Dusk

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Like Limberlost, Robbie Arnott’s latest novel Dusk has a small cast of characters, close siblings and a wild animal at the heart of the quest. (Here not a caged native quoll but an imported menace: a South American puma). [My thoughts on Limberlost, here]. 

James Bradley compares Arnott’s prose to Cormac McCarthy, with its ‘pared-back textures’ (Guardian, 2024). Ned Hirst sees the novel as ‘an adventure story [which] contains the narrative momentum to match Australian Beowulf’ (Meanjin, 2024). I thought of something closer in time and place: Gerald Murnane’s 1982 novel The Plains, with its mythic landscape, its allegorical cartographical suggestions and its gentrified landowners.

Iris and Floyd are children of convicts – adult orphans, nomadic and symbiotic twins. Arnott introduces them as curiosities on page 4:

Their names were Iris and Floyd Renshaw, and they were both thirty-seven years old … Little was known about them at all, except for the work they did, and even that was debated. Depending on who you asked, they were labourers, hunters, thieves or worse.

Just who would be interested in them is another question, castoffs as they are. Dusk, on the other hand, has everyone’s attention. The puma is on the prowl. MacLaverty, a friendlier specimen of grazier, tells Iris: ‘Her range is up there, along with every other peak of the plains’ (p. 30 – ‘plains’ – there is the word). A famed Patagonian hunter has gone missing, and the graziers are offering a large reward. So, the stage is set for the life-and-death struggle, with our unarmed twins in it for the money, brave in the face of the impossible challenge.

Arnott writes simply and beautifully about the landscape encountered on the journey (as Bradley suggests). Sounds, sights and smells come alive for the reader (pp. 50-51):

‘They were greeted by a burst of noise: rattling thunder that seemed to come from the soft ground.’ (Deer).

‘Others pushed out dry green needles from knots of wood that could, to an imaginative eye, have been fists.’ (Trees).

At one point, Iris leaves her brother to do a day’s work for First Peoples (not named as such). They work the peat and prepare food in a manner Iris hasn’t experienced before, wondering ‘how long they’d kept doing it, how long they’d be allowed to’ (p. 95). Her host Lydia shows Iris a rare kindness, and ‘… an acknowledgement of something shared’. Lydia tells Iris (of her people), ‘[the graziers] would rather us disappear’ (p. 101).

Indeed, the twins are outsiders trying to survive, and at points in their past, doing so by stealing, hoping to remain free, with the dream that ‘they’d be able to slip into new identities and live quietly on the margins of this brutal fledgling society’ (p. 134). A sense of shame follows Iris and Floyd, nonetheless, as the sins of the father (and mother). Our sympathies are with them, and we hope for their success, even as we suspect the attention of Patrick Lees, a moustachioed fellow hunter who Iris trusts, despite her brother’s suspicions.

To say more would lead us into the temptation of synopsis.

Mythic elements include scenes where the twins understand that strange trees are the bones of the leviathans, emblematic of deep time and long-receded oceans. On this point, Bradley comments: ‘Evocative as these moments are, they sit a little uncomfortably alongside Dusk’s treatment of Aboriginal presence’ (2024).

Here I return to that earlier, mythic book about the plains, where the graziers ‘own’ the landscape and wield a form of pointless power, and not a First Nations person in sight. I don’t think either text attempts a representation of history. Rather, they place the reader in the uncomfortable position of surveying a rugged and beautiful landscape through the eyes of colonisers (even sympathetic ones) – a landscape that is impossible to (finally) own. One can only walk through it and notice and name its parts, or one can hide out in a labyrinthian library. But who would wish to be a grazier on the plains, rifle in hand, forever defending the indefensible, forever wishing the true mythic past had never existed?

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