European University StudiesEuropfiische Hochschu lsch rifte n

Publications Universitaires Europ6ennes

Series XIV

Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature

Reihe XIV S6rie XIV

Angelsdchsische Sprache und LiteraturLangue et litt6rature anglo-saxonnes

Vol./Bd.201

PETER LANGFrankfurt am Main 'Bern'New York'Paris

lrmtraud Petersson

German lmages in AustralianLiterature from the 1940s to the

1 980s

PETER LANGFrankfurt am Main 'Bern.New York.Paris

CIP-Titelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek

Petersson, lrmtraud:

German lmages in Australian Literature from the 1940s to the1980s / lrmtraud Petersson. - Frankfutt am Main ;Bern ;

New York ; Paris : Lang, 1990(Europiiische Hochschulschriften : Reihe 14, Angel-s?ichsische Sprache und Literatur ; Bd. 201)Zugl.: Brisbane, Univ. of Queensland, Diss., 1988]SBN 3-631-42260-1

NE: EuropZiische Hochschulschriften / 14

Typesetting in 10 Pt Times Romanby MiguelPeirano

lssN 0721-3387lsBN 3-631-42260-1

@Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1990All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Anyutilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without

the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable toprosecution. This applies in pafticular to reproductions,

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Printed inGermany 1 34567

Preface

This book is the slightly revised version of my PhD thesis submitted at andaccepted by the University of Queensland (Brisbane) in 1988. I am grateful o theunlversrty of Queensland for granting me the tlayes Post$aduate Scholarship,and also to the Deparrnent of English for accepting me as a post$aduate studentand ttrus enabling me to pusue this project. I appreciate ttre kind assistance I havereceived from members of staff and postgraduates in ttre Department of Englishand other departments. In particular I wish to thank my supervisor or. GurieHergenhan for his scholarly advice and support

Irmraud PeterssonSL Lucia, May 1989

Note: The documentation system used in ttris book distinguishes between primarysources cited by (short) titles in the text (listed in Parr A of the Bibliography), andsecondary works documentod according to the author-date-system (listed in Part Bof the Bibliography).

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . .l

PARToNETHSIMMGRANTS 13

Ch. l: Exploring a Heritage: Early German Setrlers . . . 15

ch. 2: Literary Joumeys in Search of l,anguage arrd Belonging: German speaking Mgraot writers

(l) An overview of authors and thanes(2)'Where a Man Belongs': David Manin

Or. 3: Images of Difference: German Speaking Mgrant Characrer . .

3652

:t2

PenrTwoAUSTRAUANS AND THE oLD woRLD

Ch. 4: Australian Travellers and Their Responses to the German Culture Area

(l) Pastoral south and sinisrer north: prewar rravellers Boyd and White

95

.. ..97' 104

113

ll8tztt28138

148

.155

(2) Encounters with violence and savagery: postwar travellers Johnston and Duqon(3) Nino Culoua's metamorphosis as a rourisr the reliable Volkswagen(4) Partisan views: Dymphna Cusack and the east-west division(5) Ghosts, kobolds, and nighrmares: David Malouf(6) Strange, familiar territory: Elizabeth Jolley(7) Boring and stifling normality: recent German travel images

Ch, 5: 'White Rflvens' in a World of Violence: Thomas Keneally

PARTTHREE

PATRICK WHTm's PRESENTATIoNOTGSRMANCHARACTERS AND CULTURE I81

Ch. 6: From Leichhardt to Voss: The Changing Image of a German Explorer . . . lg3

Ch,?: Voss . 2U3

Ch. 8: Himmelfa6 . . 216

coNcLUsIoN . . .23rBIBUOGRAPHY

Abbreviations 85Part A: Primary Works 236Part B: OtherWo*s 2U

IndexofAuthon ....259

128 Chapter Four

5. Ghosts, kobolds, and nightmares: David Malouf

David Malouf was one of those young Australians who in the 1950s and 1960s feltthe need to get away from the AusEalian isolation. He has travelled and lived inGreat Britain and continental Europe for extensive periods. Along with Keneally,Shapcott and other Ausualian writers of the same generation, Malouf shared the

cultual predicament "of having been brought up as one of the last of the British-Australians" (Davidson 1983, 265). Malouf says that when he lived in England,Ausnalia became much clearer to him, but it was Cenral Europe which helped

him o overcome a "condition of absolute paralysis" ("Interview by Davidson"266).He throws an interesting light on the complex attitude of Australians to theircultural identity when he observes that there is somettring accidental about beingAusralian. In an interview given o Michel Fabre in Augsburg n 1979, Maloufargues ttrat in Australia, unlike in countries such as France or Germany, "thequestion arises of other kinds of experience, of alternatives that got shut out"("Interview by Fabre" 60).55

Even ttrough Malouf lived abroad for long periods, he has disliked beingdescribed as an 'oexpatriate" writer, and has emphasised his constant dialoguewith Ausralia.55 For him, the old world is more than just an interesting or attrac-

tive plaCe where culture and art are "made".57 It is also a world of historicalterrors-a perception that has traditionally been part of an Australian fascinationwittr Europe. This lints up with a sense of guilt about not having been exposed to

such ordeals ("I come from a place where nothing very terrible ever happens. Youcome !o feel guilty that you have been so sheltered from history" ["Interview byFabre" 621). The Ausralian-European dialogue is apparent in much of Malouf'swriting. It creates a pattern of contrasts, both of places and characters. This is mostobvious in Malouf's early poems, in his fust novel lohnno, in Fly Away Peter, andin some of the stories n Antipodes.5s

55, The notion that there is something accidental about living in Australia recurs in Dante's

reflections in lohnno: "What an extraordinary rhing it is, that I should be here rather than somewhere

else. ... It is practically an accident, an enrirely ururecessary farc" (52). As Martin Leer has pointed out,

the "experience of 'altematives', though corlmon enough in colonial and post-colonial phases ofculture, was made keener for Malouf", because of his multicultural background which was more

unusual in his generation than it would be after the postwar immigration from the Mediterranean

countries (1935,7).56. See for instance "Interview by Davidson" 263; "Inrerview by Perkins and Jurgensen", or

David Malouf's reply to Russel Ward's "accusations of un-Australian activities" (Moorhouse 1980,

186-88).57. In recent years Malouf has repearedly rejected the notion of Ausrralia as a 'cultural desert'. In his

reply to Ward he writes: "Far from being a 'culrural desen' (a phrase that seems meaningless to me)

Ausualia, like most other places these days, has more 'high cuhure' than even the hungriest of us can

absorb" (Moorhouse 1980, 187).

58. Pivoting around rhe theme of exile, Az lrnaginary Life seems profoundly 'Australian' despite its

foreign settings and characters, as critics and Malouf himself have pointed out (cf. "Interview by

Fabre", "Inrewiew by Copeland"). Child's Play, his only prose work without an obvious 'Australian'

Australian Travellers 129

German settings are less frequent in Malouf's writing than those of some other

continental countries he has lived in or visited, e.g., Italy or France. Yet a gteat

many dfuect and indirect allusions to German culture and literature do occur.

Goettre and Thomas Mann, Malouf says, are among those European writers who

had some attraction and influence on him at certain stages of his artistic develop-ment:

Goethe's wholeness is something one is nostalgic for rhe way one is for the Golden Age. His ability

lo pracrise poetry and the novei and the drama the way he does. ... The most trivial thing he can

pick up and make golden because of his presence and personality and sensibility. It's a great

triumph of the imagination, and a great example-even if it seems these days more and more

diflicult ro emulurc.59 l"Interview by Fabre" 67)

And on the Thomas Mann connection, Malouf comments:

Eventually I got round ro Thomas Mann. All three of those [Balzac, Tolstoi, Mann] were inlluential

but in different ways. Not in ways, necessarily, that you could see, and probably Mann more than

rhe others because he oflered something modem, and lyrical and philosophical that you might

actually try to emulate. Baizac and Tolsroi were too big. Mann is a writer that in some ways I feel

close to because all his books have a lyrical gsrm, even when he expands them to epic proportions.

I've said several times that I think of him as being an exemplary modern witer. Among other

European writers no one at present strikes me particularly. ("Interview by Perkins and Jurgensen"

70)

Mann may have been one of ttre models for the writer in Child's P/ay; Goethe,

whose senss of wholeness Malouf admires, could have been another.60 Echoes ofMann could be traced in Malouf's prose, and not only wittr regard to the form ofthe Novelle or the use of leitmotifs (cf. Leer 1985, 14). There are also literaryreferences to other German authors in Malouf's work, e.g., in a German epi$aphfrom Heinz Piontek in Malouf's "birthday poem, at thirty", or in the poem "TheCa4)", which is ar adaptation of Joachim Ringelnatz's "Cassel (Die Karpfen inder Wilhelmstrasse 15)" (both publ. rn Bicycle).If we take Johnno's reading as an

indication of what the creator of the character read, we may add to the list works

by Musil, Bonhoeffer, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer; Nieusche's Birth of Tragedy

and Rilke's D uineser Elegien (Johnno 59, L07 , 159).61

link, is set in Italy and focuses on violence in the European context. In presenting the terrorist as a

product of bodr rhe fictional writer and the spirituai situation of the old world, Malouf promotes a rather

pessimistic view of Europe's cuiture.

59. The lack of wholeness and the sense ofincompleteness is one ofthe characteristics of Malouf's

protagonists (cf, Pierce 1982).

60. Malouf (who says that he is less interested in the political motivations of terrorism than in more

general aspects) links terrorists wirh the suicidal romanric heroes, thus suggesting a modem Werther:

"Terrorism is a kind of epidemic-a fashionable form of self-definition or role-playiag. Like

melancholia in the sixeenth century or the cult of rhe suicidal romantic hero in the eighteenth"

("Interview by Copeland" 430).

61. The German text on a postcard Johrno sends Dante from Africa (106) is a quotation from the

first of Rilke's Duiruser Elegien. As critics have poinred out, the narrator Dante and his "surrogate

risk-taker" Johruro are complemenrary sides of one charac[er, and both contain autobiographical traits

130 chapter FourGermany as a place appears more often in an associative or symbolic ttran in a

lealistic way in Malouf's work. Malouf himself describes his writing as"'imaginative' rather than absolutely descriptive of an existing reafiry"("Interview by Jill Rowbotham" 80). Even where settings and detaits seemauthentic, Malouf's texts are not always explicit about locations, nationality ofcharacters or historical events to which they refer. Indirectness and elusivenesi arecharacteristic aspects of Malouf's work, as Laurie Hergenhan has pointed out(19U,328). However, the geniusloci,thatis, thepeculiarcharacterofaphceandthe effects it has on the mind, is quite important in Malouf's writing 1if. rierceL982, 526). Images of Europe in Johnno, in some of the European stories inAntipodes, and in a number of autobiographical poems in lvlalouf i earlier collec-991r (pr4.olarly in Neighbours in a Thicket) seem ro rake up impressions ofIvla]oufs European wanderjdhre in ttre 1950s and 1960s. some poems immedi-ate]v refer-tg places or stages of sojourn in Italy, France and central Europe (suchas Rome, Pisa, Ravenna, Fiesole, the champagne country and vienna). with ottrerpoems it is not clear which place inspired them (for insance "In the pinewood",'nPieces for a Northem Winter" or "Off ttre Highway" , in Neighbozrs). Germanplacenames are occasionally dropped, for instance Hirschhornln "white Days,W_hite Nights" (Selected Poems 74),62 u a peculiar and intensive travel imagc in"Decade's End", a poem of stocktaking both privately and politically:

Postcards of travel: slowRhine barges towingcathedrals through fog;towards dawn the Aegean

breaking dolphin-backedwith islands. Ql eighbours 18)

rnJohnno, it is Paris which mainly functions as a locus of old world terror andterrorism, as the place where Johnno's violence fits in as "pa$ of a wholesociety's public nightmare" (L20). German places are mentioned only fleetingly inthe novel, but wittr a similar effect on the travellers. At one stage olhis Europ-eanadventures, Johnno travels with "a German boy with ttre improbable narne ofMchael Kohlhaas", stealing and destroying Mercedes cars (130). In this episodeJohnno is obviously associated with the upsuge of youth rebellion and tenorismin west Germany at the time, and with what Marouf calls terrorism as a

@ierce 1982,526). Johrmo "contrives and enjoys the routine existential torments of that age-booze,Nietzsche, anguished and unrequited love", which Dante mainly observes @ierce 19g2, 521). T\esignificance of Nieuschean ideas for the yorurg men's generation is suggested but also ironicallyundercut, e.g., by the naive remark of lohnno's mother after his death: "He's happy, I know he isl He,swith Nietzsche and Schopenhauer" (159).

62. In "whire Days, white Nighrs" the persona reads a joumal he has kept for twenty years andremembers himself as a young man hitchhiking through continental Europe. The joumal mentionsHirschhom (a small town on *te Neckar near Heidelberg), a place recorded but no longer recognised inhis memory: the exact places have become bluned and do not matler any morc.

AustralianTravellers 131

"fashionable form of self-definition or role-playing". The novel was written in

!972, at a time when the activities of the so-called Baader-Meinhof-group and

their sympathisers were still mainly directed against the material symbols of a

capitalist iociety and power sEuctrue. Some of ttre young rebels could well have

been seen as descendan6 of the stubborn Michael Kohlhaas, who took to robbery

and murder in his fight for justice and became one of the best known characters ofGerman literature through Heinrich von Kleist's Novelle (Michael Kohlhaas' Aus

einer alten Chronik. First publ. 1808). The brief Kohlhaas episode illustrates apervasive way of linking liierature and reality in Malouf's novel Johnno's search

ior connections and m&ning is acted out through literatue as much as through

travel.Like Boyd before him, Malouf contrasts the northern and southern parts 9f

Europe. In "Decade's End" the Aegean, reached towards dawn, Symbolises the

place of light and spiritual awakening after ttre more gloomy _Rhine cathedrals in

iog (see above). The poem "After Baedeker" presents Italy ttuough the perspec-

tiv-e of fire nortiremer, taking up ttre uadition of English and continental romantics,

of Goethe's ltalian Journey, of Hesse's Wanderungen, and, above all, of W.A'Auden's "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno", a poem with which "After Baedeker"

shows considerable affinity.63 Bottr poems focus on the descent from the gothic

norttr to the joyous, un-otherworldly and vital world south of ttre Alps, and on the

touristic migration that has taken place for centuries'64

Both Malouf and Auden'(who ranslated Goethe's ltalienische Reise into

English) bring in Goethe as a prototype of south-bound northemer in search forfibJration and life.OS In Auden's poem, the persona associates himself (albeit

somewhat reluctantly) with ttre northerner Goethe who personifies the deep butfutile longing to absorb the south and transmit its values:

... As PuPils

We are not bad, but hopeless as tulors: Goethe,

Tapping homeric hexameters

On the shoulder-blade of a Roman girl' is(I wish it were someone else) the figure

Of all our stamp: no doubt he treated her well,

o drew my attention to Auden's poem and its German

cqmections.64. An interesting contrast to the more cofirmon north-south descent is Rosemary Dobson's poem

..painterof Anrwerp;' (selected Poems32).It constructs Brueghel gratefully retuming home from the

sout1, a peasant 'honh-bound from Italy" who, though he rejects the fanciful, has experienced

"strangeness enough to empty many tankards".65. The t*o y"u6 Goethe spent in Italy (178G88) are considered a tuming point in his artistic

development, changing his ideas about art from the Sturm und Drang peiod in favour of classicism'

They were also the happiest years in his life, said to have given him a sense of genuine belonging'

whereas in Weimar and elsewhere in Germany he often felt like a spiritual exile (Friedenthal 1982'

260).

132 chapter FourBut one would draw the line at callingThe Helena begotten on that occasion,

Queen of his SecondWalpurgbnacht,

Her baby: between those who mean by a life aBildungsroman and those to whom iivingMeans to-be-visible-now, there yawns a gulfEmbraces cannor bridge ... (Auden, Gedichte. poems 66)

In Malouf's n'After Baedeker", the Germans are similarly unable to becomesoutrerners: they "capture nottring/ with their sketchpads of

'the play/ of light on

tgrrageq hills" (Neigltbours 28). Malouf's personal and artiitii quost, likeGoethe's, had taken him to Italy. The last line of his poem "The Little Aeneid"('Three syllables: say, Italy"), faintly recall (ttrough in a less pompous tone)Goethe's enthusiasm oxpressed in the epigraph to his ltalian Journey,l'Auch ichin Arkadien!" ("I too in Arcadia").eo'Ii an interview Malouf undirscores theliberating effect of his Italian experience, liberating not so much from northernfrusrations than to the actualisarion of the kinship, i.e., the heritage of his Latinbackground ("Interview by Fabre" 61). In "Afte. Baedeker,i the personaconsciously joins the line of tourists from the north ("we have thelook/-unbuttoned, ill-at-ease-of the eternaV tourist"). But he also takes over theguide's voice, possibly addressing German Eavellers:67

Descend out ofthe mist, hangoverof a decade of divisions, Ier it be holy wars, the break-upof a marriage, a career. Stepthrough to a middle period like Goerhe's, punjng rhe nine points of *re Alpsbetween

you and the wolvesand sad-eyed Wutderkinder. You musr breakaII ties wirh the gorhicnorth, irs kobolds, drill-square, pogroms,barhs. ... (N eighbours 28)

whereas Auden refers to British as well as German "barbarians" from thegotlic north invading the south, Malouf's gorhic no{h with its kobolds (i.e.,

66. Goethe uses Arcadia for Italy as a spiritual landscape in Vergil'srsense. Originally the l,atinphrase "Et in Arcadia ego" had been an inscription on tombs, with quite a different connotation: the"ego" referred to death, thus the phrase suggested that even in Arcadia there is dearh (cf. Einem i974).Gwen Harwood refers to the original corurotation in her poem "Evening: 'Et ego in Arcadia,,': ,,Even

here, in Arcady, are graves " ("Oyster Cove Paslorals,', The Lion, s Bride 25-21).67. German fiavellers seem to be notorious for their use of 'Baedekers' and other touristic guides. In

Johnno, Dante takes out his BIue Guide which he, to lohruro's disgust, carries everywhere ..like a

bloody German" (139). A.D. Hope in "A Lqrrer from Rome,, makes fun of a similar srereotype ofGerman tourists 'leaming'culture: "In any picture-gal7ery todayl Kultr.rgeschichre rakes away the fun/Unless one joins a group and cares to stay/ To watch the Herr Professor toss the burV To teach uspeasants, munching it with zeal,/ Not only what to think but how to feel" (Collected poems L3f-37).

Australian Travellers t33

goblins or haunting spirits) is more acutely linked wittr the terrors of the ThirdReich. In many of Malouf's German images, memories of the concentration campaBocities have shaped the genius loci.

Malouf's early perceptions of Europe, and particularly of Germany, wereformed when he was a child during the war, and. they are therefore closely associ-ated with menace and fear. Dreams and nightmares play an important pafi in hiswriting, in his personae's and his autobiographical childhood memories. The novellohnno ad&esses ttris theme, illusLrating how an Australian child's imaginationwas impressed by the threat of the war-enemy. The fears and excitements of theadults are passed on to children who are in the process of forming an understand-ing of the world outside. There they combine with the child's natural fears of theunknown and ttre unfamiliar in his environment. Hitler and Mussolini invade thedreams as enemies. They are seen tp be in league with the similarly sinisterstaghoflIs and terrifying ferns that haunt ttre boy's fantasy. Forests stretching formiles, 'nas dark as anything in Grimm", make up the rumpus space under thechildhood house on stumps, "a dream space, dark, full of' terrors" (12Edmondstone Street 43, 47). The subconscious and the experienced merge, and thefear of ghosts, of death, of the unpredictable and of unthinkable terror connectswittr the war events.68 It is notjust a case of projecting one's childhood fears onthe enemy (which any 'warchild' might do) and then, as an adult, rationalising thecauses. ln Malouf's perception, the honors of the child's nightmares iue premoni-tions which surpass ttre actual events reported for instance through the media at thetime. Later, when ttre degree of Nazi atrocities is discovered, the nightmaresappear to have anticipated the actual occulTence, as the narrator n Johnnosuggests:

In later years my night terrors came to seem truer to the real history of our times, as it was finallyrevealed to us, than the lisr of sinkings and beachheads that made up the headline news. (26)

The combination of nightmare fears and facts connected with the holocausthave determined the German images in Malouf's work to a large extent. Historicalteror is transformed into images of dream horrors, ghosts, sinister Mrirchenvisions, and gloomy aspects of Germanic mythology. Seuings rendered as"perfect Grimm" (a pun used in "A Trip to the Grundelsee", Antipodes 29)surround the traveller "from another continent, one of the living", who tries tounderstand what has happened in fhe northern part of tire world and finds himselfhaunted by the ghosts of ttre dead victims ("Off ttre Highway", Neighbours39-40). When Dante leaves the lovely Italian countryside and crosses ttre Alps, ttretrees appear to him "like witches' broomsticks upended and stuck savagely intothe earth" Qohnno 111). The witch image recurs in an association betweenholocaust and Mtirchen in Malouf's poem "The Interpretation of Dreams":

,.. [the] storm will break and sweep all Europe clean. A new

broom

68. See particularly lohnno 22-39,12 Efunondstone Street L9,and also the poem "Episodefrom an

Early War" (Neighbours 13-14).

134 Chapter Four

in the witch's house. And five bones at an oven's moulhrehearsing

their promise of gingerbread:' K ird e r, f.eel, tree. This isyour dream.' (Selected Poens 103)

Calling up connections between Wagner, Freud, and Hitler (and ttreOberammergau Passion Plays), the poem associates Wagnerian romanticperformance with the megalomaniac concepts of ttre Nazis, where "The passionscan be staged, played out by millions", and "theatre continued as politics" (avariation of the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz's concept of war as acontinuation of politics). "The Interpretation of Dreams" uses Alberich's linesfrom Wagner's The Rhinegold as an epigraph, "Nacht und Nebel-niemandgleich".69 In "Off the Highway" the traveller remembers the age of deadlymigrations where millions of innocents were gassed, "ghostly travellers withoutluggage". The image of night and fog recurs, reminiscent of Alain Resnais's filmof the same title on the Auschwitz concentration camp.70 Whereas France, in F/yAway Peter or in "Report from the Champagne Country", impresses as the landof dead soldiers and the hell of the battlefields which have merged with the soil,the German settings in Malouf's work often evoke memories of the gas chambersrather than of war sites.

In many poems by Malouf, the artistic imagination pivots around the martialand savage European past which commenced with "the barbarous northern peoplepushing south into history" ("Reading Horace Ouside Sydney, 19'10",Neighbours 50). The disturbing impressions of Central European terrors on theconsciousness of the Ausralian traveller are combined in the image of a nightmarein Malouf's poem "Bad Drearns in Vienna" (Neighbours 35-36). The tourist,sleeping under the feattrerbeds in the Hotel Graben, re-lives centuries of wars,plagues, crimes and genocide. Death and operetta, Hitler and Mozart, gilt saintsand Nazi death's-head parties join in a macabre Totentanz (dance of death) in thesleeper's fantasy. As a symbol of this mad place, the Pestsdule oufside ttre hotelappears to the traveller like a monument for bad dreams, recalling representationsof the gates of hell and other apocalyptic renderings of nightmares in Europeanart.7l The traveller, conscious of his fortune in having been spared by history, has

69, Nacht and Nebel is night and fog. The rerm "Nacht-und-Nebel-Aktbnen " usually refers ro rhecriminal raids which Nazi organisations committed stealrhily at nighr to avoid publiciry and possible

Protest.70, Resnais's documentary film Nzit et brouillard was made in 1955 and frequently shown in

Europe, in Germany under the itle Nacht und Nebel. The descriprion of the film n The OxfordCompanion Io Filrn suggests a congenialiry with Malouf's ideas and thus a possible impression on him:"Instead of isolating the death camps as a single historical event, Nlrl et brouillard seeks to be a

reminder of an ever-present threat to liurnanity" (51 1).

7 L,\\e Peststitie in Vieffra, a votive column erected in gratitude to God and various saints after theplague, became the model for a number of similar monuments in southem Germany, Austria, Bohemiaand Hungary in the seventeenth and eighreenrh centuries (cf.. MEL 18: 465).

Australian Travellers 135

nevertheless experienced Europe's madness vicariously in his dreams, and knowsthat they answer to something in his and everyone's psyche.

Apart from ttre Freudian echoes and the reflections on European history, "BadDreams in Vienna" also seems to mirror the impression baroqus art made on thepoet. In an interview Malouf talks about the ways in which Europe affected hisperceptions, and he mentions that early in his exploration of Europe he appreciatedGerman Baroque for its liberating effects on him:

... all the elements in Eurbpe which worked for me were nol ones which I could in any way havepredicted: in factit tumed out notto be England and all fie things that I ttrought were familiar, butCenrral Europe and a whole lot of things which now I'm not particularly interested in. I've recentlybeen back to Europe, and I think the German Baroque is a great bore. But in 1959, when it first hitme, it served to articulate a whole lot of things in my own sensibility which I had no other touch-stones for, and which then worked to liberate lots of furher things about myself that I was able todiscover and build on. ("Interview by Davidson" 266)

It seems to be the sinister aspect of the Baroque in particular which found itsway into Malouf's German images; not Boyd's or Jolley's onion-spired churchesin pastoral settings, but rather ttre combination of grim suffering and death wittrgaudiness and gilded pomp. The juxtaposition of architecrural grandeur and deadlyttreat, and of artistic beauty and human misery, which is characteristic of ttreworld as perceived and represented by baroque ail, has obviously occurred toMalouf as a particularly striking aspect of ttre Austrian environment. The follow-ing lines from the first version of "Bad Dreams in Vienna" (publ. 1974), omittedin tlre revised later edition, indicate such a perception:lz

[Nightmares drag us

back tol this sleepy capital; old feudal ties survivein the names of palaces, fear has an address, baroque illusionsoutlast the shock of bombs, facades of dusty confectioner's sugar,

moclcing our greed,

The mainly sinister and ambiguous qualities of Austria as a place recur inMalouf's story "A Trip to the Grundelsee" (Antipodes 26-35).73 Focusing onAustralian responses m Central Europe, the story is a variation of what Hergenhan,in discussing Fly Away Peter,has summed up as a repeated concern in Malouf'swork: "Australian experience can extend European experience through theformer's openness and difference, reciprocally Australian experience must takeinto account Europe's nightmares" (1984, 340). The story explores the effectsAustria and is atmosphere has on four foreign students on a Eip to see two elderlyladies (who tum out to be survivors of a concentration camp). The reader's

72. The discrepancy between sinister Freudian secrets and Austrian minh seerns ro puzde theAusrralian imagination. A recent poern by Isobel Robin, "Freud's Back-Yard: Berggasse X, Vienna",closes with the lines: "There's no detritus here from dreadfui dreams;/ rhe sanely walrzing Viennese/have whipped it stiff and baked it in a torre."

73, The Grundlsee (sic) is a lake near Bad Aussee in the Ausrrian Salzkammergut.

136 Chapler Four

sympathies are directed towards the reactions of the Ausralian girl Cassie, and itis her perspective the story mainly focuses on. Cassie senses something sinisterand oppressive in ttre pasloral setting. For her it is "perfect Grimm" (29). HerAustralian friend Gordon, who represents the cultured snob, describes theambience as "perfect Mahler" (29). He is equally enchanted by the landscape andthe baroque abbeys, and by what he perceives as 'culture'- which includes"heaped Schlagobers that were absolutely continuous ... with the confectionaryclouds of local allars" (28-29). In the Austria of the young foreigners' experience,a century-old royal romance has become more important than the sufferingsconnected with recent history. Yet both the touristic facade and the baroqueglamours of the past fail to cover up the horrors. Through Cassie's eyes the storyconjures up dismal and depressing associations: the shadows of ttre firs and theterrible peaks of the mountains evoke memories of crimes and sorrows, hangingover Cassie like a huge dark cloud.Ta As in Harland's Half Aue and in the earlypoems, Malouf again relates European to Australian suffering. Cassie's premoni-tions of a life under the spell of Gordon suggest gloomy prospects and a fate withdisturbing effects similar to ttrose apparent in the neurotic Austrian lady. Cassie'sawareness of the potentialities of suffering is obviously sharpened by herEuropean experience, helping her to change direction in time. (If this is a correctreading, one cannot help but wonder if the story does not relate fates which arebeyond comparison.)

"A Trip to the Grundelsee" contrasts cultural styles and characteristics moredirectly than other works by Malouf. The young American (of Austrianbackground) is porrayed as a personification of stereotyped American simplicity,that is, as a naive, emotional, and rather childish boy, "foolishly impressed byeverytlring foreign and picturesque" (27). The urban Ausralian Gordon, with hissuperior airs an imitator of Europe (and reminiscent of the "cultured apes" inHope's "Australia"), does not farc too well in the story either. In contrast, Cassieis an 'innocent' Australian in a positive sense. She is an ugly duckling, but good-natured, sensitive, and more aware of human suffering than interested in culturedtalk:

Elsa Fischer ... had been speaking in a low concemed voice of Michael Pacher, his nobleforms and glowing colours, whjle Gordon asked queslions to which, Cassie reminded herseU, healready knew the answers.

The questions blunt Cassie wanted to pul were these. What about the suffering? How do youknow if you can face it? Do you just go through it and come out the other side? Does rime duII thepain and anger of it? (3 1-32)

The fourth traveller is a French girl, Anick. Good-looking, elegant and spoilt,she represents the opposite of the Australian 'innocent'. In contrasting the twowomen, the story addresses the theme of mutual fascination between Europe andAustralia. It is a fascination based on mirages, on stereotyped conceptions of

74. The "drowned babies" (32) recall Mahler's Kindertotenlieder;leaden boxes" (32) refer to the Nazi records.

Australian Travellers 137

exotic otherness. Anick and Cassie see in each other embodiments of what ttreother place signifies for them: European sophistication on fire one hand, Australianfreedom on the other. They rsmain friends over the years, and while Cassieeventually finds happiness in a quiet ordinary family life in Australia, the Frenchwoman turns out to embody what Australians may perceive as European discon-tent:

A hard, discontented girl of thirty, still strikingly good-Iooking, she had that mixture of slovenlinessand chic that Cassie, to whom chic would be forever foreign, thought of as uniquely French. Sheseemedmuch occupied with herdigestion. ... Thank God I don'thave digestion, Cassie thought.That'd be worse than the Black Cloud. She felt embarrassed by her bouncy good health. She wasnever ill--Sarring pregnancies, of course, which didn'r count. (33-34)

Though the story plays wittr the mutual images in an ironic way, one senses that,it satirises a condescending European attitude towards (and lack of understandingof) Australia, for instance, when Cassie adds to the French girl's "image of the'oreeeble place", Australia, by "describing in sinister detail trips to resorts Anickwould never have wanted to visit and could never find on the map" (3S1.zs 11r.irony is increased by the fact that the real horrors were encountered on the trip tothe more famous, but sinister resort in Central Europe.

Two other stories in Antipodes deal with Australian travellers in Europe andtheir encounters wittr the incomprehensible terrors of the old world. In "A Changeof Scene", the setting is a Greek island (obviously Crere) at the time of the coupd'€tat of the military junta in the late 1960s. For the female protagonist of thestory, a Polish refugee to Australia, Europe represents the "dark side of herchildhood" (102). Again fairy tales and ghost stories are associated with thesinisfer old world. "The sun in winter" takes an Australian youth to the Belgiancity of Bruges on a "cold afternoon in the Fifties". "Bruges is very beautiful,very triste ... Bruges la Morte. And German too maybe, a little? Die tote Stadt",the Flemish guide describes her town (Antipodes 88).70 4*r1n Maloufs storycontmsts tie diverging images the old and the new world have of each other. TheAustralian traveller belongs to the sphere of sun and youth, and the prevailingimpression ttre place has on him is that of old-fashioned horrors and lorments, abloody history, and images of death (in one instance associated with "a ring offog" [90]).

I have argued that in Malouf's writing the genius loci of the German culturearea is a predominantly sinister one, associated with images of darkness and fog,with deathly gloom and mythological monsters out of fairy tales and ghost stories.Southern light is contrasted with northern darkness which, rather than being aromantic glorification of night, is full of Freudian echoes and linked with the

75. Stephen Alomes examined the cultural images France and Australia have of each other, whichderive from "rhat fantasy-world known as tourism". He argues that many French have viewedAustralia "as an exotic frontier, eitler a raw colonial country or a land in which the society might be as

unusual as its flora and fauna" (1985, 36).76. Die lote Sr4dl might be an allusion ro the Nierzschean ideas in D'Annunzio's La cirhi morte.

"!he records, deep-sunken in

138 Chapter Four

terrors of Cenfal European history. However, Malouf does not present theAusnalian traveller in Europe as a better being from a world of light who encoun-ters a world of depravity. His writing rather seems to suggest that western societieshave equally inherited the afflictions imposed by the dark sides of history. Thisnotion of a common cultural consciousness underlies the essay "A Foot in theStream", where Malouf writes about his impressions of India (12 EdmondstoneStreet 103-22). There the traveller steps "out of our own culture for a time", andis surrounded by people "who are innocent of what we know because ttre culture,tle 'human nature' that produced it, is not tireirs" (114). He realises the burden ofwestern history, and the use of the first person plural is worth noting here:

It is difficult to explain the sense of freedom I feel at being for a moment outside history as weconceive it.

A simple example. The swastika, which immediately evokes for us a set of responses that mayrange from anxiety, guilt, terror, through a perverse joy in the glamour of violence to moral despairat what we are all capable of, renrains untouched here by 'the facts of hisrory'. Thar complex offorces that for Europeans has the code name Auschwitz, and which for nearly four decades now hasdarkened our notion of our own possibiJiries, has no power here, because in the history of this placeAuschwiu never happened. (1 13)77

6. Strange, familiar territory: Elizabeth Jolley

Elizabeth Jolley's images of the German culture area are somewhat different fromthose of the ottrer Australian writers discussed in this chapter. Jolley's novels andstories "doal with displacement, transplantation, obsessive attachment to plots ofland, homosexual attraction, death and decay, the sense of entrapment, and thestruggle to survive" (Goodwin 1986,259), and particularly in her earlier fictionshe has quite a few of her characters moye between Australia and the old world,both geographically and mentally. It seems fair to assume that Jolley's provenancehas something to do wittr this preoccupation with moving away from, or returningto, cultural roots. The daughter of an English fattrer and a Viennese mother, Jolleylived in England until her immigration to Australia. Long before her own migrantexperience, she had been affected by her mother's suffering from the impact ofcultural alienation.T8 Lack of understanding, the pain of homesickness, and the

77. The figure of the swastika has been used as a religious symbol and an omament not only inEurope, but also in Asia and in pans of Africa and Middle America @ut not Australia) since ancienrhistory, and it was formerly best known for associations with Indian Buddhism. Only from rhenineteenth century on, nationalisric groups in Germany and Austria began to use it as a political emblemand (requisitioning it as 'aryan') eventually as a symbol of anti-Semitism. Repiacing rhe lzsces, theswastika (Haknkteuz) becamethe emblernforfascist.movements. From 1919 on Hitler used it for hisparty and put ir on the official Cerman flag in 1935 (d. OCGL 329; MEL 11: 308).

78. Jolley recalis that her mother was never genuinely accepted in her husband's Engtsh family orhomeland, nor did she adapt to her new environment satisfactorily. The mother's story seems to be one

of great expectations followed by grear disillusionment. For autobiographical surcments see, for

Australian Travellers 139

feeling of being excluded from an established mainsream society caused depriva-tions which Jolley not only observed as a then incomprehensible unhappiness inher mother, but also to a degree experienced herself as a child in a cross-cultural,in many ways non-conformist household. Her familizrl background thus accountsfor many of the themes and motifs in her fiction. In fact Jolley admits that shefound a way of overcoming the effects of these tensions only by retreating intofanrasy and imagination, and by writing from an early age.

Jolley's novels and stories abound with references to German/ Austrian culture.Literary or musical allusions are used as commentaries, to foreshadow events,underline themgs, or reflect a character's state of mind. A film version of ThomasMann's Death in Venice, for instance, serves as a point of reference for Laura'slove for Andrea in Palomino (13, 17); lines from Schubert,'s and Miiller's DieWinterreise mirror the old musician's loneliness, desolation and nostalgia in MrScobie's Riddle (125, L82). Having grown up bilingual and being well-read inEuropean literatures,T9 Jolley is obviously quite familiar with German authors,even wittr some otherwise rarely acknowledged by Ausralian writers. There areallusions to Goethe, Schiller, Riickert, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Fontane, Chamissoand Kleist in her fiction. (There is, however, no reference to any German writerlater than Rilke or Mann, and no suggestion that she has an interest in contempo-rary German women writers such as Christa Wolf, Karin Struck or BrigitteSchwaiger.) Music plays an important pafi in Jolley's writing, to such a degeethat the structues of her novels and their musical themes and variations have beenrelated to musical forms, particularly to the contrapuntal movements of a fugue(cf. Daniel 1986; see also "Interview by Trigg"). Some of Jolley's literaryallusions owe their significance to the fame the texts achieved as musical pieces,e.g., Lieder by German poets such as Riickert, Schiller and Mtiller, set to music bySchubert, schumann, Brahms or Mnhler.80 Jolley's musical connections may addto the impression that her images of German culture are predominantly romanric,albeit often ironically undercut (for instance in "Winter Nelis", in Stories).

instance, Jolley's "Self Porrrait" and "Who Talks of Vicrory?", "lnrerview by Headon,' and"lnterview by Trigg".

19. "My mother and father alwayi spoke German together and I spoke German tiil I was six when Istarted school and then, surrendering to my surroundings, I sropped speaking German" ("Self Ponrair"303). As to her extensive reading see "Self Ponrair" 307.

80. Sir Robert R. Garran's bilinguai text. edition of Schuben's and Schumann's Lieder (1946)renders interesthg clues for the reception of German poetry in Australia through the mediation ofmusic. ( am grateful to Dr Vivian Smith for this reference.) Friedrich Riickert, for instance, is notconsidered an important poet in German literary history but for Schubert's and Schumann's famousLieder such as "Du bist die Ruh" (qrd. by Jolley in the dedication to her husband it Wonwn in aIannpshade), or "Lachen und weinen", a song which prompted Duuon's poem "variations on a SongBy Schubert, 'l,achen und Weinen"'. Ri.ickerr also wrote the Kinrlertolenlieder ser to music by Mahler.Another iess known poet, Wilhelm Miiller, is mainly remernbered for his texts to Schuben's Diewinlerreise, referred to in Jolley's Mr scobie's Riddle, rt also provides rhe riile for a poem by A.D.Hop, (A Late Picking 29), and for Jurgensei's a ,winter'

s journey, cf , Chaprer Two (l).

140 Chapter Four

ln Jolley's novels Miss Peabody's Inheritance and Palomino, and in her story"The Libation" (Woman in a Lampshade 105-11), Australian travellers visitVienna and ottrer places in Ausria and Germany. The women Eavellers aremotivated to go to Europe by two related purposes: they look for the culturalopportunities Europe offers (and Australia ostensibly lacks), and they hope for thehealing effecs of the journey after having been disappointed by life in Ausralia.This is not to suggest that Jolley's fiction generally depicts life in Ausralia as

alienating and discouraging, even though it does deal with hardships brought aboutby ttre harsh land and by insensitive, materialistic or 'suburban' features ofAustralian society. In Jolley's writing, as in that of Murray, Malouf and manyother contempor:uy 'non-migrant' authors, Ausralia can also function as a way !oliberation.8l When one of Jolley's major characters, Miss Peabody, is broughtfrom England to Australia in what has been called a rite of passage, Australia as

the land of imagined enchantment becomes a place of regeneration, release andfertility, both erotic and imaginative (cf. Kirkby 1984). However, there is a sensethat it is not the new world's better or enchanting reality which causes the libera-tion, but rather the initiation into ttre possibilities of imagination and creativewriting. In writing, ttre fictional novelist Diana Hopewell observes in MissP e abody, "the writer remakes himself and his world" (1 5).

ln Jolley's fiction, Europe is not simplistically played off against Australia orvice versa, neither geographically nor culturally. The protagonists'journeys areattempts !o escape from unbearable or incarcerating personal situations throughchanges of place. Riemer argues that the most interesting facet of Jolley's writingis a concern which transcends social, sexual and psychological (and one might addgeographical) issues, that is, the sense of "the individual adrift between twoworlds, between opposed possibilities of being and becoming" (1983, 240).Though Ausralia and Europe certainly are important as social places in Jolley'sfiction, they are also presented as 'countriss of the mind'-and one is reminded ofVoss when Jolley herself suggests, "the landscape of my writing is not, to be foundclearly on any map" ("Self Porrait" 306).82 Continental Europe serves as analternative to the Australian travellers' realities, and it is connected wittr culturallongings and personal hopes which it ultimately fails to fulfil. It may be for thisreason that we find these travellers to Europe in somewhat stereotyped touristicsituations, and that despite precise details, there is a sense of vagueness andrepetitiveness in some of the descriptions of place.83

81. On the image of Austraba in Mbs Peabody see Dorothy Jones, "The Goddess, the Arrisr and the

Spinster". Jones concludes *rat "in Mrss Pe abody' s Inheritazce the image of Australia as a harsh, alienland, defeating the hopes and expecutions of those who settle there has been tumed around ... Insteadof imagining the land as a passive female victim, Elizabeth Jolley presents it as the territory of a mightygoddess who embodies in herseU the contradictory forces of nature" (1984, 87).

82, The novelist Diana in Mus Peabody expresses similar views on imagination and reality, and on

the imagined land the wriier creates from fragments of the real world (L36-37).83, The accuracy in detail may derive from Jolley's habit of keeping folders and joumals where she

notes the observations she draws on inher writing (cf. "lnterview with Headon" 44-46). This links up

with another idiosyncrasy: Jolley has reworked, re-used and re-arranged much ofher material, wi*r the

The frame novel in Miss Peabody's Inheritance presents the protagonist'sliberating movemenr from a rather dull and dreary city life in England to a-kind ofartistic fulfilment in Ausralia. The novel-within-the-novel focusis on the reversemovemen[ and is therefore mainly considered here. The trip to Europe has aspecial and almost ritual significance for Dr Arabella Thorne,84 headmistress of anAustralian _bgarding school for girls, and her two women friends Edgely andsnow^don.85 one highlight of the annual rip is the wine festival at Grinzing whichsignifies fantasies about an escape from rather boring (Australian) lives intoDionysian @uropean) adventures. However, for tre culiured but imperious MissThorne (who speaks several foreign languages and is "an avid scholar of litera-ture" [78]), the trip's major attraction consists in taking a friend or lover toEurope, and for this reason she has invited the pupil Gwenda to join the party ttristime. The touristic progamme in Munich and vienna includes uisits to museumsand galleries, to the opera and tre graves of famous dead. But Miss Thorne'sinterest lies less in 'high culture' per se than in the satisfaction she gets fromiq$ting a simpler and less experienced mind: "It is a tremendous pleasure toinitiate a person whom one believes to be innocent. To be the initiatoi ..." (34).

Tlgrqt ironically subverted, both the erotic and cultural implications of sucir aninitiation evoke notions of male dominance on the one hand, and of hegemonicEuropean pretensions on the other. when she introduces her dependents to"incomprehensible paintings and to the difficulties of unaccustomed opera" (34),or to "the art of ravelling; the choosing of elegant clothes and how to wear them;and to the music and the art and the culture of Europe" (27), Miss Thorneconsciously or unconsciously tries to exercise power through the possession ofknowledge and 'culture'.86 Such power is subverted by the naturaisimplicity ofcharacters like Gwenda and Mr Frome, just as the pretentious features of lrauettaThome are undercut by elements of comedy. (The ttreme of initiation is full ofironies in Jolley's novel, as the f,rctional novelist herself initiates her devotedyggder, Miss Peabody, to the pleasures of imagination and creativity, and ttrus'liberates' her.)

Australian Travellers 141

result that charackrs, themes, images and situations as well as linguistic elements recur in differentvariations throughout her wriring, as crilics have pointed our (e.g. Camer l9g3).

84' Jones suggesls that the name Arabella alludes to rhe goddess Anemis (1984, 82). ConsideringJolley's preference for musical and literary references, the somewhat pretentious name (which becomesElla for her Auslralian friends), may contain an ironic reference to tt" op"* Aratilla by fuchardStrauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, with its theme of jealousy and virlue. If the name is suggestive ofStrauss, it could comprise a notion of lack of depth in character: in Palomino,I:ura commentsunfavourably on Strauss's "commonplace" music which (unlike Beethoven's) is said to require noreiationship or deep understanding between rhe players to perform it well (10-l 1).

85. Miss Thome, Miss Hailey in Mr scobie's Riddle, and r.he narraror in ..The Libarion" arevariations of one characler. Edgely recurs as Ainsley in "The Libarion", parrly wirh similar dialoguesand comrnenl.s, and in similar situar-ions.

86. Wift some authorial irony, r-he fictional novelist has Dr1home feel the uncomfonable situar.ionof being inexperienced and unknowing, when she ponders abour the difficulty of modem lirerary theory(151).

142 Chapter Four

Miss Thorne, a parody of Sappho in her desire to initiate young Gwenda,

imagines the fip as "a kind of short pilgrimage to bring out in the gel a true

appr*eciation of beauty in all its forms" (21). The contrast between ambitious

inientions and the picaresque course of the trip produces numerous comic effects,

unmasking (though always in an humorous and sympathetic way) human fallacies

and foible-s.b7 Oie facetof the comic contrast between high-cultured aspirations

and petty reality in Miss Peabody's Inheritance lies in the way the characters

relate to European literature. In her thorough investigation of tle novel, Jones

points out the iorurection between extemal reality and underlying associations, and

she writes:

Ia Miss Peabody's Inheritonce the lives of the principal characters are related not to events of social

and polirical significance, but to major works of an, Othello, Goethe's Fausl, Wagner's qeraThe

Valkyie and Dickens' Great Expecarioru. Society may deem these women trivial and inconse-

quential, bur from another point of view the events which befall them have a magnirude, intensity

and heroic scope of Shakespearean tragedy or Wagnerian operar even though at the same time

considerablehumouris derivedfrom contrastjng such disparare visions oftheirlives. (1984,79)

Such a disparate vision is implied when Miss Thorne associates the shy and

unsophisticated Gwenda with Faust's image of Gretchen, whose domestic idyll he

is about to desEoy.88 In Miss Thome's case, the initiation touches off the girl's

domestic desires and ambitions, and causes her to leave the initiator to marry tho

wealthy and sociable widower Mr Frome (who, in a sense, is the most unpreten-

tious and perceptive character in the book, and as unsophisticated as_Gwenda).

The usi of Wagner (especially The Valkyrie) also testifies to Jolley's mode ofcomicatly inverting a cult-uml model (cf. Jones 1984, 84-86). Wagner',s signifi-cance in Australian literature is considerable. It has prompted Riemer to wonder

why Wagner, of all musicians, recurs in the writings of Ausfalians to the extent he

does (1983, 251).89 Riemer goes on to suggest:

Is it perhaps thar the absurd demands made on audiences by Wagnerian music-drama and by the

institutions of Bayreurh are the absolute antithesis of Ausrralian pragmatism and lethargy? Does the

Ionging, ambivalent but sure, for European culture embedded in rhe very concePt of the "novel"

itself find its most compelling image in the extreme manifestation of European romanricism and its

obsessioo with music, theatre, and particularly wirh opera?

aying, "Human beings realiy are awful' I've written about

loneliness and jealousy bur I hope I've seen the ridiculous side and the Ioving side as well" (1985' 30).

This is cenainly truefor Miss Peabody's Inheritance.

88. The lines from Goethe (Mrss Peabody 63, 138) are from a dialogue between Faust and

Mephistopheles abour Gretchen (Falsl Part I, Scene 14, "Forest and Cavem")'

i9. Ri"."r refers ro Jolley, fuchards on's The Young Cosina and Parrick White. One could add to

the list references in the writing of Boyd and Malouf, and poems by Slessor (sects. 1'2'8'9 of..Music"), Shapcotr ("Richard Wagner at Schioss Donndorf, Bayreuth 1873" in Welcorru!), Margaret

Scon ("Wagnei at Low Head"), Dorothy Auchterlonie ("Nighr at the Opera", a satire on a modem

Isolde), or, more generally, rhe alention Wagner has been gening in Quadranl'

Australian Travellers 143

Jolley for her part employs Wagner in an ironic way, and quite unlike othermore serious musical references.9O Jones is surely correct when she points out tlurLin addition o the comic overtones, the Wagnerian references n Miss Peabodyindicate relationships which defy all conventional morality (1984, 84). In Milk andHoney ud Palomirn, that is, in less comic contexts, the Volsung-theme of lovebetween brother and sister is not associated as explicitly with the obviousWagnerian parallel. Laura in Palomino describes a European stage performancefeaturing the love between brother and sister, thus prefiguring later events (12-13).Although Laura presumably refers to Siegmund and Sieglinde, neither the operanor the composer Wagner are mentioned in the novel. Laura extensively lives withand expresses herself through music, and she appreciates Bach, Beethoven,Mozart, Schubert and Brahms. Clearly these composers compare more suitably toLaura's seriousness, solitude and suffering, whereas Wagner's more gaudy,operatic sfyle is echoed in the ragicomic, slightly absurd characters Thome andIlailey.et

Arabella Thorne makes use of Wagner's music and his image to stir upemotions in the women she is interested in, expecting to benefit from the effectshis music and themes may have on them.92 Wagner touches off the "idyllic,tender, hilarious and ludicrous" night of love in Vienna ("Tell me how you feelabout Wagner and his music. Did you like his music? Did you, Gwenda?" [61]).Enthusiastically she describes Wagner's physical appearance and personality: hisrefined taste and love of fine clothes and good food, his romantic appeal and hisunconventionality. Her purposes are thwafled when Gwenda transfers the enthusi-asm for Wagner onto the "suburban Wolan" Frome (155), who is more a parodythan an embodiment of the model, but offers all these admired qualities toGwenda: "I think Mr Frome is a bit like Wagner, don't you?" (112). On losingGwenda, Miss Thorne admits the relativity of her preoccupation with 'culture':"Miss Thorne tries to read something about Wagner and discovers with horrorthat, unless she is talking to Gwenda about Wagner, she does not have any realinterest" (121). In a sense, bottr Thorne and Frome employ Europe and its'culture' for their immediate purposes. Where Thome had tried to woo Gwenda,with Wagner and with touristic attractions such as the Glockenspiel in Munich, ttreZlgspilze at Garmisch or the Prater in Vienna, Frome had bestowed elegant giftsand generous attentions on her. And Gwenda's decision seems pragmatic: theEuropean initiation has helped her to secure a prosperous future in AusEalia.

90. 8.g., her use of Brahms's Gerrnan Requiem in Mr Scobie's Riddle arld also in Miss Peabody(where it is related to the death of Miss Peabody's mother, and to that of the novelist Diana [97-98,1 131).

91. Miss Hailey too had taken girls on trips to Bayreuth (Mr Scobie's Riddle 149, 175), and rhe

Wagner analogies have a comic effect, for instance when Hailey sings Senta's therne from The FlyingDulclman while waiting patiently (but in vain) for Scobie's retum outside the men's toilet (115-15).

92. See Mbs Peabdy 52-53,80, and above all the episodes with Gwenda, Thome takes Gwenda toa Wagner festival in Munich and wants to invite her and the tempting girl Debbie to Bayreuth thefollowing year.

144 Chapter Four

The new world's ambitions to imitate and transplant old world traditions are

rearcd in a similarly ironic way when Miss Thorne, inspired by the lovelymountain scenery between Munich and Vienna, creates a "Saint Pine" for herAusralian boarding school. She imagines "Saint Pine's Day", with "colours,badges, a flag and a song" (51), evoking in ttre Australian reader familiar scenesof rather meaningless relicts of British raditional ceremonies and customs onAusualian soil. The notion of a Cennal European Saint Pine to promote a strug-gling Ausralian boarding school is as comic and odd as the effect of Wagnerenthusiasm on the Australian girl Gwenda.

The purpose of ravelling as one of ttre themes in Miss Peabody remains ironicand ambivalent. In tho frame novel the novelist Diana enthusiastically recom-mends travelling to Miss Peabody (whose own travel experience hitherto had beenquite bleak). The story Diana writes, however, presents the trip to continentalEurope as a parody of aBildungsreise,resonant with touristic clich6s of fascinat-ing, romantic and unpredictable Europe. As an attempt to overcome loneliness andmeaninglessness in life, the trip fails in the end. The ravellers retum separately,each o their previous miseries, yet already planning next yeal's trip lo Europewittr expectations of happiness. They battle on, faithful to a device Jolley in an

autobiogaphical statement expressed with a line by Rilke: "Who talks of victory?To hold out is all" ("Who Talks of Vicory" 15). The novel seems to suggest thatemancipation from restrictions and dullness requires the courage for self-recogni-tion and change rather than touristic adventures or superficial and imitative 'high-cultural' enthusiasm.

In Palomino, a novel more serious in tone and themes, Jolley has her maincharacters realise more overtly that ttre hope of finding relief from suffering bymaking the journey, is an illusion. The novel opens with Laura's return from avoyage around the world, which included an extensive stay in Europe, and itcloses with Andrea's life in Austria, where she has escaped after the breakup ofthe women's relationship. Jolley's story "The Libation", closely related to thenovel in terms of plot, can be regarded as a sequel to Palomino.93 In both worksJolley has her female protagonists search for a refuge in Europe at crucial stages oftheir lives. However, Europe eventually emerges as a place of alienation anddeatl. Laura's first rip fails to become the desired "self-healing voyage" (9, 18).Through Laura's stocktaking on returning, the novel takes the reader on a touristicjourney from "the terraced vineyards on the banks of tle Rhine" to a sunrise inCeylon (12), affectionately dwelling on the pastoral aspects of the Alpinelandscape around Salzburg, where "Everything the tourist sees charms":

93. In a hotel in Vierura, the slory's narrator (possibly Laura) discovers lhat a woman who

csnmitted suicide in her room was her friend (possibly Andrea). The story ends with 'Laura' deciding

to follow 'Andrea' into death. The historical "suicide pact" between Crown Prince Rudolph and Maria

Vetsera in I 889 at Mayerling is used to foreshadow lhe events. ' 'The Libation" focuses on the process

of writing and on a writer's disappoinlrnent on being rejecred, but also adds lurther aspects to the

characters of. Palomino, especially to that of the older woman.

Australian Travellers

Snow-covered mountains panemed with magic light and blue shade rise round Salzburg and the

trees are frosxed with snow . .. There are little churches wirh gi.lded steeples sparkling in the morning

sun, quiet rivers with grasiy banks and men waiting in the water patiently to grab a fish. The litrle

houses are crooked with auic roofs and pink urd yellow colour-washed walls. Roadside shrines are

everywhere carved and cherished with leaves and branches and the people seem so happy and

friendly. (11)

But Laura, who suffers from her solitude and guilt, remains untouched and

disappointed: "When I travelled thore I wondered if I would feel the loss of itafterwards and suddenly I was tired of it" (11). Tourism cannot heal, neither can

Europe's natural nor its cultural attractions:

Music is like mountains covered with snow and valieys of deep meadows sprinkled with spring

flowers. If I can't be part of the land then I am tired quickly with justlooking at it. It is the same

with music, I tire quickly of sitting and watching people perform it. (10)94

In concerts and theaEes Laura sits "[ike a block of wood", and all her attempts

to restore herself fail.

I stared wittr terrible blankness in picture galleries and yawned through museums, passed close 1o

fountains without seeing them and, standing before great churches I failed to uke in their history

and to absorb their mystery and significance. (12)

The narrator in ''The Libation" experiences a similar feeling about being in the

wrong place with ttre wrong person while travelling in Austria, and not even

Mozart's operas can ease her discontent.InPalominoLawa observes:

I am afraid of the loneliness and depression it is possible ro feel in a foreign country. .. . Loneliness

sits in an galleries, concen halls, museums and churches and most of all in the hotel bedrooms ...

Q22)

In the absence of love, both natural beauty and cultural possibility remain

meaningless, even alien to the traveller. What Europe has to offer and proudlydisplayi provides no satisfactory alternative. Loneliness seems easier to compen-

sate f6r on her Ausfalian land. Even music, Laura's own medium, means more

there ttran in its European place of origin: "in Europe there was nO real music;

concerts and recitals of course, but no music to listen !o alone where for example itis possible to give onesolf up completely to the cello" (10). Andrea cannot be

saved in Europe either, not even by the pragmatic and sociable Irma who provides

her with a refuge at the Berghof in the mountains.9s Though Irma has also knownsuffering at timos of war and exile, she accepts and enjoys the world as it is. The

hen he listens lo Mozart resemble rhe description of the

Central European places in Palomino: "The music was meant to recall too the linle churches with

steeples and onion spires, and wayside shrines, decorated with offerings of fruit and flowers and grain,

guarding the curves of the mounrain paths. Contained and stored in rhe music were fountains spilling

water over wom steps, and noble grey buildings, their heights shrouded in early moming European

mists" (Mr Scob ie's Riddle 98).

95. The name Gasthaus Berghof is reminiscent of the Berghof in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg,

a similarly timeless realm between life and death'

145

146 chapter Four

voluble and vital viennese woman is contrasted with the introverted Laura just asthe lovely Austrian scenery is with the dry, harsh Ausralian landscape, "theuntidy flat country lthat] both beckons and repels" (palomino lT). one gets thefeeling that ttre writer's symilathies are ultimately with Australia, and ttrat the'prettiness' of European scenery and the 'niconess' of the Ausrian charactersqomprise somettring superficial. In a similar way, the presentation of EsmdGollanberg comments on Australian illusions about Europe. In a sense Esm6personifies Europe. Ideatsed by an Australian imagination as the perfect mixtureof intellect and beauty, she really turns out to be a disappointing and distortedcaricature of the ideal.

Some of the same Austrian settings recur in different writings by Jolley. one of!!9se, the Pension Eppelsheimer, where Miss Thorne and her-friend! stay invienna "under the shadow of the stephansdom" (Miss peabody 55), emerges ast!t9 Penllon Heiligtum in "The Libation" (with the same small enclosed garde,full of lilacs).The Pension Heiligturn is a "Zufluchtsstrjtte,, (105), a sanctuary, ina double sense: a resting place for the weary travellers and for the final reunion indeath. The renaming of the Pension has a special significance, linking it wittr thetheme of joy in friendship. Heiligtum is the German word for the goddess's sanc-tuary in Schiller's "Ode to Joy", used by Beethoven inhis Choral Symphony.Thecharacterisation of Laura relates her to the idealism Schiller and Beethoven repre-sent. with its enthusiastic praise of friendship and a brotherhood of humankind,and its appeal for courage and hope for a better world, the ode symbolises Laura'sfeeling for Andrea.95

snce Palomizo lacks the overt comedy and irony of other books by Jolley,critics have been at a loss about how seriously Jolley takes the views of thecharacter Laura.97 Riemer (one of those who find Palomino less successful and itspurposes curious and puzzling) suggests that the novel is intended to be ironic,"another instance of the operation of the imitative fallacy,' (L983,242). Heconcedes that in Palomino "the fact of Australia and the 'culture' of Europe enterinto an interesting metaphoric relationship", but admits that he has no clearpercaption of what the use of Schiller, Beethoven and Schubert has to do with thenovel's overriding concern. one possible clue may be found if one examines thequality of contrasts, or "clash of cultures" which, according to Riemer, informsPalomino and much of Jolley's other work. They are dichotomies not so muchbetween Australia and Europe, but between ideal and reality, expectation anddisillusionment, the world of everyday life and of the mind. Laura, "cultivated in aEuropean sense" (Riemer 1983,u3), strives for an ideal state of being she canonly temporarily attain through music, poetry, the idealisation of her land or the

96. Laura sings it when she ukes Andrea to her "sanctuary" (Palomino 71, cf. "Libation"ll0-11). Andrea discovers in Laura "a sensitive resemblance ro the portrait of her favourire poet,Sctriller", whose face "could have been a man's or a woman's" (Palomino253,75).

97. Whereas some reviews praise Palomino forits brave subject (e.g. Keesing 1981; Clancy 1983),others call it disappointing, melodramatic, or even a failure because of its seriousness (Gamer 1983;Daniel 1986).

Australian Travellers 147

short times of harmony with her friend. Hers is an ideal world of the imagination,and neither Australia nor Europe can fulfil her expectations. She feels closer toThomas Mann's Gustav Aschenbach in Death in Venice than to the 'living'Europeans Irma and Hrlde (Palomino L7), closer to a constructed world of aft than

to social reality. The longed-for Edenic realm does not exist in either place, and

'culture' becomes an escape. A similar dichotomy underlies Jolley's story

"Winter Nelis" (Stories 150-160). Unlike Riemer, I would therefore not read the

fantasies of Leonora about her namesake in Beetlioven's Fidelio as establishing "acontrast between Australian dullness and European romanticism" (1983, 243).

After all, suburban wives are not likely to be made into heroines of operas inEurope any more than in Australia. Leonora's romantic fantasies rather mirror the

conrast between the dullness of everyday lives and a real longing for somettring

better. Simitarly, Miss Hailey's lament about a "spiritual wilderness" and a"cuhure starvation" (Mr Scobie 99) imply a notion of disappoinunent about the

individual fate as much as ttrat of cultural criticism. Jolley's characters, as Riemerpoints out elsewhere, "constantly dream of escape, they fashion fantasies of a

happier life elsewhere-'outside', in cultivated Europe, in consoling Australiawith its freedom from constraint-to find that there is no escape, there are no

better worlds" (1986, 68). Thus Jolley's fiction both diminishes and emphasises

the distance between Australia and Europe, and either tenitory can be both strange

and familiar. The 'ideal' place, imagined as much as real, must be created individ-ually, regardless of its geographical location, and more often than not it can onlybe found in a breakthrough to the world of the mind.

Although Jolley's characters are presented as products of their respectivesocieties, ttre focus is on civil rather than political community. Looking at her

images of the German culture area in general, one finds suqprisingly few aspects ofthe historical savagery and terror (though such are invoked, e'g., in "PaperChildren", or Milk and Honey), and even her refugee characters reflect personal

rather than political implications (cf. Chapter Three). This distinguishes Jolley'sGerman images from those of other Ausralian writers discussed in this chapter. Inher fiction, the most tenible events go on internally, in people's ordinary lives,rather ttran externally in 'history'. To be sure, there is always a sense that internalturmoils reflect society's deficiencies, but political or ideological causes are

neittrer spelled out nor evaluated. Though it would certainly be too simple toexplain this absence with conflicting claims of cultural heritage, the recent autobi-ographical essay "Who Tatks of Victory" throws an interesting light on whatmight be called Jolley's apolitical stance. There she recalls how her upbringingshut her off from ttre world of politics: "[we] were taught to love our enemies, tobe our brothers' keepers and to tum our attention to positive achievemsnts,including Hitler's. Even in the final period when both the school and my father'shouse were full of refugees no one talked about the cause" (9). Jolley spent the

summer of 1939 in Germany (partly with a German family, pafily in a Germangirls' camp), barely making it back from Hamburg to England before ttre outbreakof war. The personal German connections, and the German afhnities of her mother(who was "given to tearing up Churchitl's picture wherever she saw it and o

148 chapter Four

listening to the German news on tle radio" ["Victory" 9]), made her aware oftwo contradictory versions of reality, and she comments: "I had !o accept theaccounts of German policy which the English government put out but I knew ttratthe account of all Germans as evil was untrue" (Ia). Jolley designates this periodas particularly significant in her progress towards becoming a iuriter, but grantsthat she has not yet been able to use much of it as ,material, (13).9s it will beinteresting to see if and how she uses it in her future writing

7. Boring and stifling normality: recent German travel images

when one scans recent Australian writing for images of Germany, finding a poemqn Ludwig Erhard in a new anthology comes somewhat as a surprise.gg poisiblythe editor of The New oxford Book of Australian verse,Les Murray, chose HalColebatch's two 'German' poems, "On the Death of Ludwig Erhard;' and ..One

Tourist's cologne" because in some ways they represent rather untypical views ofGermany, aspects of a contemporary German society Australian-writers havetelded to neglect.l00 The poem on Erhard speaks up for "a fat and kindly man,/who humbly cleared ruins, and successfully applied/ prosaic knowledge for merehuman happiness." such a man, the poem suggests, will be forgotten by historyand literature, whereas inspiring leaders wittr high visions and philosophils createlegends, and tragic heroes "whoso dreams were shattered'-' are praised andremembered, even though ttrey may have been contemners of humankind or mass-murderers. Although the poem does not name such famous or notorious country-men of Erhard's, it evokes in ttre reader's mind names such as Hegel andNietzsche, perhaps also wagner's siegfried. It certainly evokes Hitler and ottrersuch "monsters of our times" (to quote from the title of Maloufs poem onEichmann),l0l who owe their places in literature to the fascination of evit. wittr

98. In the recent story "Mr Berrington" (1987) the narrar.or mentions a trip ro Germany with themother in 1938, and a long summer there.

99. Ludwig Erhard (1897-1977), minisrer of economic affairs in Konrad Adenauer's cabinet andchancellor of the FRG from 1963 to 1966, has been seen as a symbol of wesr Germany,s posrwarecqtomic recovery. Erhard's theories on social market economy (Soziale Markrwirtsclaft) areexpanded in his books Wohlstardfiir alle and DeutscheWirtschafispoliti,t (rans. Prosperity ttnoughCompetitionaadThe Economics ofsuccess. London, 1958 and 1963).

100. The Erhard-poem first publ. in Poetry Australia 61 (1978):35; rhe Cologne -poem in PoetryAustralia 65 (1977):14. Both rpr. inThe New Oxford Book 34041.In his preface Murray wrires rhathe has, among other criteria, Iooked for "best" poems of aurhors, " which are often those in which rheirchieflhemes reached a culminaring, transforming expression", but has also scanned "for a quality, fortheir untypical Poem or poems" (xxiii). Several olher poems wirh German connections by Colebatchput forward a similat view as those selected by Murray. h should be noted here {har The New OxfordBool< also presents another image of Germany, in David Manin's "Dreams in German" (cf. ch, Two).

101. "Epitaph for a Monster of Our Times" (Malouf, Selected Poerns 5). Another such monsrer,Joseph Goebbels, prompred a poem by Richard Kelly Tipping, "The Minister of Enlightenmenr andPropaganda" (Nearer By Far 89-90),

AustralianTravellers 149

his poem "Freisler to von Witzleben" (Outer Charting 37-38), Colebatch himselfwrotg on such a monster who claimed to ride "high on the surge of History", andon his arrogant treaunent of one of the men o1 dt* pesig1anss.l02

Ausralian writers have tended to associate a German concept with megaloma-nia and sinister evil, and these characteristics are expected to become tangible inthe place iself, as Colebatch's "One Tourist's Cologne" suggests: "At night Itry/ to imagine wolves. My first German forest./ Dwarf-delvings here?" Howgver,the reality the tourist experiences, turns out to be different and almost disappoint-ingly normal. "Young and old / go out of their way to help"; "The good burghersof Cologne/ take their evening walks by the Rhine"; and in the Kt)lner Dom, thecathedml which is a symbol of power, sheer size and skyward vision, fat monkscollect money from tourists. It is a respectable but boring place, the tourist finds,perhaps the "ultimate bourgeois city".l03 He ponders about the change, about thedeviation from a traditional cultural reputation, and about the incompatibility ofhisorical grandeur and social safety:

.., Will ttris country everdream of a future? Who may guess

what romanticism leads to? It must be the least of crimes

to play ir safe, to play it safe.

Where is the soul here? Where rhe new blueprints?

'Boredom', another architect wrote,

'is ttre one hellish torture the poet forgot to describe"

Although the poem talks about Germany, one senses that it may also be talkingabout Australia. In a way, the following lines take up an Ausralian dilemma ofenjoying a safe, sheltered, "egalitarian" socigty on the one hand, but feelinginsignificant in the face of historical events which move the world on the other:

,,. Who dares sneer

at a country where people are nol tortured?

To wish more? And further? How can we have both?

Hal Colebatch focuses on dniting rather than on separating features of German-Ausualian connections in his poems. This stance is particularly stiking in theunusual approach in a poem "Visiting Dachau, 1973" (Outer Charting 78).Dachau, a symbol of German auocity and evil, is not even mentioned in the poem.

The persona, an Australian traveller who presumably has just visited the mernorial,gets a lift back to the train from two nice German girls who do youth work for a

102, Roland Freisler, from 1942to 1945 president of the "People's Covt" (Voll<sgerichtshon,has

been seen as the personification of the National Socialists' judicial terror (cf. MEL9:40L).103. In Colebatch's "The Tourisr Finds No Eagles on the Caps" (Outer Charting 25-26) the

persona expresses a similar surprise at finding a normal, familiar world at Kiel, Germany: a club

advertising sexual iilercourse "was perhaps / the only trace of that exotic (Teutonic precision)/ I had

come to find."

150 Chapter Four

church. The encounter promotes an impression of kindness, friendship andinternational understanding. I 04

Such an understanding between the young is also suggested in Marian Eldrige'sshort story "At fire Signora's" (first publ. 1985). The young Australian Drew, ona hitchhiking journey around the world, is juxtaposed witl some middle-agedEnglish and German tourist and their Italian landlady in Tuscany. While the olderones with ttreir various memories of the Second World War still have problemswith laying the ghosts of the past, the young Australian draws the line lessbetween nations 0ran between generations and what they stand for. Thus hiscommitment to work for a better world will take him to Hamburg, where he wantsto participate in peace demonstrations with his German friends. Whereas Drewfeels that he has nothing in common with, and no sympathy for, the older German,Herr Schumacher ("the German bugs me, I can't srand these heel-clicking [ypes",he writes in his diary), the reader is left with the impression that Drew will feel atease with the generation of Schumacher's son, because a common concern for thesurvival of humankind unites ttrem.

The representation of Germany in Helen Gamer's short story "A ThousandMiles from the Ocean" (Postcards from Surfers 71-80) renders, through theperception of an Ausualian woman traveller, a rather drab and disillusioningpicture of the place and its people. The narrator follows her German lover !oGermany, only to realise that he is a "prolix cultural pretender" (Bums 1985) whoruns numerous other love affairs. The theme is reminiscent of Teresa's followingJonathan Crow in Stead's For Love Alone. Yet whereas England provides asuitable environment for Teresa's gradual process of emancipation (a kind ofemancipation she had not been able to accomplish in Ausralia), Germany forGamer's female traveller turns out to be a place of stifling entrapment. Australia'sopenness is contrasted with Germany's enclosure. Images of cartons, apailrnentsand houses serve to convey a claustrophobic atmosphere where people liveencaged and sterile lives, far away from the vastness of the ocean, as themeaphoric title suggests. As signifiers of such an oppressive confinement,windows and doors are tightly closed, the bed and ttre cupboards are narrow, paperhas square-ruled pages, and ttre sky is clouded. People don't respond to friendlygestures. They ridicule others and prefer to call "Vorsichr" (attention). There is asense of irony when one of the Germans tells ttre Australian visitor:

'Two main things have changed.in this counlry over rhe pasr lweily years. The upbringing ofchildren has become less aurhoritarian. And rhere is less militarism.' (76)

Yet the place the Australian perceives is full of tensions, stiffrress and coldness.she realises ttrat she has fallen victim to a romantic illusion of Europe when her

lM. Colebatch also used Dachau for a setting in the shorr srory "spirir of '73".It seems a slrangeand puzding ideological context to have the Ausrralian rourists acr our the problems of theirrelationship on a visit to the Dachau memorial.

Australian Travellers 151

lover sang her "the song about the moon rising" (76).10s In reality her Germanlover has been shaped by filial hatred and has become selfish and self-immersed.He pities only himself and has a drab view of the world:

He grumbled all the time. He laughed, to pretend it was a joke, but grumbling was his way oftalking. Everything was aw-ful. His life was aw-fnl. Q6)

Significantly, the Australian woman escapes from the dismal relationship andthe equally dismal place by boarding a southbound train. Across the border, in an

unspecified southern counEy, her spirits are revived by the serenity, fertility andopenness of the southern atmosphere. The journey south becomes a trope for thereturn to a liberating and familiar vitality. The Ausualian traveller is one of thevarious female protagonists in Garner's fiction who have succeeded in the attemptof taking control of their own actions and of subverting patriarchal models (in thiscase represented by ttre attitudes of the pompous German lover and hisenvironment).

The dichotomy of male and female 'worlds' and perceptions plays an importantpart in Garner's fiction. In "A Thousand Miles from the Ocean", this links upwittr the polarisation of German enclosure and Australian (and southem) openness.In comparison with some otler (and particularly earlier) Australian travellersdiscussed in this chapter, this story's female protagonist is construed as havingfound an unusual confidence and cerlainty with regard to her Australian culturalbackground. It. seems fair to assume that she embodies the author's sense of placeand of home, and ttrere is no longer a trace of the 'periphery syndrome'. When shelongs for her home, she remembers: o'I was on the day side of the planet where Ihad a garden, a house, creatures to care for" (78). This is not the longing whichLaura, in Jolley's Palomino, feels for the beauty and solitude of her land whichhappens to be in Ausralia but could well be elsewhere. Neither is it just a longingfor the familiar environment. Garner's female protagonist has become convincedthat her 'world' is moro human in its social, spiritual and physical quality of life.Whereas some of the travellers in works by Johnston, White, Malouf and ottrerAustralian writers still seem tom between Ausralia and the old world, and arefascinated by ttre latter, Garner's traveller no longer suffers from the notoriousinferiority complex.l06 She embodies a view which has obviously become morecommon among Ausralians recently: whereas one AusEalian tradition used to

105. Presumably she refers to one of lhe b€stknown German folksongs, Matthias Claudius's

"Abendlied", which opens with the line "Der Mond ist aufgegangen'' (the moon has risen).

106. Hd Poner's "Brett", a slory of multilayered ironies, also addresses ttre theme of Australianexpecutions and European reality. It satirises, among other things, the Australian gullibility inidealising the 'superior'old world. A disillusioned Auslralian travellertalks about "an Old World she'd

been lured into visiting by gilded legends, propaganda ablaze with seductive adjectives, She'd been

taken in by a mirage of civilizations accounted superior to her own country's, of breattr-taking

landscapes suewn with gorgeous cities and enchanting villages alive with diverting and decorativepeople." The Italy she does perceive is "a fifth-rare vaudeville show, the Italians cheap and nastybuffoons" (Hal Porter 238). Significantly, Brett's German experience consists of tkee days in the

lock-up after she had run down a deer on the outskins of East Berlin.

152 Chapter Four

picture and revere Europe as a place of Culture and History, a modern contraryview looks down on the "museum culture" of Europe (cf. Alomes 1985, 36).Thus for the traveller in Garner's story, European art has no longer a specialappeal but is seen and appraised (though still somewhat reluctantly) according tothe character's own values and growing self-confidence:

She passed between its [the gallery's] tremendous pillars. It is my duty to look ar something. I mustdrag my ignorance round on my back like a wet coat. He [the German] will ask me what I have seen

and I must answer. Is there something the matter with me? The paintings look as vulgar as swap-cards, the objects in them as if made of plaster. Grotte auf Malta 1806t waves like boiledcauliflower' A heaven full of tumbling pink flabby things. Here is the famous Tinrltorclr.oi Vull(anilberrascht Venw wd Mars. Venus has buds for breasts; a little dog hides under the table. (77)

The recoiling from the genius loci of Germany, moreover, is no longer arejection of historical atrocities (though Nazi thefts too are mentioned marginally),but rather a recoiling from an impersonal coldness of human relations, and from apatriarchal condescension the woman immediately experiences. Thus the negativeresponse to Germany of Garner's Eaveller is, above all, a positive response to herown cultural (and gender) identity.

Defining oneself against other cultures has been a major aspect of the going-abroad stories in recent Australian writing, as Rosemary Cresswell's anthology oftravel stories , Home and Away, exemplifies. The responses to the German culturearea, represented by Garner's "A Thousand Miles from the Ocean" and MichaelHaig's "Eighteen Hours in Frankfurt", emphasise the experience of disillusion-ment wittr what is 'over there'. The young Australian traveller in Haig's storylooks for the idea of the country rather ttran the country itself. Like the narrator inGamer's story, he stafls out with vaguely romantic-and ttroroughly stereo-typed---expectations of "some distinctly German culture: Gothic buildings, beerhalls-maybe even a few buxom wenches" (Home and Away 174). The realityturns out to be quite different and rather bleak: he wastes his time in gloomy trainsand railway strations, and the only people he meets are a black American soldier, adubious Frenchman, and a drunkard, "all a bunch of phoneys" (18 1). In his angerat not having encountered what he takes for a genuine German, he even comes upwittr the horrible thought, "maybe ttris is how Hitler felc the race must be purgedof alloys" (181). In lhe end, the young Australian is left blank, exhausted andthoroughly disappointed, because the pictures in his head have been revealed asmirages.

The wide range of texts in this chapter precludes a homogeneous image ofGermany as a place, as various traditions and ideologies have influenced the waysin which Ausralian writers have constructed their own, and their fictional charac-ters', travel experience in the German culture area. In conclusion it might be said,however, that in general Australian writers have seen German-speaking countries

Australian Travellers 153

more critically and unfavourably than other places in Europe.loT Though there aresome counter-images, more often than not the texts have foregrounded aspects ofwhat Australians do not want !o be. Moreover, it seems that most Australianwriters have only reluctantly come to terms with German modemity, or have notbeen particularly interested in it. Where the theme of going abroad in search ofone's self-understanding comprises the responses of Australian travellers toforeign environments, the survey has shown ttrat the responses to the Germancultuml sphere, diverse as they are in the period, have generally accentuatedambiguous and sinister qualities. Apart from a few exceptions, as for instance insome of Jolley's fiction or Andrew Taylor's poems, German-speaking societieshave mainly been set off as 'ttre otlers'-more so than Southern Europe, whereusually a classical heritage and a southern brightness are emphasised and admired,whereas negative aspects of 'southern' history have been all but ignored. Thehistorical relations between Australia and Germany in the first half of this centurystill shape many of the cultural hetero-images in Australia and give them adaunting quality. Romantic beauty and creations of 'high culture' (especiallyGerman music) have been expected and appreciated. The overriding impression,however, is that of the savagery of history throughout the ages, culminating in thebrutality of the Third Reich and in the holocaust. For many Australian travellers as

they appear in the literature of the period, a (mainly sinister) fairy-tale atmosphereand *re monuments of a cruel past represenl the genius loci of Middle Europe,even in more recent years. Jennifer Strauss, for instance, who stayed in Germanyseveral times during the past fifteen years, wrote two poems with German settings.One of them, "Schloss Favorite" (Winter Driving 2l-22), conveys reflections onthe occasion ofthe tourists visiting a rococo castle out-of-season, in the dead lightof November, and focuses on the theme of ransitoriness of both royal glamour andhuman life. The other poem, "The Anabaptist Cages, Mtinster", is srucnrredaround a particularly savage event, in German history. 108 fhs traces of past

107. A comic (if rather outrageous) parable in Morris Lurie's novel Flying Harne confirms thisassumption. There a (South African) tourist conveys her responses to various European countries interms of her digestive reactions: "I've had trouble all over Europe ... . I don't think I went once inSwitzerland, not the whole time I was there. I was like a rock inside. ... And Germanyl You shouldhave seen me in Germany. I had to walk around like a crab. Don't think I wasn't eating, either. I ate likeahorse. Sauerkrautl Sausages! Tons of cakes! Nothing worked. Boy, was I stuck. ... It's a miraclel'msrill alive. WeIl, then I got to Italy, and in Italy I was so-so, you know, nothing fantastic, but I went.

And then I took a boat across to Spain. Spain! Wow! I don't know what happened in Spain. I didn't doanything special and suddenly I was going all the tjme. I don't mean sick, I mean like clockwork." The

best activity, however, could be performed in Israel: "thal was truly beautiful. That must have been the

very besr in my whole life" (Flying Hone 110).

108. I am grateful to Jennifer Strauss for informing me abou! her stays in Germany and for sending

methe stillunpublished poem "The AnabaptistCages". The cages, where the executed leaders oftheanabaptist movement were publicly exhibited in the seventeenth century, can still be seen hanging fromthe sreeple of the l-amberti church at Miinster. David Martin at one time pianned to write on this

historical subject (cf. Hetherington 1963,157), but later abandoned it (Letter to me of 6 Nov. 1985).

154 Chapter Four

cruelties sharpen the non-European tourist's awareness of the world's terrors ofthen and now.

As in Strauss's poem, the daunting aspects of European history have occasion-ally been used by Australian writers (such as White, Malouf and Cusack) toawaken the awareness of Australians to violence and disorder in their own society.This has also been one of Thomas Keneally's concems. Several of his novels withEuropean settings deal with some exceptional, one could almost say moral,characters within a disintegrating, fragmented world of violence. Their Germanconnections will be discussed in the following chapter.

Peter Poner wrote a radio play on the anabaptists, "The Siege of Miinster", which was broadcast by the

BBC in England but not published.

56White Ravens' in a World of Violence:

Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally's wide range of settings, the variety of historical material heuses, and his ability to comprehend the inherent peculiarities as well as ttretoricality of historical subjecs have been generally appreciated by readers andcritics as major achievements of his fiction.l Keneally says that he has foundhistory an easier paradigm to work with ttran the present. In his opinion the bestsort of historical novel is "the one which is really about the present and uses thepast as a sort of working model for the present", that is, a novel ,'in which thehuman issues are the same as those we have now, and have always had to face"("Interviewby Hergenhan",453). In analogy to this allegorical use of the past as"a parable for the present" ("Doing Research" 29), Keneatly's use of foreignsettings and characters can be assumed to be paradigmatic, providing refereniepoints for AusEalia, and raising questions about both human behaviour in generaland Ausralian issues in particular. In his early period as a writer, Keneally chosemainly Australian subject matter, whereas from the mid-seventies on he hasi-ncluded France, England, America, Antarctica, yugoslavia, poland, and alsoGermany (cf. OCAL 385. The entry does not mention Germany, however). Therecent novel A Family Madness combines Eastern and central Europe withcontemporary Australia, and a similar linking informs a still unfinished book.2Thus Keneally's thematic 'universalism' (a controversial term in Ausralianliterary studies) relates specif,rc cultural meanings to a wider range of modelswhose societal determinants may be different, but some fundamenral decisions andconsequences for the individual nevertheless seem comparable.

Two major characters in novels by Keneally are Germans, Matthias Erzbergerin Gossip from the Forest (1975) and oskar Schindler in schindrer's Ark e9{2),and so are some minor characters in A Family Madness (1985) and season in

1. As to Keneally's mode of relating historical material to issues conceming the present, see forinstance his own statements in "Doing Research", "Inrerview by Fabre", and "Inrewiew byHergenhan"; see also Hergenhan's study of Briag larks and Heroes (1983, 139-50).

2. In an interview given in St. Lucia in 1985, Keneally says, "I have one more book, I think, abouran Aussie Candide, who's a middle-aged innocent Aussie hack like myseU, travelling Europe with asurvivor of the holocaust. This is based on a person I met while researching for Schindler's Ark"("Inrerview by Fahey", l8). A chap6r of this novel is published in rtre first issue of Antipodes (L987),where Keneally is quoted as saying, "It's about an Oz Candids travelling in Poland in 1981,Solidariry's last season-with a midget, a Beverly Hills businessman and a former child survivor of rheHolocaust" ("The Man Who Knew Walesa" T).