Book Review : Coming of Age in Australia’s Outback

Billarooby by Jim Anderson (Ticknor & Fields: $17.95; 322 pages)

For a farmer, weather is fate; as capricious and unpredictable, and capable, in a few sudden weeks, of affirming or uprooting a family’s existence.

“Billarooby,” set in the parched Australian outback in the 1940s, has war and weather as outsized actors in its story of a boy going through his own storm and struggle while passing out of childhood.

War is World War II; present in the hamlet of Billarooby in the form of a Japanese POW camp whose inmates’ bloody attempt to escape provides one of the book’s climaxes. Weather is the endless drought, heat and dust storms that destroy the flourishing farm where the boy lives, and drives his father and mother to states of desperation that cross back and forth into madness.

Jim Anderson’s first novel uses strong colors and high dramatics in setting out the more tumultuous externals in the life of Lindsay Armstrong during his 12th and 13th years.

Weather as Character

The writing works brilliantly in bringing us the weather as a character. Its grip on the lives and sanity of the inhabitants of Billarooby is powerfully evoked. It infiltrates and exacerbates the secrets, tensions, hopes and passions among the Armstrong family members and their neighbors.

If the book has one preeminent climax, it is a storm that comes when the farm is on the verge of expiring. There are boiling black clouds, violent gusts of wind and a fearful display of thunder and lightning. Most violently, there is no rain. It is a dry storm, whose ferocity seems literally a matter of fate mocking the Armstrongs before ruining them.

But there is a degree of awkwardness and crudity in other climactic events. The prisoners’ escape attempt provides a lot of action but, despite the author’s effort at understatement, it is action as rhetoric.

The mysterious death by gunshot of Lindsay’s paternal grandfather is another dramatic element that doesn’t work very well. It was a death that both Lindsay and his father, Jack--who detested his own father--witnessed. The truth of it never quite breaks free; what remains is a dark undercurrent of anguish and distrust in the Armstrong household, and terrible nightmares for Lindsay.

“Billarooby’s” particular strength, however, lies apart from the author’s varying success in handling drama in a dramatic setting. What it does best is to evoke the internal condition of a boy living in the volcanic state of pre-adolescence and trying to deal with, evade or fantasize the real volcanoes around him. He constructs a kind of paper village on the edge of his Mt. Etna and yet, when it’s all over, the fragile constructions have allowed him to survive.

Lindsay’s wavering awareness is that of an organism still taking shape; which is what happens at his age, in fact. For a while, he falls in love with Jimmy, a neighbor’s son; imperceptively, his passion shifts to Jimmy’s sister, Jennifer. It is puppy love, in each case, and impermanent.

He absorbs the emotions and latent harshness of the world around him, but transforms them for his own use. There is a vigilante, lynch-mob mood among the Billarooby farmers toward the Japanese prisoners. Lindsay, who gets hold of an illustrated book about the Bushido warriors, fantasizes them as legendary figures; and conceives a hero-worshipping passion. “Ferocious, sardonic, heroic Samurai, imperial knights of the sun,” he mutters to himself as a busload of prisoners passes by.

On the Edge of Passion

This case of hero worship conflicts, of course, with another case; this one directed to Brown, a cheerful young farmer whose legs have been crippled fighting the Japanese in NuGuinea. Lindsay does everything he can to encourage the tender friendship, hovering on the edge of passion, between Brown and Lindsay’s gentle, cultivated Mum.

Part of the encouragement stems from his own state of warfare with Jack, his father. The dark heart of that warfare is the grandfather’s death, and Jack’s implied involvement in it. Lindsay has blocked out a clear memory of just what happened, but there is repressed fear on both sides. Jack is afraid he will speak more precisely. Lindsay, sensing Jack’s fear, has a half-conscious terror that Jack will decide to kill him.

Even without such an abyss, teeming with real and imaginary horrors, there is plenty for the two to fight about. Jack is a rough man, a hard-working visionary who has installed the only system of irrigation in the area and who prospers until the water runs out. He is unstable, aggressive and timid by turns, pious and judgmental, yet capable of having regular sex with one of the woman field-hands. Naturally, Lindsay catches him at it.

‘Babes of Christ’

The drought unhinges Jack. He stays up all night putting damp cloths on his lettuces, and calls them his “babes of Christ.” He holds the visiting bishop responsible for a plague of rabbits; at a reception, he dumps a bag of dismembered rabbit parts over the prelate, and is taken off for a temporary stay in the hospital. The tensions between Jack and Lindsay are fearsome at times; and comical at others. Trying to be conciliatory, Jack takes his son out for ice cream. They have a man-to-man talk in which he reproaches Lindsay for liking girls’ games and getting good marks at school; clearly, a sign of effeminacy. “I’m not very good at mathematics,” Lindsay replies, trying for conciliation in his turn.

Anderson does not make Jack a villain. There is a choked love, in fact, between father and son, and it comes out touchingly and at odd moments. All the Armstrongs are trying to survive, in fact; Jack, his defeat by drought; Mum, her yearning for tenderness and a more civilized life; Lindsay, the perplexing whirlwinds of growing up.

“Billarooby” is an affecting and imaginative report on weather of all kinds: the general searing wind that twists human lives when it doesn’t extinguish them entirely; and the micro-climates that each of us evolves to shelter from it.