Book Review : A Structuralist Discovers Australia

The Road to Botany Bay by Paul Carter (Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95; 344 pages)

“Where have you been walking?” you might ask someone who comes in, flushed and dusty, from a trek in the hills. “Inside my boots,” he might answer if he is Paul Carter.

Carter has written a wonderfully expansive and curiously cramped book about what it means to discover and explore a new land; in this case, the continent of Australia, where he lives. He approaches this by going back to the writings of the discoverers, explorers, settlers and historians, considering their premises and distortions.

Carter belongs to the extended and highly articulate family of Structuralists. In the same way that Structuralist critics treat works of literature as being fundamentally about their own texts, Carter treats the accounts of the exploration and settlement of Australia--journals, letters, the books and records of explorers and even the place names they gave to the new country--as being fundamentally about themselves. Or, to put it differently, as reflecting their authors more than their discoveries.

Borrowing Reality

For Carter and his fellows, a specific culture neither creates nor alters reality. It borrows it, instead, for its own purposes. A particular national history is simply one possible version of reality, and defines it no more than the litter from one particular picnic defines the meadow in which it is held.

It is an approach that can exasperate and illuminate, often in the same paragraph; that can wander off erratically and stumble suddenly upon something valuable. Carter’s redrawing of the history of his country’s settlement--spatial history, he calls it--does both. His style ranges from pithy epigrams to a kind of long-barreled abstraction that sounds as if it might have been translated from Middle High German.

Carter’s “spatial history” has splendid and suggestive things to say. To think of what it actually meant to find and explore a new country, we must place ourselves at the point where it was done. And this is what he tries to do.

‘Prehistory of Places’

“The Road to Botany Bay,” he writes, “is a prehistory of places, a history of roads, footprints, trails of dust and foaming wakes. . . . It is concerned with the haze that precedes clear outlines.”

Conventional history travels the track backwards in the security of what already exists. If we think of “discovering” a river, we forget that to the explorer it first showed itself as a glimpse of water that might be a Mississippi or might simply meander.

Carter portrays Australia’s explorers struggling to plant not simply their feet but their language upon an ambiguous landscape. “Possession of the country depended on demonstrating the efficacy of the English language there,” he writes. “It depended, to some extent, on civilizing the landscape, bringing it into orderly being. More fundamentally still, the landscape had to be taught to speak.”

Australia was especially frustrating. The explorers needed to orient themselves, to say where they had been. They needed mountains, and these refused to appear in Alp-like or even Pennine-like proportions; so you get a 100-foot promontory named Mt. Inspection.

They needed rivers even more--as highways and to provide a sense of direction. Exploring a European or American river, you would get progress and climax; they became more important as you went downstream. Australian rivers petered out into marshes; they went nowhere. But you wanted a river anyway, so you would call a bit of water “River Lett.” It was a play on words, in fact; an admission that it was no more than a rivulet.

What’s in a Name?

Names, once given, seem solid indicators of places. But to decide that a place was in fact a place and needed a name was often arbitrary. And the name had little to do with the place itself but perhaps with the patronage of the expedition--Admiralty Bay--or an experience during the expedition--Repulse Bay--or perhaps with the presence of naturalists aboard--Botany Bay.

Asking the Aborigines was no sounder. That a place needed a name was an English expectation. The Aborigines answered politely or evasively or as best they could; and you have places named, for example, with the Aboriginal word for “I don’t understand.”

Carter discusses the journals written up by Australian explorers from notes taken on the spot. The best place for writing them, Carter tells us, was on board ship because the experience of travel is most vivid “in an environment devoid of external stimulation.” He adds that “the true dialogue the writer conducts is not with external reality but with language itself.”

Of course, we look for patterns in what we experience, and many of the patterns are drawn from the luggage we bring along. Carter’s agility in discussing the patterns that the English brought to the new land sometimes dances him right off his own shipboard. Of the explorers’ books about their ordeals and exploits, he writes:

Explorer as Traveler

“Heroism is a significant ingredient of all their narratives. It is not, however, to be attributed naively to the explorer himself. The heroic explorer exists, rather, as a convention of the explorer discourse . . . . It is the explorer-writers’ talent for forging a metaphor of himself as a traveler that makes the narrative heroic, not the country and even less the personal qualities of the explorer.”

The mind tends to wander frivolously away when points of this kind are reached. Dr. Livingstone-Discourse, I presume, Henry Stanley-Discourse is heard to mutter, far up the Congo. And, almost involuntarily, a celebrated jingle paraphrases itself:

Structuralist Bear is fierce and coarse.

It’s gobbled up Explorer-Discourse.

Explorer-Discourse’s not aware.

It has been eaten by Structuralist Bear.