An Analysis Of David Malouf's 'Johnno'

There is a passage in David Malouf's Johnno where the adolescent narrator muses upon the very full address which he, like Stephen Dedalus1 and schoolchildren all over the world, has written on the fly-leaf of his exercise books: ‘Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World’. Queensland is ‘a joke’ and about Australia he asks,
Why Australia? What is Australia anyway1? The continent itself is clear enough, burned into my mind on long hot afternoons in the Third Grade when I learned to sketch in its irregular coastline: the half-circle of the Great Australian Bight, the little booted foot of Eyre's Peninsula. Spencer's Gulf down to Port Philip … … I know the outline; I know the names (learned painfully for homework) of several

We may discover things years before or years after we realize their meaning. So all discovery is really rediscovery. Malouf is not interested in the power of the human mind to create something new and startling, but in the sharp shock of déjà vu: those moments when we realize the meaning of something that was always lurking in the back of our minds, but only becomes conscious when we see it in its true place in the pattern of things. Discovery and artistic creation are two sides of the same process, a process of recognition. Suddenly we remember forgotten experiences and events because we are brought face to face with them again in something apparently unrelated. In effect we have met a part of ourselves which we did not realize was there.’

However, he believes that the old notion that Australia was merely an ‘ugly’ or ‘clumsy’ or ‘second-hand’ version of Europe is wrong. For him it is not merely Europe ‘transported’, but Europe ‘translated’. So Malouf is not a staunch believer of the so-called ‘germ theory’ of the development of New World culture—which claimed that the Europeans brought their minds and their habits with them and these became the matrix of the new society, and remained unchanged by the new environment. The word ‘translated’ suggests that these habits of thought and culture have to be rendered into another environmental