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Rednecks of the outback Dirt Music by Tim Winton 480 pp, Picador For years now Australia has been the last frontier. Those who flock to its scattered wild places come from all over the planet, not least from within Australia itself. The crowds at Darwin or Broome, or scouting through the Red Heart, are as likely to start out from Macquarie's Street Consulting Rooms or Collins Street Legal Chambers as from Detmold or San Diego. Only a few will be ecological pilgrims: most are attracted by the combination of rugged landscape and hi-tech convenience.
Nature may still be bleaker there than anywhere on earth, but its visitors can expect the latest in aircraft, refrigeration, personal hygiene and haute cuisine, plus the best sporting facilities that well-equipped marinas and golf courses can offer. The retired couples driving mobile homes across the continent know they are safe provided they dont run out of petrol. Travellers en route to the well-publicised destinations of modern eco-travel who stop at some ill-favoured point along the way will find that the people who live and work outside the cities also enjoy Australias renowned comforts. But they will discover something else as well. Here live the other Australians, those for whom the nation has had to borrow American terminology: trailer trash and rednecks. Some, but not all, are poor; most make their living the hard way.
But their women dress in the brightest of Lycra and their kids have the newest computer games. No matter how remote, no settlement is beyond the reach of Blockbuster. White Point is Tim Winton's invented fishing port about five hours drive north of Perth, Western Australia. Continuing along the Indian ocean coast, WA covers more than 1, 000 miles of desert, vacant beach and rumbling mesa as far as the Kimberley's, a terrain of crocodile-infested rivers and archipelagos. The action of Dirt Music is stretched along this line. Its protagonists are White Pointers.
First we have the Buckridge family, led by the master of the town, Jim: the best fisherman on the coast and a sure located of rock lobster and abalone, a cash crop that is airlifted to Tokyo the same day it is unloaded in Australia. Then there is the Fox family, outcast musicians with, in the person of Luther Fox, a sh amateur or poacher of the heavily policed fishing grounds and a rival of Jim Buckridge for the books main female figure, Georgiana Jutland. Georgie comes from Perth's elite; her father is a yacht-owning barrister, and she is conscious of being just another Princess from the Lady Mill (a further Australian borrowing from American social nomenclature). Georgie has turned her back on university and the professions to become a nurse, working in Saudi Arabia and then travelling the world. At the novels start, she is an eco-refugee at White Point. She had helped crew a yacht that was wrecked at Lombok in Indonesia, where she took up with Jim Buckridge on the tourist trail.
A salient moment in her life came when she was forced to beach in the northwest of WA at Coronation Island, a place that contributes heavily to the novels ambience of pantheism. Winton's plot is well-handled, though the pace is slow. Georgie knows there is some sort of dirty secret surrounding Buckridge, and her affair with Luther Fox sets in place the unravelling of this mystery. Revelations about the dysfunctional Fox family follow: everyone in White Point is hiding something. A sort of sexual shimmering pervades the atmosphere. Perhaps Winton's most considerable achievement is his description of this fishing community, with its violence, its resentment of urban big shots (lawyers and surgeons and kick-arse CEOs) and its love of dirt music, an Australian composite of everything that was ever moaned along to a guitar in the United States.
Perth society doesnt escape, either. The Dress Circle Suburbs, where the sprinklers come on automatically each evening, are full of tranquillized shoppers obsessed with money and health. The course of Georgie and Luthers true love runs far from smooth. White Pointers kill Luthers dog and set fire to his house. He escapes drowning and travels north to find Coronation Island, which Georgie has invested with a mystic force for him. There he becomes a sort of New Age beachcomber, substituting a fishnet Aeolian harp for his beloved guitar.
Some of the rednecks he encounters on his trip are worthy of any Bumper Book of Monsters. Lotus-land Broome is presented as a vision from book three of Gulliver's Travels. The novels final scenes are protracted, and it would be wrong to reveal the outcome beyond commending Winton's skill with traditional adventure-story climaxes. Dirt Music is very well written. Winton has absolute command of Australian vernacular, but enough taste not to employ it as a guarantee of democratic decency. Jims memory of betraying his wife with an oversexed female member of the Fox clan cannot be assuaged by landing the biggest barramunda in the north; Luthers privations wont banish his forced recognition of the corruption of his music-obsessed family.
Georgie's sisters remain in thrall to celebrity culture and nursing homes, while Georgie herself needs a harsh coup de th&# 233; tre to overcome her irresolution. Over everything and everybody looms an Australia of hard options, relieved and yet benighted by technology. World travellers, beware! &# 183; Peter Porters most recent book of poems is Max Is Missing (Picador)
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