Matilda Munro
, May 3rd, 2021 11:54
Matilda Munro reviews Mark Mordue's new book on the early life of a Bad Seed
Photo by Bleddyn Butcher
To write about Australianness is a contradiction in terms, as one of the country’s effects is to rob you of all will to put it into words. It tends to be only those who leave that get anywhere near laying out the truth of the place. It’s the case for many of its major wordsmiths over the past decades: Patrick White, Peter Carey, Clive James, David Malouf, Tim Winton, Robert Hughes, as well as for painters Brett Whiteley and Sidney Nolan. The bass notes of the place rumble out and away from the coastal cities, beneath the unforgiving sky, and through an eternal California of the intellect, where addiction is endemic, threat of violence constant, and the blood of all the convicts and all the natives lies in the dust. There is all the quiet horror of the Church, and the contradiction – through the sheer distance itself – that Australia enforces between these conditions and their universal expression. It is a country unable to conceive of its own viciousness. I grew up there and left as soon as I could. It is hard to give these ghosts their names.