ACL 2009
Australian Literature
Semester 3 2012
Footscray Park

Lecture 5
Sydney or the Bush

by Ian Syson

Sydney and the Bush are the two big options in Australia .

  • Sydney (meaning Sydney and by metaphorical extension the bigger cities) was the place of one kind of lifestyle;
  • the Bush (meaning all those places outside of the cities) was its other -- and vice versa.

Each has its benefits and drawbacks that sometimes are seen as inversely relational to the other's.

In contemporary Australia the two are seen very much in opposition.

Call for a series of oppositions and write them on the board.

Sydney

Bush

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tension between Sydney and the bush is one of the long-standing themes and points of conflict in Australian life and literature.

Last week we mentioned AD Hope's bleak vision in ‘ Australia '

She is the last of lands, the emptiest.
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry . . .

. . . And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

The selections today are all chosen because of the way they exemplify and build upon that opposition between the cntre and the edge of Australia.

The opposition is well captured by the Lawson Paterson debate.

Read the first exchange: p 355

The poets set their stalls on the qualities of their chosen domains.

  • Lawson sees the bush as hellish and full of despair whereas Paterson sees it as a place of variation and life – where once you saw drought you will soon see fertility.
  • Lawson prefers the comforts of the city whereas Paterson sees the poverty and the mean streets.

Etc

The exchange is to some extent a fabricated argument designed to sell copy and one made in the spirit of friendship between the poets but I think it does ask us to confront the question of what is better: Sydney or the Bush.

For example, John Grant in Wake in Fright is in no doubt. Sydney (or the city) is his goal.

P.5

Like Odysseus trying to get home he is confounded at every turn by the people and situations he finds as well as his own arrogance and weakness.

In the discussions of the book a number of classic comparisons get made. Jennings compares Grant to Aeneas from the Iliad. Simon Caterson in a recent article in Quadrant sees a Heart of Darkness comparison.

Indeed it's hard not to see Wake in Fright also as having a classic descent into hell narrative.

One question is whether it fulfils the crieria of a katabatic narrative.

How we see this depends somewhat on when we understand the descent into hell as beginning:

  1. Leaving Sydney? Tiboonda is after all is described as a "variation of hell" (p6) If this is the beginning of the descent we need to realise that the story finshes with Grant very much stuck in Hell and with no sense of impending escape.
  2. Leaving Tiboonda? Leaving the variation to the pure version? Perhaps. His return to Tiboonda is one that is based on a change in attitude and perception.
  3. Entering the two up pub? (bottom p 31) There's much that could suggest that – the frenzy and heat of the game. Grant is being escorted by a Charon like figure who has taken him across the Styx into Hell. He espapes Hell having learnt a lesson – but he is nonetheless far from out of Hell

Does the ending of the book give us any ideas about this question?

Right at the end Grant comes to the conclusion:

can see quite clearly the ingenuity whereby a man may be made mean or great by exactly the same circumstances.

Which is another way of saying that a life seems to have little in the way of design especially when set in contrast to the vastness of the plain and the universe. Though the book does leave us with a sense that meaning will probably be uncovered – but when and how?

What is significant I think is that John Grant the heretic has been stilled – the ending is something akin to the ending of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . Though perhaps Randle McMurphy is more of a Christ figure than John Grant.

The ending of WiF brings the book to a full circle. The plain at night is the inverse of the plain in daylight that we are introduced to at the beginning of the book and which inspires the opening scene of the film.

Wake in Fright opening scene youtube

7.30 report story + youtube

This perspective underlines one view of the bush: arid, roasting, relentless, populated by laconic almost-cheerless figures made bitter by their environment. The Bush is Hell.

We could make useful comparisons with a number of the texts we are studying this week:

  • The opening sentence of O Lucky Country : The sky here compensates for solitude
  • Opening of ‘The Drover's Wife' (read)
  • “To a Country Town ” (out of a collection called Alien Son ) where the family is in conflict over the wisdom/necessity of going to this bush town. The father sees economic virtue of the move whereas the mother only sees loss of community. Even when community seems established the story shows how fragile it is. The bush is figured as a place of loneliness and despair.

It's not all one way, as we know:

Les Murray “Sydney and the Bush” read

The bush is the only thing that keeps Australia Australian, the only thing that gives the city's “poor folk a soul”.

Les Murray has long been an advocate of the spiritual superiority of the rural. He sees in ordinary men and women what is lacking in the effete and corrupt city elites.

Interesting precursor to this in William Lane 's piece from A Workingman's Paradise .

Finish with Coral Hull's Liverpool. It's set in order to give the view that the city is Hell: “ Liverpool , city of the damned”. But it also contains a journey into the suburban Hell of the western suburbs of Sydney . It's a journey poem, a hell poem, but in a sense it's about neither the city nor the bush but about a different space, Suburbia.