Wild Cat Falling (14 page)

It was mooted that he might go to Burma to become a monk and in the process of inquiries he was presented with a life of Gautama Buddha by the Burmese consul. Meanwhile he continued his ordinary studies, but with Buddhism and Yoga in ascendancy. “How wonderful,” he exclaimed, “to escape from dreary civilization into sweet nothingness!”

On brief holidays he discovered the lush beauty of the Dandenongs, camped, read and luxuriated in a landscape “where, between two breasts of green a township rests serene as a child in its mother's arms and ferns and undergrowth creep up over roads and clearings. . . .When the wind blows up, the trees moan and groan in a sort of agony of joy and here and there a dead gum stretches ghostly arms to the sky as if praying for life again. The air is full of the sounds of birds and insects exulting to be alive and free, and of a milky stream that hurry-hurries down the valley. . . .” Early in 1959 he was asked to go as a Western Australian delegate to a Federal conference of the Aboriginal Advancement League. “I did,” he told us, “but sat there too chicken to do anything. . . .I was a failure, but I enjoyed the meetings as they gave me an insight into what is being done to elevate and to obtain citizen rights for my people.”

About the same time he wrote of going to hear Billy Graham.

It was rather terrifying to see how so many people (including myself) can be influenced emotionally by a voice, a choir and their own fears. . .

After a longer silence than usual he wrote, in November 1959:

Time has pried loose a few months of my life and I cannot tell what he has done with them. . . .

I am a Bohemian type now. Well, not exactly that but a Beatnik engaged in the Holy Search for Self. I have grown a small beard and wander vaguely through Melbourne just looking and looking, thinking and thinking. . . .

But I still listen to music. I go to classical concerts now and appreciate them, but I also still feel Rock and Roll and Jazz, and dance and sway to them. I can be moved with the Blues and cry with the Negroes of old.

I also like Art. I go to exhibitions and know some of Melbourne's Bohemians and Intellectuals. So you see my mind has broadened a bit, or so I hope. . . .At the moment I am out of a job, being typical Beatnik, but I have written a play called “The Delinks”.

I did not read the play, but he sent me some poems written about this time. They were somewhat cliche ridden expositions of Beatnik philosophy in which people were “immersed in shadows and nothingness”, bent under a “leaden weight of sorrow”, wondering whether the world had ever been young and gay, the trees green instead of blue and the moon “a yellow orb of serenity”. This conformity of outlook held in check for a while the original expression of which he was capable, but to have made a creative effort of any sort was at least some departure from the nihilism that had previously absorbed him.

When the University quarterly
Westerly
announced a competition for stories or sketches by people of Aboriginal blood I suggested that he enter something written from his own experience or observation. He sent two sketches, one of a boy whiling away some dreary hours in a downtown Melbourne nightclub (very Beatnik), and another the feelings of a boy on the morning of his release from jail. The latter, he said, was part of a novel he intended working on.

Entries in the competition were foreseeably few, but in any case Colin's starkly telling little sketch would have found its way to the top. Encouraged by his win, he set himself seriously to writing his novel, on which he sent occasional progress reports.

The book concerns a part Aboriginal boy trying to find himself and failing ... a sort of mock hero, a stupid, self- pitying, broken-down mess, barely existing. He is
not myself,
though a little perhaps what I might have turned out. He talks and acts like many delinquents I have observed and I have put into his mind some of my own doubts and foolish contradictions. I'm afraid it is pretty dreary and uneven. . . .

* * * * *

I lead a mere, vague, bumbling existence now, broken by frenzied spells of writing. At night when I am working it sounds all right. By daylight I know that my glorious novel is
bad.
Sometimes I get quite disgusted with it and don't care if it is lost or destroyed. I tell myself however that I am just lazy, as most primitive people are supposed to be, and that when I see hard work ahead I want to disappear. Then I come back, look again and get enmeshed in it once more.

* * * * *

I think style is my main difficulty — the smooth connection of sentences and images, the switching from subjective to objective points of view. . . .I am going about seeking dialogue these days, examining people's words and also going to plays for this purpose. . . .

* * * * *

Thanks for your criticism of the section forwarded. I wanted the book to be a sort of
Pilgrim's Progress
rather than a particular person beset with his own separate problems, but I can see I have not brought this off. I am therefore making my character more positive in tone and altering his outlook a little, while keeping his ambiguities, false thinking and contradictions. . . .He must continue to reject life, shoulders slouched, head low, hands in pockets, shuffling. . . .

Yes, I will prune because I see it is necessary, but about the repetitions — Aboriginal poetry and songs are full of them and so are the French writers — the neo-realists. . . . Perhaps I am too much under the influence of the Existentialists and the French school of abstract aloneness or whatever of Beckett, Sartre, Robbe Gillet and the rest. I realize I tend to imitate them and am getting myself out of this. Still, I excuse myself by saying (even if it's not valid) that I am young and Australian and most of them are old and European and therefore my findings must be different. . . .One point I want to stress is that the character I portray is not against the world — he thinks the world is against
him.
I consider this important because it shows that he is not a juvenile dramatizing his condition, but rather that his faulty perception of the world causes him to dramatize it. In
The Catcher In the Rye
the position is reversed
      

Unfortunately — or could it be otherwise? — I feel very detached from what they call “The Australian Way of Life”. Australianisms seem false and meaningless to me — “fair dinkum” they do, but I “dig” the beatnik jargon. It comes naturally....

I now agree with you about repetition. It does get boring except where skilfully used for some deliberate effect. But you know about muddled sentences — I dote on them, but I realize that no one else will. I like your last sentence and must quote it some time: “Contradictions are all right so long as the reader does not suspect it is the
writer's
mind that is in a stew.”

These extracts indicate the seriousness with which Colin had come to regard the writer's craft and the extraordinary patience and tenacity with which he was applying himself to it. His life apart from the job to which he soon returned, continued meanwhile as a persistent search for a personal truth among the religions, cults and arts of East and West. Curiosity led him inevitably into so many odd associations that I wondered at times whether after all his
Mara
might win the day. His letters were disturbingly frank and to the point, but I need not have feared for him. He emerged from each new experience with another set of questions and a further mental horizon:

Does merging with the infinite result in identity or loss of identity? Is identity equal to personality or to something else? In all my reading I find that the words used to express this thing are much the same, with minor differences due to differing cultural groups and languages. I have yet myself to find a meaning in life. At the moment it seems to have nothing to offer me, except perhaps records. . . .I spend my wages on jazz, folksong and blues and my time reading science fiction, poetry, Hindu philosophy and plays
      
. . . .

His attraction to Buddhism and Indian philosophy may have been some equation of Eastern mysticism to that of the Aboriginal
Dreaming
in which he became increasingly interested.

“I now find myself oriented to the Aboriginal people,” he wrote, “and am for the first time definitely committed to a race.”

He attended meetings concerned with Aboriginal advancement and collected signatures for a petition for the removal of discriminatory clauses from the law. He also became implicated with a dance group “. . .formed for the purpose of bringing Aboriginal culture — mainly dancing — before an audience and thus laying the foundation for a purely Australian art form.”

When the Aborigines, collected from goodness knows where, “went to jail or wandered away”, Colin and his associates in the venture planned to gather a number of tribal-living natives from Western Australia and set them up in Melbourne as “professors” of a true Australian culture. This foredoomed experiment, however, soon died a natural death.

He began moving in left-wing political circles, attending ban-the-bomb meetings and adopting “a Marxist attitude to society”, but he does not seem to have got very deeply involved. Before long he wrote:

Can't stand the middle class, the workers, or the Beatniks any more. Went to a working class party and drank and nothing else. Was flung out of a lower middle class party for sneering. Went to a Beatnik party and drank a bit and talked, which was somewhat better. . . . If one works with and knows people one has to drink with them or snub them — especially around Christmas time. . . .I have now taken up learning the guitar, the first really new interest I have had in ages. . . .

During this period he wrote me that he had become acquainted with the author Criena Rohan who encouraged his writing and whose untimely death, after the publication of her novel
The Delinquents
, deprived him of one of the few people with whom he could discuss his work.

In the meantime he had sent me his completed M.S. which I showed to my friend, the writer and literary critic, Florence James, then on a visit to Australia. She agreed with me that it was a first novel of unusual promise and significance, but that it was still in need of some organization. We had both been engaged to talk at a writers' school in Adelaide, so Cohn hitch-hiked from Melbourne to join us there and to discuss final editing. By this time, however, he was more interested in talking over ideas for further books and seemed to regard
Wild Cat Falling
somewhat in the light of an exercise or a proof of staying power — a deflection, perhaps, of the pointed bone of his Aboriginal heritage.

To his surprise, but not to ours, we soon found a publisher who believed with us that the book was important, both for its literary quality and as the first attempt by someone of Aboriginal blood to express himself in this form. The writer's use of the first person and the realism of his portrayal should not lead the reader to identify him with the details of his story. The book should be read as a work of fiction by a young man who, although open to the degenerate influences of native camps and milk bar gangs, has been strong enough to set himself a positive goal requiring detachment and discipline. The honesty of his approach floodlights a sinister and dangerously expanding area of the postwar world that few outsiders can begin to understand. His “make-believe-they-are-alive-kids”, convinced that they have plumbed experience and added up the sum of life, haunt a jukebox limbo of abysmal boredom, their only aim to flout accepted morals and behaviour and to provide themselves by theft and violence with the ritual trappings of their cult. The author has allowed himself no sentimentality; he has made no overt attempt to enlist the reader's sympathy for the “mock-hero” who baffles and exasperates even those most concerned for his welfare. None the less, the story is an unconscious appeal and an imperative challenge to the society that breeds his kind.

 

MARY DURACK

Western Australia, 1964

 

 

 

NOTES:

1 The Child Artists of the Australian Bush:
Harrap.

2 By the middle of 1964 major citizenship rights, including the franchise and the freedom to drink alcohol, were granted to all natives in every State except Queensland, where legislation is still under review.

 

ME - I AM ME!

 

By MUDROOROO

 

‘No fun at all. Ugly, reprehensible, disappointing.

Being lied about in print, you wouldn't like it.

And I don't either.'

(Salman Rushdie, Guardian News & Media, 2010)

 

I have been described as one of the most
enigmatic literary figures of Australia perhaps because until recently I lived in an exploded village in Nepal and was to a great extent forgotten in Australia. If I was remembered it was as a person assuming a false identity; a Jacky if you will without clear title to his Aboriginality. I am a writer of many books, articles and poems. Some years ago I was considered an Aboriginal writer who set the key to what might be considered an Australian Aboriginal text; an “authentic,” decolonized black text; but I now consider that in this globalised era there are no more “authentic” texts, only pastiches that are named from subject matter rather than form. Thus content determines form and this may be my final word on the authenticity of any text. My writings have been translated into quite a few languages, Italian, French, German, Russian, Hindi and Chinese as well as Polish. My poetry continues to be anthologized in Australia and Wild Cat Falling has been in print since it was first published 50 years ago. It is a modern classic.

Since Wild Cat Falling I have worked to expose some of the contradictions inherent in Australian culture and life. Owing to my love of Aboriginal culture and storytelling I sought to develop an orality of style, a sort of brief spurt of action or reaction spoken out in a story. An example of this was my short dramatic piece “Me” which was staged in Perth at the Subiaco Play House. My story telling continued when I was blessed with a son who demanded that I tell him stories and not read from books. In Nepal I began writing my autobiography, three volumes finished and three more in the pipeline. In these I seek the strength of the spoken rather than the written word.