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AUSTRALIAN STORIES OF TODAY edited by Charles Osborne. (Faber and Faber.)

THE TILTED CROSS by Hal Porter. (Faber and Faber.)

‘The arts of painting and writing, the lonely arts, have prospered in Australia while the more social arts, those that require performances before a collection of people, have not fared so well. Distance and solitude are very largely responsible for this.’ Thus Charles Osborne in his introduction to the short stories, making a shrewd hit at both the nature of Australian culture and the dominant feature of much of her fiction. The temptation to theorize about the influence of Australia’s vast distances and the effects of the bush is perhaps too strong to overcome. Certainly one cannot help observing that the major artistic achievements of the only country which is an entire continent, Patrick White’s Voss and Sidney Nolan’s Kelly paintings are essentially outdoor works. (Works, incidentally, which deal with outdoor figures — men who are not at home when confined by walls but who are instead only at ease with ‘distance and solitude’.) It is not surprising therefore that the majority of these stories are connected with the outdoors, greater or lesser. Cattlemen, trappers, fishermen are the heroes. Even the mechanized become hunters in Geoffrey Dutton’s The Wedge-Tailed Eagle when the magnificent bird is killed by two pilots.

     And while one can occasionally see literary influences at work as in E. A. Gollschewsky’s The Salmon which, with its sensual awareness, its rippling muscles in the sunlight for the man and its joyful pregnancy and delight in the admiration of the other fishermen for the woman, recalls the early Hemingway these are not nearly as important as the country itself. Without their setting and their language these stories would merely be the routine stuff of magazines. Given these two native advantages, however, many of the stories have a gamey flavour which goes beyond any local appeal. Act of Faith by John Cantwell could so easily have been just another sentimental story about children having an adventure during a depression. Yet the author has succeeded in giving it a sense of place and time and in particular that peculiar knowingness which is not offensive because it is the product of a rather deliberate Australian quality which one can only call anti-sophistication.

     This quality combines well with the feeling for country and for people Uncorrupted by European over-education which never degenerates into the folksy but instead consists of a hard-edged intelligence which is all the more welcome because it is never smart. One finds this in the stories by Judith Wright and especially in Peter Cowan’s Journey, the best story in the collection.

     The stories mentioned above are essentially indigenous and, for that reason, take the landscape for granted. There is never any of the rapturous description that one finds in the writings of a stranger such as Lawrence. The bush does not obtrude as the author of Kangaroo knew it to obtrude: ‘Yet a stillness, and a manlessness, and an elation, the bush flowering at the gates of heaven.’ Rather the bush is unsentimentally ever-present, something of which the writers are aware but which does not obsess them. Which is as it should be and their stories gain by it.

     The only two writers represented in this excellent anthology who do not fit conveniently into the pattern are Ray Mathew and Hal Porter. Mathew’s two stories are elegant and funny enough to have come from the New Yorker and display a wry, almost macabre humour which is strangely inward looking, even self-deprecating. Hal Porter’s excursion into a boarding school cruelly exposes the underlying nastiness and, oddly, prepares one for his novel because it has a similar breathlessness of style and a similar cool eye for deformity both mental and physical.

     The Tilted Cross is that rare book, a historical novel which can be safely judged as a work of literature and not as simply an excursion into the past which so loses itself in a maze of forsooths that all characters become lay figures and plot a rehearsal of dates and events. Set in and around Hobart in the first half of the nineteenth century it gives a grim picture of an emergent society whose heraldic devices should have been shackles and the cat o’nine tails. The reasons and the manner of England’s export of convicts to Van Diemen’s land remain a blot on England’s imperialist policy far worse than any Amritsar massacre because they represent neither short-sighted expedience nor a temporary loss of nerve but an extended hell of coldly calculated savagery not easy either to forget or to forgive. Battened on to the convict strata of society were the minor colonial officials who became all-powerful jacks-in-office and the loose scum of adventurers, pimps and publicans who constituted the community of Hobart.

     Mr Porter’s novel is based on research into the life of a transported painter, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright who, as Judas Griffin Vaneleigh, is one of the key figures and moves, relatively untouched, among the bizarre collection of expatriates who inhabit a tiny world with an enormous capacity for evil. Vaneleigh is accompanied by his devoted shadow the cockney Queely Sheill, a saintly Adonis who, although very much l’homme moyen sensuel, remains curiously innocent despite the depravity which surrounds him and in which he participates. He sleeps with a repellent cripple, whose usual pleasures consist in the whipping of her Negro page-boy, out of genuine charity and denies both himself and the predatory lady Knight the pleasures of her ladyship’s bed. Because lady Knight has an impotent husband and therefore feels acutely the denial of what is granted so freely to her crippled cousin she causes her husband  — suitably outraged at the crossing of class-barriers in the bedroom — to have Sheill tried on a false charge. Sheill gets seven years but before he can be sent to the convict settlement dies atrociously from gangrene as a result of yet another disinterested act done for a fellow-sufferer.

     In his fascinated juxtaposition of good and evil and particularly in his obsession with suffering and the incorruptibility of those who are truly innocent and those who have stood so much that they cannot be touched because they are no longer alive Hal Porter recalls Dostoievsky. And if, as it undoubtedly is, this is an impossible comparison from a qualitative point of view one can also mention a more approachable writer, Robert Penn Warren. Here the comparison is much more valid. The Tilted Cross is as obviously the result of careful historical research as, say, World Enough and Time which it approaches, if not actually rivals, in quality. Both have the feeling not so much for the past — which is what makes the historian — but for the sense of the past which makes the historical novelist. They have the power to take events culled from newspapers and diaries and mould them into a narrative which is in its psychological insights essentially modern while at the same time clothing them in a language at once authentic and exciting. Because Penn Warren was using a language which was part of a long cultural and intellectual tradition World Enough and Time is a much smoother, more polished work. He is also a sufficiently controlled writer to keep his poetic instincts in check. Hal Porter has written The Tilted Cross in a poet’s tongue and has occasionally let his joy of words newly found run away with him.

‘From every gin-crib, rum-shack and grog-shop in Hobart Town gushed the bawlings and whinnyings, the obscenities vile to the point of innocence, the punctilious blasphemies, of tin-men and their gap-toothed doxies, of spit-curled ostlers and sweaty cocottes, of gin-crazed fan-makers and spewing chaw-bacons.’

On every page there are such passages, some even more over-ripe, others full of a vigorous humanity which rushes one along revelling in Mr Porter’s obvious pleasure in having struck a vein of language completely foreign to the rather limited vocabulary of twentieth-century Australia. ‘The hand of the randy sawyer fumbled the bonnet-maker’s gape’ and similar flights mingle happily with ‘Suddenly with Anglo-Saxon abruptness and resolution, the uncircumcised began to jolt and jar from their church bells the advertisement of the birth of Jesus Christ.’ The language is still undisciplined but at least it is worth close attention and at least it contains a novel of Dickensian social criticism. But while Dickens’s horrors were always faintly genteel Porter’s are brutal and unequivocal. Drink and decay are the hallmarks of the destitute who live in the Shades of Hobart while cruelty rules at the big house where Vaneleigh paints the portraits of the ladies. The Tilted Cross is a morality without a preacher, a didactic novel in which the teacher never obtrudes. It is an Australian historical novel as far removed from Roll Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms as that was an advance on the Boy’s Own Paper. It is not an intellectual’s book and it cannot be compared in any way with the work of Patrick White. But patchy and frequently over-ripe as it is it is still a truly exciting and truly Australian book with as much vigour as any ten average native products.