coming home
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 7, 2009
Raised on a London housing estate before coming here on an adventure at 16, Alex Miller has become one of Australia's finest writers. But his youth as an outsider has left a scar, he tells John van Tiggelen.On wednesday afternoon, all things being fair and equal, Alex Miller will win the Melbourne Prize, worth $60,000 and awarded triennially to the Victorian author whose work is deemed to have contributed most to Australian literature. It's a quality shortlist, but Miller's a shoo-in. In 2006, with seven novels to his name, he was shortlisted for the inaugural prize, which went to Helen Garner. He has nine novels now, including Lovesong, out last week. He is regularly touted as "one of Australia's finest living novelists", and his books have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award more often than not (two have won). The head of the three-judge panel, Hilary McPhee, has previously written that "Miller belongs with Gnter Grass, Ismail Kadare and J.M. Coetzee" - in other words, he's worthy of a Nobel. Another of the judges, Mark Rubbo, of Melbourne's treasured Readings bookshop, has described Miller's eighth novel, Landscape of Farewell, as "almost perfect".The man's as good as home, surely. Then again, Melbourne's a funny place. It's not always who you know, or even what you've done. It's how you fit in. miller lives on the periphery of melbourne's literary scene, in a central Victorian town on the dry side of the Divide. It suits him to craft his stories in a lovely goldfields home, fine Australian art on the walls, around the corner from the railway station. He can plan his little raids on Melbourne to the minute. And it's quiet. Next door's conversion of a red-brick church into a women's gym was a little unsettling, but he got over that. By and large the town is welcoming of him. After all, he's been here as long as anyone - the joint is overrun with city escapees. As Miller gently jokes, "It's a town of 10,000 people, 13,000 of whom are poets."He lives here with the love of his life, Stephanie, an academic. Their two children have left home. He introduces her as "The Novelist", for she's soon to become one. "She's got a cheek," he says with a laugh. "The novel's good. It will probably sell more than mine."I live up the hill from Miller, who seems keen to be interviewed, as he's forever being told by publishers, friends and fellow writers that he is undervalued and under-recognised. We've met before at polite local gatherings, where he shines as a raconteur, though I've heard he can be prickly. Doubtless it's the impatience of any serious writer, testament to a bristling inner life. But mutual acquaintances are quick to counsel he carries a chip. Whatever you do, a local bookseller advises, don't call him a 10 Pom.So I do. Indirectly, by paraphrasing another. "Right," says Miller, squaring up in his sunlit kitchen. "Step outside." He's joking, of course. He's 72, albeit a very fit 72 - each day he completes an hour's walk and 100 sit-ups. His eyes harden. "Don't call me a 10Pom. And don't call me a f...ing Brit. I'm as Australian as any other f...ing European who came here, so f... you."He pauses to reassure me he's addressing whomever I'm quoting."Look, my father was Scottish and my mother was of Irish background.I grew up on a South London housing commission and I just wanted to get away. As far away as I could."With Canada in mind, he quit school at 15 to become a labourer's "boy" on an Exmoor farm. While learning to be a horseman he befriended an Australian, who gave him a book with photos by Sidney Nolan, the painter. "One of them I still remember," says Miller. "There was just one feature in the landscape, a dead tree. The caption said, 'You could ride for a month here and never strike a fence.' Oh mate, what a place. I had to go there. The outback. For someone brought up in the density of London, it seemed unbelievable." In 1953, not yet 17, Miller found his way alone to a station in north Queensland. He was paid five times what the Aboriginal stockmen were. The station owner gave him access to his library. He was no longer bottom of the pile. "Australia was everything I'd dreamed of. My parents' people, the Scots and the Irish, had got here a few generations before me and got things going. People looked you in the eye and I understood the dry humour of the place. For the first time I knew I was not an outsider. I felt as if I'd made my way home."Miller frowns. "It wasn't until I became known in literary circles through The Ancestor Game [which won him the 1993 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and an audience with the Queen] that I became one of 'You Brits'; you know, as in, 'You Brits are all the same.' That hadn't been around all my life. How Australian did I have to be? It's a land of f...ing migrants, for Christ's sake."The tension in this country among intellectuals about their national identity, you can hear it creaking. They are so anxious to be deeply Australian. One told me once he was sixth-generation Australian. I said to him, 'Don't tell that to the Aborigines.' We are deeply European. A lot of things that make sense for us are there. And the struggle to become purely Australian, and non-European, is misplaced, I think."miller owns his story. instalments of it haveappeared, in varying degrees of dress-up, in all of his books. As a self-described rearranger of facts, he is fascinated by the process of story: how it comes to him, whose it is to tell, and at what point he can claim it as his. But giving up his own story for a journalist to rearrange is no easy business, and I'm left to bumble around the edges of things.Played back on tape, Miller's sonorous, deeply authoritative voice could pass for that of John Laws. The swearing is free and vigorous, as if hammering the point that he has assailed the literary world from the wrong side of the tracks. I'm reminded of Steven Muir, the writer-narrator of The Ancestor Game, describing his father's voice as one "beneath which aggression strode in time with rhythm". Muir's father, like Miller's, is a friendless, essentially decent Glaswegian with a frightful violence in him born of dreams quashed by war and class. Occasionally he'll beat his children, but more often he'll have them cringing in embarrassment as he booms the poetry of Robert Burns, the Scottish bard, at Londoners. Muir eventually escapes to Australia, where he seizes upon the story of two mysterious strangers in the hope they "might occupy the vacated homelands of my interior, which were in danger of being colonised by the chanting spectre of my father". Two days after our interview, a Sunday, Miller rings me for my email address. He's got some thoughts to send me, nothing major. It's his life story, in 1500 words. His father is not in it. It begins:"My simple story is that I'm one of those people who made it through from a place where you had little choice and no obvious way forward - a ghastly education where the teachers derided your hopes until you fell silent. None of my schoolmates made it through. Not one of them ...When the Downham Estate was built, a brick wall was constructed across the road that had once led to the private homes of the well-to-do neighbouring suburb, Bromley, the home of the Conservative Party. It was there to keep us out. To deny our existence. It was a real physical expression of the contempt in which we were held by our neighbours and by the culture they represented and enjoyed ...When we were 10 or 11, a friend and I designed and constructed a glider large enough to carry us over the treetops - and over the Bromley wall! The construction of the glider, in sections, took us a year. It was a year of soaring hope - we flew in our imagination long before our machine was ready to carry us. Everyone on the estate knew our plans and scoffed at us. But the day we assembled our beautiful machine they all came to watch. A windy day in the park on the hill above the railway yards. And they all ran alongside and cheered when we almost lifted off the ground, just before we crashed into a line of poplars. The glider was destroyed and we burnt it. The fire was wonderful and lasted half the night. It was a celebration, not of defeat, but of hope ...There is no sign of the bromley wall in miller's books. not a brick. Any bitterness he carries - any chip - is accommodated privately. Miller is extremely self-contained. He never loses his temper, he says, but those who have aggrieved him - critics, London publishers, waiters - are spoken of with a pugilist's terse menace. He would have stood his own as a stockman.His nine novels, on the other hand, are suffused with love. There's the author's abiding affection for his characters, always. But there's a shimmer of sensuousness to every relationship - between lovers, friends, with a horse, to art, to country. Outsiders readily spot how innately Australian Miller's work is. Ron Sharp, an American professor of English, notes Miller's treatment of mateship in Landscape of Farewell "is more ambitious, and in my view more comprehensive and perceptive, than that of any other contemporary novel - Australian or otherwise - I know". Sharp wonders if Australians can't see the bush for the trees. The Tivington Nott, Miller's brilliant early novel about a nameless boy who joins a deer hunt in Exmoor (based on his time as a farm labourer's boy), was almost passed over for publication because it was misunderstood as an English story. Yet in waiting 35 years to write up his experience, Miller's nameless boy couldn't be more Australian. He's The Man From Snowy River, with feeling.Miller's work, and how it's valued in this country, is presently the subject of a PhD. Ingeborg van Teeseling's thesis is that Australian critics don't hear what Miller has to say because they don't recognise him as a migrant. "If you miss that, you miss half his writing. Alex can see things no Australian-born writer can. His books tackle Aboriginal rights, masculinity, Australian identity. He's spent his whole life writing about prejudice, but Australians can't see that."It's as well she and Miller get along, for he abhors being called a migrant. His entry in The Oxford History of Australian Literature expressly lists him as a "non-migrant Australian writer". Van Teeseling smiles at this. "Of course he's a migrant," she says. "I don't really believe Alex when he says he came here to come home. I don't doubt his sincerity, but I don't read that in his work. I read confusion. Whenever someone calls him an Australian writer, he's fantastically happy, as if he finally belongs somewhere."Yet Miller's argument, that his Scottish/Irish parents migrated to an English culture and he simply moved back to their home culture, albeit in Australia, cuts to the bone of the national anxiety. In the landscapes of his books, the locals, those who truly belong, can "jab at their ancestors' bones". Thus being Australian doesn't carry the same weight as being English, or Chinese, or Scottish; Miller is as Australian as anyone because he's as non-indigenous as anyone. "A local's always got something extra on you," he writes in The Tivington Nott. "They can afford for outsiders to make a mistake. Saying nothing. Being there and waiting." After five years as a stockman, miller's exploring mind needed more than the outback. He moved into a boarding house in Melbourne and started studying, first to matriculate, then to graduate in history and English from Melbourne University."By then I had begun to set in verse the conversations I was having in my head. I worked alone because I did not know how to approach the literary people. I would have liked to have joined in, but I didn't have the confidence."During Melbourne's literary renaissance of the late '60s, Miller remained on the sidelines, short-haired and drug-free. "I wasn't Australian enough in that Melbourne type of way," he says. "It's a very specific Melbourne thing. I never have been, and I'm still not, part of that. People would say, 'Where are you from?' and I'd say, 'Queensland.' "Still he wrote. And wrote. Through the '70s, he married into an establishment family, cleaned offices in Sydney, became a public servant in Canberra, fled to a remote farm, lived in Paris and turned to teaching. There were years of despair and his marriage self-immolated. In that time he completed what he calls his pre-novels: three long, try-hard works burdened with issues of society and their Melbourne setting. His eureka moment came when a respected friend asked him why he didn't write about what he loved. "I'd mistaken what novel writing was about," says Miller. "I thought novels were supposed to be about issues. But they're about the intimacies of our daily lives." Just as there is love in all of his books, there is guilt. Miller left home when his little brother was four. His mother expected him back within two years, in spite of his father declaiming, "It's for life, Winnie!" Says Miller, "When I was at university planning to become a novelist - and I did plan to become a novelist - I read Camus saying, 'First get rid of your family.' And I thought, 'I've got rid of mine. I've done something right.' "Miller long believed his father despised him; they never reconciled. Relations with his brother and two sisters remain distant. And when his mother lay dying, Miller left it too late to return to say farewell.Miller doesn't like to talk about it. It's a wrenching business, loving your family in retrospect. He disappears into his study and returns with a copy of The Sitters, his guilt-soaked novella about an artist who, having achieved success with a masterly portrait called The Tan Family (Miller's breakthrough novel, The Ancestor Game, is set in China), has hit a rut. He has become conscious of "the last enigma of my life - my family and my childhood. That cold legacy of silence and absence." Miller reads: "My father's gone, of course. Long ago. My mother too now. There's no one left. They may as well not have existed. My family. It all came to nothing for them. All the passions and hopes and the little dreams and wayward moments. The small repair jobs. It was a piece of music performed once and never repeated." He reads on for a bit, then snaps the book shut and looks me hard in the eye. "I had a wonderful family. I f...ing am who Iam because of my family. Quote that."If I'm honest - if I am prepared to open my heart a little here - I will say that the Bromley wall is still there, the scar, the mark of the contempt that it left, and that it will never quite be gone, despite the outback, despite my success, despite my wonderful children and my wife and all my friends, who are so important to me.I feel the oppression of the wall, the resistance of it on my spirits still sometimes, and there seems to be nothing I can do to overcome it. But when I'm writing, the wall is hardly ever there. When I'm writing, my home-made glider does not crash into the poplars but rises and carries me over them and beyond the wall to the imaginative landscapes of my life's experience and my hopes. Writing fiction is the most wonderful liberty imaginable.Miller says lovesong is the first novel he's written purely for his own pleasure. Set mostly in Paris, and focusing on an aimless Australian farmer's son and his Tunisian wife, he describes it, with light provocativeness, as "the story of a standard Australian family in Carlton". He's presently working on his 10th book, a fictional account of the life of Sidney Nolan, with whom he deeply identifies. "It was Nolan's pictures that drew me here," he says. "I feel I'm going full circle."Miller returns about once a year to outback Queensland, where the real-life characters of what many consider his masterpiece, Journey to the Stone Country, welcome him with open arms, black and white. It's his country, too, now. Some of Australia's most popular novelists, the true-blue insiders, as it were, have a tendency to express a literal love of country that often finds a sideline in environmentalist non-fiction. Miller's feel for the land, for both its indigenous pulse and the Europeantraditions that clothe it, goes much deeper. His landscapes can leave a reader stricken with longing. It's not enough to say Alex Miller is one of Australia's finest novelists. Quite possibly, he is our most Australian one.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald