MCH Newsletters

The essence of northness

by Robyn Davidson

Recently, I came across this passage written by David Malouf, about various train trips he took into far north Queensland in 1955, looking, as he says, for the ‘exotic’.

Quote: "There are many elements in the North that remain outside control. And wasn’t it just this, the belief that there might be "up there" a place that was uncontrolled and uncontrollable, that first attracted me and attracts me still? Isn’t that what I meant by the exotic? A hope that somewhere close there was a place that belonged to us, and was in that sense ours, that had escaped the laws we like to impose, and the interpretations, and remained unknown within us: darkly mysterious; overgrown and hard to find our way into; not yet mapped or fully described; where we, too, when we entered it, might become other and unknown, even to ourselves."

The paragraphs had enormous resonance for me. First of all, they echoed my own longing for what I would now call ‘authenticity.’ That is, something elemental, lying outside law and convention, outside the comfortable, foggy mediocrity most of us agree to live in, most of the time. And they pointed towards the idea that traveling isn’t just about looking , it’s about one’s own becoming. The external world is a place evolving in time, and it is in dialogue with an inner process of development and understanding.

The passage has a very particular and singular resonance because I would have heard that very train, the one containing David Malouf, as it passed by my house on its way north. I would have been five years old at the time, and I was living at my first address. Not where I was born, (we had moved from the dry country of Western Queensland the year before), but where I first became aware that I was located in a particular place and time, within infinity. The wonder at the improbability of ones own existence might explain the writing of that address on every copy book I owned: ‘Malabah’, Mooloolah, North Coast Line, Queensland, Australia, The earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Universe.

The North Coast line defined where we were both literally and metaphorically. It lined us up in relation to all that was north, and all that was south. There was a mantra drilled into us at school, which every Queenslander of the fifties will remember. Brisbane, Gympie, Maryborough Bundaberg Gladstone Rockhampton Mackay. That line gave cohesion to the Sunshine State, made us feel that it was a place, and that we belonged to it.

So there I was in my bedroom in the homestead known as Malabah, a mile from the train tracks, listening to the Sunlander’s haunting whistle as it carried David into the vaporous ill-defined North. That train always passed our house at night, and it was fitting that it should do so. Unlike David I had no desire to go north because I was already north. To go further north was to gradually fade away. North was a prosidy of place-names, and a train whistle diminishing into the dark. North was forever behind my back, and I faced south, along the Sunlander’s daylight return.

I, too, was oriented to what was exotic and other, but in my case, it was to civilization, density, mass. Perhaps I imbibed this from my mother, whose whole married life could be defined as a vast grieving for the city.

That polarity formed me, and remains as a dialectic in my life. I headed south, first to Brisbane, and as soon as I could get out of there, to Sydney. And I kept heading south, in that Antipodean inversion, to Europe. (Civilization, density, mass). Before I left, I wanted to absorb the essence of my country — the essence of its northness if you like — by going to the desert - the centre of my country’s mythological crucible. The very locus of home. And yet I turned my back on it and took off. Why did so many of us do that? Because we wanted to test who we were and what we knew, in the bigger pond. To throw perspectives on who we were and what we knew. It was a risky business. Some things wither under too much scrutiny. Certainties are shaken. And some vanities do not survive.

For good or ill, I have lived that polarity, as so many have done. I had two homes, and they were homes inside me as well. Different selves inhabited those different places, and consequently one self was always closed down, background, put away. One part was always grieving for the other, and disgruntled with where I was. I was constantly escaping from the bush to the city, and from the city to the bush. The English were so irritatingly unAustralian. And the Australians so hopelessly unEnglish. There was tremendous tension between the two. The way I dealt with that tension, to find a point of balance, was to find a third place. India.

For all that, I’ve never thought of myself as an ex-pat. It’s a disparaging word, a smug and self-satisfied word, smelling of insecurity and suspicion. I often think that the Australian obsession with ‘who we are’, the desire to fix a national identity so that we can feel less uneasy, is misguided. We are lucky that it isn’t fixed. It makes us great travelers, we’re flexible and able to absorb and accommodate new perspectives. And it should make us generous. In other words, our ‘identity’, (horrible word), is in a state of becoming. The ambivalence and anomalous quality in our history and sense of place, are fertile things, ‘not yet mapped, or fully described.’ Long may they remain so.