The spiritual insights or epiphanies experienced by Malouf’s characters are
never predictable within the context or structure of the story and often contradict
the exterior circumstances. One such case is the Changi episode in The Great
World when Vic drags Digger to the river ostensibly so that the fish will nibble clean
Digger’s putrid and gangrenous leg wound:
All the stink and ooze of it was being taken back into the world,
away from him, into the mouths of the living and turned back into
life there ... 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 (Malouf, 1990:161-162).
This event is in itself not terribly important, in fact it is inconclusive. I t is
rather a motif of interconnectedness that Malouf uses; it is almost descriptive of a
sort of participation mystique. Both Vic and Digger transcend their immediate
circumstances, Vic “ ... was in a kind of wonder” and aware only of “ ... a pleasant
contact” and Digger “ ... understood at last, but thought it must be a dream”
(Malouf, 1990:161).
I t is as if this reconnection with another state of consciousness reveals the
individual’s true nature, the soul. I n a similar way in Malouf’s short story Southern
Skies, the adolescent narrator says that he was:
... always abroad and waiting for something significant to occur,
for life somehow to declare itself and catch me up, [ and that he]
... longed for the world to free me by making its own rigorous
demands and declaring what I must be (Malouf, 1985:13).
A similar expectation is declared in An I maginary Life when Ovid says:
We barely recognise the annunciation when it comes, declaring:
Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second
chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by
inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for
yourself. I t will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune
in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions
through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last
the one you intended to be (Malouf, 1978:94).
Once the annunciation occurs a psycho-spiritual transformation begins, as
the young narrator of Southern Skies declares:
I t was as if I had stepped out of the city altogether into some
earlier, more darkly wooded area ... it was miraculous... I might