By Núria Lecina
BIOGRAPHY
Murray Bail
(born the 22nd of September 1941) is an Australian writer of
novels, short stories and non-fiction.
He was born
in Adelaide, South Australia, a second son of Cyril Lindsay Bail
(1914-1966) and Hazel Bail
(née Ward). His father
worked in the tramways and his mother was a housewife and a milliner. He has two brothers.
He has been married
twice. His first wife was Margaret Bail (née Wordsworth). They got married in
1965 and divorced in 1988.
His second
wife was Helen Garner; they got married in 1992, and they divorced in 2000. She
also was a well-known Australian writer.
He has lived
most of his life in Australia, except for sojourns in India (1968-70), England and other
parts of Europe (1970-74). After working for advertising agencies in
Adelaide and Melbourne, he moved with his first wife to India in 1968, where he
worked for an agency in Bombay. During his travels, he became ill of
amoebic dysentery and went to London for treatment. Once there, he decided that the novel
he had written in India was worthless and threw it in the trash.
For
recovering, he remained in London for five years (1970-1975), spending the
first year on unemployment benefits. He then wrote for many newspapers,
which encouraged him to publish his first novels once he returned to Australia. This travel’s experience influenced
him. Many of his works reflect which he, an Australian, thinks when observing
his country from outside, its culture, and the way people live.
Now
he lives in Sydney.
Before
dedicating himself to literature, Bail worked in galleries and as an art
critic. He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to
1981, and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather.
Bail is
considered one of the most innovative Australian writers in short fiction,
classified as very interesting, unique and an intellectual of the 20th century.
He is known
for his dry humour and for challenging the traditional narrative. Bail used to
say that novels should not be stories with a beginning and an end, but that they
should be instruments for thinking. That inspiration comes from mistakes. When
nothing goes as you expected, imagination begins, he says.
He did not
believe in sudden inspiration, he believes in thought and patience. He could
spend years revising a work. He is an admirer of Kafka, Borges, Nabokov and
Calvino —all writers who play with language and with the way people tell
stories.
He had often
said that Australians were too practical, and that the local culture did not
value invention or fantasy.
He says it
with irony, but it is a real criticism: he wanted Australian literature to stop
being just stories of the outback and survival, and become a more philosophical
and universal literature. He doesn’t have a very extensive body of work, but he
does have a lot of work to do. He says that writing is like making furniture with
words: few pieces, but well-made and useful. This is in line with his passion
for cabinetmaking and object design.
HIS WORK
-Novel
Homesickness (1980)
Holden’s Performance (1987)
Eucalyptus (1998). He has been awarded several times for this work. This is
the story of a botanical fairy tale. It is his most famous novel, where realism
and fairy tale are mixed. A father promises that only he who knows the name of
all the eucalyptus trees of his property will be able to marry his daughter.
Curiously, Eucalyptus was to be made into a film starring Nicole Kidman
and Russell Crowe, but the production was cancelled at the last minute due to
artistic disagreements between Bail and the director.
Camouflage (2000)
The Pages
(2008)
The Voyage (2012)
-Non-fiction
Ian
Fairweather (1981). This
work was written when Murray was working on the National Gallery of Australia;
it’s a biography of this artist, an
Australian painter who was also eccentric and solitary, who lived in a cabin
made of drums and scrap wood.
Longhand (1989)
-Notebooks 1970-2003 (2005)
He (2021). The last book, only 164 pages to explain his autobiography. He writes it in the third person; he
doesn’t like to use the first. It’s curious that he describes why he started writing his memoirs:
it was dissatisfaction of his way of working, sitting at a table writing every
morning and at weekends. And
he admits that the inspiration for his fiction is found in his childhood
memories and travels. He
says that he has lost interest in art, and that music occupies more of his free
time than looking at paintings.
-Short fiction
Contemporary
Portraits and Other Stories
(1975), republished in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. Here
is where we can find our short story, The Silence.
SUMMARY
Let’s set the scene:
Australia is
a continent of seven and half millions square kilometres. It’s the largest
world island. In spite of this extension, there are only 28 million inhabitants
and the population density is of 3,4 residents for square kilometre.
The first
residents arrived there 42,000 years ago. They were nomads, hunters and collectors.
Their spirituals values were revering the earth and believing in the dream
time. Nowadays, Aboriginal people keep this culture even though the political
changes. It’s the country less world populated, where the ninety per cent lives
in the urban areas. The big portion inside is arid and desert.
It would be
in one of these deserts, some years ago, that we could imagine at our
character, Joe Tapp.
The Silence seems a simple history. Joe Tapp lives in the desert, in an
enormous landscape, alone, in a campsite where he has a tent, a freeze, a
petrol drum, firewood that obtain from some cut trees and a lot of rubbish. All
of it scattered.
It’s not
clear if Joe is an Aboriginal Australian, but his habits and his behaviour make
us think that he is very close to this culture.
His life is
very repetitive, the story explains his daily routines. For over a year he has
been there, in the desert, hunting rabbits that live hidden in the dunes. He
sets traps so that they are stuck in the rabbit’s neck. His activity is in the
morning, he goes with sacks on his back to collect the corpses. Once in the
camp, he skins and cleans them, removes the pelts and puts them in the freezer.
He rests, and at sunset, he returns to the trap area to prepare them again. He
sleeps and starts the new day again.
Joe is an
introverted person, rooted in the environment where peace and silence reign; tranquillity
is only broken by some animal noise. It’s the silence of nature.
All this
activity, which aims at his survival, is altered every two weeks when Norm
Treloar arrives with his noisy red truck, to buy and pick up the dead frozen
rabbits. This is the only relation with another human. Joe doesn’t feel well at
all when Norman arrives. Norman is a communicative man, and always, like a
social routine, greets him, asks him how everything is going. Then, they load
the meat on the truck, they have a tea, and finally Norman leaves, raising the
desert’s dust. All return to natural state, the silence!
Joe feels worse
and worse each time. He is overwhelmed, often thinks about the meeting with Norman,
and suffers waiting for the next time. Every time he feels the meeting more
intrusive. Breaking the silence bothers him, disturbs him. Norman’s words and
noise offend him. He doesn’t want this relationship, he even throws to the fire
the newspaper that Norman lefts. He wants silence, but also humanity
disconnection. But he needs to go on with the business.
Joe thinks
about his work, enjoys his peace, he loves to be there, surrounded by nature,
he spends hours squatting. Like an Aboriginal.
And when
suddenly he heard the truck’s far noise, Joe knows what he would do. He runs to
the sand dune and hides behind the bushes. From there, he can see the campsite,
and he lets Norman do the work. The truck driver looks around, searches for
Joe, honks the horn, smokes a cigarette, and finally goes to the freezer, fills
the truck with the meat, and leaves.
The silence
returns, and Joe comes back to the campsite ready to carry on his work. Now he
can go and setting rabbit’s traps, happy to have had a resolution.
My opinion
Silence is
the absence of all sound or noise. In this story, it is the fact of stopping
talking little by little. Joe is becoming more and more silent. For what
reason?
Joe decided
to be there more than a year ago, in the desert. We don’t know where he came from
or what he did before, or why he came there. He chose to live in a place where
it was easier to find himself, to be in contact with a silent world, to live at
his own pace.
I think that
the environment has been absorbing and integrating him in the nature, and he
has finally found an inner peace and a meaning to his life. Possibly we, who
live in a completely different place, don’t understand this. We live in a
continuous communication, sometimes very crazy.
Silence can
also be a kind of non-verbal communication, and maybe Joe’s story wants to
transmit this other lifestyle to us. Maybe it’s not necessary to speak a lot
and think more.
QUESTIONS
-Hunting with traps today here is forbidden: What can be the rules for an "ethical" hunt?
-Now and then there is a rabbit pest, or a locust pest, or any kind of pests. If they are natural phenomena, must we fight them?
-What are the benefits of being alone? And the damages? Do we need moments to be alone? Why are we nowadays more individualistic?
VOCABULARY
singlet, drums, burrowed, gears, whine, melt, sport, juice, grub, saltbush, billy, rowdy, strain, stunted, revved
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