African Nations

In October 1988, I went to the Australian instalment of the “Common Wealth of Letters” series presided over at Yale University by the Jamaican-born Michael Cooke (1934–1990). This was a cornucopia of stimulation, and it was here that I first met Australian scholars and writers such as Kevin Hart, Ivor Indyk, Andrew Taylor and Michael Wilding, who continued to be important reference points as I delved further into the intricacies of books from down under. But the unquestioned star of the conference was Thomas Keneally. Though the film Schindler’s List (1993), based on his 1982 Booker Prize-winning novel, Schindler’s Ark, had not yet been made, Keneally was already a world literary celebrity. From my reading of his Confederates (1979), I knew him as a writer with an astonishing ability to imagine times and places distant from his own, and to do so with impressive economy.

At the conference dinner, I was fortunate enough to be at Keneally’s table. This repast was distinguished by Keneally, in the middle of a voluble discourse, realising that he had not yet touched his main course, a Salisbury steak, and popping the entire thing into his mouth in a gesture of genial, offhanded machismo worthy of Paul Hogan. More seriously, Keneally was addressing the topic that had convulsed Yale over the past year. This was the revelation that Paul de Man, the acclaimed professor of comparative literature and nonpareil of deconstructionists, who had died in 1983, had, during his youth in wartime Belgium, written articles that were collaborationist or pro-Nazi. Keneally spoke wisely of writers who had made mistakes, or ethical lapses, both of the right and of the left. Keneally’s own books had been equally critical of Nazi and communist totalitarianisms. His clear-eyed moral witness was a refreshing change from Australian writers such as Katherine Susannah Prichard, Frank Hardy and Eleanor Dark, who, out of an excess of radical zeal, had been frankly toadyish in their attitudes to the Soviet Union, which had proven itself a monstrosity.

Keneally addressed the scandal of de Man’s collaborationist wartime journalism from a conceptual angle as well as a political one. He found the speculations about language characteristic of deconstruction to be arcane trivia, comparing deconstruction to the theological differences in the fourth century AD (a comparison first made a few years before by Richard Rorty).1 In contrast, he spoke of his recent visit to Eritrea, an insurgent area in northeast Africa at that time governed by Ethiopia. Here, a rebel Eritrean army was opposing the malignant Soviet-allied Ethiopian government of Mengistu Halle Mariam. The Mengistu government was responsible for the atrocious famine that had garnered headlines worldwide in the mid-1980s and had inspired, “records, tapes, and performances”, as Keneally later put it in his Eritrean novel, To Asmara (1989).2 A year before the dinner, Keneally had written for the New York Times Magazine about his visit with the rebels in Eritrea. In his engagement with Eritrea, Keneally was witnessing real hope and real pain, far from what he saw as the academic hair-splitting of deconstruction.

I was aware that the Eritreans, like their Ethiopian suppressors, were Monophysite Christians (or as they prefer to call themselves, “Miaphysite”) who separated from the rest of Christianity over theological disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries.3 I pointed out to Keneally that the Eritreans were descendants of those for whom these arcane theological disputes mattered, my implication being that deconstruction ultimately might also matter. Considering all the other people at the table were scholars of world eminence and I was an unknown 23-year-old who had not yet published a word, Keneally was admirably tolerant of my cheekiness. He aided Antipodes many times in the years ahead, once personally sending me two books of his that the journal was unable to obtain from the publisher for review.

Keneally is thus a writer capable of showing concern in matters both large and small. On a more abstract level, in this chapter I address the issue of “concern” as a general affect in contemporary Australian literature. What are the ethics of writers caring about people of different origins and backgrounds? Is this a manifestation of altruism or liberal guilt? In an era when so many philosophers, from Martin Buber to Emmanuel Levinas to Adriana Caverero, have written about the ethics of addressing, speaking for, caring about or presuming upon “the other”,4 and if, as Martha Nussbaum has argued, compassion on an individual level is “a central bridge between the individual and the community”,5 what does the idea of concern, which generalises compassion across communities, mean in moral and affective terms? Does the potential bad faith of feigning concern for others or using that concern to make oneself look good outweigh the benefit of showing concern for the social conditions of other groups? Is even a hypocritical or self-deluding concern better than callous indifference?6 Is concern inevitably a part of what Ruwen Ogien calls the “non-coercive means” by which prescriptive agents try to move people in directions they have not willed for themselves?7 Or is concern a solution, albeit a piecemeal one, to problems that emanate from neoliberalism itself?

This chapter starts with Keneally in Africa, but I will chiefly consider how white Australian writers have addressed Indigenous Australian issues, concentrating on Kate Grenville, Gail Jones and Alex Miller. I will conclude with an Indigenous writer, Alexis Wright, who in The Swan Book (2013) writes from an Aboriginal perspective of the asylum-seeker issue as it has manifested itself in Australian politics since the 2001 Tampa crisis. All the above gestures towards social altruism are aspects of what the Canadian theorist Northrop Frye called “the myth of concern”, a collective social vision that, through means both social and imaginative, postulates an interest in humankind as a totality, and includes altruism in a sense of the creative.8 Frye calls concern “the response of the adult citizen to genuine social problems”, and contrasts it with anxiety, which depends on a nervousness about protecting ourselves manifested by buttressing ourselves in self-buffeting groups – like Martin in Tsiolkas’ Barracuda when he castigates Danny Kelly as a loser. The concern–anxiety dichotomy, however, does not neatly align with differences in political or socioeconomic philosophy. It is about a fundamental attitude to the world that might include politics but also supersedes them. Concern is about what cannot be fulfilled at present in legal or formal terms, which is why it is a myth rather than a doctrine. It is speculative more than it is polemical.9

Frye stated that once “a myth of concern is recognised as such, it becomes clear that you cannot express its truth without lying”. This is because concern is “contradicting accepted truth with something that is going to be made true but isn’t true now”.10 When contemporary Australian novelists write about global inequality, racial differences, and the mistreatment of Indigenous people, they are fostering a hope for something not currently true but which they hope to make true; this is precisely why the imagination is needed. The imaginative writer cares about people in a way that it is impossible currently to care through conventional socio-political means. Concern is what remains of a collective horizon once the state is no longer seen as a vehicle to bring us towards that horizon. While all of these writers are aware of the pitfalls of concern, they nonetheless maintain it as the central agent of their affective mission.

Part of the modus operandi of concern can be linked to “the relational turn” in 1990s psychological thought, particularly as exemplified in the work of Axel Honneth. Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition is subtitled the moral grammar of social conflicts, and concern, as a concept, argues just that: that social conflicts have a moral basis and can be regarded ethically as much as polemically, interpersonally as much as ideologically. Honneth’s work represents the socialisation of psychoanalysis, which in Freud’s era had emphasised the individual ego and its relation to the society, but in the postwar era, with the dominance of the object-relations school, emphasised how inner and outer circumstances mutually and constructively adjusted. Honneth takes this dynamic a step further, seeing the individual’s experience as meaningful only in the context of other individuals; individuals constitute one another in relationships of mutual recognition, which “must possess the character of affective approval or encouragement”.11 Importantly, for Honneth, recognition is built upon, but is larger than, Eros, “supplementing libidinal drives with affective”.12

The Australian novelists of concern have similar insights: in depicting the romantic relationship of Bo Rennie and Annabelle Beck in Journey to the Stone Country, Alex Miller makes clear that the erotic is subtended by a deeper connection to land and values, premised on the recognition of both self and other. Annabelle thinks about how she might speak of Bo to her ex-husband in Melbourne: “I knew him as a child. There are connections between us you would not understand. In this place I am becoming myself again.”13 Love is not just Eros, but recognition, concern, an implicated acknowledgement. Analogously, concern is political altruism ramified by the acknowledgement of affect. It is an awakening not just to political inequality but to interpersonal feeling. As Joel Anderson says in his introduction to Honneth, “justice demands more than the fair distribution of material goods”, and the “emancipatory struggles” of “marginalised groups” must be situated within a social world that is interactive and affective, not just economic or political.14 To care about a place there must be some sort of affective tie. It cannot simply be a matter of short-term political or ideological pilgrimage.

It was clear at that Yale dinner that Keneally was aware of the pitfalls of political engagement on the part of writers. The American scholar Paul Hollander, earlier in the 1980s, had written Political Pilgrims, featuring intellectuals who had made trips to communist countries and become convinced that these societies represented positive achievements.15 Earlier in the century, there had been a wave of Anglophone intellectuals who adored or at least tolerated the Nazi regime in Germany. In both cases, these outsiders assumed they could assess the situation in a foreign country and take a political endorsement back to their home countries. Keneally has been aware, unlike the aforementioned political pilgrims, of the dangers of speaking of and for another people. The book that brought him to international fame – The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), powerfully adapted to film by Fred Schepisi in 1978 – was told from the point of view of its Indigenous protagonist. By 2001, Keneally had reconsidered this, stating that he was wrong to presume he could speak from inside an Indigenous person’s experience.16 By the time of To Asmara, Keneally did not funnel any of the narrative through the point of view of African characters and thus avoided accusations of cultural appropriation. Yet his stake in the Eritrean situation was nonetheless open to question. Keneally was in the difficult position of exploring a conflict in which he had sympathies – for the Eritrean rebels, against the Ethiopian government – but which he did not mean to present in a moralistic or propagandistic way. This can be seen in the last line of his novel, attributed not to the protagonist Darcy but to an authorial over-voice: “and all the incidents fail to be separate”.17 If the earlier writers who had been naive about the nature of the Nazi or Soviet regimes and trusted too much in the brotherhood of man and soil, Keneally disclaimed what the theorist Louis Althusser termed an expressive causality, a yoking of historical currents. And yet, try as he might to see things cautiously and analytically, the narrator has to grasp for a collective lens, even while aware of the totalising flaw in such a gesture.

While the American edition of the book was titled To Asmara (Asmara being the capital of Eritrea, which the rebels hoped to liberate from its Ethiopian occupiers), the British and Australian title was Towards Asmara. This was surely intended to be a micro-linguistic distinction, reflecting the fact that American English uses “to” as a directional while British and Australian English might favour “towards”. Yet there was also a semantic difference: “to” is more inspirational, even martial, as in “marching to Pretoria” or the cries of “À Berlin!” at the end of Zola’s Nana, whereas “towards” seems more tentative, a setting-out that never quite gets where it is headed. In the book, the rebels do not reach Asmara, but in actual history they did: the Ethiopian government fell and, in 1993, Eritrea was recognised internationally as an independent state under the presidency of Isaias Afewerki, the rebel leader whom Keneally had lionised. Keneally praised Afewerki’s concern for education, his respect for the value of each individual, and his promotion of a progressive, humane, business-friendly Africa, while attributing to Afewerki’s opponents a desire to see Africa fail. Keneally hoped for an Africa that the West would not have to feel sorry for, an Africa that could avoid white patronage. At the beginning of To Asmara, a rock singer who talks with Darcy about the region finds Eritrea uninteresting because he cannot see its people as simply passive agents of compassion and patronage.

Keneally recognised the principle of statehood in Africa, that contemporary Africa is a set of states that exercise sovereignty. Westerners who make cultural or anthropological generalisations about Africa are unconsciously hearkening back to colonial days in denying the importance of African state sovereignty, and in seeing Africans either as an undifferentiated mass of poor people who need Western help, or as an “uncontaminated” people who can teach Westerners alternative wisdom. The phenomenon of “Afropessimism”, what Manthia Diawara terms a “fatalistic attitude towards economic and social crisis” in Africa, is but the inversion of an overly utopian and categorical expectation of the African future.18 Keneally was trying to change that, or to challenge it.

Keneally’s hope for Eritrea, alas, ended in disappointment and bitterness. The Eritrean regime got bogged down in a border war with the new Ethiopian government and Afewerki remained in power for twenty years, amid accusations of human-rights violations and political repression. In a 2004 interview, Keneally spoke of Afewerki possessing “purity” and noted that Afewerki did not cultivate a Stalin-like cult of personality; there were “never posters of him anywhere”.19 Keneally further averred, “If he’s a tyrant, he’s pretty remarkable.” Although Keneally makes no bones about criticising the Eritrean leader’s repressive policies, there was still a more than sentimental attachment, much as a teacher might still see promise in a former student who has not realised his potential. One should not be too hard on Keneally here, for the mistake he made – hoping an African leader would break the continent’s perceived cycle of failure and establish a model state – has been repeated by others, most recently with the independence of South Sudan in 2010, which excited the same sort of energised partisanship as occurred in Eritrea. In both cases, one suspects Western interest was inspired in part by the Christianity of the rebel regions, and by their proximity to the lands of the Bible (Cush, Punt and Havilah, in what today is the region of Eritrea and South Sudan, are even named in the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden).

Keneally can be said to have written about this region once before, in his 1973 children’s book Moses the Lawgiver. In addition, there is a traditional Australian tie to the region through the Suez Canal, the British Empire, the two world wars, and the explorations of Alan Moorehead in East Africa. Thus there is a larger point here than just Keneally’s endorsement of a leader who ended up disappointing. All of us make mistakes; Western imperialism colours even benign attitudes towards Africa; no intellectual is infallible, certainly not politically. More largely, To Asmara is about a search for affective understanding, however partial and foredoomed. At the end of Darcy’s narrative, he admits, “We could not share the same table.”20 He is not speaking about the Eritreans but about Anna, a German woman who has witnessed scenes of untold carnage and horror, and is unable to accept Darcy’s more detached and touristic attitude, however compassionate his intent. Darcy’s perspective reveals the limits of individual compassion. Keneally anticipates critiques of his inevitably partial and inadequate relationship to the material. He realises that the same social concern that animates the altruistic thrust we so often value in fiction might also impede our awareness.21

Settler Land Claims: From Sustenance to Fragility

In his next book, Flying Hero Class, Keneally contrasted different kinds of subalternity – Palestinian and Aboriginal – by having an Aboriginal dance troupe fly on an aeroplane hijacked by Arab terrorists. In 1991, when the book was published, readers might have seen Palestinians and Aborigines as two populations with legitimate grievances. But they may also have seen Australian Indigenous people, as Keneally tends to, as more “spiritual”, as somehow benign and otherworldly, in contrast to the Palestinian political activists striving for national liberation. Twenty years later, scholars such as Steven Salaita have identified similarities between Palestinians and other indigenous groups in Anglophone settler colonies.22 Rosanne Kennedy has studied trauma and memory in Palestinian contexts in a manner directly applicable to Aboriginal circumstances.23 International sympathy for the Palestinians has risen. Furthermore, the fight for land rights changed perceptions of Indigenous Australians: they were no longer seen as otherworldly exemplars of ancient spirituality, but as political actors who were advocating for their rights, both through Western legal systems and through the traditional frameworks of their own peoples. Yet Keneally’s juxtaposition of the Aboriginal and the Palestinian retains some residual provocation. Inevitably, when Westerners think about land and claims to land – and when Western ideas leave traces on Indigenous writers who have had Christian upbringings or read the Bible – the idea of Israel as a promised land underlies these thoughts.

This can be seen very clearly in New Zealand, where the frequently used phrase tangata whenua – people of the land – could almost be a calque of the Hebrew am ha’eres.24 The Ratana and Ringatu religions, established by Māori leaders in the nineteenth century, were syncretic faiths that braided traditional Māori spiritual practices with a sense of the Hebraic; today, many Māori personal names are adaptations of Biblical ones. Māori nationalism, in rhetoric, like most Western nationalisms, appropriated the self-identification of the Jews as the chosen people.25 In Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), repeated references to imagined Queensland localities called Nebo and Pisgah bring to mind Mounts Nebo and Pisgah near the Promised Land, which Moses envisioned but never reached. In Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, the Rainbow Serpent is depicted as a revered creator-god, but the serpent imagery inevitably also brings to mind the far more destructive serpent in the Bible. There is much crossover in Western and Indigenous ways of talking about land. Thus the history of concern features both Indigenous writers and, with varying degrees of effort and acuity, white writers negotiating these enabling contradictions and using literature to heal the wounds of land that has been stolen and, frequently, arrogantly misused.

Africa, with its legacy of slavery, apartheid and colonisation, can aptly serve as a ground for Australian modes of concern. Gillian Mears’ The Grass Sister (1995) plays with these African–Australian analogues. Yet for Australian writers the problem of concern is inevitably local, as it has to do with land and claims to the ownership of it. Indeed, what is pertinent about all three forms of affect that I am surveying in these chapters – rancour, concern and idealism – is what a localising effect they have on Australian literature. Hope reads Juvenal and Pope, yet snarls from Canberra at chattering European apes. Tsiolkas’ Danny has problems in Australia, but has no place else to go. Concern is inevitably bound up with specifically Australian territory, because it is there that the injustices perpetrated by settlement have to be addressed. Although affect is something psychological, in Australian literature it is a force that tugs back against the transnational. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, affect theory gestures to the abstract even as it plausibly operates to “bind one ever more imaginatively and profoundly to the local possibilities of an individual psychology”.26 Australia is a continent and a country, not an individual person. But affect is specific because feelings are specific. If politics and world history take Australian writers abroad, states of feeling tether them to (a revised version of) home.

Sedgwick also points out that this affective “fold” is often characterised by repetition of the same key concepts, in ways that at once totalise and distract. This can be seen in the role of the land in mid-twentieth-century Australian popular fiction. For settler Australians in the mid-twentieth century, land was the magnetic pull that prevented them from simply soaring away, à la Teresa Hawkins in Stead’s For Love Alone, to metropolitan sophistication. To be Australian was to feel a tie to the land, and that tie often obviated any other personal goal, fate or preference. In Frederick J. Thwaites’ The Broken Melody (1930), the hero goes through many travails, finds and loses love and fortune, but has his family’s ancestral land to fall back on:

Just seventy years later, however, the tonality of the affect had changed: the Masons may still have possessed their fictional land, but, post-Mabo, the ontological and legal question of whether non-Indigenous Australians could “really” own the land was in question. In The Broken Melody, land has an affect deeper even than love or art, and is able to fend off the losses incurred in those emotional enterprises; but after Mabo, this deep, geological life is suddenly more frangible. There is a large-scale shift away from a view of the land as an inanimate backbone underneath merely temporary feelings. Yet residues of this view remain, even in the rhetorically powerful ending to David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993). Despite earlier acknowledging that “here the very ground under their feet was strange”, the book concludes with the idea that the land can be a source of consolation, albeit a far more gossamer consolation than imagined by Thwaites:

For Australian writers of an earlier generation, the “other life” that Malouf speaks of so eloquently was often connected with “atavism”. In The Storm of Time (1948), the second novel in her Timeless Land trilogy, Eleanor Dark uses the adjective “atavistic” repeatedly to describe how Dilboorn, depicted as the daughter of the Eora man Bennilong (sic), is tugged back to an Ur-primitivism even after experiencing white manners and mores. In the most popular white depiction of Aboriginal life from this era, Arthur J. Upfield’s detective series featuring the half-caste Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, Bonaparte is depicted as an Aboriginal man with wit, tenacity, charm and unmatched intellectual ability. But Upfield indicates that these traits are part of a conscious self-fashioning on the part of the detective, cultivated to prevent himself from careering back into the bush.

Upfield makes clear that he sees the ratiocinative quality of Bony’s detective abilities as at one complementing and counterpoising his Aboriginal identity. Complementing, as Bony’s notable abilities as a tracker are matched by his intellectual discernment. Counterpoising, because, as the detective himself says, “I had to conquer greater obstacles than social prejudice. I had to conquer, and still have to conquer, the almost irresistible power of the Australian bush over those who belong to it.”29 A similar “atavistic” tug of the bush at once fuels and imperils Inspector Bonaparte’s profession. Upfield’s novels are poised on the edge of concern, acknowledging the reverberations of “country”, in the Indigenous sense of the word, but still keeping them at a distance.

Upfield’s Death of a Swagman contains a fascinating scene between Inspector Bonaparte and Mr Jason, the son of the murderer but also a sensitive if impaired young man who, like Bony, has an affection for Rose Marie, the young daughter of the local police sergeant. At one point, Bonaparte and Jason stare at each other in both confrontation and solidarity. The entire dilemma of Australian identity might be boiled down to the fact that their two constituencies – to put it broadly, Indigenous Australians and lower-class whites – have been put at odds when in many ways their interests are the same. Concern can speak to this gap only in a limited way because it is inevitably an upper-class initiative of the privileged, like the Western helpers in Keneally’s Eritrea: a cadre of well-intentioned professionals, intellectuals and altruists. Les Murray might level the charge of left-elitism against such a group. Yet concern has to make do with this possible layer of bad faith. It does not have behind it any sort of organic or essential solidarity.

Given the formal kinship between the detective story and the récit, as discussed in Chapter 4, Upfield’s novels also provide a formal precedent for concern, as the novels of Gail Jones and Alex Miller, shortly to be explored, have the quality of récits, in which style matters more than sprawl, stance as much as content. Upfield also provides a precedent for such later novels of concern by having the physical landscape of his novels precisely laid out, and by not only associating Bony with a knowledge of country but also having that knowledge, in terms of tracking and discerning clues upon the landscape, be portable, as the various cases Bony pursues occur in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, as well as in his native Queensland. Upfield acknowledges the specificity of the landscape without making his detective merely a parochial figure who knows his own territory; rather, Bony understands the idea of territory. Bony’s expertise is tethered to a country even when he is not working in his own country (only one of the novels, An Author Bites the Dust, is set in the city). Bony has adventures in every Australian state except Tasmania – perhaps reflecting the then widespread belief in the effacement of the Indigenous people in Tasmania after the death of Truganini in the late nineteenth century.

Although Upfield’s tales were idealising, he made advances both in presenting Indigenous Australians as intelligent and resourceful (and in Bony’s case, more so than most whites), and also in registering that the attitude to possession declared by the fact of settlement and colonisation cannot be an inalienable trait of white Australian identity. There is always another claim, another layer, as is revealed by Bony’s knowledge of the land, which helps him to solve innumerable puzzles and quandaries. This is true not just of the Jindyworobaks, the white poets who awkwardly espoused Aboriginal themes, but also of writers such as Colin Thiele, who focused on the animal inhabitants of the land in ways that dislocated anthropocentrism. If, as Martin Harrison’s poem “Breakfast”, puts it, “to conceive a dam’s bearing towards human nature requires the same skill as the resolution of any ethically knife-edge, historically many-sided issue”, nature and history, with respect to Australia, can crisscross, although not coincide.30 It is a mistake to imagine that Aborigines before European contact did not alter or manage the land, as Bill Gammage shows in The Biggest Estate on Earth.31 As Marcia Langton asserted in her 2012 Boyer Lectures, there is a potential competition between environmental awareness and Aboriginal participation in the contemporary resource boom.32 Philip Mead describes Langton’s critique of the “meme of the noble savage”, a meme that has the potential not only to deny Aboriginal people access to natural resources and the income derived from them, but also to absorb urgent assertions of Aboriginal sovereignty into a more quietist and anodyne acknowledgement of the sanctity of the land.33 Ecology and Indigenous sovereignty are not necessarily aligned. But, as an initial critique of Eurocentric assumptions, awareness of both ecological crisis and the disinheritance of Indigenous people unsettled assumptions about who owned the land called Australia.

By the 1970s, this uncertainty had worked its way into even mainstream books that did not aspire to take the Indigenous question into account. Although the 1977 publication of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds could have been said to augur the more propitious climate in publishing Australian novels in the USA that led to the high-cultural breakthrough of Peter Carey in the next decade, there has always been embarrassment, in the USA and sometimes elsewhere, about including McCullough in the Australian canon.34 Examining The Thorn Birds in light of this increasingly shaky sense of landed reassurance, however, can be productive. Whereas there will always be a Mason in Thwaites’ Nullabean, at McCullough’s Drogheda there will not always be a Cleary. The novel ends with the descendants of the Cleary family renouncing their Drogheda estate in western New South Wales. McCullough presents a parable in which white settlers’ relation to the land begins in vainglory and ends in futile consolation; in its view of the land, the book is more reminiscent of Faulkner’s vision of the American South in Absalom! Absalom! than of earlier middlebrow reassurances such as Thwaites’.

No sales would have been lost had McCullough opted for a hearty, there-will-always-be-Clearys-in-Drogheda ending, but instead she went for a bittersweet and melancholy note, providing an early portent of the more self-aware melancholy to be found after Mabo. Drogheda – an Irish name meaning “bridge of the ford”, epitomising the idea of the transference of European title to Australia – fails. Although Germaine Greer is right to say the novel has “dated horribly” in only making one mention of “half-caste aboriginals”,35 it does metonymically imbibe a sense of the fragility of white claims. It is also infused with a sense of melancholy, as instanced in the very image of the self-impaling, titular thorn birds, who after impaling themselves sing beautifully until they die: an early symptom of a diminished white cultural arrogance. So is the character of the Catholic priest, Ralph De Bricassart, who can only reproduce illegitimately and sub rosa, perhaps implying that any white possession of the land will never have full formal title. Middlebrow The Thorn Birds may have been, but it told a sadder story with regard to whites on the land than many highbrow successes of the next decade. Indeed, the fate of the Clearys foreshadows that of the Bigges of Ranna Station in Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country; both books describe a formerly dominant white family now wiped out from the land. If there are few direct references to Aborigines in The Thorn Birds, there is a resonant sense of the fragility and perishability of settler claims to the land.

Of the Australian books that made it big abroad in the twenty years after The Thorn Birds, only Remembering Babylon had similar resonance with respect to ideas of whites on the land, although the sales of Malouf’s novel, for all its acclaim, were much smaller. Other books tracing the erosion of white entitlement to the land received less notice. John Hooker’s Beyond the Pale (1998) depicts the British aristocracy’s victimisation of Irish working-class settlers who in turn victimise Aborigines, passing on brutality in an endless cycle. The bleak despair of this cycle provides little reassurance, and thus Hooker’s fierce and original book proved totally unremarked-upon. David Ireland’s Burn (1974), featuring the rage against the system of a half-Aboriginal man, is also pertinent here. The last novel by the underrated Elizabeth O’Conner, Spirit Man (1980), echoed McCullough’s sense of the fragility of white land claims while introducing Aboriginal characters of various dispositions who give a vivid indication of Indigenous presence on the land. But this book did not do well even within Australia and was unheard of abroad.

By the late 1990s, the international viability of the Australian blockbuster of the land was gone. Bryce Courtenay, for example, wrote huge bestsellers throughout the 1990s and 2000s, mainly set in the Australian landscape with big plots and compelling themes of hope and loss. But the only book of his ever published in North America was The Power of One (1989), a book set in Courtenay’s native South Africa that gained success through word-of-mouth and through its inclusion on high-school reading lists, rather than through reviews in highbrow periodicals. Although Courtenay did mention Indigenous Australians in his books, particularly in Jessica (1998), by the 1990s international readers were more alert to the frailty of white land claims.

A faint vestige of the traditional blockbuster of the land was seen perhaps in the success of a book such as Bail’s Eucalyptus, a far more filtered and artistically conscious novel, or of the decidedly pre-Mabo approach to the land of Robyn Davidson’s feminist outback travelogue Tracks (1980). The latter was described by Paul Sharrad as “complicit” with hegemonic colonialism, but nonetheless paraded its “struggles” with it.36 After Mabo, however, any complicity, even a complicity as self-aware as Davidson’s, had little high-cultural cachet. The land could no longer be a sanctuary for white Australian writers.

Something Going to Be Made True: The Novelists of Concern

Kate Grenville is the best-known contemporary Australian novelist of concern worldwide. Grenville emerged in the 1980s with Lilian’s Story (1985), which told the story of a young girl victimised by her abusive father. Joan Makes History (1988) gave the first sign of Grenville’s interest in a more ambitious purview, as it spanned many years in the long life of a twentieth-century woman and highlighted the ability of the individual, even the inconspicuous one, to mean, historically. Dark Places (1994), published as Albion’s Story in the USA, delved into the point of view of Lilian’s abusive father. The change of title for the American edition was of note, as its foregrounding of a character already known from the previous novel signified that Grenville had a high enough profile in the USA for her books to be marketable to a defined audience, one that saw Grenville primarily as a feminist author.

The Idea of Perfection (1999) was a transitional book for Grenville’s career: more philosophical, even tendentious, and also more situated within the local and Australian. Like David Ireland’s The Chosen, it uses Australian small-town life in a way that is both parabolic and representative. It was with this book that Grenville crossed the boundary between “writer from Australia” to “writer of Australia”. In The Secret River (2005) Grenville began her historical Thornhill trilogy, concerned with the first decades of contact between settlers and Indigenous Australians.37 Notably, as in the cases of Jones and Miller, an interest in what I am calling concern surfaced in the second half of Grenville’s career, after she had established herself as a notable world writer. Cultural changes were one reason for this. But another may be that concern, with its reflectiveness and its sense of social interaction, seems to be an affect that surfaces later in a writer’s career, when she or he is no longer functioning, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, as an oblate trying to enter the cultural (and, in the case of Australian writers, often the world-cultural) system, and can focus instead on matters and destinies that are not merely personal but suprapersonal – or matters, in Keneally’s wise words, that fail to be separate.

If Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda launched the first stage of the contemporary Australian historical novel – although its genealogy went back to Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves, if not to Voss, and included Randolph Stow’s A Haunted Land (1956), Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant (1975) and many novels by Thomas Keneally – it was Kate Grenville’s The Secret River that launched its second. This stage dealt centrally with Indigenous issues, in ways that White’s and Carey’s novels had not, although they had included Aboriginal characters or references. It did not repeat Keneally’s blunder (as he came to see it) of voicing an Aboriginal perspective: Grenville sees everything through the white characters’ points of view, although she seeks to render those points of view problematic. The novel’s protagonist, the frontier settler William Thornhill, has two choices as he tries to carve out the land around the Hawkesbury River for settlement: find a modus vivendi with the Darug people, or try to extirpate them. The fact that Grenville sketches out the first possibility – the fugitive hope of finding a state of coexistence – marked the breakthrough to this new stage of the historical novel: there was a substantial difference between the elegiac wish that “things might have been otherwise” in another major trilogy written by a white writer about early settlement, Eleanor Dark’s Timeless Land books of the 1940s, and Grenville’s sense of a real possibility of active acknowledgement and interchange between two peoples.

In the trilogy’s next instalment, The Lieutenant (2008), set twenty years earlier and only tenuously linked to the other two books, Grenville provides a mode of cultural encounter that has less to do with the usual premises for interchange – war, sex, territory – but is conducted on the level of language and abstract knowledge.38 The Marine Lieutenant Daniel Rooke (Grenville’s fictionalisation of the real William Dawes) embarks with the First Fleet in 1787 and ends up serving as an interpreter as he begins to comprehend the Eora language, as taught to him by the Eora girl Tagaran.

As opposed to the real-life relationship between Dawes and the young Eora woman Patyegarang, who was fifteen years old and whose age led to (uncorroborated) speculation about a sexual relationship, Grenville makes the girl younger and rules out sex as a motive so she can more purely isolate the idea of concern: that is, of cross-cultural understanding conducted for its own sake. This agenda is unapologetically reformist; as Sue Kossew puts it, Grenville wishes “to take the reader out of his/her comfort zone and into a new, uncomfortable space” that can operate as a “way of challenging set ideas and beliefs”.39

This tendency is liable to be attacked by those who see it as condescending. Grenville attracted criticism not only from the right but also from members of the public intelligentsia such as Inga Clendennin, who criticised the assumption that fictional deviations from history could either improve or testify to the historical record, and from influential Indigenous scholars such as Jeanine Leane (to whose critiques I will return). The historian John Hirst sees Grenville’s stance as exemplary of “the liberal imagination”, which “does not believe in savagery”.40 In Hirst’s reading, the fact that Aborigines are not portrayed as violent reveals a Rousseauistic assumption about the nobility of the “state of nature”. Hirst depicts Grenville as a sentimental liberal apologist, perhaps more or less a version of the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver: a writer popular among well-intentioned whites, especially women, for evocations of cultural difference that are at once reparative and anodyne. Such depictions offer, in the philosopher Ruwen Ogien’s phrase, “non-controversial conceptions of the good life”.41 On the other hand, however, there is a family resemblance between Grenville’s historical trilogy and Kingsolver’s work. Grenville is a more literary writer, but her work does, in its sinews, take on some of the issues raised by Hirst.

One could also point out, in response to Hirst’s criticism, without sanctifying Indigenous people or denying that they committed violence, that not only were the whites indisputably the aggressors in a strategic sense, but also that anthropologists such as Pierre Clastres have observed differences between statist and non-statist societies. It is not simply a question of indigenous vs non-indigenous peoples: Clastres and others have identified “statist” indigenous societies in the Americas (for example, the Incas) whose state practices were similar to those of European and Asian empires.42 In Maurice Shadbolt’s trilogy about the Māori wars in New Zealand, the Māori are depicted as warriors who wield structures of power and domination in their own defence. Although Australian Aboriginal society was complex, such structures of domination were largely absent. This is not to say that Aboriginal people committed no acts of violence, but that they did not have access to state power structures of the sort wielded by the white colonists.

Given the reality of racism and white privilege in Australia, Hirst’s insistence on moral equivalence between white and Aboriginal violence seems disingenuous. But the larger issue is that writers of concern have to risk being anodyne or hypocritical. There is always the danger of being judged inauthentic. Rooke’s relationship with Tagaran in The Lieutenant is tentative, distant, marked by politesse and decorum; they maintain the tactful and respectful distance of academic colleagues, not the heedlessness of unfettered personal encounter. There is also Grenville’s temporal distance from her characters; inevitably, she brings to bear a twenty-first-century affect. A similar gap existed between Patrick White and his character Voss, who was based on the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. Patrick White was a twentieth-century Australian, Cambridge-educated, upper-class, and gay. Ludwig Leichhardt was a nineteenth-century rough-and-tumble German heterosexual who lived a life of action, not of thought. How, we might ask, could White possibly portray such a man?43 If we grant White aesthetic licence to do so, why not grant the same licence to Grenville? Is the difference that some of her characters are Aboriginal – should Indigenous characters be off-limits for any imaginative representation by white writers? It may well be Hirst, rather than Grenville, who is making an exception for Aborigines. In imagining the early years of contact between British and Indigenous peoples, Grenville might be seen as asserting her right to try to understand, and to possibly get things wrong in the process.

This sense of inviolable intercultural curiosity, even if it is a tentative, unobtainable ideal, suffuses The Lieutenant. Rooke’s cognitive quest is epistemic as well as affective, knowing as well as feeling. Concern strives to disenthrall human relationships from the customary grooves of power, greed and possession, and to put them on a more abstract level. At the end of Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, it is not just that the whites who have met Gemmy have been transformed, but that the whites’ nature has been transformed, and taken out of conventional heterosexual relationships. Malouf casts a slightly queer light here whereas Grenville, in The Lieutenant, keeps sex out of the relationship so as not to trivialise it, while Miller, in Journey to the Stone Country, takes the dynamics of an erotic energy and makes them concomitant with debates about acknowledgement and recognition. Concern is all about, as Honneth’s relational turn suggests, broadening erotic energies into a larger affective realm of care and mutual knowledge.44

The third book of Grenville’s trilogy, Sarah Thornhill (2012), concentrating on William’s daughter, returns to the Hawkesbury and examines how traumatic events have consequences in the next generation.45 Sarah Thornhill has been sharply questioned by Jeanine Leane for its sentimental glossiness, its “colonial affluence”, and its sense of the Indigenous issue as merely a place for well-minded whites to show their liberality, without fully acknowledging the deep existential pain and loss suffered by the Indigenous people.46 In owning up to the past, Leane asks, are whites merely attempting to appropriate it, or to re-annex by contrition what was first attempted by armed aggression? Leane’s critique is couched not in terms of historical accuracy, but of rival affect – she substitutes loss and rage for plangent attempts at understanding. Clendinnen, who was more critical of Grenville for deviating from history than for being racially utopian, also saw Grenville’s work as potentially too pessimistic about history’s ability to construct the past in a determinate and documentable fashion.

Grenville’s novels are in many ways the fictional enactment of what Bain Attwood calls the “Aboriginal turn” in Australian historical studies.47 Attwood characterised the Aboriginal turn as bringing into focus “the burden of the Aboriginal past for the Australian present”.48 The Aboriginal turn, however, quickly received a more colloquial name in the media: “black-armband” history (as Geoffrey Blainey first called it). Debates about Indigenous history dominated the culture sections of the broadsheet Australian press in the 1990s and 2000s. In one of the most dispassionate academic accounts of the controversy, Patrick Brantlinger quoted newspaper columnist Greg Sheridan as criticising the “moral and linguistic overkill” of “left-wing” historians.49 Black-armband history was decried for its racial critique and its questioning of white ownership of Australia. As Brantlinger puts it, the black-armband debate had potential “legal and political outcomes”. It was not just academic rhetoric.

Grenville’s willingness to look at the unresolved fissures in the past told the reader that history was not a process that could culminate or be resolved in the present. This nuance features in Sarah Thornhill, a book in which a conventional love plot is redefined in light of awareness of the moral lapse of colonisation. This pattern, of melding the social and psychological in a broader canvas of, in Honneth’s terms, “recognition”, is a practice also participated in by Grenville’s fellow novelists of concern, Gail Jones and Alex Miller.

All this tended to be lost in the noisy debate over Grenville’s work. The initial Secret River controversy provided a fillip to a debate about “black-armband” history that had been underway since the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One (2002).50 This in turn stemmed from debates that had begun with the Mabo decision ten years earlier. Technological changes also played a role: as McKenzie Wark has asserted, the early years of the internet saw an eruption of controversies that at once demonstrated the vitality of the online media sphere as an arena of debate and reaffirmed the idea of an Australian national space, however virtual.51 Indeed, the era of the black-armband debates was, technologically speaking, a borderline one, as it saw both the early abundance of internet reading – and the quantum increase in the audience for Australian debates abroad – as well as perhaps the last years of a robust broadsheet weekend-supplement culture. Ironically, a white Australian hegemony whose arrival on the continent had been accompanied by print culture began to unwind in print culture’s apparent last period of glory. Grenville’s novels came into this discursive field, determined not only by redefinitions of Australian racial identity but by the new discursivity of the internet. As Brigid Rooney asserts, The Secret River was received as “an intervention in contemporary debates about Australia’s past”.52 Rooney observes that Inga Clendinnen, who famously excoriated the novel, was at first sympathetic to it, but altered her position after the media debate was well underway. These debates often had their own logic, and carried their participants in their train.

These debates were catalysed by the transitional media space of the early 2000s. In the 1970s, cultural debates might be aired in newspapers, but they were unlikely to spread further. Both in Australia and elsewhere, national radio and television networks were designed to address a broad, not necessarily university-educated, public. The spread of the internet in the 1990s allowed a more self-selecting and consciously intellectual quotient of this larger public to tune in to these debates, as Wark suggests. Although they flourished on the internet, however, these debates originated in broadsheet newspapers and print quarterlies. There was a combination of the emergent and the residual in this era, the cutting-edge and the vestigial, which maximised the impact of cultural news. Furthermore, there was a sense of crisis: intellectual stances seemed up in the air in the 1990s, following the fall of the USSR. Meanwhile, the rise of multiculturalism, challenges to traditional gender roles, and, in Australia, Indigenous rights, provided new challenges to a white-dominated consensus. By the mid-2010s, with the very survival of newspapers in peril, the further fragmentation of the reading public, and the personalisation of cyberspace, Wark’s “vernacular republic” was splintered. But during that transitional phase of the 1990s and 2000s, these cultural debates could be fruitfully disseminated both in print and on screen.

Similarly, Grenville’s trilogy still inhabited what Rooney has described as an “aesthetically conventional” novelistic form.53 This conventionalism expedites Grenville’s affective concern even while fastening it to palatable narrative patterns, and thus is privileged. A similar issue affects Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004), a book at once about the discovery of Indigenous remains and a story of a young boy growing up. McGahan’s book, despite its excursions into what Ken Gelder has termed “the postcolonial Gothic”, feels the pressure of integrating Indigenous-related material with customary narrative form.54 It is hard to rid ameliorative assumptions, no matter how revisionary, of their association with colonial settlement. The coming-of-age novel is too tied into imperial entelechies of betterment to operate as a capacious mode of critique, as welcome as McGahan’s attention to the issue of land rights was.55

Gail Jones, by contrast, came to the subject of concern as a consciously experimental writer, and also as a literary academic with a theoretical perspective on her own writing and that of others. Jones, born in 1955, grew up and made her early career in Western Australia. She started as a writer of metaphysical short stories, published in the collections The House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997), that were influenced by her wide reading in feminist and poststructuralist theory as well as in the Anglophone and Western canons. In the 2000s she turned to the novel and was published internationally. From Black Mirror (2002) through Sixty Lights (2004) and Dreams of Speaking (2006), a series of récits established Jones as a major Australian novelist. Although they were challenging in form and mode, they were less overtly academic than Jones’ short stories, deftly communicating to the reader through limpid implication. They took on transnational, and, in the case of Sixty Lights, historical subject matter, and also, like much of Alex Miller’s work, dealt with artists and the making of art. Sorry (2007) and Five Bells (2011), books Jones published after she moved to Australia’s east coast to take up a chair at the University of Western Sydney, received international acclaim and found their way onto numerous academic syllabi.

Jones is more interested in our grasp of the material than what the material actually is. Perception matters to Jones as much as cognition, the abstract as much as, or more than, the concrete. Jones is not primarily a political or social novelist, which makes her forays into those areas all the more original and captivating. The very title of Sorry, which foreshadowed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, performs a complex gesture of reparation (as did the title of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report), one which goes beyond novelistic closure. There has always been a sense that the accommodation of indigeneity in the Anglophone novel is a formal, not just thematic, problem: that the novel is so rooted in certain assumptions about land and society that it is incapable of incorporating Indigenous ways of thinking.

Jones’ heroine is named Perdita Keene and the imagery of Shakespeare’s late plays, with their sense of reparation and community renewal, pervades the novel.56 Notably, however, it is her mother, Stella, whose denial of the truth represents white Australia’s customary “white blindfold” attitude towards Aboriginal issues, and whose recurrent motif of “snow falling softly in the desert” represents white cultural arrogance, who is preoccupied with Shakespeare (19). While Sorry enacts late-Shakespearean patterns of recognition and forgiveness, it delinks them from a veneration of Shakespeare, which in this context has the danger of bolstering white self-importance. Thus Shakespearean patterns are at once jettisoned on one level and reaffirmed on the other. Jones’ novel involves not only the exoneration of Mary’s Aboriginal father as the killer of Stella’s, but the recognition that Stella’s father, an anthropologist studying Aboriginal life, committed sexual abuse against Mary. The family legend that for Perdita has been a source of identity is poisoned at the source. Indicatively, Western knowledge of Indigenous people, so often culturally mediated through anthropologists, is rotten at the core.

Jones is not indicting all Australian anthropologists, but calling into question previous knowledge, both academic and literary, of the Indigenous: she implies that anthropologists have presumed a virtue they have not earned and do not possess. Thus the novel moves beyond a benign and bland cultural recognition, and beyond a rhetorical guilt (which is ultimately self-affirming and self-congratulatory) to a much more pervasive culpability. If, as Michele McCrea argues, Sorry conducts Perdita “from trauma to recovery and from forgetting to remembrance and responsibility”, it does so with an acknowledgement of the moral costs that have been incurred.57 Jones recognises that forgiveness can only be achieved in a projected future, a future that the novel has, it is to be hoped, done its small bit to create.

In an interview with Maria del Pilar Royo Grasa, Jones spoke of the affinity she sees between the production of art – not just her own, but also Indigenous art – and the politics of hope. She expressed a sense that a given body of work is not just valuable in itself, but for the possibility of survival it projects.58 The poetics of respite that Jones espouses (one thinks in particular of the two “political” characters in Five Bells, Catherine and Pei Xing) are not only about healing specific personal injuries or political fissures; they are engaged in an ongoing project of concern. The role of disability in the novel – as exemplified by the deaf and mute Billy Trevor – recalls that of the mute Decima James in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians (1988); in both novels, portraits of characters who are deprived of conventional communication are used to testify for those generally objectified by conventional, dominant modes of representation.

But generalised goodwill alone will not do the job. Only by acknowledging the depth of guilt can this novel, or any novel, do more than merely say “sorry”. Nishant Shahani has spoken of “the politics of reparative return”, as part of which a critique (in Shahani’s examples, a queer critique) deliberately returns to an origin it knows is brutal and traumatic in order consciously to politicise its present moment.59 This dark, complicit return, rather than a pastoral sprucing-up of history, is what unfolds in Sorry. The novel remains in a self-assigned limbo: it knows it cannot possibly repair the sufferings it has evoked, yet it tries to do as much as it can, through a subtle form of social critique. As Jones reveals in her essay “Sorry-in-the-Sky”, she participated in the May 2000 March for Reconciliation across Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the novel Sorry is for her a “form of activism”. Necessarily, it is indirect, subterranean, tacit rather than focal, told, as Perdita Keene says, “only in a whisper” (3).

Indeed, one of the great appeals, and yet perhaps the most vexatious feature, of concern is its vagueness, its inexactitude. Jones is herself aware of the potential pitfalls of imprecision, which is why she prefers the historically specific trauma theory of Dominick LaCapra to more generalised deconstructive models privileging a more vague disruption and difference; Marc Delrez adduces the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth as an example of the latter, vaguer model.60 Concern may try to be historical in its account of what it seeks to redress, yet its resulting initiatives are condemned to be inchoate. Concern may forsake the grand syntheses of Enlightenment settler knowledge, but it does not replace them with an alternative analytic precision.

In Keneally’s words, concern fails to be separate, even if it renounces a Eurocentric synthesis. Thus it can provide neither an overall grand theory nor a graspable policy solution. It is general, conceptual, influenced by the fluidities and conjectures of the “soft sciences”: sociology, anthropology and humanistic psychology, with which its intellectual sources are so intimately, if ambiguously (as shown in the mostly negative sense of anthropology as depicted in Sorry), connected. The vagueness of the soft sciences is illuminated by Foucault, in the final section of The Order of Things, when he speaks of how the human sciences are bounded by the hard, evidence-based facts of biology and economics but never actually dwell in these fields. Instead, they eddy around helter-skelter in their bounded interrelation.61 In the novels of Australian concern, this social-scientific vagueness is pulled even further away from the calculable by affect: by grief, shame, repentance, and a sympathy that will always be too belated.

Perdita herself realises that she should have said sorry to Mary much earlier, and that by the time she feels the need to say it, the apology has become stale and superfluous, its enunciation archaic. Something has unquestionably been lost: the prescriptiveness that, say, Keneally felt he could give in his account of Africa, the sense that a particular person or party has the potential to “cure” history, is not available to Jones. No policy prescriptions about how to improve the lives of today’s Indigenous people can emerge from Jones’ book. The wounds she foregrounds cannot be healed overnight by fiat, repentance or pardon.

Even Jones’ exacting self-scrutiny has perils. There is always the danger of bad faith in concern. Les Murray, in his summarising end-of-century verse novel Fredy Neptune, enjoins:

This implies that white concern can become a self-expiating preoccupation, and that people saying “sorry” to the Aborigines in fact resent them for being on white Australians’ conscience. But, even if we take Murray’s deftly made point, injustices have still been done to Australia’s Indigenous people, and literature is not ill motivated in trying to take a leading role in addressing them.

Alex Miller: Landscapes of Concern

In his late-career emergence, Alex Miller resembles such classic novelists as Defoe, Miguel de Cervantes, Theodor Fontane and, more recently, as discussed in Chapter 1, the crop of Australian women writers who emerged in midlife in the 1970s and 1980s.63 Born in 1936, he published his first novel only in 1988, and made his breakthrough with 1992’s The Ancestor Game, one of the first serious novels to depict Chinese–Australian affective relations and the Chinese experience in Australia. His major sequence, however, can be said to have started even later, with 2000’s Conditions of Faith. From this novel through 2013’s Coal Creek, Miller has written a series of artistically self-conscious books that meditate on the legacies of totalitarianism in Europe, the experience of subaltern and colonised peoples, and on the moral consequences of whites’ violence towards Indigenous Australians. (As of 2015, Miller was doing research for a new novel set partially in Poland.)

Miller’s novels from 2000 to 2013 – Journey to the Stone Country, Landscape of Farewell, Conditions of Faith, Prochownik’s Dream, Lovesong, Autumn Laing and Coal Creek – have been exacting in their awareness of the limits of representation.64 They exemplify how ideas of concern challenge comfortable attitudes about the nature and mission of fiction. Journey to the Stone Country, the highly personal love story of Bo Rennie and Annabelle Beck, is modelled on real individuals and on the experience of the Jangga people in central Queensland. Miller has explicitly acknowledged the real identities of the individuals involved – notable both because one of them is Indigenous and also because of the intimate and personal nature of the story. This is necessarily more confrontational to the reader than the traditional novelistic contract to which most readers are accustomed, which tells the reader that the novel will deal with personal emotions without naming the real individuals who are the sources for those emotions.

Journey to the Stone Country suggests that fiction must acknowledge what Miller calls, with respect to his aims in Landscapes of Farewell, “the persistence of violence in human history”.65 This can be seen in Lovesong, in which the author-figure, Ken, listens to a story of love and loss among members of the Maghreb diaspora in France, as told to him by a man named John Patterner – a name that is an obvious nod to the idea of the writer as someone who patterns other people’s stories and melds them into shape. But Ken too is a “patterner”; he moulds the story to suit his own narrative ends. John Patterner, indeed, is the novel’s source of agency, someone who alters his life by marrying the North African woman Sabiha and helping her and her family to run a bakery in Paris.66 Niki Tulk has suggested that in Miller’s fiction, the agency of his characters is sacrificed to “the agency of the storyteller”.67 In fact, Miller reverses two customary ideas about narrative. First, he subverts the idea that the narrative consciousness patterns material reality, and thus is privileged over that reality. Second, Miller upends the Eurocentric assumption that the non-European provides the content, but the European provides the form. It is the European, Patterner, who provides the content; form yields to content and white privilege is, in a sense, ceded, even if not entirely. In foregrounding Ken’s retelling of Patterner’s story, Miller is not pursuing narrative intricacy or authorial self-consciousness for its own sake, but because people’s stories, real or fictional, require permission to be used. Miller acknowledges the dynamic relation of his fiction to its material sources and insists on both the ethical and artistic dimensions of this awareness. What Robert Dixon calls the danger of “easy harmonisation” is avoided.68

Indeed, Coetzee’s reading of Tolstoy – prophetic but also hyper-self-conscious – could well be applied to Miller, and Brenda Walker has written compellingly of the Tolstoyan aspect of Miller’s fiction.69 Tolstoy took on, in works like Hadji Murad, representational and intercultural questions much like those explored in Miller’s fiction. Miller is that rare novelist who believes both in art and in the novel’s social mission. One could take up the subjects he has in a more Keneally-like style, as dispatches from the front, incidents of moral witness, but that would lose not just Miller’s positive sense of art’s capacity to heal wounds, but also his deeply earned sense of the costs of art, of the inevitable character flaws of the artist, of the way art cannot help but distort even as it enlivens.

Of the novels mentioned above, all but The Ancestor Game were written after Miller turned sixty. Like Grenville and Jones, he established himself as an acclaimed novelist before turning to matters of concern. Again, this might simply reflect a larger cultural shift towards reconciliation and Indigenous issues after Mabo and leading up to Sorry Day. But it might also reveal something about the individual trajectories of these three writers: perhaps concern is a mode for the second half of life, one that emerges in the careers of novelists after their initial literary reputation has been established. Similarly, David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon moved into the area of concern when the author was approaching sixty. Concern is something one writes into, as it were, rather than writes out of; it is unfinished and self-questioning. Concern pertains not to something that has been true and needs to be expressed, but to something, in Frye’s terms, that is “going to be made true” and needs to be striven towards, to be aesthetically “built” as Friedrich Schiller might say.70 At times concern becomes a kind of being-towards-death: not a second-half-of-life question, but an end-of-life question. We see this in the resonant detail in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance where Wunyeran and Dr Cross, a Noongar man and a white coloniser, establish a friendship based on intellectual affinity, and are, albeit temporarily, buried together. Concern is no country for young men, or young women. It is a product of reflection, retrospection, and even remorse.

In 2013, Alex Miller, in discussing the Australian government’s refugee policy, lamented that the fair-minded, compassionate Australia he knew on arriving in Queensland at age sixteen no longer existed.71 Miller worked as a young stockman in central Queensland in the late 1950s – he would come back to this material in fiction thirty years later, in Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (1988) – and became acquainted with the Australian rural working-class in a way Patrick White, who spent a “gap year” as a jackeroo, never was. By the time Miller wrote about this world, however, it was as distant from present-day Australia as were the European, Chinese and Indigenous heritages evoked in Miller’s other novels. To write about “ordinary Australians”, Miller has to go back in time, to the world he first knew as a migrant from England. This is the world Coetzee says he glimpsed when he arrived many years later, even as it was dying. Miller had a long incubation period as a writer. This late start may have unshackled him from the systemic expectations of what a novelist should do and given him the courage as a novelist to explore intercultural communication: the relationship between an Indigenous man and a white woman in Journey to the Stone Country; the relationship between a white man and an Arab woman in Lovesong; the depiction of Chinese immigration to Australia in The Ancestor Game; and the difficult attempts to render the experience of the visual artist in literary terms in The Sitters, Prochownik’s Dream and Autumn Laing.

Miller might be criticised for exploring horizons of concern instead of addressing specific political issues. Again, one of concern’s vexatious features is its vagueness, its cognitive haziness. But as we have seen with Keneally, there is a danger in hitching one’s wagon to the star of a particular country or leader. If a writer puts his or her imaginative energies into endorsing a specific political cause, for better or for worse, he or she may be tainted by that cause. Moreover, even when the cause is morally justified by history – as was the case with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the writer may still be dismissed as being merely a social campaigner rather than an artist. Miller’s later works address issues of cultural difference and global inequality without tethering themselves to specific agendas. The writer thus protects both his political independence and the status of his work as self-conscious art.

In Journey to the Stone Country, Annabelle Beck is a recently separated middle-aged woman who returns from Melbourne, where she has spent her adulthood, to the central Queensland of her youth, a region scorned by her husband as “culturally a lost cause” and worthy of “no serious attention” (3040). The reader is set up for a story of an alienated urbanite returning to her home country and reclaiming it. But whose land is it, really? Once back in Queensland, Annabelle comes across Bo Rennie, an Aboriginal man whom she knew briefly in their youth, although they were never close friends. The affective tie between the two, however, is deep. Bo says to Annabelle, “We tumbled naked in the water together” (339). Annabelle then thinks that she knows the place and can picture them there together. The repaired or restored memory is secondary, but it also fills an emotional gap. Annabelle and Bo’s ensuing love is an emotion at once newly kindled and rekindled. As Robert Dixon indicates, Annabelle’s love for Bo is initially laden with exoticism, but this is purged as she comes to know him and his context better.72 That this middle-aged love is not innocent of bad faith does not staunch its healing power. Equally, as per Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, Annabelle and Bo’s love, although sexual, is not reductively libidinal. It opens out to a larger reach of affect; in articulating her feelings for Bo to herself, Annabelle thinks in terms of trust, respect and companionship as much as of the “body’s message that love would work” (2512).

Annabelle wonders, when Bo first tells her that they knew each other in childhood, “Could his claim be true?” This claim to shared childhood turf morphs into a larger claim: an assertion of land ownership. While Annabelle’s family and the neighbouring Bigges family premised their ownership of the land on the effacement of Indigenous people, Bo’s white pastoralist grandfather married a “traditional Jangga woman”. He fostered an inclusiveness and heterodoxy that was not only rare for the time but “exceptional” in comparison to Annabelle’s conventional grandfather. Bo tells Annabelle, however, that “around Mount Coolon” most people acted in this inclusive, live-and-let-live spirit (340). As with Grenville’s work, the reader might be tempted to cry anachronism here: our image of 1950s Queensland is not generally one of racial inclusion. But not only should we give Miller, who was actually there in the 1950s, some credence on this point, but also, more importantly, the novel’s role in this context is as much to herald what should be as to reflect an attested historical condition. Literature’s power to bring hope stems from its being hypothetical; this necessarily involves the possibility that it be inauthentic. Concern, as a mode, risks anachronism and inauthenticity, as well as an overly diffuse general goodwill, in order to reimagine the present and provide alternative futures to those that may seem predestined or inevitable.

This does not mean that Miller is incapable of precision. Indeed, the topography of the book is not only beautifully rendered but precisely limned, from the verandah on Zamia Street in Townsville to the stations of Ranna, Verbena and Haddon Hill. Yet this locality does not imply an organic sense of the land. True, the stone country is Annabelle’s mental recourse, a curative ground to which she returns sickened by the false relationships and meretricious trendiness of the city. Miller’s novel might therefore seem a tale of pastoral redemption, of the rescue of the damsel in distress from the rapacious city by the timeless land. But Miller is, despite his love of character and landscape, a riddling and intricate chronicler. The book’s references to Ludwig Leichhardt, metonymically pointing to the explorer’s fictionalisation in Voss, acknowledge that the otherness of the Australian landscape has already been encountered by white writers. Miller’s is a ruminated, twice-told tale. He does indeed see the land as a home for Annabelle that she lacked in the city; but he also sees it as a source of more material resources. Bo Rennie is involved in the negotiations for the use of the stone country on behalf of the Jangga people, and is not a priori opposed to development, although he is horrified by the way the land has been poisoned by previous exploiters. As if to dispel traditional associations of Indigenous people with antidevelopment ideology, Miller has Les Marra, a radical Indigenous activist, be the most vocal advocate for building a dam that would obliterate the Bigges family’s Ranna Station.

Indeed, the Bigges family occupies the role ascribed to the Indigenous people in Dark’s trilogy: they are a vanishing race, set to be obliterated like the Clearys of Drogheda in McCullough’s The Thorn Birds. (This sense of the effacement of white settlement is also seen in the ghost town of Mount Coolon.) Unlike the Rennie family, who on their station, Verbena, envisaged the future “as a modest continuation of the past”, the Bigges had hoped to spearhead “a landed dynasty according to the old model, a new European aristocracy of the Antipodes” (4548). The Bigges asserted not only control of the land but also sovereignty; they sought to enforce European hierarchies and precedents. In consequence, their estate crumbled. The Rennies, meanwhile, survived by keeping to a middle way, and by fostering a more inclusive relationship with the people of the land. Miller does not see a simple upending of European modes of sovereignty. His level of enthusiasm for Les Marra’s activism is discreetly cool. For Miller, Indigenous and Western traditions are different from each other, but not radically so; the unread editions of Edward Gibbon on the shelves of the abandoned station are the white equivalents of Aboriginal memory. If Bo’s people have an oracular “language of signs and silence” (1000), so did the ancient Greeks. In a hybrid world, it is hard to untangle tradition and modernity. However, what Bo and Annabelle end up seeking together, in all their compromised, weathered frailty, is a way of life in which recognition depends more on affect than on sovereignty.

If we need to speak in a new way, and the only language we know is the old language, how then may we speak? Ten years later Miller set another novel in central Queensland, this time focusing on a young white man, Bobby Blue. In Coal Creek (2013), Bobby Blue is framed and goes to prison for a crime he did not commit.73 He loves Irie, the daughter of his employer, Daniel Collins, but she does not come to his defence even though she knows the truth. At the end of the novel, Bobby reconciles with Irie but comments, “I do not think that we could speak”; he feels an emotion, he says, “more than I can speak of” (291). In forgiving Irie yet struggling to articulate why, Bobby Blue embodies the major problems both of Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century – how to speak as an Australian, as the inhabitant of an old land newly settled – and in more recent decades: how can the pain of others be acknowledged without merely buffeting ourselves? How can language be at once a medium for artistry and intricacy and a tool for restorative justice?

“Blue”, short for Blewitt, perhaps denotes depression, as well as potentially a kind of primitivism. The character of Blue in Eve Langley’s The Pea-Pickers (1942) – female yet cross-gendered, migratory yet associated with the land – may also inform the name here. Bobby Blue’s stance in the face of his unjust imprisonment – stoic to the point not just of martyrdom but of stupidity – suggests a kind of inarticulacy born of oppression and relegation. When Prince Philip, consort of Queen Elizabeth II, visited Australia in 2002 on a royal tour, he asked if Indigenous people still threw spears at one another. An Australianist of my acquaintance remarked, waggishly, that the Indigenous individual so addressed should have retorted, “Do the British still paint themselves blue?” – garnishing oneself with woad dye having been a practice of the ancient Celts. All peoples, of whatever colour, have at one point in their histories been on the wrong side of cultural encounter, and so often, as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, references to the ancient Britons have been used to express the relativistic nature of all colonisation or ideas of racial hierarchy. Bobby Blue is white. He is not Indigenous. But as a convict he has, like Indigenous people, experienced a fundamental injustice. He is, as it were, rewarded for this suffering by being granted, by the author and by life, an undisturbed, harmonious relation to the land. At the book’s end, Bobby and Irie are “going back to Mount Hay, where we belonged” (287). Bobby’s white privilege has been abraded by his own disabilities and through suffering. This broadens the canvas of reconciliation – without denying the categorical difference between the collective victimisation of Indigenous people and that of individual whites – by making concern a hypothetical territory in which all manner of gaps and fissures in understanding transpire.

This is why concern is not just hypocritical white self-pity or a consummately acceptable sentimentalism. Concern can easily be a means of getting out of the predicament it at the same time expresses – as when Stella, the culpable character in Sorry, “enjoyed the concern she solicited” (59). Concern, to get out of this trap, has to examine itself meticulously. These novelists of concern distinguish themselves with the scrupulousness with which they all – whether or not they succeed – measure themselves and are aware of the protocols and pitfalls of writing about Indigenous issues. Earlier writers who described Indigenous characters, such as Eleanor Dark and Katharine Susannah Prichard (whose Coonardoo was published in 1929), were communists or communist sympathisers who were committed to a teleological view of world history spearheaded by a white power, the Soviet Union. Their accounts of Indigenous culture had a touch of the “vanishing Australia” motif about them.

Jones, in including Pei Xing, survivor of the Cultural Revolution, in Five Bells, and Miller, in featuring many refugees from communist countries as well as Australians who have become disillusioned with communism (such as Freddy in Autumn Laing), draw a clear distinction between critiques of existing Australian institutions and the grievances once aired by communists and others. The leftists Dark and Prichard could assume either that a social safety net existed or that the advanced world was moving towards such a safety net. In the contemporary era, thanks to neoliberalism, a rhetoric of concern that might previously have been only ornamental has had to take up the slack.

Concern between Sacred and Secular

Not all articulations of concern are overtly spiritual, and none of the major white Australian writers of concern – Jones, Miller, Grenville, Malouf – seems particularly to espouse any form of transcendental belief. But concern has its rough equivalent in what Lyn McCredden, among others, has termed “the contemporary sacred”: a sense that braids spiritual awareness with a radical reaching-out to the other.74 McCredden’s “contemporary sacred” nimbly circumvents the question of, which sacred? Is it a case of a genuine acknowledgement of Indigenous spirituality complementing traditional Christianity, as occurs in Les Murray’s Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle? If, as Elaine Lindsay has argued, scholars have assumed that Australia is “embarrassed by discussion of religious and spiritual views”,75 is this silence somehow equivalent to the relative silence about Indigenous issues in mainstream Australian fiction before Mabo? If, as Michael Griffith has argued in his work on the mystical poet Francis Webb, there is a link between Webb’s outsider status and his dynamic sense of the sacred, is to seek transcendence a form of rebellion against Australian conventionalities?76 A radical Christianity exceeding the bounds of both secular progressivism and traditional liturgy, as in the poetry and criticism of Kevin Hart and his complicated engagement with ideas of “negative theology”, or the eco-spirituality seen in the work of Judith Wright, John Kinsella and Oodgeroo Noonuccal, could both address this question.77 McCredden’s rendition of the sacred is thus not just a fetishisation of the Indigenous, not just Christianity by other means, but an intermediate, even synthetic compound. It is a sacred that does not insist on purity or organicism, which finds plenitude without needing that plenitude to be anchored in authenticity. In this respect, the almost inherent inauthenticity of concern, its tendency towards bad faith, can be an advantage. Concern makes no claim to total reparation or perfection; it knows that it cannot cure all the wounds it acknowledges, but it nevertheless hopes to treat them.

For concern, heterogeneity and imprecision become assets. Toby Davidson evokes this semi-curative imprecision in “Arrival of the Sunling”:

It is not that the songbird is so beautiful as to assert its beauty over the country. It is that the dominant alternative to it seemed so overpowering, until the surprise the songbird represents. The rhetoric of concern often operates as a surprise: surprise that there is still another order of values out there to rival the flattening consensus of self-interest.

In another avian poem, “Black Swan”, Davidson associates the distinctive bird of Western Australia with the beliefs of the Nyoongar people:

The black swan is linked to the Indigenous idea of the Rainbow Serpent and to an overall sense of heightened perception as signalled by the assonance and paronomasia so abundant in Davidson’s language. This is not simply consolation, but an attempt to braid awareness of indigeneity into a heightened understanding. Concern often sets out to be primarily perceptual: its intended work is not necessarily social work. Concern did not set out to be an alternative to neoliberalism, but it has had to assume that role for lack of a better option.

In The Last Utopia, Samuel Moyn argues that in the 1970s, progressive thinkers embraced the ideal of “human rights” simply because earlier social utopias had failed and human rights, as a principle, was sufficiently transcendental to fill the gap.80 Although concern is quite different from human rights as a concept – it focuses on the viability of others, not on the inviolability of individuals – both involve a non-collectivist ideology in place of a collectivist one. The distinction is captured in Winton’s Eyrie when Keely’s post-industrial, ad hoc caring takes the place of his mother Doris’ more purposive, late-modern altruism. Yet there are articulations of concern that are not necessarily spiritual, such as Alison Ravenscroft’s in The Postcolonial Eye,81 which combines a sense of attention to the integrity of Indigenous cognition and experience with a rigorous critique of spectatorial fetishes or illusions. Analogously, Jennifer Rutherford’s The Gauche Intruder links a more inclusive moral sense to the attenuation of white privilege in Australia.82

Concern is so nebulous that it evades the inflexibility and paralysis of late modernity that abetted the rise of neoliberal individualism. In this, concern’s ability to accommodate multiple levels of being is paramount. In allowing the contemporary world to register what McCredden calls “luminous moments”, concern affirms that interpersonal regard does not have to be characterised by a culling of losers. The imprecision of concern is what enables its affect to unfold.

The Thanatopolitics of Concern: Aboriginal Writing into the Contemporary

Do Indigenous writers themselves explore themes of concern? Concern largely stems from liberal guilt, which in turn comes from white privilege. The writers I have discussed have meticulously tried to disassemble that privilege, but they have had to do that in a way Indigenous authors have not. Frye posited that concern provides a collective solution that lacks Marxist authoritarianism while broadening an ethics of care potentially comparable to that of psychoanalysis. Frye’s criticism, however, espoused Jung rather than Freud, partially because Jung seemed to represent a more optimistic and autonomous role for the imagination. Australia’s few Jungian-influenced thinkers – David Tacey paramount among them – have articulated a framework of anchored and sensible compassion that complements the reparative ethical aesthetic of writers such as Miller. Whites have had the privilege to be this meditative and reflective. Indigenous people have been in the direct path of racism and oppression. Much Aboriginal writing has of necessity been protest writing: Jack Davis, Oodgeroo, the early Archie Weller and the “Aboriginal” Mudrooroo. Protest literature, as in Davis’ poem quoted in the previous chapter, is closer to the affect of rancour than of concern. Yet through the course of their oppression Indigenous Australians, in life and writing, have offered succour to others within and outside their community.

Mudrooroo was the least compromising of polemicists, and although in middle-period works such as Us Mob (1995) he seemed to espouse a non-essentialist basis for divisions between white and Indigenous, in general as an essayist he came not to bring peace but a sword. In the 1990s, partially due to the institution of the David Unaipon Award by the University of Queensland Press and the flourishing of Indigenous-run publishers such as Magabala Books, a far wider range of Indigenous writers began to be published, articulating a challenging variety of affects and priorities long present but relatively new to print culture.

Many novels of the 1990s and early 2000s by Indigenous writers, such as Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs (1998) and Vivienne Cleven’s Bitin’ Back (2001), are close to the Bildungsroman genre, which with its emphasis on individual development precludes the idea of concern, as Gayatri Spivak demonstrates in her classic postcolonial reading of Jane Eyre.83 This is so even if both of the books mentioned above are formally risky, and even though the identities of their protagonists are, as Jeanine Leane puts it, “fractured”.84 As Leane points out, in the Aboriginal Bildungsroman collective growth or enlargement sometimes lies beneath an individual story, as in John Muk Muk Burke’s Bridge of Triangles.85 The traditional Bildungsroman protagonist does not face a deep temporal reservoir of debilitating circumstance. But as Leane shows, in a novel such as Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air (2006), a protagonist ostensibly too young to have experienced the trauma of the Stolen Generations is nonetheless haunted by it.86 In books such as these, the main tension is between self and other, whereas concern jettisons the very idea of self – which is why so many novels of concern are either ensemble novels or layered novels, in which one story subtends another. This is not to say that many Indigenous-authored narratives do not show solicitude of one person for another or for a community. Jackie Huggins’ Auntie Rita (1996) is a consummate portrayal of relations of affection and dependence proceeding from altruism. Bill Neidjie’s concern for Kakadu in the Northern Territory, as a lived space, as expressed in books like Kakadu Man (1985), is not just narrowly ecological but part of a broader human network of care and connection. Eric Willmot’s Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior (1989) is an exemplary portrait of altruism as a mode of leadership, as the early freedom fighter against white occupation of coastal New South Wales not only rallies disparate Aboriginal peoples to his cause but even persuades white convicts to join him. Pemulwuy indeed comes close to being a novel of concern simply because Pemulwuy has power, or, as a resistance leader, tries to arrogate power to himself. Power is a correlate and prerequisite of concern: if one is powerless, one has no leverage to care for others, a task at the heart of concern’s mission.

There are indeed numerous instances of Indigenous characters in novels by Indigenous people caring, looking out for, or helping each other. To again adapt Leane’s logic concerning the Bildungsroman, mere routine acts of care might be a great achievement for Indigenous people denied the very idea of a natal family or family of origin, considering the agenda of the Stolen Generations was to break up families in the interests of assimilation and eugenic racism. In addition, Leane argues that the Western Bildungsroman is based on an individual growing out of his or her community, often leaving a narrow parochial background to search for art, self-realisation, knowledge and sex. The Aboriginal Bildungsroman, in contrast, is more centred on the achievement or recuperation of community that racial oppression has tried to shred. In this respect, Kim Scott’s portrait in Benang: From the Heart (1999) of Ernest Solomon Scat, who attempts to assimilate Indigenous people and obliterate their identity, is the opposite of a figure of concern. The alternative road is represented in the novel by the reparative posture of Scat’s part-Nyoongar grandson, Harley, who tries both to reclaim his Indigenous identity and to atone for his grandfather’s crimes.

But the senior Scat’s sense of governmental power as a means to social improvement does highlight something which must be faced: that concern is frequently conditioned by white privilege and by the exercise of power. As Leane points out, the trajectory of the Bildungsroman presumes individual agency, which whites can assume as part of their birth right, but which has a different connotation in Indigenous literature. This is because the rights claims subtending the Bildungsroman – which Joseph Slaughter has discussed as tantamount to that of the cognitive subject in civil society – have historically not been able to be asserted.87 Analogously, it can be said that Aboriginal Australians have felt, in centuries of historical experience, the timbre of threats that white Australians have felt only recently – of a calamitous upheaval in the natural order as seen in anthropogenic climate change and the erosion of people’s sense of security in the face of the massive sociocultural change of the neoliberal explosion. That being said, even the “losers” of the neoliberal era, such as Tsiolkas’ Danny or Winton’s Keely, are permitted far more agency by the “winners” than whites have historically permitted Indigenous people. They still enjoy white privilege, and the problems of neoliberalism and late modernity are but pinpricks compared to the protracted trauma of occupation, disinheritance, and the arrogant white forecast of Indigenous extinction. And in any case, Indigenous communities are themselves subject to the same effects of neoliberalism as the larger community of the nation.

We can even go deeper and say that not just agency but, in Agamben’s terms, life itself is what white Australian literature can assume but which Indigenous literature has to fight for. As Michael Griffiths88 has argued, Aboriginal people in Australia were subjected to what the African political theorist Achille Mbembe89 calls necropolitics: both the prospect of literal murder and the assumption that as a people they would either die out or be forcibly assimilated. Necropolitics is an inversion of the idea of biopolitics as proposed by Foucault and Agamben to describe the power and processes by which populations and bodies are managed. Concern tries to be the affective avatar of good biopolitics, or biopolitics which is as benign as possible. It tries for tendance, supervision, or, to use Foucault’s term, pastorship. It is an affective successor and locum tenens for the gutted mid-century welfare state. It is compassionate and inclusive, but from a position of privilege. Rainer Forst has discerned a problem with “tolerance as an individual virtue”: it implies a gracious putting-up-with of flawed people, people about whom a “normatively substantive objection” still exists.90 As we have seen, this implicit bad faith is also present in concern. But concern tries to use its bad faith and its awareness of such as a synthetic catalyst to create internal change. That concern proceeds from privilege thus is not an indictment but a prerequisite. Without power there can be no concern.

One can liken the difference between earlier Indigenous fiction and the works of Alexis Wright, to which I will turn shortly, as similar to the difference between early and late Dickens. Early Dickens features Bildungsroman-style protagonists and a fairly straightforward protest against cruel social conditions. Later Dickens involves ensemble casts of characters and more ambiguous constellations of beneficence. Similarly, where earlier Indigenous novels often focused on the fortunes of an individual protagonist, Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) is notable for its portrayal of an entire community, or really two Indigenous communities among the Waanyi people, the East Side and West Side Pricklebush mobs. There is an emphasis on the totality of the community in its strengths and weaknesses rather than an attempt to single out an exemplary hero who will, like the “talented tenth” of African Americans W. E. B. Du Bois identified, emerge as something between a redeemer and a role model for her people.91 Indeed, the most likely candidate for this role in Carpentaria, Kevin Phantom, has his wonderfully promising mind severely damaged by a mining accident and is disabled. His once-brilliant prospects are ruined. The community’s problems will have to be solved more collectively: under the sort of capitalism sustained by the mining company that dominates Carpentaria, no single champion will be permitted to emerge.92 Phantom’s very name illustrates that, in the white world’s eyes, the Indigenous people are ghosts, people who in the white-supremacist view of history died out simply because they were consigned to death. Bain Attwood states that the dominant Eurocentric theory of history in settler Australia held that “Aboriginal people had no place in the modern and progressive nation because it was deemed that they were an ancient or even regressive people. Indeed, they were commonly regarded as a dying race.”93

Wright’s novel is suffused with an awareness that the rhetoric of racial death, even if unsuccessful, has a real and brutal impact. The Phantom clan, in its various permutations and often fierce internal divisions are, collectively, survivors not just of necropolitics but also of what Roberto Esposito calls thanatopolitics: presuming the extirpation of people.94 Necropolitics assumes that the relegated or oppressed will just die; thanatopolitics actively seeks to kill them. Thanatopolitics can operate literally, as in genocide, or metaphorically, as in the consignment of “losers” to insignificance under neoliberalism, via what Nixon calls “slow violence”. A palpable mode of slow violence transpired in the Northern Territory intervention in 2007, in which the federal Australian government, just before a national election, intervened to halt what it saw as rampant child abuse in the territory. The intervention was an event of crucial importance to Wright. Indeed, the media coverage when Wright won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Carpentaria in 2007 was eclipsed by the controversy over the intervention, and this event deeply infuses her subsequent novel, The Swan Book. In a politics that substitutes death for life, a decisive collective amelioration cannot happen, at least not in the present. In Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), the Bandjalung woman Jo Breen’s role as caretaker for the dead reveals an association between regard for the dead and Indigenous advocacy that goes beyond a reverence for forebears. Contemporary Indigenous people are portrayed as using the reality of death as a galvanising premise for care, while white assumptions about Indigenous identity are shown to reflect a tacit white belief in a link between indigeneity and death.95 In Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, similarly, Bobby Wabalanginy is seen as fundamentally dead in the eyes of the white invaders with whom he vainly seeks to develop ties of affection and collegiality. The verbal leitmotif of Bobby’s experience is “rose a whale”, a phrase that describes a whale rising as whalers approach, but which also augurs a resilient, natural optimism, standing in dolorous counterpoint to the reality plotted for Bobby by the conquerors. Whales might rise, but in the whites’ minds, Bobby’s people never will.

Launching Concern Forward: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

Given that concern is hypothetical, interested in things that are yet to be, speculative fiction may be its most apt genre. Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book is set late in the twenty-first century. Climate change has engulfed the world, leading scores of refugees to come to Australia. One of these is Bella Donna, a benign old woman from Italy who raises a young Indigenous girl, Oblivion Ethylene. Why does this act of individual care register as concern, while earlier plots involving individual acts of care might not? It has to do with the issue of sovereignty.

The character of Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal prime minister of Australia, has been read, for instance by Jennifer Mills in a 2013 issue of Overland, as a fictionalised version of Noel Pearson,96 the Aboriginal activist from Far North Queensland who in the late 1990s was seen as a potential future prime minister of Australia, presumably from the left side of politics, but in the 2000s emphasised personal responsibility and, as Emma Kowal has argued, saw rights as essentially opposed to responsibilities, with responsibilities proposed as constructive and communitarian and rights seen as a symptom of entitlement.97 Finch views himself as responsible, and thus a winner; his policies help only those deemed responsible, and thus winners. Finch at once adheres devotedly to the rigid expectations of others and imposes his own rigid expectations on those over whom he gains power. Oblivia is made to marry Finch against her will, putting a Harrower-like allegory of domestic tyranny at the heart of this book about contrasting modes of power. The ethics of concern are affirmed by the exaltation of Oblivia, who cares for others, and also in Finch’s death: the Indigenous communities reclaim him, burying him in his ancestral territory and showing his body the concern he did not show for others in life. Finch is not excoriated or turned into a scapegoat; he is depicted as a human being whose life has human value.

In the past generation, “custodianship” has emerged as a term to describe the Indigenous relation to land. Nicholas Jose, in his novel The Custodians (1997), depicts custodianship as a process in which, in different ways, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous can engage, and as an attitude that puts stewardship above possession.98 Custodianship, however, involves not only responsibility but also authority, even if it does not make the claim of ownership and thus sovereignty. It is not merely a duty, a keeping watch of the land, but an active process of care, not only for the land but also for larger Indigenous cultural traditions. The Bangarra Dance Theatre, for instance, in its publicity material for its performance piece Brolga (first staged in 2001) says that the company exists for “the care and celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life”.99 The Swan Book does not make an absolute, legitimist claim to land on the part of Indigenous people, as if trying to mimic a European nation-state. Instead, it depicts Indigenous people tending and shepherding a commonwealth in which non-Indigenous people who share their values can also gather. This is not just a utopian countercultural community, however. If Oblivia’s mind is, as she laments at the book’s end, “only a mansion for the stories of extinction”, it is a mansion in which “acts of love” have been practised, and where vulnerable animals and people have been sheltered.100

The Mabo decision was about sovereignty. In New Zealand, the Māori had the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which formally acknowledged their stake in the land; even Native American peoples had reservations, which acknowledged their parallel legal status as nations in some form. In Elazar Barkan’s view, both of these would be examples of “fictitious legality”, legal documents which the white signatories had no intention of following. Yet these documents, operating, in Barkan’s terms, within “the formal constraint of the law”, create the possibility of a gap between intention and reality; although the white signatories might dishonour them, their hypocrisy would then be foregrounded and could potentially be redressed.101 In Australia, because the white settlers never felt even tactically compelled to engage in negotiations or mock-negotiations, they did not. Therefore the Indigenous people never ceded sovereignty, and as early as 1981 Aboriginal activists such as Kevin Cook began to speak of the “unceded sovereignty” exercised by the Indigenous people.102 Mabo, not so much in its acknowledgement of substantive land claims, which in themselves did not involve sovereignty, but in abrogating the principle of terra nullius, which claimed that nothing before the arrival of Europeans could constitute a legal precedent, raised the spectre of sovereignty. Sovereignty involves self-determination but it also involves the exercise, or at least the discourse of, force.

Inevitably, this force can be perverted. In The Swan Book, Warren Finch’s political rise proceeds from the Australian state making a formal treaty with the Brolga nation. The Brolga people become an international showcase for faux-utopian human rights, one that holds up a pleasing mirror to neoliberalism and allows its political leaders to hail “the most peaceful era in the existence of the world” (although this utopia is punctured by the disasters consequent on climate change). Elders are “hailed for sitting on their land since the beginning of time” (1539), something that apparently only becomes admirable when whites stop trying to annul sovereignty. The Swan Book treats sarcastically the postcolonial instruments of recognition.

When Coetzee moved from South Africa to South Australia, his work took a turn from the postcolonial – reimagining European classics, fashioning allegories of vigilance and brutality – to the biopolitical: that is, to a concern for animal rights and a scepticism about the role of the intellectual in a world suffused by cynicism. In The Swan Book, Wright’s work has undergone a similar turn: from tales of the land and people themselves to stories in which the flow of refugees is described alongside a luxuriant animality, epitomised by the swans, and a recognition that the matrices of world power are more complex than those that are legibly colonial. Wright and Coetzee share a sense of Homo sapiens as an animal, and of the biopolitical as not totally separate from the animal world, yet distinguished from it by those dark necropolitical, thanatopolitical practices of which only humans have so far been shown to be capable.103

Thus the totemic animal for Wright’s novel is not simply the swan, but the symbol of the swan, with all the significance humans ascribe to it. Like most birds, the swan has lyrical associations. But they are also associated with coursing along on rivers and lakes, and so are associated with the earth. Swans symbolise beauty and indeed in the late nineteenth-century poetry epitomised it, but also beauty in distress. Beauty can be a trivial or distracting adornment; but in the form of the swan, it gestures towards a tragic yet redemptive augury of a meaning beyond what is there on the surface. Warren Finch, of course, has a bird name too, although not as majestic or sonorous a one.

Oblivia’s recognition of others, such as refugees and animals, is not so much an act of personal or collective discovery as, as her name suggests, a creative, positive remembering, much as seen in Gail Jones’ Sorry. If Oblivia is to un-forget herself, it is necessary to engage in the exercise of power, even if it is a very different mode of power than that of Warren Finch.104 Indigenous people in The Swan Book are not simply adorable victims, “beautiful losers” in Leonard Cohen’s phrase.105 They are agents who can wield and dispose of power. It is the exercise of power that is important and from which Wright does not flinch. As Ghassan Hage and Robyn Eckersley have argued, “responsibility” has often been used as a paternalistic, colonial code word, implying that whites can take responsibility for others, but Indigenous people cannot even take responsibility for themselves.106 Oblivia and to a lesser extent her loved ones take responsibility for themselves and others, and can only do so because they have some power. If one is disempowered there is no way one can express concern. It is only in the wake of the collapse of traditional sovereignty – “all around the world governments fell as quickly as they rose in one extinction event after another” (155) – that concern is a possibility.

Oblivia is plagued by nostalgie de la boue, a French term used to represent intellectuals’ yearning for a ground with which they feel out of touch, recalling Rousseau and his yearning for a lapsed nature. The phrase literally means “nostalgia for the mud”, but it was often used metaphorically, for instance to describe 1960s radicals fascinated by violence and the marginal. But this nostalgie is not, in Wright’s novel, a yearning for Indigenous Australian land; it is a “virus” that introjects memories of refugees from other places who are exiled from where they have been (114). Oblivia thus accommodates the thought-worlds of other, distressed people. But she also asserts her relation to her own ground; the swamp-world where she and so many others take refuge is not essentialist. Oblivia is not tethered to the ground either materially or cognitively, nor does she yearn for territory as such, but for sovereignty. Her community of concern in The Swan Book is made rather than born. Concern, both as Frye originally articulated it and in my own extension of the concept here, is secondary, derived, “imagined” in Benedict Anderson’s sense; it is part of natura naturata and not natura naturans, heterocosmic. Wright’s heterological idea of concern finds echo in Ali Alizadeh’s and Penelope Pitt-Alizadeh’s argument that for contemporary Australian Indigenous writing, an awareness of “the destructive combination of interconnected factors and forces unleashed by life in an unjust … society” is more pertinent than identity politics (their example is Charmaine Papertalk-Green).107

In The Swan Book, it is Finch, the white man’s willing puppet, who gets to where he is by articulating an Indigenous identity that is yet legible within the system.108 After Warren Finch appropriates ideas of Indigenous belonging and uses them to make his leap to power, Oblivia’s people are left “for dead” by Finch (3581). Out of this thanatopolitical mire they feel solidarity with “the throngs of banished people wandering aimlessly throughout the world”. By becoming symbolically homeless, they discover compassion for others, of whatever background, who are homeless as well. And it is Oblivia, a victim herself, who acts, not the male figures in the community. The men are consumed by rage at Warren Finch, at the same time as they are unwillingly fascinated by him. While they rail against him, it is Oblivia who acts to bring people to safety.

Wright depicts two different modes of Indigenous governmentality: one epitomised by Warren Finch, an Aboriginal man who has triumphed within the system by conventional means; the other epitomised by Oblivia, who sets up a new power formation that is able to fulfil the duty of a state to care for the people under its umbrella. If, as Foucault has pointed out, there are hypocrisies and self-perpetuations in any form of power, as bureaucracy develops its own momentum and its own privilege, at least for the “refu gees of every nationality coalesced by flights from the ruined cities” (4284), there is tendance, and some of the refugees will take that succour even if it is inevitably accompanied by the velvet prison of governmentality.

We are back to the important gesture made by Keneally in To Asmara, of seeing Africans as organisers of a state and African institutions as state institutions. Similarly, the international recognition of the Brolga nation, although tokenistic and motivated by white complacency, creates the formal outline of a sovereign Indigenous state, an outline that can one day be filled in by reality. As Mala Htun has pointed out, tokenism can be an important force in establishing the conceptual possibility of leadership by formerly subjugated groups.109 Similarly, material conditions among Indigenous Australians were not much changed by their attainment of formal citizenship in the 1967 referendum, but that event created the rhetoric of enfranchisement, which could be used to highlight the shortcomings of reality, as Wright with consummate causticity does repeatedly in The Swan Book. Thus it is compelling that Warren Finch, however failed his politics, is an Aboriginal leader who governs both whites and Aborigines, as the Indigenous community makes clear when it seeks to bury Finch in his own territory. They are reclaiming him from himself. But they also codify their own sovereignty in the act of rebuking and outflanking Finch. Oblivia’s swamp commonwealth cares for its people more effectively than Finch’s Australia can. Although Finch is the villain of the novel, he possesses his own pathos.

Wright’s concern incorporates all those distressed and itinerant in the world, an affirmation of the value of all human life. In a world bereft of a constructive statism or of a sense that social equality can be achieved, the imperative to reconcile with the Indigenous people and to take in refugees became correlated with the very possibility of altruism, and in tackling these issues contemporary writers are also tackling something more general. The idea of concern provides a way for literature to be altruistic without being moralistic, to care for others without subjecting them to social control. Concern envisions a world in which inequality might not be cured, but in which reparation is lived out, and incidents still fail to be separate.