Lohrey, Amanda: Vertigo. Black Inc, Melbourne 2008. ISBN 9781863953191
The Victorian bushfire tragedies suggest that Dorothea Mackellar was right. Except for works by Indigenous people, Australian literature has one deep and abiding theme — the continent's 'beauty and her terror'.
A writer's concern might seem to be primarily psychological or social or political, but the constant motivation is to interpret the ways in which living in this place of contrasting landscapes and climates influences the human condition.
Amanda Lohrey's novella Vertigo addresses this question directly but its subtleties should not be overlooked.
Luke and Anna, editors of corporate and legal documents, have portable skills but modest incomes. Life in mortgage-obsessed Sydney threatens to make them, especially Anna, 'anxiously acquisitive', corroding her good will towards the world.
That most acidic of beasts, envy, had a fang-hold on her heart. She was past 30, she was in a spiritual impasse and she needed to find a way out of it.
When she develops asthma — 'an invisible vampire' — they decide to go bush into 'a mysterious limbo, a potential space waiting to be filled'. Readers of Lohrey's 1995 novel Camille's Bread will not be surprised at how skilfully Lohrey evokes lives in limbo.
As they drive 'the boy' materialises more often than he had in the city. The reader shares their quest to deal with this apparition and to understand what he represents.
They happen upon the hamlet of Garra Nalla by a river and lagoon near the sea. This is a place of beauty, with flowering gums that make a 'palette of pinks and orange and gold' and she-oaks that provide 'a subtle blur of fine filaments ... drooping to the ground in wispy canopies'. Garra Nalla has escaped development because a rip on the beach claims lives regularly.
They pack a sophisticated espresso machine, but otherwise they adapt quickly to their old weatherboard house: preoccupied with saving water in an area that has experienced seven years of drought, cooking on a fuel stove, becoming involved in their neighbours' lives.
Luke delights in identifying birds and when one, fearless, stares back at him, 'a current passes between them, a soundless exchange of energy'. Luke is ecstatic because he feels so at home.
Anna experiences greater doubts. The boy becomes elusive. She decides to plant casuarinas, against the advice of Gil, a neighbour, who calls them a fire hazard. She-oaks propagate after fire: 'Australia, it seems,