of time and place and yet, simultaneously, can be in some other time and place. A
time and place peopled, too, just as substantially, by identities of another time and
place.
I n explaining how his poem An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton works and how
it made the writing of An I maginary Life possible, Malouf says that the crux is a
subjective experience that precipitates belief:
The movement of that poem is from something observed,
described – objects, events – straight through into the mind, and
the experience in enacts – the belief – is that there is no
disjunction between thought and object, between mind and body
- that the old subject/ object dichotomy is resolved in experience,
in being itself. The movement of the poem, and whatever drama
there is in it, is in the way in which objects stop being outside in a
world perceived and end up inside the perceiver; in the way in
which the poem changes those objects into perceptions. The
whole movement of the poem is from the house and garden
outside to a point where the house has become the house of the
body itself and the anatomy that one is talking about is the body
as the point from which the thing is experienced in itself but not
as something separate (Neilson, 1990:54).
I n Fly Away Peter Malouf leads the reader to a much deeper consideration of
this issue, an altered state of consciousness, in fact, he describes a near-death-
experience. The protagonist Jim has fallen unconscious on the battle field, mortally
wounded but:
Jim, doubtful, began to dig. He looked about. Others were doing
the same, long lines of them, and he was surprised to see how
large the clearing was. I t stretched away to the brightening
skyline. I t wasn’t a clearing but a field, and more than a field, a
landscape; so wide, as the early morning sun struck the furrows,
that you could see the curve of the earth. There were hundreds
of men, all caked with mud, long-haired, bearded, in ragged
uniforms, stooped to the black earth digging. So it must be alright
after all. Why else should so many be doing it? The lines
stretched out forever (Malouf, 1982:127-128).
This image of hundreds of men digging conveys a profound reality from
beyond the limits of waking consciousness and it anticipates a transformative event.
As a symbol it acts in the same way in which Malouf used it in An I maginary Life.
There the poet Ovid dreams of digging with wolves, digging to discover his own
grave.
I n both works Malouf deliberately leaves the significance of digging vague
and allows the reader to interpret it. I n An I maginary Life, Ovid knows that
whatever the wolves are scratching after, he must discover before them or “ ... I am