Since the publication of his début novel, Johnno (1975), Malouf’s fiction has provided readers with a map of the emotional history of a place and its people. His concerns are the complexities and contradictions of Australian identity and history, along with those of the land and landscape in all its diversity. Another fixation that recurs throughout Malouf’s work involves the sensory life that the continent gives those who have come from elsewhere, or what in his latest book he terms ‘a first place’. Having left their original home, they carry it with them, Malouf writes, in the ‘contrary states’ that the mind is capable of inhabiting.

‘To occupy new land – to take its flora and fauna into your consciousness and spiritualise it and make it your own – is an activity that is essentially human, part of the great work of culture,’ Malouf writes in A First Place, a remarkable collection of essays that spans thirty years and reads like an education and a gift from an inimitable voice with a mind at once penetrating and passionate.

David Malouf
(photograph by Conrad del Villar)

Early in the collection, Malouf writes:

It is worth exploring a little what it means, this leaving the place where your ancestors’ bones lie in the local churchyard, the streets where you first played games of hopscotch or taws … to leave what was familiar, what belonged to a first place and to family, for a place where all that is most immediate to your nature would be forever not just different but second-hand and questionable; where the life you live, whatever success you may have there, will always to a degree be ghostly, since it is a second life, and your first life – the one you had begun to grow up in, at least in the part of you that belongs to memory and to dreams – is still with you. No man or woman really migrates. They bring their first life with them, and that too goes on in the new land, and peoples it with shadow lives as well as real ones.

Australia – the place where those lives, shadow or real, have come to mingle – provides Malouf’s perpetual starting point. Here, as in his fiction, he seeks to dissect the place that ‘began as a myth in the mind of Europe’ (A First Place) and which is ‘Too big to hold in the mind!’ (Johnno). The exclamation point highlights what has become, in a Neustadt Prize-winning body of work that includes poetry, stories, novellas, novels, libretti, autobiography, and essays, Malouf’s primary fascination. The continent’s past and present, and all the possibilities of its future hold him in thrall, and the essays in A First Place include Malouf’s most penetrating explorations of questions he began to pose in his first novel: ‘Why Australia? What is Australia anyway?’

To answer them, Malouf begins, always, with the local. But as his gaze widens to embrace larger concerns, his poetic sensibilities permit him to be astonished at what others might deem trivial, or what our rushed lives prevent us from noticing. Contemplation of Brisbane’s wooden houses – ‘a living presence as a stone house never can be’ – soon leads to other assessments:

One observes in Freud’s description of how the mind works how essential architectural features are, trapdoors, cellars, attics, etc … What I mean to suggest … is ways in which thinking and feeling may be intensely local – though that does not necessarily make them incomprehensible to outsiders, and it is the writer’s job, of course, so long as we are in the world of his fiction, to make insiders of all of us.

The same should be said of these essays. Through Malouf’s acumen on subjects that range from literature and linguistics to botany and Australia’s relationship with England and the United States, we become privy to knowledge that, if previously uncertain in our minds, these essays allow us to hold firm. In his author’s note, Malouf defines the impetus for this work, which was originally given either as talks in the United States (an Anzac Day address), Italy (on his ‘multicultural life’), and Australia (The Boyer Lectures), or written for publications that include the New York Review of Books (on Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore), Quarterly Essay (on Australia’s ‘British inheritance’), and articles, timely then as now, for The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Monthly:

These pieces of writing are personal in that they have their basis in personal experience and represent personal opinions, but their purpose was from the beginning public; they belong to that part of my life that is conscious and considered rather than dreamily obscure till it demands to be expressed; to the world, that is, of analysis, and open opinion and discourse.

While those public concerns include more than an occasional thought on nationhood (‘We are easiest with “Australia” when what we are referring to is a national team’), Malouf continually turns inward in order to begin new forays into matters beyond the back door. In doing so, these essays often echo his fiction. From Johnno:

What an extraordinary thing it is, that I should be here rather than somewhere else. If my father’s father hadn’t packed up one day to escape military service under the Turks; if my mother’s people, for God knows what reason, hadn’t decided to leave their comfortable middle class house at New Cross for the goldfields of Mount Morgan, I wouldn’t be an Australian at all. It is practically an accident, an entirely unnecessary fate.

Or here, in Remembering Babylon (1993): ‘In the meantime he was here, though where here was, and why he was in this place rather than another, was a mystery to him.’ And in A First Place: ‘I have always been impressed by the degree to which accident may be fate.’ (Later, Malouf writes, ‘All meditations on history in Australia begin as geography lessons. Geography is fate.’)

Those who, like Malouf’s English mother and his father’s Lebanese parents, came from elsewhere to Australia carry what he deems, in A First Place, ‘the amazing human capacity to re-imagine and remake themselves’. He traces this reimagining of an identity, one that is typically Australian, back to the First Fleet:

When Europeans first came to these shores one of the things they brought with them, as a kind of gift to the land itself, was something that could never previously have existed: a vision of the continent in its true form as an island, which was not just a way of seeing it, and seeing it whole, but of seeing how it fitted into the world … It has made a difference. If Aborigines are a land-dreaming people, what we latecomers share is a sea-dreaming, to which the image of Australia as an island has from the beginning been central.

The questions of Australian identity will grow more complex as its many cultures at once assimilate and impart facets of their own heritage. These are, therefore, essays that prompt further discussion. They deepen our understanding of the past, of place and nation, and, in their clear-eyed focus, provide a vision for us to ponder the present.

To paraphrase Joseph de Maistre, every nation gets the leaders it deserves. How fortunate, then, for a nation to have a writer such as Malouf, one capable of putting these matters into historical, social, and cultural contexts – a writer whose seductive style at once satiates and ignites our desire for more of his illuminations. As Malouf writes in A First Place, ‘This business of making accessible the richness of the world we are in, of bringing density to ordinary, day-to-day living in a place, is the real work of culture.’ Every place should be so fortunate as to have a writer who explores these primal concerns with such heightened sensitivity and insight.