Today's post looks at the second of my review copies from Harper Collins Australia taken from the Angus & Robertson Australian Classics range. The first, Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land, looked at race relations after the arrival of the first fleet in 1788. This one is set a century later, but as you'll see, little has changed...
*****
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is one of Thomas (or Tom) Keneally's best-known works here in Australia, and it's fairly easy to see why. It's the story of a half-caste Aborigine who wants to get on in the world, having lost faith, and patience, with the lifestyle of his family and tribe. With some gentle encouragement from the Methodist minister on the settlement he is attached to, Jimmie decides that he needs to make an effort to succeed in life, an effort which involves leaving the traditional past behind and embracing a white future.
This is 1899 though, and while Australian federation is just around the corner, the birth of a new country does not mean a new era for race relations. Racism is common, casual and accepted. Aborigines are still... well, I was going to say second-class citizens, but that would be a lie. They weren't even counted on the census until the second half of the twentieth century...
Nonetheless, Jimmie knows what he wants, and the best way to get it:
"Possession was a holy state and he had embarked upon it with the Nevilles' shovel. The Nevilles had succeeded so well as to make Jimmie a snob. In the mind of the true snob there are certain limited criteria to denote the value of a human existence. Jimmie's criteria were: home, hearth, wife, land. Those who possessed these had beatitude unchallengeable. Other men had accidental, random life. Nothing better."
pp.16/7 (Angus and Robertson Classics, 2013)
Unfortunately though, Jimmie is never likely to achieve his dreams, and even his marriage to a poor, young white girl is unlikely to help when his bosses continue to despise, cheat and laugh at him. One day, Jimmie snaps - and the consequences are horrific and legendary...
While Keneally himself claims in a foreword that this is not one of his better books, it's one that has captured the imagination of readers since its publication in 1972. The key to the story is that Jimmie, unlike his brother Mort (another of the main characters), is the product of a relationship between a white man and a native woman. He is different both in appearance and mindset to his kin, but unable to completely escape his tribal upbringing and his responsibilities to his extended family. Caught between two worlds, he is destined to fall into a deep void.
Of course, he is pushed towards his fate by the white men who employ him (while always looking to exploit and cheat him). Each time Jimmie works hard, his employers' cruelty or meanness forces him to move on, an action which reinforces the stereotype of the lazy 'blackfella' who ups and leaves when he pleases. Even his time as a police tracker is cut short by a savage, cruel event.
Even so, when we come to the turning point, and Jimmie finally takes his revenge, we are stunned. The cover of the book makes no secret of the fact that he snaps and commits murder, but we are perhaps conditioned into finding excuses and expect his actions to be almost understandable. They are nothing of the kind, and the book is all the better for it. Once Jimmie has time to look back on the event, he expects to feel remorse:
"Jimmie himself still waited for the slump of spirits which could be expected after merciless Friday night. It failed to come. He was still in a viable balance between belief and non-belief in the dismembering he had done. At the same time, the thorough nature of the punishment he had dealt out continued to soothe and flatter him. Because he had been effective. He had actually manufactured death and howling dark for people who had such pretensions of permanence. He had cut down obelisks to white virtue." (p.101)
Instead of regretting his actions, he feels a sense of vindication...
As the great event of Federation draws ever closer though, you sense that Jimmie's time is running out along with that of the old six colonies. His punishment will be less a noose or a bullet, than a feeling of failure and remorse for the mess he's made of other people's lives. After spending time on the run with Jimmie and his friends, will we feel more sympathy for the murderer? I suspect that will depend on the individual reader...
While The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a great read, it does start slowly, and the first half can be a little predictable in its lament of a poor Aborigine cheated by the nasty white man (the dated racist jibes at the English wore a little thin too...). However, once we reach the pivotal point of the story, it turns into something more, a subtle, complex exploration of what it means to be caught between cultures in a society which is, literally, black and white. There were no shades of grey (or light-brown) in the eyes of nineteenth-century Australians...
Oh, one last thing (and it's probably something I should have mentioned earlier). This novel is based on a true story, and while some of the names and dates have been changed, the basic plot is the same. There really was a Jimmie (Governor, not Blacksmith) living at the end of the nineteenth century, who married a white woman and went on a killing spree, ending up the same way as his fictional namesake. Perhaps that makes the story even more powerful than it already is...
It's been a squeeze, but I've just managed to fit in a second review for Kim's Australian Literature Month. While last week I talked about a modern classic, today's post focuses on a real classic, a book which looks back to the late eighteenth century. There's a boat on the horizon, and the First Fleet will soon be in sight...
*****
Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land (one of the reissued Angus and Robertson Classics series, review copy courtesy of Harper Collins Australia) was first published in 1941, but tells of the first years of European settlement in Australia, from the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 to the departure of the first Governor in 1792. It's a meticulously-researched, fictionalised account of life and struggles in the new colony, where the British colonists (and convicts) attempt to obtain a first toehold on a vast, timeless continent.
We start though, not with the white men, but with Bennilong, a member of the local Aboriginal tribe. He and his father, a famous Youara-gurrugin (a maker of songs), have long been expecting the return of the white men in their 'winged boats', and often trek out to the cliffs, hoping for a glimpse of the ships. It is not until after his father's death that Bennilong's vision is realised, but the dream soon turns sour. You see, unlike last time, when the white men soon went home, it appears that this time the visitors are here to stay.
Gradually, the natives realise that this is not a mere interlude in their timeless tribal story, but a turning point, a change in something they had considered changeless. The Governor of the first colony, Arthur Phillip, does his best to accommodate the natives, and initial mistrust turns to uneasy cooperation, interspersed by conflict. The native tribes are willing to share the land, even helping the white intruders in their initial difficulties, but it soon becomes clear that this is not a visit, but an invasion...
The Timeless Land is an excellent piece of historical fiction which, while not always literary, is a fascinating glimpse of life post-1788. It's a vivid picture of life in a new world, and the changing of a timeless culture - as such, it works better than any history book ever could. Dark succeeds in evoking the sensations of the new country, the smells, the heat, the feeling of dust on the skin... And it's not just the white man's view that we get to see - the writer also succeeds in showing us familiar ideas in a new way:
"The black man's lean forefinger pointed urgently towards a gap between the tree-tops, and then, in the dust beside the fire, made marks to show the position of the stars he meant, so that Johnny was able to see them quite clearly. There were four very bright ones, arranged something like a cross, and a fifth, dimmer and smaller nearby. Two of the bright ones, Johnny was told, were great warriors who had fought for a woman called Namirra, and wounded each other so badly that they both died; and the other two were their brothers, who had been so overcome by grief that they killed Namirra, who was now the fifth pale star, and then killed themselves too."
p.266 (Angus and Robertson Classics, 2013)
For white Australians, this is a new take on our most famous constellation, the Southern Cross...
The novel runs to almost six-hundred pages, and that gives the writer plenty of scope to explore the realities of life in a colony far from home. Having begun as a place to dump undesirables from Mother England, the colony has a surplus of unhappy convicts (both male and female) and a lack of the people who would actually be useful (e.g. farmers and tradesmen). There aren't enough tools or decent clothing, and as the gaps between the arrival of supply ships stretches out into months, the threat of starvation looms ever closer. Controlling the colony and constructing a town is hard enough then, so the frequent infighting and power struggles between the civilian and military authorities is not exactly going to help matters any.
Fascinating as the internal politics of the British are though, the main focus is, of course, on the clash of two very different cultures, each obeying their own tribal law. The difference between the two is so great that the word 'alien' is unavoidable, and in fact some of the scenes could come out of a work of Science-Fiction (or Speculative Fiction). When Bennilong muses about the Bereewolgal ('the men from far, far away'), strange, hairless beings carrying gooroobera (magic firesticks), the image is not one of Australia, but of a remote, dusty planet...
Just as in any good space story, The Timeless Land has its moment of first contact, and Dark captures the meeting of the two leaders with stark, brutal honesty:
"Tirrawuul saw a smallish man, quite incredibly ugly, with a pale face and a very large nose. He was covered from head to foot, and, though his coverings were not as splendid as those of the men with the weapons, Tirrawuul, himself a leader, could recognise in him a confidence and authority which required no outward trappings.
Phillip saw an elderly savage, quite incredibly ugly, with greying tangled hair, and alert dark eyes. He was stark naked, and strangely ornamented with raised scars across his body and upper arms. But he stood very erect, and wore his air of leadership with unconscious dignity. For the present, at all events, they assured each other wordlessly, there need be no bloodshed." (p.40)
If only the two groups can find some more common ground...
One of the more surprising aspects of the novel though is that it's not just a two-way conflict. As wide as the gulf between the whites and the natives is, the gap between the colonists and the prisoners is every bit as wide. The convicts make up a third, separate, group, and they have just as much (or as little) in common with their captors as with the original inhabitants of their new home. Not that this means that the natives have sympathy with them. Bennilong sees them as an inferior race, a group of men who allow themselves to be ordered around and sent to dishonourable deaths. In his eyes, 'the subordinate tribe' are not real men...
While the novel (the first in a trilogy) has multiple strands and a whole host of characters, both real and imagined, the reader always comes back to two: Governor Phillip and the fiery Bennilong. Fate has decreed that they be there at the start of something much bigger than themselves or their tribes, and both are changed (not necessarily for the better) by the encounter. The two grow to admire aspects of the other culture, and they are formed by the land, making something new - the start of a new country.
The Timeless Land was written in the late 1930s, so by today's standards, it may appear a little ethnocentric at times. On occasion, the Aborigines are portrayed as being a little childlike in their thinking, and the idea of the noble savage is overplayed. However, Dark casts just as critical an eye on the behaviour of the settlers (or, if you prefer, the invaders), and while some of the ideas of the first Europeans are praised, the actions and greed that corrupted these ideals are scrutinised. Of course, seen from the other side, the European insistence on progress appears very strange indeed:
"They were like bees or ants, these white people, Daringha said. They toiled and they swarmed, always moving, always going hurriedly from one place to another, always dragging things about, building, struggling, making a labour of their life." (p.441)
That's a view which I quite agree with...
The sequels will be coming out in new Angus and Robertson Classics versions later this year, and while historical fiction isn't usually my thing, I'd love to read the rest of the story. The Timeless Land takes us from 1788 to 1792, but the sequels will take us into the early nineteenth century to see what becomes of the tiny settlement at the bottom of the world...
...otherwise known as Sydney ;)
