lost” even though it is his grave. I n Fly Away Peter, the dead Clancy gives Jim a
similar clue:
Jim looked around, astonished. I t was Clancy Parkett, whom he
had last seen nearly a year ago, and whom he believed was dead,
blown into so many pieces that nothing of him was ever found
except what Jim himself had been covered with. To give poor
Clancy a decent burial, some wit had said, they would have had to
bury the both of them. And now here he was quite whole after
all, grinning and rasping his chin with a blackened thumb. Trust
Clancy. Clancy would wriggle out of anything. ‘I thought you’d
been blown up.’ Jim said foolishly. ‘You just disappeared into thin
air.’ ‘No,’ Clancy told him, ‘not air, mate. Earth.’ And he held up
a fistful of the richly smelling mud. ‘I t’s the only way now. We’re
digging through to the other side’ (Malouf, 1982:127).
This digging ritual might also be seen, metaphorically, as scratching away at the
membrane that separates the material realm from the I maginal Realm, the place of
the soul and of souls.
Malouf’s character Harland is not unlike Shakespeare’s Prospero in The
Tempest: both return to an island and exert some sort of control over nature, for
both the opacity between nature and super nature is dissolved and both experience
contact with the spirits of their milieu. The structured similarity allows Malouf to
create a mythology for the Australian milieu out of local, identifiable images. I t
allows him to introduce an indigenous mythic quality that is superimposed over the
tension and human conflicts produced by the characters of the overt tale. I t is an
example of Malouf’s meditation on the many layers of perceived experience and of
the way in which the soul and the body experience their milieus. To be sure,
Malouf’s world is that of the mystic poet and it is the preponderance of this in him
that is the key to his work. He magnifies and deepens experience in the manner of
the poet – almost as if he were in a trance in which he ‘chants’ of another plane of
existence.
I n his poem sequence I nspirations, Malouf creates perhaps one of the
richest and most mystical encounters of the language of depth imagination in the
cannon of Australian poetry:
to breathe out
air that has been taken
deep and give it voice – clear vocables
move into the real world glow there
as stone