I n a short essay where he describes his idea of the relationship between
imagination and reality, Malouf writes, in a manner that is echoic of D.H. Lawrence’s
blood knowledge:
There is only one way of experiencing the reality of the world we
live in-that is through our bodies, our senses. But we humans are
fortunate in having two ways of attaining that experience; either
through actual events or, when it is working at its most powerful,
through the imagination. And I would want to insist, myself, that
what we experience in this second way, if it is deep and immediate
enough, is every bit as real, every bit as useful to us, as what we
experience directly in the everyday (Green and Headon, 1987:19-
22).
I n The Great World, we read that Digger has developed this capacity: that
his home, Keen’s Crossing, has become for him, a temenos, and that:
Years later, in some of the worst times in Thailand, this connection
would sustain Digger and help keep him sane, keep him attached
to the earth; to the brief stretch of it that was continuous with his
name and through that, with his image of himself. He could be
there at will. He had only to dive into himself and look about
(Malouf, 1990:199).
Digger also realises that:
There was a tie, a deep one, between the name as he bore it and
as the place did ... And not just by his being there. He could leave
it ... but the link would remain. The name contained him ...
wherever he might go ... There was a mystery in this that he
might spend the whole of his life pondering ... that he would have
to explore ... and he saw, regretfully, that he might have to forgo
all these other places (Malouf, 1990:197-198).
This raises the question of to what extent and in what way does this physical
place construct or influence the person? Malouf ponders too, through Digger, just
what it is that constitutes place:
What had Keen’s Crossing been, he wondered, before his
grandfather stopped here and claimed the crossing and built the
store? Did it have any name at all? And, without one, how had
anyone known what it was or that it was here at all? ... Nameless
it would have been; untouched in all time by the heel maybe of
even a single black. The same hard sunshine would have beat
down on it ... But it was not Keen’s Crossing. I t wouldn’t have
known there were any Keens, to drive their horses across the river
and cut down the first tree ... But then the two things met: his
grandfather’s axe and the hard trunk of one of its trees, and the
first letter of a syllable cut into it. Keen meant sharp. The axe’s
edge was Keen. So the place got a name (Malouf, 1990:198-199).