Wanderers In The Worlds Of Serious Dreaming

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday December 17, 1994

Sally McInerney

The permanent child alone can return the fabulous world to us ... Grown-ups write children's stories too easily. Thus they make childish fables. To enter into the fabulous times, it is necessary to be serious like a dreaming child.

- Gaston Bachelard in Poetics of Reverie (a consideration of "childhood, language and the cosmos"; translated by Daniel Russell, 1969).

I WOULD want to defend true playfulness as well as true seriousness, though it's likely Bachelard would include that in his philosophical embrace. Here are three books for young people, and adults, written by those rare "permanent children".

Don Campbell's first novel, Blue Clair (Hodder, $10.95), creates a haunting, haphazard world. It is that most unusual thing, a young man's novel, though I cannot imagine any young male wishing to look inside its unfortunate cover, which shows boy, girl and misshapen horse all lit by blue-white corpse-light below a near-illegible title.

Blue Clair is almost a war story, taking place between 1934 and 1944 with the hero, Bob, too young for active service but aware of the war's shadow darkening his world. The other hero of this story is a remarkable, sometimes wild horse, Blue Clair. The horse becomes famous through southern and central-western NSW, ranging from the Snowy Mountains and Bombala, where young Bob's family farms, through Gundagai as far as Cowra where it appears on the night of the Japanese POW breakout. At one stage, it is even seen heading for Koorawatha (pop. 300), my home town.

This seems an extraordinary premise, so I asked a rural druid if a horse could have made such seemingly farfetched journeys during that period. He advised that a horse could easily have travelled between the Snowy and Gundagai, and, only rather fantastically though just possibly, as far as Cowra. ("It's a wonder I didn't hear of him," he added.) So the premise holds, just; and while the events in this story are sometimes chaotic, as life is, they are unified by the writer's passionate feeling for the landscape of the times: the surreal nature of the countryside itself and the emotional landscape of youth, clouded by war and isolation.

"In the city it doesn't seem to matter, people leaving," says Bob to his girlfriend Abbie, "but it's more apparent in the country. Doesn't matter who the people are, when they go it seems lonely. The days will be quiet. You'll hear all the faint noises, like distant birds, the sound of a car a long way out. A dog will bark somewhere and you will be aware of all the distance that keeps you out of things ..."

Patricia Wrightson, already an international treasure, is at the height of her powers with Shadows of Time (Macleod/Random, $19). The absolute lucidity of Wrightson's words (her language reminds me of many-coloured, polished river pebbles) means that the story flows as naturally and mysteriously as time or water, from 1798 to almost now.

WRIGHTSON has invented native, but not specifically Aboriginal, spirit-creatures for this story. She has done this with true sensibility, as if responding to the land itself rather than merely distorting other people's beliefs.

Two children are exiled from their own people (the Aboriginal boy has blue"devil's eyes", while Sarah Jane Tranter, having broken a gravy boat, has fled her employer's house) and wander purposefully through the countryside - from North Coast to South Australian deserts. One child has power over fire, the other commands water; because of this they remain children, immortal and unchanging, while the world changes around them and they become more and more like displaced shadows, though - in the end - they also have the power of choice. This is really a book about the strangeness and simplicity of time, and other things:

Distant sandhills hid the sea, but she heard it all night in her sleep. It spoke like God; one single word too large and simple to be heard.

Nadia Wheatley's short stories in The Night Tolkien Died (Macleod/ Random, $19.95) are more precisely written for children, with details of school excursions, divorced parents, acid trips and women ashing Craven A cigarettes into beetroot tins, watched by adoring young girls. Pervading all these stories is a fierce and moving sense of empathy with all young and consequently powerless people.

There are many masterpieces in this collection. There is no badness and blackness in Wheatley's stories: she is too subtle for that and her wry humour always tempers tragedy. In Pastoral, a motherless girl is passed around various relatives' families; staying on Uncle Clem's dairy farm, she is befriended by Kylie, the wicked cattle-nipping dog, and her life becomes a kind of speculative dream as she wonders what will happen to her:

... no-one knew how long Denzil was staying on the farm. It might only be a couple more months, it might be forever, no-one was really sure. It all depended on whether Auntie Gwen's back got better or whether Auntie Pat's daughter went nursing or whether Auntie Mim found Denzil too much or whether Uncle Clem really believed that blood was thicker than water. Whatever they decided, Denzil would have to do ... What Denzil herself wanted to do was run fast out of the valley and hide in the hills with Kylie. They'd live on bananas and rain and hunting. But now she couldn't dream that either, for one fine day Kylie went too far, and Uncle Clem wasn't a man for idle threats.