Word: malouf
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AUTHOR: DAVID MALOUF...
...would be called Native Australians. ''Blacks,'' the fearful pioneers call them. If readers on the other side of the world experience a weird sense of displacement (the wildlife and astronomy are different, but these old Aussies with their Scottish, Irish and English accents are familiar), it is because + David Malouf writes about his historical compatriots as if they had never left the British Isles. Their bodies may be in the boundless Down Under, but their heads are still full of neat patches of sod, heather and greensward. Not to mention the God of their fathers, who blesses the seeding...
There is little doubt that Gemmy, embodying the Old World reborn in the New, is a sacred memory. But Malouf, a poet as well as a prizewinning novelist, is never too obvious. No stereotypes jump out of the bush. Crocodile Dundee and an easy way with strangers await the next century. Two of the novel's main characters survive to sample the new age. The boy who first led Fairley into town is an important government minister at the time of World War I. His cousin is a nun and natural scientist whose correspondence with a German bee expert arouses...
...such a setting, Australians--Sydneysiders in particular--have evolved a natural ethos as pleasure seekers in all areas of life. As the writer David Malouf points out, we don't even think of ourselves as hedonists because that would be too self-conscious. Australian culture is for the most part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well. It is no longer "provincial," a distant and nervous response to norms generated in imperial centers. It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social revolution conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more complex, shook...
Where it counts--which is more in production than interpretation--Australia has a vigorous cultural life, sometimes enthrallingly so. The list of first-rank Australian novelists, headed up by Murray Bail, Peter Carey and David Malouf--writers of exceptional power and social insight--is a considerable one. London has a brilliant biographer and diagnostician of past culture in Peter Conrad, an erudite and dark-minded expatriate from Tasmania...