Book Review: Fly Away Peter

I have been a great lover of David Malouf’s work. Malouf figures regularly in my list of favourite authors. But, when I think about it, apart from Johnno, there are very few of Malouf’s books that I have read.

It was convenient, therefore, that, in the week before Christmas, a friend unexpectedly gave me a copy of Malouf’s 1982 work, Fly Away Peter. In the drifting days between Boxing Day and the holiday at the beach commencing on the Saturday after New Year’s, I commenced this little (132 page) novella.

I finished it with the sound of Angourie’s breaking waves in my ears soon after we arrived.

From the first line, Malouf’s beautiful prose style was there. Also present was the beautiful feeling that comes with having the history told of the reader’s familiar environs. The action in Fly Away Peter commences in the first decade of the twentieth century and is set on a farming property at Burleigh on what is now the Gold Coast.

The narrative revolves around a friendship among three people. Jim is a working class young man with little in the way of prospects. Ashley is a privileged young man who has returned from the traditional education in England and found himself the owner of the large property. And Imogen is an English woman in her fifties, who ekes out a little income sending her nature photographs back to be published in English magazines.

The three are brought together by their love of birds and Jim’s considerable talent in observing and knowing about them.

Then, war breaks out.

I have read many treatments of the soldier’s experience of the Great War. I hope to read many more. As a member of a privileged generation who was never called upon, I retain a desire to understand that which is almost impossible to grasp or communicate.

Fly Away Peter becomes a record of Jim’s war experience. In situations of terror and stress, his and his comrades’ recollections of life back home provide him with great comfort. Ashley is also in France. Ashley serves as an officer. The paths of the two men cross briefly.

The closing scene of Fly Away Peter describes Imogen on the Burleigh shore, towards the end of the war, watching practitioners of the new art of surf board riding. She thinks that, in time to come, these riders will become a suitable subject for photography: but not today.

The next day, Sunday, I went to an exhibition at the Yamba Museum in the Old Kirk in River Street. It was an exhibition of photographs by Osric Notley, taken before and after the First World War. One featured three young men on a hunting expedition in the bushland around what is now Angourie where I was staying. The accompanying written information explained that one of the three died in France. The other two returned but were significantly disabled by being exposed to gas.

The other key photograph of the exhibition was of Australia’s first ever photograph of surf board riding. In the summer of 1911-2, some four years before the (usually accredited as Australia’s first example of surf board riding) 1915 performance of Duke Kahanamoku at Freshwater in Sydney, Osric Notley’s friend, Tommy Walker, is shown surfing on Main Beach, Yamba.

Tommy Walker went one step further. The photograph shows him doing a headstand on the board.

Imogen would have been impressed.

Stephen Keim

Angourie

11 January 2013