Review | Feeling country in Australia
- Terri Seddon
- May 6
- 3 min read
Nicholas Rothwell’s Journeys to the interior is a collection of essays examining the palpable sense of country that distinguishes Northern Australia. He captures this subjective feeling as an apprehension, a kind of fear that is also an ‘exaltation, urgency, the dread that comes from being at the core of life’[1]. He connects this presence, the ‘glamour’, ‘wild intensity’, resonances with death that feed on silence and breed love, with the landscape.
This presence of country became more tangible when I drove north from Naarm-Melbourne in-between COVID-lockdowns this year. I felt that presence haunting the spectacle of Uluru sunsets, the immense Katherine Gorge and chattering pools on the Jatbula Trail. At the Red Kangaroo Bookshop on my return journey through Mparntwe-Alice Springs, I recognised that presence in the cover of Rothwell’s book. The image of Kata Tjuta’s immense red sandstone boulders as a horizon to pale green spinifex and blowing desert oaks was like sighing wind in my memory.
But this presence of country is also indefinite, not readily knowable. It invites storytelling that, as Toni Morrison suggests, means navigating the ‘power of knowledge’ and the ‘ferocity of beauty’[2]. Rothwell’s essays, organised into eight sections, tackle this agenda.
The prologue establishes this presence of country, anchored in Rothwell’s memories of Europe and Northern Australia, as the focus of this creative non-fiction project. Reading this book as I travelled through the East Macdonell’s beyond Mparntwe and driving on to Naarm solo, I found myself reflecting on Rothwell’s narrative relative to my experiences ––intense red silence at N’Dhala Gorge, the soft green Flinders Rangers and Mildura’s grey grid-patterned streets.
In the first section, Pathways, Rothwell reviews ways of understanding the North, approaching landscape as both stories and a concept. The term ‘landscape’ is an abstraction premised on European story traditions, but those stories are layered over deeper stories, which become visible through the records of explorers, the pattern of told and untold tales, as well as song cycles that sing Country.
Focusing on this present, within the ‘mortal past’ of lived lives rather than remembered records, he considers the nature and effects of these layered stories. On one hand, the relation between lives and records are shifting as social changes drive the lives of remote and urban Aboriginal communities, white and multicultural settler communities, and between them/us all. Australia, he argues, is ‘becoming conscious of its past’ with both a pathos and frustrations that can encourage closure. On the other hand, the subterranean roots of these stories persist; the layers and fracture lines, shrouded in ‘unease and shadow’, continue to invite art and writing in and across these communities.
These living cultural pursuits seek ‘a landscape behind the landscape’. It’s a seeking ‘with eyes and heart’, a way of seeing that Rothwell associates with Tjukurrpa, the simultaneous ‘flash of the present moment’ and ‘echo, far off, of primary, long-vanished events’, which frames futures.[3] Opening himself to this presence, he says, feels like a dissolution, a death and new revelations that marks a threshold, where the presence writes him.[4]
Rothwell probes this layered landscape through interfaces with the physical world, his memories and other point of view stories. He considers Shadows, Horizons and Sketches some Northern Australian characters. He offers Sightings where submerged stories surface in the visible world and Soundings where he plumbs the depths of that visible world. Portraits show how Aboriginal artists portray their country by singing its songs.
The final section, Last Words, speaks of seeing and symphonies. Its poetics didn’t entirely resonate for me, but that is unsurprising. The synthesis is, inevitably, personal to the author: The Australian’s correspondent for Northern Australia[5] who dreams of Darwin as a ‘city ruled by a sceptical intelligence’. His dream recognises ‘environs and the hard rules of country’ and the possibility that ‘thought-worlds’ pre-dating Darwin might ‘shimmer more fully to the mainstream’[6].
Journeys to the interior is a provocative read. I welcomed Rothwell’s efforts in naming the presence of country and showing how it is anchored in the great cultural, colonial disconnect that fractures Australia. His narrative reveals the logics of journalism, reading country in ways that are different to science, even when scientists offer poetic readings, such as Matthew Colloff’s Landscapes of our hearts. It also offers a method for writing stories, using sensory thematic narratives to both acknowledge and untangle these different points of view. It's a method I felt the book invited me to use in my own storytelling.
Title: Journeys to the interior
Author: Nicholas Rothwell
Published: 2010
Publisher: Black Inc
Category: Non-Fiction
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