Wayne Macauley’s novella tells the story of a failed
government-funded housing estate. Envisioned as a village of 1,000
people 50 kilometres north of Melbourne, potential residents are
offered incentives, such as the building of a highway and petrol
discounts, to relocate. But these promises never materialise and the
community dwindles to seven people. Stranded far from the city, the
remaining develop an informal commune increasingly isolated from the
outside world.
The novella (though billed as a novel) feels more like a bloated short
story in form and scope and Macauley’s tale spirals into an
absurdist surreality reminiscent of
-era
Peter Carey. The residents of the estate (pseudo-cleverly renamed
‘Ur’ because those are the only two remaining
letter of its
official name - the Outer Suburban Village Development Complex) square
off against vandals, government freeway builders, and the creation of
an adjacent garbage tip. Eventually two are driven to a
bushranger/guerilla insurgency that evokes Ned Kelly.
To Macauley’s credit, the plot remains bewitching and
ethereal,
lending a vaguely allegorical bent to the story, which seems to reflect
on Australia’s own settlement and antipodean isolation from
the
West, as well as the alienation of modern suburban living.
Unfortunately, the characters remain flat and unbelievable - and while
this may be the point, evoking ‘types’ rather than
rounded
characters, this approach often comes off as affected rather than
effective. Bram, the novel’s narrator, claims to be in love
with
Jodie, but she remains a secondary character and inexplicably
disappears from this short book for dozens of pages at a stretch -
despite his supposed infatuation. At other points, important
information is delivered after the fact (e.g., after cleaning a gunshot
wound, one character conveniently mentions her background as a nurse).
Macauley’s prose, though verbose enough to suggest an
intellectual narrator, is staid and uncomfortably ridden with cliches
(such as ‘ridden with cliches’).
The book’s nadir occurs when a character literally navigates
up a
sewage-drenched river in a barbed-wire canoe - a premise trying so hard
to be clever that it nearly cripples an otherwise enchanting story.
Still, the hallucinatory power of Macauley’s tale ultimately
manages to surmount these shortcomings. His novella remains ambitious
and experimental - and it succeeds more often than it fails. In an era
when many Australian novelists are playing it safe,
Macauley’s
literary gambits are refreshing even when they don’t pan out.
Most impressively-for a work that is consciously literary, intellectual
and experimental -
makes for a page-turning, accessible read. It is not a masterwork, nor
even an unqualified success, but its high aspirations and ability to
tackle multiple issues in a small space suggest that Wayne Macauley is
an ambitious talent worth watching.
Romana Koval interviews Wayne
Macauley
27 November 2005
Blueprints For A Barbed-Wire Canoe
Summary:
We’re up the creek without a paddle this week. Ramona is in
conversation with Wayne Macauley about his first novel
Blueprints For A Barbed-Wire
Canoe.
It’s about a failed suburban housing development. And while
the
story is firmly rooted in the complexities of contemporary urban
Australia, it also has the timeless feel of a fable or allegory to it.
The new housing estate promises its residents a marvellous lifestyle,
but what they end up getting is a life they could never have imagined.
It’s a bleak, funny, and utterly original take on the
Australian
dream of owning your own home and living a happy life.
Ramona Koval:
Hello, Ramona
Koval with you on ABC Radio National. This is Books and Writing, and
this week we’re all going up the creek in a barbed-wire
canoe.
Wayne Macauley is the bloke who’s taking us there.
He’s the
author of a book called
Blueprints
for a Barbed-Wire Canoe.
It’s his first novel, published by a relatively small
publisher,
Black Pepper, and unusually for a first novel it’s just gone
into
reprint. It has also now found its way onto the Victorian certificate
of education English curriculum reading list, and it’s a book
that’s firmly rooted in the complexities of contemporary
urban
Australia, but it also has the timeless feel of a fable or allegory to
it.
Blueprints for a
Barbed-Wire Canoe
is the story of a failed housing estate, an outer suburban development
in Melbourne that offers the people who go to live there affordable
housing, a village lifestyle and the promise of a fast freeway to the
city. But in reality the services and amenities never arrive.
Eventually only a few obstinate residents remain, feeling conned and
isolated. As Wayne Macauley writes of their situation, and
it’s a
strange but actually very apt way to put it; ‘We had no
mighty
river of a freeway to irrigate us, to give us cars and life.’
Wayne Macauley:
Yes, it’s
an odd metaphor, isn’t it, because it almost goes against the
grain. We’ve been trained to dislike freeways, but in fact,
yes,
that’s right, almost every outer suburban development is
totally
dependant on them. So if we were to look at a symbol that represented
what actually provides life, work, travel to an outer suburban housing
development, then the freeway is it.
Ramona Koval:
So these people were promised a freeway, and they were encouraged to
really go to a suburban utopia.
Wayne Macauley:
Yes,
you’re buying a home not a house, you’re buying a
life…it’s more the advertising that annoys me
about the
idea of utopia. I think it’s possible for people to dream
about
utopias, and I think dreaming about them is fine, but selling them as a
package is another thing entirely.
Ramona Koval:
So these citizens
who’ve bought here in the ‘outer suburban village
development complex’, as it’s called, and
they’re
expecting this freeway as a river, giving them cars and life, and they
suddenly realise that they have been really let go by the planners,
politicians, and it has turned into a suburban dystopia. It
doesn’t turn into that immediately but slowly, slowly, and it
starts with a smell. Tell me about the smell.
Wayne Macauley:
It’s the
smell of sewerage flowing into a creek from a pipe that was never
connected. As simple as that really; the smell, the first scent that
something may be wrong. I suppose the idea of the smell, of something
that’s on the nose, continues throughout the book, as also a
rubbish tip is then put nearby, to the residents’ horror, to
the
residents’ disbelief, and that smell also wafts across the
estate.
Ramona Koval:
Interestingly though, Bram, who’s... well, I guess in a sense
he’s the author of this, it’s his history...
Wayne Macauley:
He’s a narrator.
Ramona Koval:
He’s a
narrator, but he is writing, he’s trying to write a history,
and
he’s an archaeologist in a sense too because we meet him kind
of
at the end when he’s digging through the stuff and
he’s
finding artefacts and he’s telling us about those artefacts
and
how they got there. Why does he stay in his stinking house?
Wayne Macauley:
Initially
it’s because he’s staying there out of protest. He
believes, and most of the other residents do, that this can’t
be
true, that what has been promised will come, utopia will happen. But
then eventually I think there is a point at which the logic of that
disperses and there is something more strange and perhaps insane that
takes over.
Ramona Koval:
There’s
also a kind of Ned Kelly twist, there are some urban bush rangers that
get developed during the plot, and all sort of twists like that. But
it’s a kind of bleak book with amusing bits.
Wayne Macauley:
I love that. That’s very quotable.
Ramona Koval:
Did you mean it to be whimsical?
Wayne Macauley:
There’s a
certain element to myself that enjoys whimsy. Whimsy’s a bit
wet
for me but... humour, I can’t help it. Amusing bits, I
can’t help it. And of course there’s another side
of me
that is dark, troubled... not troubled but that worries about things a
lot. So I suppose it’s those two things coming together.
I’d have to say that some of my favourite bits are those bits
where, as a reader, I would say, ‘I don’t know what
I’m supposed to do. Am I supposed to laugh here or
not?’
And I love that moment where any art form takes you to that very
uncomfortable place where you know you want to laugh but
you’re
not sure whether you should be, given the circumstances. But in fact
that’s often where the best laughter comes from.
Ramona Koval:
In the suburbs,
and in fact in this particular suburban dystopia, the name of the
suburb is Ur, because it was... now what’s the phrase again?
Wayne Macauley:
Outer suburban
village development complex. However, all the letters from the sign
which, on the roadway into the estate, have fallen off or been
souvenired by the vandals, and after some time everything except the
two letters from ‘suburban’ are left;
‘ur’, Ur.
Ramona Koval:
Which is also,
strangely enough, the name of a ancient city. Tell me about Ur, and
tell me about the fragments of poems at the beginning of the book.
Wayne Macauley:
There’s
an epigraph at the beginning of the book which is from an ancient
Sumerian poem. Most of those Sumerian poems are hymns, laments,
threnodies... they mourn the loss, mostly in fact, of cities, and this
being an extract from a poem called ‘Lamentation for
Ur’, I
think it is. Ur is famous for a couple of things. Ur is in the
Mesopotamian Valley in present-day Iraq...
Ramona Koval:
And Abraham came from Ur too.
Wayne Macauley:
Correct, yes.
That’s one of the things that it is famous for. In a sense it
was
the place in which Monotheism began really, and those three great
religions then sprang from that. Judaic myth and legend tells the story
where Abraham one day had a fit with his old man Terach who was a maker
of idols, and said, ‘You’re making all these idols
to all
these gods, this is bullshit, you know? There’s only one
God,’ and he actually picked up all the idols and smashed
them on
the floor. That’s what I think of your polytheism, Dad! And
off
he went and ended up, of course, going to the Promised Land as we know
it in that particular strand of mythology.
Ur was also an extraordinary place because it was also generally
acknowledged as the birth of civilisation. That is to say, some of the
fundamental things started there, particularly urban living. People
moved in off the plains and actually settled down, built houses, brick
houses, and they planted crops, they actually settled, and they
established all those kinds of city things that we know about. They had
pubs and cafes and stuff and they started to live an urban existence.
Also writing as we know it (symbols that imitate the phonetics of
speech) was invented in a.... which I find really intriguing, but
that’s where writing, as we westerners understand it, began.
And also probably the most important thing of all; beer was invented in
Ur. So Ur was a very interesting place, but of course as it relates to
this book clearly there’s a couple of things... one is the
idea
of an ancient civilization, an original civilisation, and from my
nihilistic view of how in some ways the civilisation of the west since
then has got so messed up and so screwed up. There is some sense of;
what is civilisation? Civilisation of cities, urban civilisations; how
can we be getting it so horribly wrong?
Ramona Koval:
But then again,
how can we expect that anything will last forever, because things have
always diminished after they’ve been built up.
Wayne Macauley:
Look, true, and
in some ways that’s the metaphor running back to ancient Ur,
which is precisely that; it rose and it fell, it rose and it fell, and
that’s what civilisations do. The other interesting thing is
archaeology because we only know about these civilisations by digging
them over...
Ramona Koval:
Through their rubbish dumps.
Wayne Macauley:
Well,
that’s absolutely true; we actually dig over their rubbish,
and
we pull them out and these things are precious items that we display in
glass cases in museums, and it’s what tells us about those
civilisations. So in some sort of small way, the metaphor of all the
letters but ‘ur’ falling off the sign out the front
of the
estate points us in this direction of an attempt at civilisation, an
attempt at urban living that unfortunately does go wrong and is
lamented over. But there are signs and symbols there, there is debris
embedded in the ground that we can go back and we can hunt though and
look through. As readers we can hunt through and look through the clues
and signs in this thing called a book. We can go back, dig that over,
have a look in there and see what we can find out about these people;
who they were, how they lived their life, and also maybe where they
went wrong. What happened? Why? Did they screw it up or were they
sacked by invaders or...? For me that’s the perhaps tenuous
thread between some place that rose up out of the desert, out of the
flat landscape 4000 years ago and an estate in some time roughly
concurrent with ours that springs up on the northern plains out of
Melbourne.
Ramona Koval:
Blueprint for a
Barbed-Wire Canoe,
this story of an urban nightmare, begins with days of pelting rain and
the discovery of the washed-up remnants of a canoe and the body of a
young woman called Jodie. Later, the narrator Bram is given a leather
satchel. Inside is a piece of writing that gives the novel its title.
Here’s Wayne Macauley reading what his character, Bram, has
discovered in the satchel:
Wayne Macauley
[reading from
Blueprints
for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, pgs 104-106]:
Be
sure you’re sick of life, say to yourself: I’ve had
enough.
Take a roll of rusted barbed-wire and some pieces of nail-infested wood
and shape it into a canoe. Choose a moonless night, a night with no
moon, the darkest night; you are the only witness, the only one who
should see.Take your canoe down to the filthy creek when the stench is
at its worst, tighten the chin strap of your hat and button your jacket
up hard—the journey will be long and fraught with danger. You
will use no paddle, you will need no paddle, but will carry a big jar
of salt with you and throw handfuls from the stern. This will propel
the canoe away from the dark unfathomable ocean, of which the salt is a
cruel reminder, upstream towards the pure crystal waters at the source.
Recite the prayer: Nothing Matters, I Don’t
Care—three
times every hour: this will give you strength. Hold your head up high.
Never doub tthe wisdom of your journey, do not ask Where or Why; the
canoe is a sensitive one, it may turn on a pinhead and rush you back to
the ocean or drop like a stone beneath you. All night you will travel
and well into the following day. When the salt runs out do not despair,
the waters will be clearing now and the canoe will know it has safely
left the muck behind. Dip the empty jar over the side and hold the
contents up to the light; you are looking for water so clear that it
seems not to be there, that the jar itself appears to dissolve in your
hand. If you do not find it onthe second day, do not despair, go on, if
you do not find it on the third, repeat the prayer more often and hold
your head a little higher. If you do not find it on the fourth or
fifth, don’t worry, go on. If after a week the jar does not
dissolve and the water in it is still putrid and thick, take heart, go
on, the second week may yet see you safely to your journey’s
end.
When in the third week the canoe starts leaking, bail it out, be brave,
go on, and when in the fourth week you find yourself becalmed and feel
it slowly sinking beneath you, bail harder, keep faith, don’t
worry, go on. It is then, and only then, as your carefully thought out
and well-constructed vessel sinks slowly towards the muddy bottom that
you may allow yourself to cry out: Help! But do it softly,
don’t
make a big show of it, you are the only witness, the night is moonless
again and you are miles away from home; do it softly, sweetly, and as
the waters engulf you don’t whatever you do forget to keep
your
head held high.
Ramona Koval:
So the way you
read that, of course, there is a bit of whimsy in that too, and then
you say, ‘don’t forget to keep your head held
high’,
but actually that is when the person is actually drowning,
isn’t
it?
Wayne Macauley:
Yes.
Ramona Koval:
And it’s a
kind of ‘never give up’, ‘keep your head
held high,
no matter what’s happening to you, don’t lose your
dignity’... but this is a suicide not.
Wayne Macauley:
Yes, it could
be thought of as that, but it’s also in some ways a summation
of
the thread that runs through the book which is precisely that. Maybe
it’s a little folksy and homespun but, yes, keep trying,
things
might get better, if not today maybe tomorrow. And that’s, in
fact, the core of belief amongst, I must say, these very ordinary
people who go to this place with a dream. So it’s not
unreasonable for them to keep hanging on to the dream, and really the
blueprints, as articulated in the book, the blueprints for a
barbed-wire canoe are in some ways a statement of fact of how these
residents have lived their lives.
Ramona Koval:
But then it
starts saying, ‘Be sure you’re sick of life. Say to
yourself, I’ve had enough, and then take a roll of rusted
barbed-wire and some pieces of nail-infested wood and shape it into a
canoe.’ I mean, that’s the suicide bit, I think.
Wayne Macauley:
I don’t know, I’m not going to necessarily agree
that is a suicide note.
Ramona Koval:
It’s a recipe for suicide.
Wayne Macauley:
Well, life is a
progression from birth to death and in that sense it’s one
long
walk to suicide if you want to think of it like that. I actually think
those blueprints are more (in that sense) philosophical. The
saying—to be up shit creek in a barbed-wire canoe without a
paddle—is something that I think expresses…what is
it?
It’s a way of saying how dreadful life can be, how appalling
the
situation is, whatever, but ah whatever, you know? I’ll go
on,
I’ll keep going. So it’s a fine line, as you say,
between
darkness and humour. But I don’t know if it’s a
suicide
note.
Ramona Koval:
I suppose I
thought that because we see this woman getting quite dead in the
beginning of the book from following exactly this blueprint.
Wayne Macauley:
It’s true
that the canoe doesn’t work and that’s a fact, that
you
can’t actually sail upstream, up a creek...
Ramona Koval:
With a jar of salt.
Wayne Macauley:
Even with a jar
of salt. You can’t, you’re not going to make it.
But,
again, the philosophy expressed in that, and perhaps again in the book
as a whole amongst these ordinary people, is that should that stop you
from trying? If you start from nihilism it’s all up from
there,
you know? I guess that’s, to some extent, what
we’re
talking about.
Ramona Koval:
The book is going
to have a young readership now. It’s been set for the
2006/2007
Victorian certificate of education English and English as a second
language curriculum, which is marvellous for you.
Wayne Macauley:
It’s
fantastic, it’s great, for two reasons; one is that
it’s a
first novel, so that’s obviously a nice pat on the back, but
also
it’s by a small publisher, Black Pepper, who are a small
independent publisher in Melbourne. So on both counts I think
it’s a real statement of faith...
Ramona Koval:
About nihilism?
Wayne Macauley:
And humour. Nihilism and humour.
Ramona Koval:
What do you think young people will make of it?
Wayne Macauley:
I look forward
to finding out. I mean that really sincerely. I’m excited
about
that idea. I do think it’s a book that will stand up to more
than
one reading, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why
it’s
been selected, that there are a lot of things to think about in there,
contrary perhaps to the picture you were
painting—it’s not
all bleak because it’s leavened by humour a lot and also some
characters that I think you can emphasise with. So, again, those things
are attractive to people who are perhaps engaging with literature for
the first time. I think the main thing is that it feels that
it’s
got stuff to say and be discussed, which is a great thing to know that
your book will be talked about. It’s also a great thing to
know
that your book will be talked about (perhaps hated, who knows, it
doesn’t matter) by people at that very formative point in
their
lives, because I can remember that moment.
Ramona Koval:
Oh yes, and bleakness or nihilism or passion or... it’s all
very much part of the make up...
Wayne Macauley:
It’s all
that moment of time and I remember that time vividly, and it shapes you
as a human being, no question, those years. So, look, I think
it’s a great privilege to have your work read by people of
that
age and discussed by people of that age and argued with or whatever the
case may be. It’s a wonderful thing.
Ramona Koval:
What sort of a young person were you?
Wayne Macauley:
I was a bit rebellious and I kind of took a while to get my head
straightened out.
Ramona Koval:
Where were you living?
Wayne Macauley:
I was living
out in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Mitcham, just the burbs.
But I had that epiphany that everyone has to have, and it was HSC (as
it was then), year 12, and I chose to do English literature and this
drop-dead gorgeous teacher walked into the room. We did Joyce, we did
Hamlet, we did
Voss, we did
Eliot’s
The
Waste Land... bang! It all went off in my head, and I was
a changed man. I was a man.
Ramona Koval:
She made a man of you.
Wayne Macauley:
Yes, that was
really the moment where I discovered what writing was, what you could
do with it, why it was there and how it could just blow your mind
compared to the thrashing around I was doing. Something went clunk in
my head.
Ramona Koval:
And then what happened?
Wayne Macauley:
Then I left
school and worked on a market garden, and I saved some money and I
travelled around Europe. Then I came back and I did a year at
university, which was good, and then I applied to go to a drama school
too, the Victorian College of the Arts drama school... out of nowhere.
I saw an ad in the paper and saw ‘arts’, and
extraordinarily I got in. I was in my early 20s. I went to drama
school, dropped out of that too, travelled, wrote, travelled, wrote...
and at some point, when people asked me what I did, I started saying
‘writer’. And it takes a long time to arrive at
that point.
No matter how long you’ve been doing it, it actually takes a
long
time and it is a statement of faith. It’s a moment where you
(even if you don’t have a lot of work out there) say
‘this
is what I do’. I guess that is who I am.
Ramona Koval:
What had you written then, when you were calling yourself a writer?
Were you published by then?
Wayne Macauley:
No, I
hadn’t been published. I’d been writing for theatre
and
that was initially what I was doing. I was writing for theatre and
having it performed. I’d been writing short prose, stories,
none
of which I think I’d even tried to place. It was a very
internal
world I was working in. But then I guess it was not long after the
morning that I woke up (so to speak) and called myself a writer that,
yes, I did have my first story placed, and then had progressively stuff
that I had written previously and maybe reworked and worked on and
redrafted... then I began to have my stories published. Then I knew I
was writer... well, a writer of fiction anyway.
Ramona Koval:
The book is dedicated... it’s for your father
‘as promised’. What was that promise?
Wayne Macauley:
It’s
emotionally complex. It’s a promise as much to myself as
anything, but partly to him as well. My dad died quite young. In fact
my dad died the same age I am now, which is 47, which I consider quite
young because I am 47. That was around that upheaval time, really, that
we were talking about before; I was 20 when he died, so I was only just
discovering this thing called literature, you know? And he passed away,
and I don’t think he knew what the hell I was on about, what
on
Earth I was doing with my life...
Ramona Koval:
What did he do?
Wayne Macauley:
He was a
builder. He worked on big building sites in the city, and contracted
early-onset emphysema which was actually related to his work, breathing
the stuff. So he was sick for a long time, not a well man for a long
time. So obviously, me having seen the drop-dead gorgeous literature
teacher and had my epiphany, we were obviously going in separate paths
at that time. So obviously that, as I’m sure it does for a
lot of
people who lose their parents young... it stayed with me and affected
me in many ways. I know that progressively over those lost years,
before I called myself a writer, that I was trying to work that stuff
out. So I knew that one day I would have a book published and that when
I finally did it would be dedicated to him.
Ramona Koval:
There’s a lot of building in this book actually.
There’s a lot of building, there’s a lot of
constructing.
Wayne Macauley:
There’s a
lot of building in my work generally, as a couple of people have
pointed out recently. So, yes, how much of that is conscious I
don’t know, and how much is subconscious. Yes, there is,
that’s right, and the idea of the house, the home, the great
Australian dream... my dad... actually his dad too was a builder and
they built our house, the house I was born in and brought up in, out
there on the edge of the known universe. So that also is something that
runs very strongly in what I do and who I am, but also how I see myself
in this place. Somehow that strange collusion between my father, what
he did, his death, me becoming a writer, being an Australian, being a
Melbournian even more so, all those things somehow are coming together
in my work. I guess they have come together in
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire
Canoe
in that sense because it’s about the great Australian dream,
building your house on a block of land and living a happy life.
Ramona Koval:
Wayne Macauley. And
Blueprints
for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, his first novel, is published by
Black Pepper. And another novel by Wayne called
Caravan
Story will come out early next year.
That’s Books and Writing for now, which is produced by me,
Ramona Koval, and Amanda Smith.
Back to top
Author
Notes on Blueprints
for a Barbed-Wire Canoe
Delivered at the 2005 VATE Conference
EXCAVATING UR
It
had rained for three days solid, in some places the creek had already
burst its banks; she’d waited for nightfall, a night with no
moon. No-one
can say
how spectacularly unsuccessful the launching was, no-one was there on
that dark night to bear witness. Though the remnants of the canoe were
found the following day wrapped crazily around an overhanging branch
almost a kilometre downstream, there is little point speculating on how
much of the journey was made on the surface as hoped and how much of it
tumbling in the putrid waters beneath. The body itself outdistanced the
canoe by a kilometre and a half and was recovered two days later wedged
between the root of a tree and the grey mud of the bank. It wore,
ridiculously, the uniform prescribed; the rabbit skin hat still held in
place by a chin-strap, the jacket still neatly buttoned.
I was asked into town to sign some papers and I drove there dazed and
shaken. Patterson himself seemed genuinely upset. It was, we both knew,
a strange and futile end to a strange and futile saga. Little was said,
little could be said; I saw the body, identified her as Jodie and drove
back home with the image of her blood-drained face and quiet
closed-forever eyes before me.
The rain wouldn’t stop, it came down in endless thin silver
ropes,
pelting the roof and bursting out of the gutters; it was washing
everything, washing everything clean, the whole sad sorry story, across
the paddocks and ruins, from trickles to rivulets to the creek into the
far-off sea. That night, as I sat down at my table and prepared to
break the news to Michael, I knew, at last, that my days here were done.
Michael! Mad, bad, cockeyed Michael! That it should all come to this!
All the twisted lines of our journey, the scratches, the cuts, the
bruises, were marked on her face. But serene, so serene, ghost-white
and pure. Michael! Oh Michael! That it should all come to this!
~
I
loaded the car up with beer from the pub in town and pulled the table
up that night to within arm’s reach of the fridge. Empty cans
littered
the table, the rain drummed hard on the roof. Hours passed, they could
have been years. I couldn’t write to Michael, there were no
words to
fix the image, wrap it in sympathy and carry it safely to him: six
screwed up pieces of paper lay strewn across the floor. I raised myself
unsteadily from the table, stood at the back door and looked out at the
rain. It had already washed the gravel from the path leading down the
back to the creek and the paddocks beyond lay shrouded in darkness and
damp. She’d have passed by here, just down there at the end
of the
path, beyond the murky shaft of light, where I could hear the sound of
the boiling, rushing water even now. Was she standing, head held high
as instructed, or already tumbling, groping, lost? I’d have
been
sleeping, the rain on the roof. And she passed by softly: I
couldn’t
have heard.
I put on my coat, took up the lamp, and walked out into the rain. I
made my way down North Court and trudged to the top of the mountain of
rubble that overlooked the Square. It was a lake now, a low lake of
muddy water in which a few persistent gorse bushes still stood. Nothing
to suggest the summer evenings of suffused orange light, the clinking
of glasses and the hubbub of talk; those long magical evenings now a
lifetime away. Grey sky, grey mud, grey water, drenched by an unending
rain. I walked down the eastern side of the hill towards the few houses
that still stood, miraculously, north-east of the Square. My boots were
caked with mud, my steps were leaden. Thick weeds, gorse and thistle
had long ago claimed the streets; they slapped at my thighs, tore at my
flesh and wet my trousers through.
I walked into the lounge room of an empty house; it reeked of dogs,
bird droppings and damp. A bird flew out the window, leaving the echo
of its flapping in the room. I remembered Michael, and our meeting in
the abandoned house on West Court all those years ago. Flies buzzed in
zigzag patterns around the broken light fitting and the dogs stretched
and yawned on the burnt-brown lawn. That summer was the worst, the
paddocks around us were dead grass and dust; the streets melted, the
gardens withered, a heat shimmer wobbled and distorted everything in
the middle distance and beyond. Days on end spent waiting for night,
nights on end spent dreading the days, we cowed beneath an open sky,
hugging the walls and shadows, listening with one ear cocked to the
distant rumblings whose source we could still not name. He was her
father, I was in love with her, all my words were servant to these
truths.
I trudged back home, my boots and the shoulders of my coat soaked
through, and lit a fire in the grate. Steam rose from the boots on the
hearth and the coat flung over the chair: it hung below the ceiling
like a cloud threatening rain. Rain, rain, everywhere the rain. It
battered the roof and dripped with an insistent rhythm into the
saucepans. I sat at the table and gazed again at the objects assembled
there: a piece of glass from a broken beer bottle, a chipped house
brick, a charred rabbit bone. I arranged and rearranged them on the
table before me, imploring them to tell a story, to reconstitute
themselves into a whole. But they remained stubbornly themselves;
inert, mute, adrift. So are these few reliquiae all that I have
salvaged from the ruins of those years? Small things, absurd,
earth-encrusted things. Had I not come back to dig them out they would
still be sleeping peacefully where they should be, in the all-forgiving
earth.
[pgs 1-4]
It is a great privilege to have your book listed as a text for study,
particularly if it’s the first book you’ve had
published. It says, I think, that your book is considered worthy of
being looked at more than once. And that for me is what a good book is
all about. The books
I
like, anyway. They ask to be read again. They
say to you: I’m more than just surface, there are layers here
too.
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe is a work of irony, and
as such, I
think, it can stand a bit of archaeological excavation. But that
doesn’t mean that what’s beneath the surface is
going to be easily read. I don’t think that’s what
literature’s about: a book should get you thinking, but it
shouldn’t tell you what to think. Fiction-making is a
speculative enterprise, and it’s in these imaginative spaces
the speculative enterprise opens up that the real pleasure of
storytelling and story-reading can be found.
My story is set in the barren cow paddocks to the north of Melbourne,
familiar to us all, but it is also set in ancient Sumeria, in the
fertile delta between the Tigris and the Euphrates. By that I
don’t mean that I jump back and forth between these two
places, as some more cosmopolitan globe-hopping authors might; no, my
story takes place exclusively on the plains north of Melbourne but
beneath it, as subtext (to use the old term), lie those other more
fertile plains of ancient Mesopotamia.
In the Mesopotamian valley, between about 3000 and 2000 BC, some
amazing things started to happen. Nomadic tribes started to, as they
say, ‘settle down’; and the idea of a house, a
home, was born. Why wander the desert looking for food when you can
grow it - grains especially - in the fertile soil of the delta? People
started grabbing blocks of land and putting solid brick houses up on
them. They dropped by to meet their new neighbours. They became a civic
community. Writing was born - yes, writing as we now understand it, the
permanent marking down of symbols to imitate the phonetics of speech -
and, soon outgrowing its purely market-driven origins, this writing
started to convey not just recorded facts but possibilities too and not
just thoughts but feelings. We find poems and stories (the Epic of
Gilgamesh is one), hymns and laments, that, once part of an oral
tradition, were now part of a written tradition too. And all this
activity - drinking, thinking (the Sumerians invented beer too)...
drinking, thinking, despairing, writing - reached a peak around the
second millennium BC in one particular city in the Mesopotamian valley
called Ur.
And in this city called Ur - to keep ourselves in Mesopotamia for a
moment - around 2000 BC, something very significant happened, something
that would in due course drive a wedge between the Old World and the
New, and set Western civilisation in particular (if civilisation we can
still call it) on the path it is now on. Because in this city lived a
young man called Abraham, who, distressed and confused about all the
idol-worship going on around him - An the God of Heaven, Utu the God of
Sun, Enlil the God of Wind, Enki the God of Rivers, Nanna the Goddess
of Moon, Ishkur the God of Rain, Ninurta the God of Floods, Inanna the
Goddess of the Morning and Evening Stars - one day heard the voice of a
new monotheistic God talking to him. Forget about all these other gods,
Abraham’s new God said, there is only one God now, and
that’s Me. Come away from all this confusing, primitive
polytheism and journey now to a place called Canaan, the
‘promised land’, which I have set aside for you.
We’ll start afresh, God said.
...and they went forth... [says Genesis] from Ur of the
Chaldees,
to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt
there...
The idea of a utopia, a promised land, runs deep through the Australian
psyche - the early explorers’ belief in the existence of an
Inland Sea, the events of Eureka and its secessionist subtext, wacky
young Ned’s Kelly Country Republic. And what has undoubtedly
fed into all these utopian dreams is the idea of Australia - Terra
Australis, Terra Nullius - as herself a Utopia. From the picture
painted by the ancient Greeks of Antipodean giants sitting under their
umbrella feet drinking Vodka Cruisers in the sun, to the Ramsay Street
of
Neighbours,
‘promised land’ utopianism has
always clung to us like a green and gold lycra body suit. We represent
Hope with a capital ‘h’: in hope people come here,
in hope people live here. We are western civilisation’s dream
home, the one down the end of the street upon which the sun is always
shining and in the window of which fresh smiling faces can always be
seen. In us and only in us rests the possibility of creating western
civilisation anew, of avoiding the screw-ups, of getting it right...
The Estate was built in
record time and the official opening was
attended by many dignitaries, the most important of whom, the Premier
no less, unveiled the small bronze plaque that up until the destruction
still stood on the grass plantation in the centre of the Square. It was
all a cause for great civic pride at the time and those of us who were
there, the first residents, guinea pigs if you like, felt that we were
taking part in an event of great national importance. Speeches were
made, a large marquee covered the Square and beer, wine and savouries
were served. I hope, said the Premier, one hand on the podium to
prevent his speech being carried off by the wind, that this will become
the model of things to come.
And yes, despite its questionable location and the hurry to completion,
despite everything that has happened since, the Estate was a model of
the new planning ideas at the time and was, in its way, absolutely
unique. It was designed as a kind of self-contained village; a main
Square in the centre surrounded by shops, a bank, a post office and so
on, with four streets radiating out from this Square to each point of
the compass. Each of these four streets then crossed a ring road some
forty metres out from the Square with all except one terminating on the
other side in three bubble-shaped cul-de-sacs or courts. The fourth or
eastbound street crossed the ring road and continued on for a little
over a kilometre until it met up with the main highway to the city -
the only access, by road, to the Estate. Four further cul-de-sacs or
courts branched off from the ring road, making seven in all.
So that the whole thing resembled, if seen from the air and with a
touch of imagination, the great wheel of an old sailing ship bound for
exotic new lands. The four streets and seven courts were named
according to their corresponding positions on the compass; North
Street, East Street, North Court, North-East Court etc.... And they
all, including the ring road, were lined with houses - two hundred and
twenty in all and all identical in design: three bedroom solid brick
with front yard, back yard, driveway and garage. On the basis of four
and a half persons per household, the designers had calculated on a
population of nine hundred and ninety people.
It was, to anyone’s way of seeing things, an extraordinary
achievement.
[pgs 7-9]
My book is set on those flat basalt plains north of Melbourne, where
the last scraps of the outer suburbs tumble over into overworked,
weed-infested cow paddocks. It’s the place ‘in
between’, the most interesting place when you think about it;
a place of ‘possibility’. It is neither city nor
country, urban nor rural. It’s the paddocks north of
Craigieburn, the flatlands out the back of Melton, the Western Highway
past Caroline Springs. It is a place of hope, of new possibilities - in
a world supposedly of no new frontiers it is just that: the new
frontier. Every day another pioneering family loads the wagon and heads
out there. They carve out their quarter-acreage and put up their
dwellings: frontier outposts in a hard inhospitable landscape. They put
up fences and within them set about cultivating, taming, civilising,
the landscape. Instant turf, a weeping cherry, a passionfruit vine
along the back fence. They make a ‘home’ for
themselves (these are not ‘houses’, these are
homes) and
prepare to raise children in them.
I come from the outer suburbs, and have always had an ambivalent
relationship to them. On the one hand I find them absolutely
stultifying, mind-numbing, awful, and on the other the idea of the
suburbs as a
tabula rasa
-
possibility
as opposed to
actuality
- is the
premise that underpins almost everything I do as a writer. For me they
represent the true essence of this country’s white settler
culture (the only culture I have any real familiarity with): a culture
built on our absolute, even irrational, belief in freedom, opportunity
and prosperity. It is the
landscape
of possibility.
The suburbs are and always have been this country’s political
barometer, whether we like it or not what goes on out there (out
here)
shapes our politics in ways we often have trouble dealing with. The
last two federal elections were fought and won in the so-called
‘mortgage belt’ where the twin threats of interest
rate rises and invading foreigners delivered everything that could be
asked of them. It’s in the suburbs that this kind of stuff
bites hard, because it’s in the suburbs that our grandest
utopian dreams are played out. The politicians know the suburbs are
where it’s at. I wonder if the reason so much of our art is
so out of touch with our politics is that our artists are too
embarrassed to admit that our policitians may be right. It seems
we’d prefer to live, both actually and imaginatively, in some
eucalypt-scented bush, some revved-up translatlantic metropolis, some
Tuscany - or in the past. But not in those wide streets, those
well-fitted houses, those shopping centres, those arterial roads. There
is a constant imaginative flight from the suburbs, as if it were a
place unworthy of us.
Is
it? Or is it actually
who
we are?
Outer Suburban Village
Development Complex the sign on the access road had read,
but over the years all but the letters ‘ur’ from Suburban had either
fallen off or been souvenired by the vandals. In time to come we would
take this name - ur,
a kind of laconic mumble - as our own and keep it as our own private
joke, but either way, both then and later, the name remained hidden
from everyone but us. We had never appeared on a map under any name,
old or new; the cartographers had barely begun to sketch us in before
they were forced to erase us again. The dilapidated sign out on the
access road was all we had to call attention to our existence and rare
now, if ever, were the times when foreign eyes fell upon it.
Occasionally, on a weekend stroll, one of us might see a car pull up
out on the access road and a poorly-dressed family stand gazing for a
while at the strange collection of houses in front of them. But if they
had come to consider the idea of moving into the Estate then the idea
quickly deserted them. The family dog that had scampered down to the
ring road corner to sniff the tails of the others who had gathered
there to greet it was quickly whistled back and leashed and the family
got in and drove away, carrying with them the first chapter of the
story they would tell to other poorly-dressed families back in the
city, a story that would end with the words: No, don’t
bother,
we’ve seen it and it stinks.
It did stink. Though the sewage produced by a mere seven individuals
may be rightly considered a trifle, it was more than enough to infect
the slow-moving creek and the market garden with a rich rotting smell
that often and particularly in summer hung over the northern part of ur like a poisonous
cloud.
[pgs 25-26]
When I was in Form 5 at Vermont High School I wrote an English
assignment, since lost, that must have revealed the first stirrings of
the piss-taking poetic satirist in me. I can’t exactly
remember what I wrote, I’m sure I was just being a
smart-arse, but, after giving me an ‘F’, my English
teacher, Mrs Whitrod, suggested I read something called ‘A
Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. I didn’t, of
course, I was a smart-arse. But years later, secretly, I took up her
suggestion and when I did I realised why. She was suggesting that even
this rebellious, aggressive sixteen year old energy, this cynicism,
this facetiousness, that even this, of all things, could be turned into
art.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the work Mrs Whitrod
was referring me to but I’ll quickly revisit it anyway.
‘A Modest Proposal’ was written in 1729 by Swift,
an Irishman, at a time when the ‘Irish Question’
was being hotly debated in the English parliament. A lot of high-minded
speeches were being made, and paternal suggestions put, about how to
deal with the poverty and overpopulation of Catholic Ireland. Swift, in
the guise of a public-spirited citizen, offers his ‘modest
proposal’ - that many if not all of Ireland’s
problems could be ameliorated if the babies of poor Irish parents were
sold as table meat to the rich. It is a brilliant proposal, brilliantly
argued. It walks that fine line between the believable and the
outrageous in a way that still makes me envious. It is a satire of the
highest order. Swift - and this is the essence of it - is not talking
as Swift, Swift doesn’t seriously think we should sell our
babies for table meat, Swift is taking on a character, he is
‘impersonating’ someone (from the root
‘persona’), he is an actor speaking with a
character’s voice, he is trying something on, he is doing a
‘what if?’. He’s finding a way, an
artistic way, to use all his, Swift’s, anger, cynicism, and
disgust. He’s being cool, rational, reasonable, logical. He
is - and this is my point - putting the reader in a very difficult
position. Should we believe him? Do we take him seriously? Is this
meant to be fact or fiction...?
Shortly after, as the
first of the
autumn rains began sweeping in across the paddocks, Michael started
building the wall. I had neither the presence of mind nor the
wherewithal to stop him. He seconded Alex and his bulldozer (at the
point of a gun, as I later discovered) and had him knock down half a
dozen empty houses on the edge of South-East Court. He sorted the good
bricks from the rubble, ferried mud for mortar from the creek, and day
by day the wall grew higher. It rose on the outer edge of the ring
road, with the footpath for a foundation, and one by one over the
winter that followed all the houses outside its confines were
demolished to provide the bricks. Michael worked every day until the
light gave out, often in the drizzling rain, carting mud from the
western branch of the creek on a flat-topped barrow made from scraps of
wood and an old bicycle wheel and laying bricks with a home-made
trowel. A few of the others tried to talk him in - we feared for his
health above all - but Michael could not be swayed. The wall eventually
rose to thirty courses, over two metres high, and ur
was in the end contained exclusively within the confines of the old
ring road, its size reduced by more than half. As Alex’s
bulldozer bore down on the last house left standing in North Court I
resigned myself to the inevitable, packed up my things and moved to a
vacant house on the corner of North Street and the Square, diagonally
opposite Slug’s.
Closer to Jodie, I remember thinking, as if that were any consolation.
As winter drew to a close, Michael topped the wall with a tangle of
barbed-wire and broken bottles and constructed a huge barbed-wire gate
to stop up the access road entrance. With the first days of spring,
Vito began planting his new crop in the Square (he’d already
dug
up all the front lawns of West Street in preparation for his new system
of rotation): the last vegetables had been picked from the old farm and
it would now be abandoned. ur
had become, by a roundabout route, the village it had never been
before, and now within the confines of Michael’s wall its
security seemed assured. Some of my forebodings diminished; there was
still reason to hope. I cleaned out my new house and unpacked my
things. But then, like all the lights flickering in all the houses of a
vast suburb before the power fails completely, there followed a series
of otherwise unrelated events that could only be read as premonitory
signs of the great upheaval to come.
[pgs 50-52]
I said at the start that
Blueprints
was an ironic work. So what what
does that mean? Soren Kierkegaard, in his fabulous book,
The Concept of
Irony, said irony is ‘a nothingness which
consumes everything
and something which one can never catch hold of...’ Irony, he
was saying, is a slippery thing, hard to catch, is actually nothing, a
metaphysical space. I like to think of it as the space the author puts
between himself and his subject, a space then into which (a space,
again,
in between,
of
possibility)
the readers’ imagination
can be let loose. But Kierkegaard also said irony ‘is
something in its deepest root comical’. I think
that’s equally true. For all that I’ve been going
on about the things my book might be and might not be about, I should
remind you that in the end it is a essentially comedy, built on this
Kierkegaardian nothingness of irony. A writer takes on a persona,
through that persona invents a world, into that world invites a reader,
then asks that reader to engage in this invented world’s
dialectic. The essential ingredient of an ironic or satiric work is
that it can’t be judged by what it appears to be, or what it
appears to say. (Swift wasn’t
really
suggesting
the Irish eat
their children.) Irony’s about being
difficult, playing
games
with the reader, screwing with their expectations, undermining their
confidence in what something is ‘about’, landmining
their comfort zone. It shouldn’t create a settled world of
known, comfortable truths but a world built on speculative
what-ifs.
What if there was an Ur not only on the plains of ancient
Mesopotamia
but also on the paddocks north of Craigieburn? And what if there was
someone called ‘Bram’ living there? And what if he
was trying to write, to record this place’s goings-on? And
what if the kingdom of Ur fell, and there was a great rain and a great
flood? And what if after this great flood Bram left for another place,
a place in the West, a place where it would all become clear, where
he’d be told how to live, what living was for...?
The skies have cleared,
the lakes and
puddles out on the paddocks have drained away and dried, the creek
trickles past at the end of the garden, returned to its former size.
Though the fertile silt washed up all around looks like a
gardener’s dream, I haven’t bothered to re-plant my
vegetables nor do any of the things I had planned to do when the
weather finally cleared. The smell of the earth after so much rain is a
strange and intoxicating thing; I’ve been content most days
just
to stand at my door and draw it languorously into my nostrils. Since
the rain stopped and my story was finished I’ve done very
little
else, though I’ve managed to re-bury most of the junk
I’d
collected back in the hole in the hill. That took me a week, in a
slow-moving dream; I barely had the strength to lift the shovel. For
three days I anguished over what to do with the tangle of barbed-wire
in the corner; in the end I dumped it unceremoniously back into the
creek. Most of the things in the house are packed, my bundle of papers
snug in a cardboard box. Today I went to the top of the hill to take
one last look over old ur
and
saw the bulldozers trundling towards me in the distance. The freeway
was coming again. It will be a sharp turn to head west from here, I
thought, and in the years to come the drivers encountering it on their
way to Haranhope will mutter a low curse at such shoddy planning. And
yes, in the end old ur
will
perhaps only be remembered as a dangerous bend in the freeway north of
Melbourne, just where it crosses a dry creek bed before turning sharply
left towards the New Estate in the west. Patterson arrived in the
afternoon - his last benevolent gesture - to help tow my car from the
bog. I spent the remaining daylight hours packing the last of my
things. There was little to do then but sit and think - it’s
a
pleasant pastime, that. About Michael, Jodie, my neighbours, all gone,
and the sometimes silly things that happen in this life and that so
soon pass into the obscurity of history. It was only an experiment, I
thought, built too far out in the wrong direction, favoured or flawed
by its own possibility. Should someone dig it all up again one day
I’m sure they’d make a damn sight more sense of it
than me.
I had my bundle of papers, certainly, and some time, somewhere, on an
evening like this, they might bring me a little edification and take
the sting out of that day’s particular disillusionment. But I
would not be setting sail on them, hat on head and jar in hand. No,
that nonsense is over, my days here are done, tomorrow I leave for
Haranhope where a barrow of bricks lies waiting. This time
I’ll
start from the bottom up and see what comes of that.
[pgs 146-147]
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Blueprints
for
a Barbed-Wire Canoe
