الفهرس 
An Introductory ChapterOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The question now IS, how did White and Malouf thematise Australia in their novels? The answer is that in White’s Voss it is the will to dominate others and nature ane! its subsequent failure, and in Riders it shows the importance’ of the scapegoat to social cohesion and spirituality, which is a sign that White was a precursor to post colonialism. White’s themes are a more direct indication of his moving away from colonialism; however, for him, colonialism had to be historically re-created and moments of early contact between the colonized and colonizers were particularly fascinating. White’s Australia is not just morally infected and empty, but also fragmented. It contains families of course, but also groups made up of individuals who share space almost by accident.
In his novels, White is concerned with states of being; with being in the self, or with being in the world, the world of other selves, of mass society, and the desire to escape from these states of being into the perfection of pure being. In Voss, the ~xplorer, as Laura tells Voss is ”pure will”. He wants to lranscend being in the world (whether the social or the natural world) to achieve absolute being.
In Voss, which he sets in the colonial era, \Vhite represents :olonialisation as a fragile settlement of a country that resists shaping by Europeans. In fact, the country even resists
humanization, and never becomes an easy place for habitation. It is a place where accidents and death seem to happen more often than elsewhere, but also a place where human (or European) will to power can be tested and can fail. Laura in Voss says, ”Everyone is still afraid, or most of us, of this country, and will not say it. We are not yet possessed of understanding” (Voss 28). For White, as he mentioned In The Flaws of the Glass, and for white settlers generally, Australia is an edge culture, not just far from Europe but on the edge of the ”country beyond”, the great interior, available to test will and imagination (Flaws 154).
Voss’s journey into the continent in search of perfection of self is paralleled by Laura’s comparable quest within Sydney society. However, Voss is never freed from social conflicts, or from the intrusion of others on his own world, though broadly his journey can be seen as a progress to the extremes of social alienation. Voss’s journey proves that there is no chance of fulfilment outside society or in it.
In Voss, White’s exploration of the landscape of memory and the terrain of the mind parallels Voss’s own exploration of one of the harshest physical landscapes on earth - in which the Aborigines move with ease and efficiency. Voss is hardly an anthropological novel, although it does detail the actions of tribal blacks in their extremely demanding local environment.
The Aboriginal servants Dugald and Jackie and the entire mass of faceless, undifferentiated blacks are significant, not so much because of the specific traditional customs of the people, but because of their profound spiritual - and actual - affinity with the land and its creatures. Voss’s attempt to dominate the Black Australians with whom he comes in contact is as impossible as his endeavour to tame the harshness of the desert itself.
On the other hand, the shared environment does not produce a spiritual rapport. In the critical episode of Voss’s attempt to placate Jackie and his adopted tribe with the words, ”tell your people we are necessary to one another”, the attempt is doomed. Clearly, the Aborigines did not consider the whites to be necessary to them. The fundamental dichotomy between black and white is beautifully, consistently, and strikingly evoked by the author in this novel.
In Riders in the Chariot White captures the metaphysical dilemma of a part-Aboriginal, Alf Dubbo, and the pressures exerted by both black and white Australian cultures on him. He
voided his own people, whatever the degree of colour, because f a certain delicacy with cutlery, acquired from the parson’s ster. It is true that Dubbo is one of the elect in this novel, by rtue of his finely-honed intuitive and spiritual perceptions and ~cause of n.\S stat\lS ~ a. ~~\~~\.~d. (;)~\.~~\._ ~~\. ~~ \..~ ~~~~ ~”-’. an untouchable; he is an Aboriginal untouchable, divorced from
both the larger white as well as his traditional black society. In a real sense, then, he is not relegated to the shadow of western society so much as trapped between two conflicting worlddVIews. The pressure and pain are immense, and are
commensurate with the vivid hues of tortured paint which
virtually leap on to his canvasses.
Aif Dubbo, caught between conflicting black and white worlds, achieves a spiritual communion with three other isolates rejected by conventional society. His vision unifies the outcasts but does not and cannot alter the prevailing mores brought about the rejection of these unconventional individuals in the first place.
White courageously shows the essential differences between Black and \Vhite Australians and highlights the societal forces which separate the two groups, but his vision of spiritual unity between the four ”riders” does not imply or reflect increasing harmony between Europeans and Aborigines in the general sphere. It acts instead upon giving succor and strength to those individuals whom society metaphorically crucifies through its rigidity and intolerance. The Aboriginal theme is subsumed by White’s exploration of cosmic illumination through isolation and rejection.
David Malouf can be described as a postcolonial author as he looks at Australia not from an outside point of view but from within society. In his writing he points to the problems of indigenous and immigrated people in Australia, shows the limits of traditional languages to fit a new environment and also indicates the relation between cultural centres and peripheries which is closely combined with a strong sense of being antipodean.
In Maloufs novels, the motif of the social edge is personified by socially neglected or marginalized people as in Remembering Babylon and An Imaginary Life. The protagonists of these novels share the notion of movement. Gemmy in Remembering Babylon and Ovid An Imaginary Life, both have the feeling of not belonging to the place where they momentarily are. The places and themselves somehow do not fit together. Therefore they are permanently moving - physically and/or in mind. They aim at the centre but often do not know where the centre is. But, their search opens new perspectives for them. One path towards answers in David Maloufs novels can be characterized by the operation of opposing pairs like Australia vs. Europe, edge vs. centre, nature vs. culture, self vs. other. Especially the last pair is often personified by two male characters; Ovid and the Child in An Imaginary Life, Gemmy and Lachlan in Remembering Babylon). Although opposing, David Malouf sees those sets of characters as possibilities of one character. He employs the
difference - yet similarities - as a way of expressing change. Both aspects, difference and familiarity between his characters evoke new possibilities of perception and understanding.
In Remembering Babylon and An Imaginary Life, conventional conceptions of home and exile are displaced by articulations of the unhomeliness of home and the homefulness of exile. The settlers’ situation is marked by a nostalgia that derives from their feeling of being home without being at home, which is contrasted in the novel with the difference within home that is inscribed in Gemmy. But whereas, Gemmy personifies a frightening ”mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness” for most of the settlers, Frazer is shown to be recognized as a ”forerunner” who embodies the promise of a future built on a hybridized understanding of self. For Ovid, finally, the vision of home and exile is linked to a state of mind rather than a place. Both Ovid and the Child are depicted as travellers, never fully at home or in exile, moving across a multiplicity of internal and external borders, perpetually undoing the home/exile dichotomy.
Although Malouf has chosen a reconstruction of the poet Ovid as the vehicle for the narrative of An Imaginary Life, the book is clearly influenced by the Australia of his birth and a non-Aborigine’s impressions of the indigenous Aboriginal cultures of the continent. The landscape of the grassland is much
like a poetic VISIOn of Australia with its immensity and emptiness, which feed the spirit, and leaves it with no hunger for anything but more space, more light. An Imaginary Life draws on attempts to unite mind, body and place.
In Remembering Babylon, David Malouf presents a marvellous microcosm of Euro-Australian attitudes, fear, misunderstandings and intolerance of the Australian aborigines, and the disasters such attitudes and actions get them into. The novel is so cleverly written, at one time being this simple story of a tiny, remote and forgettable village, yet on the other hand, the same story that was eventually writ large in much of the early days of the European settlemen! of Australia. It is a sad portrait of human close-mindedness and blindness to what is around them.
It is obvious that Patrick White and David Malouf are not the sort of novelists who are concerned directly with contemporary social and political issues. As novelists, their deepest convictions are clearly that only inner experience related to place and that this experience is incommunicable.
The theme of ”sense of place” can be identified as the element that sets the sad, often tragic, undertone that permeates the novels of Patrick White and David Malouf. However, it is only one important part of the whole. This theme is intertwined with many other themes and aspects of different types, most of
like a poetic VISIon of Australia with its immensity and emptiness, which feed the spirit, and leaves it with no hunger for anything but more space, more light. An Imaginary Life draws on attempts to unite mind, body and place.
In Remembering Babylon, David Malouf presents a marvellous microcosm of Euro-Australian attitudes, fear, misunderstandings and intolerance of the Australian aborigines, and the disasters such attitudes and actions get them into. The novel is so cleverly written, at one time being this simple story of a tiny, remote and forgettable village, yet on the other hand, the same story that was eventually writ large in much of the early days of the European settlement of Australia. It is a sad portrait of human close-mindedness and blindness to what is around them.
It is obvious that Patrick White and David Malouf are not the sort of novelists who are concerned directly with contemporary social and political issues. As novelists, their deepest convictions are clearly that only inner experience related to place and that this experience is incommunicable.
The theme of ”sense of place” can be identified as the element that sets the sad, often tragic, undertone that permeates the novels of Patrick White and David Malouf. However, it is only one important part of the whole. This theme is intertwined with many other themes and aspects of different types, most of
which must be analysed more thoroughly to enable White’s and Maloufs readers to get just a little closer to the true core of their fascinating literary world.
Patrick White and David Maloufs writings are diverse regarding genres, settings and themes, but, it is obvious that the image of Australia is highly relevant in their novels on all levels of interpretation, thematically, structurally and symbolically, relating above all to their recurrent themes of identity, including exile and alienation, language and creativity, crossing borders and mapping the world.