the world” (72), but he learns defensive techniques:

As for the ready smile and liveliness of manner that came so easily to him, they could leave you vulnerable, he had discovered, unless used as a mask. They disarmed people. That was their use. (73)

Vic’s boyhood sufferings motivate his drive and ambition. He plans to “rectify an error that had been made in the true workings of things….and would have no mercy on whatever it was that had sought to rob him of his due” (73).

I recommend that you read Andrew Taylor’s compelling analyses and comparisons of Vic and Digger in his essay, “The Great World, History and Two or One Other Things” quoted from above. The following summarises some of this critic’s thinking:

If Vic’s truth, his inescapable reality, is his acting a role, Digger seems to have an internal consistency through and through. Untroubled by any of Vic’s nagging convictions of inauthenticity, of alienating internal difference, Digger could easily have become a parody of true Aussie wholesomeness, the little battler brought up in hard times (the Depression, the War), not too hot with the girls, but finally enjoying a modest, working class life somehow in touch with the bush; a salutary contrast to his citified, over-reaching and too-clever-by-half mate. That Digger avoids such stereotyping is partly due to the sympathy with which Vic is drawn, and partly to the complexity with which filtration of Digger’s life with that of his parents, and particularly his mother, is established. But there is another factor also which enables Digger totally to avoid any tinge of the complacency inherent in the stereotype, and that is the urgency with which he embodies the role of the preserver. (Andrew Taylor 46-47)

QUESTION: So what does Digger preserve, and what instruments does he use to do so?

Perhaps Digger’s perception of Vic’s defensive “mask” (see quote from p. 73 above) is what alienates him. However, the two men are connected at a deep level, in a way that the narrator persists in presenting as mysterious.

Like Digger, the young boy Vic intuits a depth to experience that transcends bodily and material awareness. Passages such as the following occur often in The Great World. They’re easy to skip as being only loosely related to the plot, yet they repay close attention because they embody a poetic approach to the world, verging on the metaphysical, which is central to the novel’s meaning:

Here, at the smoky edge of darkness, even stones lost their sharp edge and their heaviness a moment and seemed ready for flight. He felt his body leave the earth. That was the animal in him, which was sure-footed and had perfect timing. It took off in a long leap and he held his breath.

The land breeze had fallen, just on the turn. Everything was suspended, hanging for one last moment between daytime and night, between its day life and that other darker life of the night hours. His body too was suspended.

But after a moment of almost miraculous lightness in which he felt he had actually done it, and worked the change, he came back to earth. The weight of his body, light as it was, reclaimed him. It was too heavy to shake off.

The sea breeze quickened and in kitchens all down the shore they would be feeling its coolness now. His eyes had adjusted. The lights were hard window-squares.

“Maybe,” he thought grimly, “there is no other life to be broken through to. It’s all continuous, and you just keep getting thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier as it builds up in you, and that’s it.”

He thought this but could not believe it. That sort of fatality was not in his nature. He would sigh and go home disappointed, but not hopeless, never entirely without hope. (73-74)

The academic speaker at Pa Warrender’s funeral gives the novel’s clearest account of this transcendent reality, which many of the mourners have found in Pa Warrender’s poetry:

He was speaking of poetry itself…how it spoke up, not always in the plainest terms, since that wasn’t always possible, but in precise terms all the same, for what is deeply felt and might otherwise go unrecorded: all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and horror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens every day in the life of the planet, and has been from the very beginning. To find words for that; to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too—that, when it occurs is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own. (The Great World 283-284)

In the article already cited Andrew Taylor identifies “this more mysterious force” with Destiny (48). Pat Buckridge finds its origins in a dominant strand of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, the “discourse of the sublime,” first identified with “measurelessness” as an aspect of Nature, but later expanded to encompass history as the record of moral anarchy:

An aspect of the sublime that comes to the fore in this novel [The Great World] more than in the earlier ones is its violation of “rules.” Those rules of composition, which in aesthetic discourse govern the beautiful, are routinely overridden by the sublime, which has no need of them; it is partly this ‘going beyond measure’ that accounts for the shock and surprise the sublime produces. Similarly, when people’s behaviour suddenly and unexpectedly breaks or changes the rules, others may react with “sublime” astonishment. (“Astonished by Everything: The Functions of Sublime Discourse in David Malouf’s Fiction.” Provisional Maps: 176)

QUESTIONS: METAPHYSICS AND POETRY

1. Compare the narrative of Vic’s heart attack in VI. 17, especially the account of his feelings on awaking from his dream (313-315) and the experience of lightness lost in gravity (317), with the passage above describing his boyhood experience of transcendence. Would you say that his hope of “breaking through” to another life is fulfilled on the morning of Vic’s death? Or is the description of his death an ironic refutation of his “hope”? (See Andrew Taylor’s interpretations quoted above.) How far and in what sense is Vic a “Victor”?
2. Immediately before his death, Vic has a moment of clarity in which he sees that he had lived “The wrong life….none of it had been intended for him” (316). What do you think this means, and what are its implications for Vic’s world view?
3. Read the samples of Pa Warrender’s poetry quoted in The Great World. How do they suggest the presence of a transcendent reality and meaning? (See pp. 236-237 and 281-282.) Discuss the relationship between Pa’s characterisation and this “sublime” dimension of his poetry.

THE GREAT WORLD SECTION III: WORLD WAR II, SINGAPORE AND THAILAND

David Malouf: “The prisoner of war experience [in The Great World] was a central metaphor as well as a central event.” (Interview with Beate Josephi, Provisional Maps 31)

Section III is a rare account in literary fiction of Australian prisoners of war under the Japanese. Its focus is on strategies for survival, the prisoners’ endurance of starvation, disease, and slave labour, and the imminence of death. Relationships among Australian prisoners are its main topic, but it steers clear of the nationalist clichés of active heroism and mateship. Instead the section thinks deeply about causes, the precariousness of order, and the role of fate in people’s lives. In an interview that Malouf gave in 2006, he commented on the realities of living in an “age of terror”:

“He says the underlying theme in Every Move You Make [Malouf’s collection of short stories published in 2006]—and one that has a strange resonance in this age of terror—is that the order and tranquillity of our lives are more precarious than we like to admit. ‘The whole terror question seems to me to be largely what that’s all about, and why it’s created such a panic,’ he says. “It simply makes clear what is there all the time but which we can gloss over, mostly.’”

Rosemary Neill: “An Imaginative Life.” The Weekend Australian Review 30 September-1 October, 2006, 4-5.

The causes that precipitate Vic’s actions are central to Malouf’s investigation of precariousness, fate and the “glossing over” of “terror.” Incipient violence haunts Vic’s boyhood: he broods about taking revenge on his father with the axe he uses daily to chop wood. Fate preempts this plan when his father dies in a drunken brawl. Vic’s new life as foster son to the affectionate, playful and wealthy Warrenders gives scope to his genuine strength, optimism and integrity. However, it also “glosses over” the tragedy and endemic violence of his boyhood. These surface again in Singapore, above all in Section III Chapter 2, which narrates Mac’s death.

QUESTIONS: MAC’S DEATH IN THE GREAT WORLD

1. “Self-possession…the one true ground of manliness”; “a ‘a black-stump philosopher’”; “One of the things Mac introduced him to was music.”; “blokes like Mac, dyed-in-the-wool idealists”; “angelic storm-trooper” (116-117): given this characterisation of Mac, how do you explain the instant rapport and friendship that develops between himself and Digger?
2. Examine Vic’s part in Mac’s death (III.2). How culpable is he? What part, if any, does the suppressed violence of Vic’s past play? What self-knowledge, and what resolutions does Vic take away from this event?
3. How does this chapter illuminate the following themes: the body; friendship; Australian heroism and humiliation; fate; the precariousness of life; the nature of death.

Chapter 12, the climax of Section III’s account of Australian prisoners in Singapore and Thailand, is suspenseful and exciting on first reading. Rereading reveals the chapter’s concrete and vivid language, and its deeper concepts and questions. The narrative juxtaposes the mud, Digger’s ulcerated foot and his whole body reeking of death, with the healing bestowed by the ravenous tiny fish; “baptism” and “cleanness” are among the terms used. Light from the stars and Digger’s inner light are used to balance Vic’s and Digger’s blind but heroic struggle. These juxtapositions entail extremes of despair and hope, and a conjunction of the physical and the imaginative, as in the following sentence:

When he came back into himself and looked about he was standing knee deep in oily water, stars overhead, so close he could hear them grinding, and he could hear the tiny jaws of the fishes grinding too, as starlight touched their backs and they swarmed and fought and churned the blackness to a frenzy round his shins. (The Great World: 161-162)

QUESTIONS:

1. Following Mac’s death, how does the narrative account for the unexpected and seemingly unlikely coming together of Digger and Vic in mutual support?
2. What is Vic’s motivation for saving Digger’s leg, and probably also his life, in Chapter 12?

JENNY

The opening of The Great World, which is a moving account of Jenny in her old age, narrated from her perspective and from the perspectives of those around her, immediately captures the reader’s attention. We understand the physical aspects of her life—the shop, children, scone-baking, clothes-washing, the magpies (which she compares significantly with “bloody nuns” (5)), and the feral cats. Jenny’s simple and incomplete understanding of her world mediates the reader’s first responses to Digger and Vic, inviting us to adopt her automatic trust in Digger and decades-long dislike of Vic. The novel then proceeds to unravel the events that have shaped the two male protagonists, so that the reader can decide how far to agree with Jenny’s judgments. Section VI Chapter 18 circles back to the starting point, by recalling all the elements of Jenny’s life described at the beginning. When Jenny comes upon the dying Vic her life-long dislike dissolves when he takes up a foetal posture that reminds her of her stolen baby: “He had his face down between her breasts. She could feel a wetness. She began to weep” (323). This is as close as The Great World comes to a conventional final shaping and resolution.

QUESTIONS:

1. What does the feral cat, with “half its face” sliced away, signify? How is this Gothic image relevant to Vic’s life and death?
2. How far do you as a reader share in Jenny’s final acceptance of Vic?
3. Through such characters as Digger and Vic, The Great World uncovers the complexity and depth of human qualities, motives and drives. Is the ultimate message of this novel therefore the need for mutual acceptance?
4. What alternative central interpretation can you suggest?

CONCLUSION

Despite its length, this Study Guide leaves many aspects of It’s Raining in Mango and The Great World for you to consider. I do not expect you to agree with all the analyses put forward. In fact I hope that the Study Guide will open a dialogue which we hope that readers will deepen and extend. Here are some general questions on The Great World. The last invites you to make comparisons with It’s Raining in Mango:

1. How does The Great World extend and transform the traditional Australian ideal of mateship (male friendship)? Base your answer on the friends, Mac, Doug Bramson, Digger Keen and Vic Curran.
2. Family history in The Great World focuses on parent-child relationships. What are the consequences for children and parents of these relationships’ success or failure?
3. How do their experiences as children shape the characters of Digger Keen and Vic Curran in The Great World? In your view, how far does each of these men “succeed” or “fail” in their later lives? Find support in the novel for your answer.
4. Discuss the characterisation and role of Digger’s sister Jenny in The Great World.
5. Evaluate Malouf’s representation of Australian prisoners of war in Singapore and Thailand during World War II.
6. What image of Australia and Australians before, during and after World War II is projected in The Great World?
7. Compare and contrast the treatment of (a) male friendship and (b) male sexuality in It’s Raining in Mango and The Great World. Base your discussion on a consideration of the Laffey men–Cornelius, Will and Harry; and the friends Mac, Doug Bramson, Digger Keen and Vic Curran.

THE GREAT WORLD: SUGGESTED SECONDARY READING

Hansson, Karen. “David Malouf and the Image of Australia.” Commonwealth Literary Cultures: New Voices, New Approaches: Conference Papers, Lecce, 3-7 April, 1990. Ed. Giovanna Capone, Claudio Gorlier and Bernard Hickey. Lecce, Italy: Edizonia del Grifo, 1993 (pp. 191-200).

Indyk, Ivor, intro. David Malouf: A Celebration. Canberra: Friends of the National Library of Australia, 2001.

Nettelbeck, Amanda. “Narrative Invention as ‘Spatial History’ in The Great World.” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, No. 7 (June 1992): 41-52.

Nettelbeck, Amanda. Provisional Maps: Critical Essays on David Malouf. Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia: Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, 1994.

See the following interview and essays in Nettelbeck’s collection:

• Beate Josephi. “Interview with David Malouf.” 29-34.
• Taylor, Andrew. “The Great World, History and Two or One Other Things.” 35-50.
• Buckridge, Patrick. “Astonished by Everything: The Functions of Sublime Discourse in David Malouf’s Fiction.” 161-181;

Nettelbeck, Amanda. Reading David Malouf. Sydney: Sydney UP; South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1995.

Taylor, Andrew. “Origin, Identity and the Body in David Malouf’s Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies 19/1 (May 1999): 3-14.