McLaren, John (1991) Melancholy in new worlds - Ivan Doig's Montana and David Malouf's Queensland. In: Western Literature Association - Conference 1991 :, 1991. (Unpublished)

Abstract

In O Brave New World [O Strange New World] (New York, Viking, 1967 [1954]), Howard Mumford Jones claims that a characteristic of writing of the American West is "melancholy ... increased by the sense of human transience" (p.384). This is true also of much Australian writing of settlement. In his trilogy starting with Dancing at the Rascal Fair (New York: Macmillan, 1987), Ivan Doig tells with great affection the story of a family's apparently successful settlement in Montana, yet his tale is punctuated with tragedy and finishes in renunciation. David Malouf, in Harland's Half Acre (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1935 [1984]) traces with similar affection the process of settlement in southern Queensland only to show how a particular family is dispossessed, broken as a family, and finishes with only the ambiguous achievement of a half acre of painting. At the centre of both works we find, not Mumford's immensity of land dwarfing human achievement, but a failure of humans to accept the nature of the land they settle.

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