autobiography

A LIVING NOVEL

David Matthews

B. Wongar
Dingoes Den
Imprint $16.95pb, 312pp
1 875892 58 3

IN 1978 THE SEARCH FOR B.WONGAR began when journalists, seeking information about the apparently Aboriginal author of a book entitled The Track to Bralgu, found only the Serbian-born Streten Bozic on the end of the phone. When Robert Drewe eventually cleared up the mystery in the Bulletin Literary Supplement in 1981, more sympathetically than most, he found the case so complicated that he called Wongar 'a sort of living novel'.
     Predictably enough there was some attempt to beat up a scandal and a few suggestions that Literature Board funding had been misdirected. But with his evident deep sympathy for the condition and history of Aboriginal people in Australia and his identification with them, Wongar was not easy to pigeonhole as a fake.
      Nevertheless, these controversies being over, opinion in Australia has never really shifted behind this writer. The main reaction to his writing here is profound indifference. Most of his books received their first publication outside this country and several of them have had very lively existences in translation in Europe. The extraordinary polemical novel of 1994, Raki, was one of his few works to receive first publication here by a mainstream publisher, but this work barely left a print on the great sandy desert of Australian letters.
     It has been evident for some time that Wongar puts a lot of himself and his own experiences into his works, especially since the Nuclear Trilogy that began with the 1983 novel Walg. But what it has been possible to deduce about Wongar from these works has remained enigmatic. I turned to Dingoes Den, the long-promised memoir, with much anticipation. How did Streten Bozic come to be living with tribal Aborigines in the Northern Territory in the '60s? Did he really live and have children with an Aboriginal woman, and what happened to them? These things go to the heart of Wongar's claims on the heritage he has written about for so many years.
      The memoir does not clear up all of these matters. It is no great surprise that the living novel is still being written. Dingoes Den features the trademark stylistic device of abrupt shifts from indirect discourse to direct; the first-person voice tends to be that of an observer and recorder, not someone who explains himself; someone too curious about everything he is seeing around him to be curious about himself. Some of the most lyrical passages in the memoir come when Wongar is telling of travelling in the desert with one or other of his Aboriginal friends -- a typical motif in the novels. The overall effect of the memoir, in short, is exactly like a novel by B. Wongar. If the novels are part-autobiographical, the memoir is at times novelistic.
     Wongar tells us how, on arrival in Australia, he became a construction worker on various projects in the north of Australia, where he encountered indigenous people. What he doesn't tell us is why he keeps sneaking away from his work to be in the desert with these people. Why exactly was this construction worker with his scarcely existent English in a Darwin courtroom in 1969 listening to an Aboriginal group challenging a mining company? Why does he risk and incur imprisonment in his attempts to visit his friends on prohibited land? Sometimes engagingly, sometimes a little frustratingly, the memoirist assumes that he is not the focus of interest; he meanders about like the green ant Gabo Djara in his own novel of the same name, observing, taking note.
      For some time it has been argued that Wongar's own experiences in wartime Serbia and after the war as a displaced person in Europe gave him a special sympathy for the plight of Aborigines. What we read here about his early experiences (and we have to wait some time before we get to them) confirms that many of the horrific experiences recorded in Raki were in fact autobiographical. It is an oddity of the book, though, that Wongar makes no attempt to analyse his own sympathy in this respect. He does draw parallels between the Serbian and Australian experiences but never by examining himself. The persona of Wongar himself remains the mysterious centre of this book. Several times he makes his antipathy for Europe clear, remarking on a couple of occasions that he had vowed never to return there. Yet a big absence in the book is any account of what happened in Wongar's (or Bozic's) years directly after the war. There is a photo of a splendidly attired Wongar in Paris in 1958, but no accompanying story.

Incomplete:

A LIVING NOVEL

David Matthews

David Matthews teaches English literature at the University of Newcastle.