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The Poetics of Travel: Rodney Hall’s The Lonely Traveller by Night

Dr Ian Dixon

Writer and theorist E. M. Forster (1984) insists that the traveller imbibes

a quality of the land they visit. Similarly, Rodney Hall’s deep interest in

travel and its effect on the individual mind are richly apparent in The

Lonely Traveller by Night (1996). In Lonely Traveller, Hall tells the story

of the internal and external journeys of Isabella Manin and Yuramiru, two

unlikely travellers, who accidentally intersect in Venice, Italy in 1667.

The book is the second instalment of Australia’s only septalogy of novels

and represents a versatile use of physical journey as metaphor for his

characters’ internal transformation. Hall utilises both poetry and

musicality in his language, which heightens the reader’s experience both

through the literature and across the foreign terrain he depicts. This

includes a telepathically projected expedition across Australia before its

official (British) discovery. I will analyse some of the poetic effects and

devices utilised in Hall’s art concentrating on Lonely Traveller.

Despite Hall’s oeuvre warranting serious analysis, there has not been

enough secondary literature devoted to him. Of those studies written, only

two give fitting credence to the excellence of Hall’s craft. Firstly, Paul

Genoni’s ‘Rodney Hall: Exploring the Land in the Mind’ in Subverting the

Empire: Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction’ provides

insightful analysis. Genoni gives a detailed illustration of mapmaking and

its connection to imperialistic thought in Australia as depicted in Hall’s

novel The Second Bridegroom (1991). Secondly, David Tacey’s ‘Rodney

Hall: Old, New, Black and White Dreamings’ in Edge of the Sacred:

Transformation in Australia (1995) gives a short but insightful Jungian

analysis of his work. This essay also draws on personal communications I

have made with Rodney Hall during a decade of our close professional

association. This includes travel in its own right: a three-month trip

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around Europe revisiting the salient places Hall visited in his three-year

walk around Europe as a 22 year old in the 1950s. I will draw upon these

sources whilst analysing Lonely Traveller.

As a seasoned traveller, Hall understands the beauty and terror of foreign

lands from an experiential standpoint. This is where his knowledge and

his love of travel amalgamate. Hall’s writing visits a maze of countries and

examines the mythologies contained within them. His ability to

encapsulate the inner experience of the traveller in poetic metaphor leads

him to the deeper perceptions of Lonely Traveller (Chekhov in Leonard

1977).

Lonely Traveller is part of a septalogy of novels merging themes and

sharing characters and spans (in narrative chronology) from Terra

Incognita (1996) set in the seventeenth century to The Day We Had Hitler

Home (2000) set in 1917. The seven novels consider Australia’s mythical

place in European history. The first of the seven reveals Australia’s

discovery as an idea for an opera in the 17th century. The last sees Europe

reinvented as a documentary film through the eyes of a young Australian.

Lonely Traveller is the second book of the trilogy The Island in the Mind

(1996) after Terra Incognita. Its title is taken from the sorceress’s curse in

the lyrics from Henry Purcell’s travel-rich first opera Dido and Aeneas

(1688):

Wayward sisters, you that fright

The lonely traveller by night,

Who like dismal ravens crying

Beat the windows of the dying (Tate 1688).

These words predict the journey for Isabella as she will indeed face the

horrors of cultures clashing and the death of her Aboriginal avatar

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Yuramiru, leaping from the ship’s window. Although from a libretto of

questionable literary merit, the very phrase ‘the lonely traveller by night’

rises and falls in a series of peaks and troughs akin to the experience of a

sea voyage (an experience common to both Lonely Traveller and Dido and

Aeneas) (Tate 1688). The novel’s title initiates the poetry of the novel and

integrates it immediately with the concept of travel.

There are three geographical journeys in Lonely Traveller. The first leg of

the journey depicts Isabella’s self-imposed kidnapping, which takes her

from her hometown in Venice down the eastern coast of Italy to occupied

Brindisi and ultimately (by implication) to the Ottoman Empire. The

second arc details the journey by foot of indigenous Australian Yuramiru

from Wilpena Pound in South Australia (‘Ikara’) across the desert and

though the Snowy mountains to Baraga Bay in New South Wales (Hall

1996, p. 274). Although occurring chronologically before Isabella’s tale,

Hall arranges a telepathic connection between the two characters such

that the two journeys unfold simultaneously within the narrative. Here

Isabella finds her dreams invaded by Yuramiru’s journey. The third arc,

again by implication, is the journey Yuramiru takes by boat from his point

of departure in Australia through India, maybe even Arabia, and ending

in Venice where the character is captured and put up for sale as a

‘priceless article’ within an illegal slave trade for exotic freaks (Hall 1996,

p. 222). Although playing out in the novel’s backstory, Hall points out that

this third (implied) journey was the central inspiration for the novel. This

Aboriginal man is not passive, not waiting for the Europeans he goes out

to discover the world beyond the sea. Each of these three journeys are

affectionately detailed so as to capture not only the vision, but the smell,

the sound and the very meaning of the places they visit, both in their

global representation and their thematic interest for the reader.

Hall’s love of travel is explicit in the novel. Rather than the showy

detailing of a travelogue, Hall’s confidence of knowing the physical

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journeys he depicts demonstrates restraint. He also possesses a sublime

ability to infer rather than describe the evolving landscapes of his

protagonists as the expression of their psychological journeys. This occurs

even to the point of landscape as poetic mindscape.

There is, of course, a fourth journey: that of the protagonist’s internal

discovery and transformation. The heroine of Lonely Traveller, sixteen

year old Catholic girl Isabella Manin writes in her diary: ‘So most people

will condemn a new thing as wicked. They can only accept it once it

becomes familiar. By then it is already a rule!’ (Hall 1996, p. 235). With

these words, Hall captures an essence of the traveller’s heart, not in

postcards, cultural appropriations and xenophobic fears, but as the

recognition of cultural beauty not yet sanctioned as beautiful. This

encapsulates the naivety and indoctrination of his lead character. This is

where her emotional transformation begins. It also describes Hall himself:

a writer fully able to recognise beauty in indigenous culture and who

recognises the European fears of an indigenous race to the south. His work

with Aboriginal people, his dedication to land rights issues and his use of

language resonant within the land itself (Genoni 2004) possesses

something of a traveller’s heart. Hall’s is a brave anti-imperial voice,

recognising and even urging visitors to Australia to listen silently to the

land they tread upon, not merely to witness it. As Genoni points out,

Hall’s words from his 1988 travel guide Home: A Journey Through

Australia state: ‘To absorb the feel of the place, you need to be alone’

(2004, p. 196).

The Island in the Mind (1996) posits the existence of an Australia not yet

discovered but rather conceived as an idea for an opera in Terra Incognita.

Lonely Traveller then delivers a part imagined, part telepathic, sexually

and religiously impeded journey toward personal realisation. Young

Isabella Manin takes up the cause of an exotic Aboriginal man (a race not

yet known in Europe) and believes she must protect him from harm. This

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harm centres on Yuramiru’s potential as a scientific artefact and the

claiming of a ‘thousand, thousand ducats’ in exchange for his head and

hand-bones (Hall 1996, p. 222). Yuramiru is so exotic that the price

continually rises in stakes as the suffragan bishop and merchant classes,

the sailors predicting telepathic experiences and the Muslim emperor from

the Ottoman Empire all vie for ownership of the creature: ‘The priceless

article is a living creature – a curio from an undiscovered world’ (Hall

1996, p. 222). This is an expansionist Europe seeking its exotic oddities as

it searches for virgin soil.

In Lonely Traveller, Hall captures the spirit of a nation untainted by

European rule by making an imaginative leap back to a time before

Australia’s (official) discovery (Genoni 2004). The novel, set in 1667,

depicts a sixteen-year-old Venetian girl becoming the willing partner to a

cultural and telepathic journey. This leads the reader on a physical

journey as well as a soul-searching inner transformation. Outwardly, we

travel down the eastern coast of Italy from Venice to Brindisi (under

Muslim occupation), whilst simultaneously confronting mystery and the

inner psyche of Isabella Manin. She witnesses alien customs on a

geographical, cultural and metaphysical stage. She perceives the

corruption within her own Catholic religion whilst also confronting herself

in close proximity to the ‘heathen’ practices of Islam and Aboriginal

animism (Hall 1996, p. 274). The novel traces her disturbance culminating

in the classic Freudian castration image as Yuramiru knocks out his own

teeth (1990, p. 448). This improvised ritual is designed to help his spirit

find its way home by relying on Isabella to transport the teeth back to

where he came from. The effect on Isabella is transformative on a personal

level.

In Lonely Traveller, travel as metaphor contributes to this character

transformation. Isabella thus changes from helpless and naive to

genuinely heroic. This classic threshold crossing in Campbell’s (1949)

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sense circumvents the boundaries of the individual’s personality (Vogler

1996). Travel defines the changes wrought on the girl by circumstance.

Transformation is a key point in Hall’s approach to literature. Both artist

and character possess a ‘deeply rooted and often unconscious desire for

transformation’ (Chekhov in Leonard 1977, p. 56).

Hall’s depiction of Venice captures Isabella’s potential transformation

metaphorically in the image of the unfinished church. This prefigures and

initiates Isabella’s change on an internal and imaginative level. Isabella’s

precious Venice is depicted in her glittering allusions to canals and

archways and implies the confident air of a native to this city. This is a

Venice of countless bridges, rounded churches and market places. Hers is

a city undergoing change as symbolised by the great church of the Salute,

which in 1667 was only semi-constructed:

There is a great church being built as thanksgiving to the Holy

Virgin for rescuing Venice from the plague… I could imagine it

filling the sky with domes’ (Hall 1996, p. 219).

This church reaches for the sky as a testament to the god of Isabella’s

imagination. This same imagination is subsequently challenged in life-

changing ways. She is a young woman crossing into adulthood. She

imagines her future as she imagines this church being built. At this stage,

she does not know that her future will cross over into an unforeseeable

land: Australia/Terra Incognita. This terrain remains undiscovered, yet

lurks in the minds of Europeans. Similarly, its author creates an intricate

web of imaginings as intricate and prolific as the church itself.

The irony at play (and beautifully captured in the easeful language of the

novel) is that Isabella’s own virginity is also being constructed and traded

around her. Her journey begins as she uses the declaration of her own

virginity as a tool to rescue the exotic prisoner from imminent death

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within the slave trade. Her journey ends as she finds herself bartered as a

slave, her Italian heritage and exotic virginity being the primary selling

points. The Salute church stands as a beacon to Isabella’s transformation

and functions as the centrepiece of Hall’s poetic depiction of Venice.

Venice remains a travel icon and as such functions as a mirror-surface

separating and initiating the three journeys of the novel. Venice is a

membrane through which the unimagined incoming world will impress

itself upon Isabella. Here Hall captures the promise of travel and

transformation within the very language of the novel: ‘Sunlight wavered

in, water patterns slanting across two walls’ (1996, p. 222). Like the

mirror-surface entered by Jean Cocteau’s poet (1930), Venice shimmers as

a glass reflection beckoning Isabella’s inevitable threshold crossing

(Vogler 1996). Her tragic and unrequited love for the unseen Cavaliere,

the object of her diary address, merges with the beauty of Venice:

Dear Cavaliere, I whisper your name aloud and the vivid little

picture of myself standing on the warehouse floor netted in a patch

of sunlight opens out to a vista of walls bounded by glittering

waterways and to the sight of you, yes you, approaching across the

bridge, a splendid feather in your hat (Hall 1996, p. 217).

Although the insistent future lurks in the wings of her enthralling and

magical Venice (including a prophetic glimpse of the ship that will ferry

her away forever) it is not until venturing offshore that Isabella’s

burgeoning journey flourishes. Subsequently, Isabella’s longing for the

absent Cavaliere undergoes a radical transformation. This rendering

within her diary demonstrates a concentrated mythopoetic power (Tacey,

1995): a backward projection relocating her within a city lost to her

forever. The imagery captured in waterways, sunlight and her ever-

evolving object of desire, is here representative of the novel as a whole.

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Travel is again heightened in the delicacy and visual splendour of Hall’s

language.

The physical journey of the novel is initially carried by the Italian leg of

her trip. When Isabella wilfully exposes her father’s disgraceful black-

market freak trade, her singular act of protecting the hapless Yuramiru

initiates a journey into the unknown world of Muslim rule and animistic

Aboriginal influence. Throughout the novel, Hall details Isabella’s primary

physical journey as an exotic one in itself. To begin with, she is rowed from

the Fondamenta and Canale della Misericordia via Cannaregio past the

San Michelle cemetery (a further augury of death). Here again the

prophesy of the far greater and more dangerous journeys across the globe

and in her mind both tantalise and deceive the reader by the glittering

seduction of Venice. From there: ‘We went in a closed gondola to Fusina

and then by coach to Malcontenta’ (Hall 1996, p. 234). Isabella’s ongoing

and deepening journey takes her toward Corsica via Hvar/Lesina, sailing

south supposedly toward her destination in Spain. However, she finds

herself and her ‘spiritual ward’ Yuramiru imprisoned within the occupied

port of Brindisi at the hands of the Muslims (Hall 1996, p. 238). She

learns that they are bound for Constantinople, but an unexpected galley

attack from the archipelago at Pianosa Island deflects her journey.

Subsequently, the naval war against Islam prevents the journeyers from

further advance. For the majority of the novel, Isabella and Yuramiru

remain stranded in Brindisi under Islamic capture.

Hall’s story carries implications of religious and historical significance.

For example, the Roman galley on Hvar where Isabella’s ship might have

docked, arose from Hall’s first-hand observation. The image then became

part of the novel’s dramatic structure. For Hall, this was more than a

mere tourist observation, this was the reinvention of fact within a fictional

form. The same is true of Isabella’s appreciation of the cold, clear waters of

Hvar, which imply Hall’s own sense memory of the island. Revisiting Hvar

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in literature means Hall’s memory is twice piqued, firstly by his own

recollection and secondly by the invention of Isabella’s plight. This places

the action on the Dalmatian Coast: the intersection of Islam and

Christianity.

Hall’s love of place and specificity within historical context also gives rise

to the inter-relationships within his septalogy. It is on Hvar that Isabella

meets a dangerous aristocratic character, a musician from a troupe of

musicians. This is Hall’s fantastical creation of the character Orlande

Scarron. Scarron, though a major character in Terra Incognita, appears

here in the second book as an incidental character, searching for authentic

representations of life in music. Scarron only fully leaps to life as central

in the third book, Lord Hermaphrodite. This concept of character

introduction by sleight of hand is a device Hall borrowed from Mikhail

Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time (2001).

The influence of other writers, poets and poetry surfaces frequently within

Hall’s writing. Lonely Traveller quotes from Jalal ad-Din Rumi, himself a

poet traveller deposed from Afghanistan/Tajikistan around 1220 A.D. by

the invading Moguls. Apart from the direct influence of Rumi, poetry and

musicality in the language of Lonely Traveller help to imitate the

excitement and heightened awareness of the reader’s experience. In Hall’s

work, this imitates the discovery process so inherent to the experience of

travel. Consequently, the reader travels through exotic lands just as

Isabella and Yuramiru do. However, as opposed to the travelogue – Hall’s

words entice the reader to participate in the discovery. In Lonely

Traveller, there is the music, the sounds of life in the streets, the caged

bird, the watery world of Venice and the promise of a life beyond. There is

the ship, the door to the forbidden cellar, the wife (Isabella’s mother)

whose devotion is mirrored only in the devotion her husband shows for his

own mother. All these things weave into the blended tapestry, which is

Rodney Hall’s literature. Hall’s professional life as a poet predates and

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pre-shapes his work as a novelist. This is a man whose poetry formed him

as a writer, thinker and public figure. His perceptions, though unique to

him are expressed through his volumes of work. These perceptions

support his major dedication to important political, social and racial

issues.

Hall is also a classically trained conductor and recorder player of ancient

music. These musicological influences help create his baroque and

colourful sense of the world and as such enhance the poetry within his

prose. His perceptions finely tune his writing, which becomes as an

instrument in his hands, a symphony conducted.

Isabella, in her naivety, observes the waterways of Venice and ponders the

church of the Holy Virgin under construction. This allows us to consider

her life through Hall’s poeticised language. Thus, the reader experiences

Venice through the heightened perceptions of a traveller. Though Isabella

strolls about her hometown, we view even her familiarity as exotic.

Further, Hall is an Australian. He sees beauty in the lands of foreign

races and peoples through the eyes of the consummate traveller. Yet, this

does not limit his writing to the travelogue’s descriptive language. The

poetry of his text allows a familiarity, which places the reader within the

skin of the protagonist. The term ‘Australians abroad’ defines not only his

travels but also his writing.

The irony is that Isabella’s passing through the unlocked door in her

father’s cellar to her father’s forbidden slave trade opens a new life for her.

Once inside that door she discovers no ordinary slave trade dealing in

beauties and exotics from other lands. Not even this traveller’s expectation

is left unrequited for us and for Isabella. What she expected behind the

door is best left to mystery – a mystery captured so sweetly in the

language of the novel. Without the poetry and transformation, we have

only the gentle reminder of intelligence unlived, a sensibility undisturbed,

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and Isabella’s facile, protected life in Venice. Through the door she

ventures and there in the shadows, in the embers of cigars and the

darkened silhouettes of merchants, lies the treasures of the orient and

beyond: dwarfs, a pale shell of a hermaphrodite (the vision of which

obsesses Isabella) and eventually Yuramiru. It seems for a time this

hapless white creature will be the focus of the novel: the inciting incident

revealed. Yet, there is a more poetic ally to come: Yuramiru, the precious

creature from an undiscovered Australia. The white of the hermaphrodite

contrasts to the vivid black of Yuramiru. Both are equally balanced

symbols of transgression: the first of sexuality; the second of the

enticement of a great southern land, the island in the mind recently

invented as the opera in Terra Incognita.

Even in the shifting sights and watery reflections of Venice, even in the

life of a naïve, virgin Catholic girl, there is the promise of travel. The

water reflects. The bird in the cage sings softly yet disturbingly, like an

augury waiting in the wings. As with poetry, we must cross the threshold

and experience the disturbance, which keeps the traveller moving on. It is

as if Isabella’s anima literata speaks of freedom. Ironically, it is her very

entrapment by the suffragan bishop, then the Muslims, which liberates

her form the claustrophobia of Venice. Thus, corruption, the church,

sexual repression and her ignorance of other lands and cultures is

banished upon her kidnapping. Isabella’s transformation begins and ends

poetically.

Hall’s poetic language also reinvents the natural land of Australia. In

poetic fashion, Yuramiru’s telepathically communicated journey across

Australia does not advance the plot. Indeed, the plot is less interesting

than the experiential nature of the journey. In our own travellers’ hearts,

we are invited into the rigorous perception of an author who has ventured

before us. Hall resists the ideology of the imperial explorer whose

language has ascribed prejudiced meaning and perception to the

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Australian landscape. This was the case with the map-making explorers

whose respect for the land waned under their imperial pomposity (Genoni

2004). On the contrary, Hall’s poetic rendering of the second journey of the

novel, Australia, re-invents the land in its own pre-colonial right. This

renewed perception of the land, as Genoni (2004) points out, is germane to

the descriptive power of Hall’s novels. Hall is no mere second-hand

reporter but an inventor of forms and words who co-creates the land before

him. Tacey adds that Hall’s vision respects the Aboriginal nations and is

‘beyond white consumerist appropriations of Aboriginality’ (1995, p. 174).

Hall’s respect and non-patronising depiction of Yuramiru is evident in the

patient wording of his text.

This is also the case with Isabella’s horrified discovery of Yuramiru in the

cellar, with the deepening layers of travel, memory and dream exoticism

and in the lyrical depiction of the Australian desert, beginning at Wilpena

Pound. For Hall, the land is a poem; just as for Yuramiru, the land is a

song. This is the song of the song-lines embedded within Isabella’s singing

voice and in the uncanny observations conveyed through the telepathic

projections of Yuramiru:

Yuramiru confused the process by singing softly in his own

language, and when I looked up at him I was dumbfounded to

find his whole body addressing itself to me with terrific force…

He knows I was in his bare land – even though fully awake (Hall

1996, p. 277).

Here, the singing, the landscape as mindscape, makes Australia

functional within the poetry of the novel. Hall conveys a poetic sense of a

land he describes as possessing:

…the unique sensation of total aloneness, and the mystery of

feeling overpowered by the very featurelessness of the land and

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its indifference to your being there… a place rich in ghosts’ (33)

(Genoni 2004, p. 196).

Here Hall aligns his story with the power of destiny, thus de-emphasising

plot in Forster’s (1955) sense. This allows the message of Australia to

surface in a ghostly fashion: through music like a summoning of

imagination as opposed to the more plot-driven Italian leg of the journey.

In the formal construction of the language, Europe is figuratively

imagining Australia. Hence, Yuramiru turns up in the midst of the green

continent as a Lamarckian idea.

In his approach to art, Hall defends the right of mystery to remain

mystery, not to be analysed into diminutive forms. The breaking of this

mysterious code might leave the reader bereft of the novel’s essential

poetry. Though in no way ignoring the pursuits of the intellect, Hall

pictures Australia as a hot, sandy continent, a land of tress and grass and

an opening toward the east through which Yuramiru makes his passage.

This slow footpace toward the east contrasts to Isabella’s gradual descent

downwards: into the cellar; into the world of the heathen; into the

unknown; and into her own disavowed sexuality. Indeed, poetry is the

flesh that binds the bones of this story.

Modern Australian writers who shy away from stories of the real

Australians do so through faintness of heart and lack of research. Hall is

the calibre of writer not daunted by any subject and, as Tacey points out,

he applies his respect and poetic understandings to the travels of

Yuramiru:

Rodney Hall has been seen by some commentators as foolhardy for

taking up the sensitive topic of Aboriginal spirituality, but he shows

a way that is clearly beyond white consumerist appropriations of

Aboriginality (1995, p. 174).

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In this vein, Hall recreates the horror and sacredness of circumcision

rituals around the poetically prescribed edges of the narrative in Captivity

Captive (1991). Similarly, Hall creates the song-line journey of Yuramiru

in Lonely Traveller. As Tacey (1995) illustrates, Hall has the applied

ability to move the reader through their own perceptions and into an

acceptance of the Aboriginal people’s right to their land. Hall invents the

character of Yuramiru, guided to travel beyond his continent, guided

beyond Western reason and beyond the pleading of his life partner, to

venture out to discover the great land to the north. For an Australian, the

irony here is twofold. Previously, Europe sought trade routes to the

southern hemisphere whilst the contemporary Australian seeks cultural

validation in Europe (Hall 1998). Hall invents a new Australia with

Yuramiru’s journey north. His imaginative, Kierkegaardian leap of faith

allows history to be rewritten, or at least re-suggested. The imperial mind

sees Australia not only discovered but also defined by Europeans. Just as

their pictorial depictions of nature, the flora and fauna of Australia

resonated more with their European sensibilities than the rugged reality

of the land, so their descriptions, their naming of the land inhibited their

ability to genuinely perceive it (Genoni 2004). Hall suggests, that to really

see the beauty and the alien-ness of the land demands the visitor stand

still, listen and observe the land in order for its gems to become apparent.

This, as Genoni (2004) points out, is Hall’s ability to imbibe language from

the land itself. The hero of The Second Bridegroom, a convict from the Isle

of Mann, does not know that his perceived hopping fawns are wallabies,

nor that the smooth white caterpillars are witchetty grubs because his

Europeanising language proves inadequate to know these odd creatures.

Those same witchetty grubs make an appearance in Lonely Traveller and

both manifestations hand the reader a cerebral puzzle, which

simultaneously adds to the poetry and to the inventive language, the

intelligence and imagination of the reader’s experience. Even the nature of

the grub changes for the reader between these two novels: the first

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appearance as sustenance, the second as animistic token. For his readers,

Hall unties the knots of imperially reinforced perceptions to gain

knowledge of the thing in itself. Just as George Orwell (2010) encourages

the writer away from cliché, so Hall teases the reader into prying open

their received perceptions.

This prying open of a gap in perception happens on many levels: Isabella’s

mind is opened during the narrative from the narrow understandings of a

girl deceived (by her Father, by religion, by her own developing racism) to

Isabella’s stolid realisation of her fate of never returning to Italy. For the

duration of the novel, Isabella’s worldview is in flux, not the least part of

this is her telepathic view of a land unseen: an Australia travelled east as

she follows the Italian coast south. This parallel journey holds within it a

poetic convergence.

This poetic underpinning to the reader’s perception interests Hall deeply.

Just as the cinema might use impressionistic editing to convey the

confusion of battle, so Hall utilises the momentum inherent in the prose to

bind the reader in a tumble of activity. Also akin to cinema is Hall’s ability

to infuse his narrative action with poetic reflection. This constant tension

between forward-moving action and inner reflection is reported in the

educated words of the diarist, Isabella (who ironically claims she shows no

talent for diarising). This allows the ensuing galley attack to unfold

shockingly, colourfully and lyrically at the same time. As the eighteen

galleys attack Isabella’s ship, she reports on the beauty and terror in a

reflective mode:

If you are the victim facing them, it is awful. The flutter of a

thousand blades at the same moment, evil beaks stabbing through

waves, and then puffs of smoke when canons fire from this prow or

that. I found myself thinking more of dragons than butterflies. So

they came frothing and sculling towards us. Terrifying. What use

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was a pair of galleots – even when they did draw close on either side

(Hall 1996, p. 246).

Not only is there beauty in her reported terror here, but there is poetry in

her reflection. In this passage, the aesthetic emotion, the dual experience

of art and emotion so common to cinema (McKee 1999), is here captured in

the more pensive form of the novel. With a view of the new world

unfolding though Isabella’s porthole comes the twice-diluted experience of

the galley attack. This occurs firstly through the prism of time passed and

secondly through the interpretive function of the poet/author himself.

Isabella is our proxy in this experience as she processes this trauma as if

by means of the Freudian (1986) compulsion to repeat. The act of writing

her experiences down infuses her words with a confessional air. The diary

serves Hall well in four books from this septalogy (although Lord

Hermaphrodite (1996) is really an extended trade report). These diaries

represent a filtering process for the reader, but not so much as to divide us

from the immediacy of Hall’s prose. Hall utilises poetry to relocate the

reader into the first-hand experience drawing upon his developed skills for

verse and creative improvisation alike. Were the writer not performing

with a sense of musicality the magic might die.

Hall’s choice of words to position Isabella within the above set piece

orientates the reader themselves like a virgin facing corruption. Isabella is

the ‘victim’ whose initial experience is one of awe (1996, p. 246). There is,

for Isabella an almost religious ‘awe’ in the petrifying sight of the galley

attack. Yet, Hall’s expression betrays Isabella’s stark heroic character as

well: although a girl disempowered by circumstance, gender and era, she

faces forward with a newly discovered and innate heroism. Hall then

propels us from experience to vision as if arrested in time. Even the words

‘The flutter of a thousand blades’ hold an inherent, fricative shock. The

victim’s in-breath is here implied in the repeated internal rhyme: the ‘a’ in

‘blade’ and ‘same’, the ‘e’ in ‘evil’ and ‘beaks’. Having reported this initial

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shock, Hall then descends to a pensive moment: ‘I found myself thinking

more of dragons than butterflies’ (1996, p. 246). Here again the reflective

nature of thought holds within it a poetic and contrasting allusion to

dragons and butterflies. Both are flying creatures and equally exotic.

Dragons are overwhelming, the stuff of myth. By contrast, butterflies are

small and delicate. Dragons are masculine whilst butterflies are feminine,

yet both use sexual/genital imagery. Here again, Isabella is implied as a

butterfly facing the dragon of the galley and the dragon of her travels to

come and further, the dragon of her own sexuality. Her own

transformation is again foreshadowed here. The high dramatic stakes are

suggested in this sentence. She begins in the butterfly-like simplicity and

delicacy of Venice under the Catholics. She now faces the dragon-like

potential of the ‘heathens’ (Hall 1996, p. 262). The very anonymity of her

attackers suggests terror and the mythological status of an unknowable

hoard. Then again, like a dangerous animal preparing for attack, the

unknown thing comes: ‘frothing and sculling towards us’. Here again, the

repetition in sound and image comes to us in pairs: the alliterative

blades/beaks; stabbing/smoke; and onward to the contrasting and

complimentary imagery of dragons/butterflies and the internally rhyming

cadence of frothing/sculling. These pairings allow formal access to emotion

in action-based excitement, but also in the poetically rendered diary

report. These two strains of the literature come not as clever devices set to

draw attention to themselves, but result from the momentum of Hall’s

truly poetic and musical use of language, even in an action-based set

piece.

The musicality in the falling cadence of ‘evil beaks stabbing through

waves’ is followed by the rising cadence of ‘then puffs of smoke when

canons fire’. This demonstrates Hall’s inherent and unforced

understanding of classical music. In a literary sense, the second phrase

utilises the suspense sentence and is a reversal of the first (McKee 1999).

Thus, another pairing is formed: the suggested ritardando/decrescendo of

18

the first phrase and the accelerando/crescendo of the second. This is

further assisted by the monosyllabic delivery of the images. Together they

form just part of a poetic and emotional impact. Then, with the sudden

force of shuddering emotion, Hall concludes, arrests and reinvents the

established rhythm with another reversal, the single word sentence:

‘Terrifying’. This word, strategically chosen to assuage the growing

momentum, thus halts the action sequence. The poetry is left to conclude

with another falling cadence describing Isabella’s frightening realisation

of her own ship’s impotence: ‘What use was a pair of galleots – even when

they did draw close on either side.’

The transformative experience for Isabella (and the reader) is captured in

every word, every image and every poetic device. Hall’s imaginative

rendition leaves the reader stultified and excited both, just as the genuine

traveller might be in the face of the new. The reader crosses cultures and

religious doctrines, transgressing their own understandings. Perhaps only

in the poetry of the novel can the ongoing journey be captured for the

reader. Only then can Isabella’s experience be communicated beyond mere

description.

However, Isabella’s experience of travel does not end with the galley

attack. The developing plot device of her telepathic connection to

Yuramiru allows the reader to take yet another step, this time a wildly

imaginative and connective one:

I am walking at night, always walking. I am not tired. I still sing.

And the song is the same. The moon floats above, its frail white

shell broken as it drifts in a sky as utterly clear after dark as it is

during the day – and almost as blue (Hall 1996, p. 275).

Here again, Hall utilises his natural capacity for poetry in prose. Yet, here

also, the mystery and intrigue of Yuramiru’s journey (the significance of

19

which is still unfolding for Isabella) is captured in language entirely

different to the previous example. The journey across Australia,

unencumbered by the details of plot-driven experience, liberates Hall into

the more alliterative, more stultifying mood of the words. The sentences

are short, halting phrases, as if the writer (Isabella) catches her breath in

starts. Repetition of the word ‘walking’ (with its internal rhythm of two

steps: walk-ing, walk-ing) suggests in one simple repetition the endless act

of walking a long distance through mostly flat landscape. Then again, it

appears in the double repetition of the words: walking/walking, sing/song,

I/I/I. Then just as we settle into the trudging emotion of distance

experienced by foot, Hall changes the rhythm again. We now move to a

gentler, more pensive use of language: ‘The moon floats above, its frail

white shell broken as it drifts in a sky as utterly clear after dark as it is

during the day – and almost as blue.’ Here alliteration (floats/frail,

drifts/dark/during/day) and monosyllabic strings of words (‘moon floats

above’, ‘frail white shell’) give us a lilting, tripping quality as if the

repetition within the former phrase (walk-ing) has now lulled us into a

meditative state. The cadence unfolds and purloins the moment like a

flying thing coming to rest upon the land. This is a theme prevalent in this

Australian leg of the journey, not only stated, but also implied in the

imagery and poetic phraseology of the novel.

In language reminiscent of Isabella’s description of the pale

hermaphrodite, the moon (with its Jungian implications) suggests an

inherently mythical experience. Thus, the language reflects the story. The

very act of walking long distances is one known to Hall, given his trip

across Europe by foot at age twenty-two. Here again, the implication of

travel is multi-layered. Hall is remembering his walking discovery of

Europe as Isabella is re-experiencing and animated by Yuramiru’s

primary experience of walking Australia. Here the novel merges with the

writer’s relived reality in a metaphor for the entire septalogy: Europe’s

dream becomes Australia’s dreaming. This is Isabella’s dream, which is

20

simultaneously Yuramiru’s dreaming.1 Isabella’s discovery of Australia is

ensconced within Yuramiru’s burgeoning experience of the prophesy of

Europe. This first chronological character in the septalogy walks in

contrast to the last character (Audrey in Hitler), who flies. In the above

example from Lonely Traveller, both walking and flying provide a sense of

travel. The first is underlined by the meditative experience of poetry itself.

These well-placed poetic devices neither draw undue attention nor arrest

the unfolding prose. This passage, as with many others on the Australian

voyage, gives the reader a poetic evocation not only of Australia, but also

of Yuramiru’s soul and his soul’s connection to the land. As we have seen,

this is a connection stemming from Hall’s own respect for the land (Tacey

1995). This places the necessary preconditions for Isabella’s interpretation

of Yuramiru’s need to return to Ikara. In order for his soul to find its

home, Isabella must return his teeth to the land. This functions as the

culmination of all three journeys in this novel. Isabella rationalises her

western misunderstanding of the ‘land in the mind’ (Genoni 2004, p. 196).

To Isabella, the island in the mind is a strange and enigmatic place devoid

of European explanation. In the chronological unfolding of the septalogy

(though Scarron has conceived of Terra Incognita as an opera), Isabella is

the first European character to (vicariously) spy the land of Australia.

Isabella’s transformation is completed not in this novel, but in its sequel,

Lord Hermaphrodite, where she reaches maturity in the Mughal empire in

India as the curator of the Emperor’s museum. Yet, for Isabella, the

sights, sounds, colours and smells of Venice remain indelible and the alien

experience of Australia takes the form of a disappearing dream: a dream

more luminous than love.

1 Hall objects to the term ‘Dreamtime’ as a misappropriation due to poor

translation (personal communication, October, 2000).

21

Hall’s literature utilises poetic device and sensibility as is amply

demonstrated in The Lonely Traveller by Night. In this novel, poetic

expression and musicality in language converge to illustrate the concept of

travel both narratively and figuratively. Lonely Traveller considers the

plight of a European character and her Australian counterpart. Hall’s

exploitation of travel as both theme and transformative metaphor holds

both literary and political meaning. This essay merely hints at the

sophistication of Hall’s art and more study ought to be dedicated to the

acknowledgement of so finessed an author.

REFERENCE LIST

Books, Films & Journals

‘The blood of a poet’ 1930, motion picture, France: Vicomte de Noailles.

Forster, EM 1984 A passage to India, Harcourt, Inc., New York.

Forster, EM 1955 Aspects of the novel, Harcourt, Inc., New York.

Freud, S 1990, Art and literature: Jensen’s Gradiva, Leonardo Da Vinci

and other works, Penguin Books Ltd., Middlesex, England.

Freud, S 1986, ‘Totem and taboo’, in Dickson, A (ed.), The origins of

religion, Penguin Books Ltd., Middlesex, England, pp. 42-224.

Genoni, P 2004, ‘Rodney Hall: exploring the land in the mind’, in

Subverting the empire: explorers and exploration in Australian

fiction’, Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd. Altona Vic, Australia.

22

Hall, R 1991, ‘The second bridegroom’, ‘Captivity captive’, in The Yandilli

trilogy: A dream more luminous than love, Faber and Faber, London.

Hall, R 1996, ‘Terra Incognita’, ‘The lonely traveller by night’, ‘Lord

hermaphrodite’ in The island in the mind, Pan MacMillan, Australia.

Hall, R 2000, The day we had Hitler home, Pan MacMillan, Australia.

Hall, R 1998, Abolish the states! Australia’s future and $30 billion answer

to our tax problems. Pan MacMillan, Australia.

Leonard, C 1977, Michael Chekhov’s to the director and playwright,

Greenwood Press, Inc., United States of America.

Lermontov, M 2001, A hero of our time, Penguin Classics, Australia.

McKee, R 1999, Story: substance, structure, style and the principles of

screenwriting, Methuen Publishing Limited, Great Britain.

Orwell, G 2010, Politics and the English language and other essays,

United Kingdom: Oxford City Press,

Tacey, D 1995, ‘Rodney Hall: old, new, black and white dreamings’, in

Edge of the sacred: transformation in Australia, HarperCollins

Publishers, Australia, pp.170-174.

Vogler, C 1996, The writer’s journey: mythic structure for storytellers and

screenwriters, Boxtree Limited, London.

Online:

23

Tate, N 1688, Dido and Aeneas, viewed October 21, 2011,

<http://home.olemiss.edu/~mudws/dido.html>

Williams, B 1998, ‘Rodney Hall’, in In other words: interviews with

Australian poets, Rodopi, Amsterdam–Atlanta, pp.35-48), viewed

October 31, 2011,

<http://books.google.com/books?id=L2UI3AG5SZoC&pg=PA36&dq=ro

dney+hall&hl=en#v=onepage&q=rodney%20hall&f=false>

Kianush, K 2000, Jalal al-Din Rumi: Persian Sufi sage and poet, viewed

November 6th, 2011, <http://www.art-arena.com/rumi.htm>

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edmundson, M 2008, The death of Sigmund Freud: fascism,

psychoanalysis and the rise of fundamentalism, Bloomsbury

Publishing, Great Britain.

Jung, C 1968 Man and his symbols, Dell Publishing, New York.

Purdon, N 1998, Spinning the globe, Duffy & Snellgrove, Australia.

Ratcliffe, G 2000, The grotesque poetics of Rodney Hall’s dream trilogies,

unpublished master’s thesis, University of Wollongong, New South

Wales, Australia.

Satyricon 1969, motion picture, Italy: Produzioni Europee Associati (PEA).