Outback

Fülszöveg

'Outback Australia proclaim number plates on
vehicles in the Northern Territory and as
Thomas Keneally says: given the aggressive
stickers which decorate the trucks ('Eat More
Beef, You Bastards!'), the patina of ochre dust
which covers them, the dents, the emergency
canisters of water on the roof racks - one is not
inclined to argue.
Outback is the heart of Australia, the
hinterland, beyond the cities and as foreign to
most Australians as it is to Europeans or
Americans. It is a vast area with Darwin its
capital, sparsely inhabited, much of it desert but
by no means empty.
In vivid character-sketches and anecdotes
Thomas Keneally who has known and loved the
outback all his life evokes a strange, harsh world
where seemingly to compete with the climate
and landscape everything and everybody is
larger than life.
Above all the outback is a magic place. Only
the Aboriginals can not be said to be immigrants,
having occupied central Australia for more than
forty... Tovább

Fülszöveg

'Outback Australia proclaim number plates on
vehicles in the Northern Territory and as
Thomas Keneally says: given the aggressive
stickers which decorate the trucks ('Eat More
Beef, You Bastards!'), the patina of ochre dust
which covers them, the dents, the emergency
canisters of water on the roof racks - one is not
inclined to argue.
Outback is the heart of Australia, the
hinterland, beyond the cities and as foreign to
most Australians as it is to Europeans or
Americans. It is a vast area with Darwin its
capital, sparsely inhabited, much of it desert but
by no means empty.
In vivid character-sketches and anecdotes
Thomas Keneally who has known and loved the
outback all his life evokes a strange, harsh world
where seemingly to compete with the climate
and landscape everything and everybody is
larger than life.
Above all the outback is a magic place. Only
the Aboriginals can not be said to be immigrants,
having occupied central Australia for more than
forty thousand years. Their spiritual life is
enriched by their mythology of'the Dreaming'.
For them, central Australia is a complex network
of tracks - Dreaming trails — leading to sites of
enormous sacred significance. The greatest is the
Rock or as the non-Aboriginal Australians call it
Ayers Rock.
Even for white Australians Ayers Rock exerts
an influence sometimes for evil as seems to have
been the case for the Chamberlains whose baby
was recently killed near there and whose story
made headlines round the world.
For the non-Aboriginal the outback can be a
place of madness and violence. Women are few
and murders occur fourteen times more
frequently than elsewhere in Australia. Floods
and cyclones alternate with terrifying heat but
white Australians can and do find solace there.
Women like Tookie Gill and Mrs Jeanie Gunn -
alone perhaps for six weeks at a stretch — find
something to hold them there if only the
extraordinary dawns of the Northern Territory. Vissza