I didn’t do much talking on the bus. I mainly slept. But I did notice that the girl on the seat across the aisle to me was reading Peter Carey’s Illy whacker and I asked her how she was liking it.

‘Aw, not much,’ she said. ‘I’ve bought it, so I’ll finish it. But I prefer A Fortunate Life.’

A Fortunate Life was an endurance story written by an old man who had undergone every known hardship and deprivation but was still able to come up smiling and proud to be an Australian. I had tried to read it, in response to the enormous popularity it was enjoying in the country, but found it unreadable. It seems to me essential that one hold on to the idea of unreadability, as a distinct literary non-quality, an innate thing in itself, even in the face of the evidence of several million readers reading it. A Fortunate Life was unreadable because it was unwritten; which unwrittenness, it seemed to me, was the very reason Australians liked it. I had noticed before that Australians preferred their fiction to be unfictional, a mere mode of access to an original, authentic, lived experience. Some of the country’s most favoured writers were in fact un-writers and un-wrote with extreme plainness and simplicity, using words only for want of something more elementary. Even the cream of Australia’s academic obscurantists, men who could be instantly unintelligible about a single line of poetry, found a new lucidity when they came to be novelists and made little sentences about Frank and Hilda and their embarrassment on their wedding night.

‘What’s that?’ asked Frank, worriedly.

‘Blood,’ Hilda said, consolingly.

‘Aw gee,’ Frank said.

‘I love you, Frank,’ said Hilda, holding him very close.

‘I love you, too, Hilda,’ Frank said.

As they pledged their troth once more, mysterious noises reached them from the bush.

4 Arse-End Charlie

Four
 
Arse-End Charlie

The saddest and least inviting town-sign you will ever see stands, miles from where any of the visitors it is meant to welcome will ever find it, at the far extremity of Derby, a spot that you neither enter nor leave by, close to where the desolate jetty strays into the rotting waters of King Sound like a half-hearted suicide.