Australian author Andrew McGahan dead at 52
I am surprised and shocked to hear of the passing of Andrew McGahan at 52 years of age. It was his first book that connects me to him. The story of Gordon and his ill-fated attempts to make sense of his life in Brisbane in the late 1980s while he loves and fears the brilliant character of Cynthia. I was living in Brisbane when I first read the book in 1992. I lived in New Farm, where the book is set, in rambling share houses surrounded by tropical overgrown gardens, where 4ZZZ played all day in the kitchen and life was as slow as the river. I now have that book next to me, inscribed on the front page by my long lost love of that time. Like McGahan, I was also born on the Darling Downs, grew up in a rural community, but was never really comfortable with a lot of its values.
In one sense Praise (Allen & Unwin 1992) is a pastiche to Charles Bukowski, something the old man may have produced if he had been 25 and living in Brisbane in the late 80s, emerging as it was from 30 years of fascistic National Party rule and that weird dysmorphia that comes with places on the edge in every sense — geographically, politically, historically, economically (Bukowski lived in Reagan’s California). Brisbane in those days was a odd place — hot, ramshackle, paranoid, awash with drugs, music, corrupt and violent police/criminals (the titles were totally interchangeable), unemployment and a youth style that is distilled in McGahan’s novel. Life was easy in one sense; a cheap room in a share house and then all that followed (captured in “He Died with a Felafel in his Hand” so well — also by a Brisbane writer John Birmingham who emerged from the same scene at the same time).
Praise was also made into a film, which McGahan wrote the screenplay to:
Today it seems Praise is a nostalgic tribute to dysfunctional youth, but it is also an important work as it was an early step towards cultural identity and independence for a generation of white Australians that had finally had enough of the “scones, Dame Edna, Midday Show, hard work have-a-go, Saturday Night Live, she’ll be right mate” postcolonial Australia. In my mind this is what the Indonesia author Ratih Hardjono described, from a work with the title White Tribe of Asia and published the year after Praise, when she referenced:
“The change from earlier xenophobic tendencies to attitudes that are more open and relaxed will ultimately produce an Australia that is ambidextrous, that is, able to use both hands with equal skill. Australia will be capable of relating to both the western and eastern worlds without any uncertainty and will become a place that can accomadate both, permitting the flexibility of Asia to replace the stiffness of England “
The myth of a White Australia was at last being laid to rest in literature. MaGahan’s next book ‘1988’ (the prequel to Praise) really took these themes on in a more explicit and less nihilistic way. In 1988 the protagonists flee Brisbane, with its dead end jobs, cheap drugs and communal housing to head north, towards the mythical frontier, and by implication, Asia.
I believe history will place McGahan on that line that first emerged in the 1980s in Australia, when we dropped so much of the ‘white tribe of Asia’ pretence, and realised we were ourselves; a strange mix of colonial myths, a turning towards Asia (begun in the 1970s but halted with the Dismissal in 1975), an integration into landscape and the powerful (although totally maligned, attacked and ignored) influence of the first nations of the Aborigines on the greater Australian culture and society. McGahan finally approached this subject in a negative sense in The White Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2004). In The White Earth McGahan wrote:
“That’s the sort of thing you have to know about a piece of land, Will, if you’re going to own it. You have to know where it fits… Every stretch of earth has it’s own story. You have to listen, and understand how it connects with other stories. Stories that involve the whole country in the end.”
These stories are still evolving in Australia, however the land itself is also speaking. This is a step McGahan never took in his writing; to move beyond his own head and cultural critique and delve into the metaphors of non-Anglo Australia. If he had lived longer there is every chance he would have (his final novel will be published later this year). His demise is a great loss for Australian writing.
