AACAI NEWSLETTER NO. 93 AUGUST 2003 Journey to the Stone Country
JOURNEY TO THE STONE COUNTRY
Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2002.
(Winner 2003 Miles Franklin Literary Award)
I have recently read this book, set in an area of Queensland with which I was once familiar, the Bowen Basin, in the hinterland of Mackay. It was just within the southern compass of the area I investigated as part of my PhD, which I completed through the History Department at James Cook University in Townsville, and it was where I carried out some of the earliest consultancies in Queensland after the passing of the Queensland Relics Act.
The story starts off as the heroine, an academic at the University in Melbourne, leaves her husband, another academic who is having a fling with one of his students, and returns to her roots in north Queensland. She stays with a friend who is a consultant archaeologist, no less. The friend had been a colleague at the History Department of the university, and set off to Townsville to establish the first cultural survey business in north Queensland to service the new Cultural Record Act.
The clients of the friend’s business are the local Indigenous community. ‘They hire me to help them do the surveys and write the reports. They send along a couple of their cultural field officers who are supposed to know the country and we search together for evidence of the old people. I record our finds on the GPS and the mine foots the bill.’ She describes herself as ‘the meat in the sandwich between the traditional owners and the multinationals’.
Now I found this book interesting for a number of reasons, including the well researched cultural survey process, the area where the story is set and the issues addressed.
There is a very strong sense of place. For example I found myself getting out my maps to see which road they were driving along, where they were camping and surveying, and whether I had been to or through any of these places. The author, Alex Miller, worked as an itinerant stockman in the region in the 1950s, and his landscapes are very evocative. The locational focus is the country at the headwaters of the Suttor River, land of the Jangga Aboriginal people, and also where the heroine grew up on a cattle station.
The heroine meets one-time ringer and now cultural representative of the local Jangga people. They fall in love and the story traces the complexities of their shared history, and the problems they encounter. They investigate an area on Urannah Creek which is to be dammed to supply water to Bowen. The bitter local guardian of Aboriginal history confronts them with the story of a massacre in which her grandfather had been involved.
Through the love affair the story focuses on the terms of possession of Australia, exploring the notions of home and belonging, subjects which Peter Read has examined by a different method in his books Returning to Nothing and Belonging. In this book Alex Miller also explores the need for reconciliation felt by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
Through the rich detail of characters as well as landscapes, Alex Miller shows the novel to be a powerful medium, capable of portraying so much more than the consulting report can. I think a great movie could be made from this story. The fact that consulting archaeology is the chosen vehicle for a novel which has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for 2003 shows how mainstream the profession has become. In time AACAI membership will doubtless burgeon in response to this book.
References
Brayshaw, Helen 1990 Well Beaten Paths. Department of History, James Cook University.
Read, Peter 1996 Returning to Nothing. Cambridge University Press, Australia.
Read, Peter 2000 Belonging. Cambridge University Press, Australia.
Endnotes
Note
What Helen doesn’t mention in her review is that the main characters in the book are closely based on ‘real people’, who are long terms friends of the author.
The other matter that is worth reinforcing is that the damming of the Urannah Creek and the consequent flooding of a significant portion of landscape, replete with outstanding natural and cultural heritage, has at various times been a real threat. A recent re-tabling of the proposal has been dropped; however, it is unlikely that is has been permanently
shelved. -Jane Harrington 20