Wandering along together, wading through the high grasses side
by side, is a kind of conversation that needs no tongue, a perfect
interchange of perceptions, moods, questions, answers (Malouf,
1978:145).Again, in his short story Southern Skies the adolescent narrator declares that
he was:
... waiting for something significant to occur, for life somehow to
declare itself ... and longed for the world to free me by making its
own rigorous demands and declaring at last what I must be
(Malouf, 1985:13).
This happens as he views the night sky through a telescope, becoming
aware of the immensity of time and space yet of his own mortality too. While in a
trance like state, the professor has sexually assaulted the boy but he is now no
longer vulnerable to chance encounters, even a potentially traumatic sexual one. I n
fact the event may rather be seen almost like a primitive sexual, homoerotic
initiation rite, often part of the initiation of a shaman.
The words of shamans, like the harmony of music, can soothe and heal
because of the way they penetrate a special area of our lives, their relevance to our
mood and condition. Much of what Malouf writes about depends on a sort of
existentialism, the sense of the uniqueness and the aloneness of the individual.
Malouf probes feelings and entanglements in a deep and strange way, just
barely perceptible, sometimes surrendering fully to experience, allowing it to flow
through himself. But he has that quality of genius that sucks out of ordinary
experiences essences strange or unknown to ordinary men. He chants obedience to
the primitive urges that rise in the soul, urging us to new gestures, new embraces,
new emotions, new combinations – new creations – but within a psycho-spiritual
matrix that is Australian; sometimes be it ever so subtle or hinted at.
5.2 Thomas Keneally: The Chanting Priest
I n 1985 I made a study of what I termed Thomas Keneally’s European
literature: A Victim of the Aurora (1977), Gossip from the Forest (1975), Season in
Purgatory (1976), Schindler’s Ark (1982); those novels set outside the contemporary
Australian milieu, in a period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end
of the Second World War. These works examine the effects of imperialism on the
individual and the inherited cultural accoutrements of European Empires. Although