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Levels of life: Modernity and modernism in David Malouf's Fly Away Peter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2016

Kay Ferres
Kay Ferres*
Affiliation:
k.ferres@griffith.edu.au
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Abstract

David Malouf's novel Fly Away Peter (1982) uses modernist techniques to describe the impact of modernity on the emergent Australian nation. At its centre is the country lad Jim Saddler, who dies in the industrialised battlefield in France. His fate is entwined with that of his friend Ashley Crowther, who inherits his family's property, and whose embrace of modernity includes a determination to preserve the land and its wildlife. Ashley recognises the value of Jim's instinctive connection with the natural world, and his knowledge of, and fascination with, birds. This fascination aligns Jim with the photographer Imogen Harcourt. Miss Harcourt is a modern woman, using the new technologies of representation to record the natural world, its movement and change. At the novella's end, it is Imogen who turns her lens towards a new future, as her grief for Jim is transfigured through an epiphanic vision of a surfer riding the waves to the beach.

Type
Queensland modernisms
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 23 , Special Issue 2: Queensland Modernism , December 2016 , pp. 258 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016 

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