Book explores a stormy relationship between nature and culture

Abstract

Book explores a stormy relationship between nature and culture Robert Zeller Chrystopher J. Spicer . Cyclone Country: The Language of Place and Disaster in Australian Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020. 202 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 9781476681566 (print), 9781476640501 (ebook) In early February 2011, I read that North Queensland was being hit by Cyclone Yasi, a Category 5 storm. When I got online, the first story I encountered was a report of the devastation suffered by Mission Beach, a town I had visited several times when researching E. J. Banfield's Dunk Island books. I was reminded of those visits and that storm in Chrystopher Spicer's book. Although the subtitle speaks of Australian literature generally, it is mostly a book about North Queensland writing. In the book's early chapters, Spicer sets up his theoretical framework, discussing the relationship between people and place where violent storms can shape both individual psyches and communal experience—tearing communities apart with their passing and bringing them together during the process [End Page 151] of rebuilding. Of course, disastrous storms are not a purely Australian phenomenon, and in the first chapter, Spicer puts his subject in larger historical and geographical contexts. He introduces the concept of terroir as it relates not just to wine: "Literature too can be permeated and characterized by terroir in that the very land on which and in which the literature is created and developed nourishes it and imparts unique qualities to that literature, imbuing it with a sense of place" (27–28). In the second chapter, Spicer discusses the naming of storms, a practice pioneered in Queensland by the meteorologist Clement Wragge in the late nineteenth century. Why, he asks, do we need to assign names to violent weather events? His answer is that "we attempt to seize back some control and to make some sense of it all by establishing a personal relationship to the event, and so we name the storm" (44). Theoretical background established, Spicer moves on to discuss cyclones as they figure in the works of five authors: Vance Palmer, Thea Astley, Patrick White, Susan Hawthorne, and Alexis Wright. Each writer uses the cyclone in somewhat different ways, though a common thread is that the storm provides some kind of revelation to the characters or to the author. Spicer analyzes multiple works by Palmer and Astley, single novels by White and Wright, and a collection of poetry by Hawthorne. He presents detailed, if sometimes repetitive, readings of the works. To me, the most satisfying readings are those of the works by Vance Palmer and Alexis Wright. In the former, Spicer uses the myth criticism of Northrop Frye to analyze how Palmer drew on his own experience of living on Green Island and on the 1934 cyclone that struck North Queensland, in short stories and his novel Cyclone, published in 1947. According to Spicer, Palmer reshaped these events into an apocalyptic narrative: "He wrote not only of tragedy but also of resilience and continuity of community during hard times. He wrote of a search to restore balance in time of disruption, of a search for meaning" (83). And Spicer discusses Wright's Carpentaria in terms of traditions of Indigenous storytelling. He claims that the novel, which begins and ends with cyclones, "embodies cyclic patterns of narrative and meaning" (136). The cyclones, he says, "have purpose, like all the natural elements of this country, and this purpose is to not only punish and destroy but also to transform. The cyclones destroy the old, but they reveal the new" (154). Spicer's discussion of Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm, however, seems less focused and more rambling. While I would not take issue with his thesis about Elizabeth Hunter's epiphany in the novel, he seems to go far afield in his effort to explain that epiphany. As a result, the cyclone itself fades into the background. It provides the still eye in which Hunter found herself on Brumby Island, but that is about the extent of its importance. As I noted earlier, parts of the book seem repetitive, with repeated citations of the same passages. There are also some disconcerting errors, none of them interfering with...