The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

the Antipodes and been vociferously opposed; its acceptance remained patchy (Ackland, Damaged 29–82; Haese). Whereas avant-garde music, such as Stravinsky’s, was often available at the flick of switch, other art forms were less fortunate. Australia, with its long tradition of centralist paternalism, had routinely banned controversial novels like Ulysses. Also groundbreaking movements in the visual arts were stunningly underrepresented; Bail has lamented that “there just aren’t any cubist paintings in Australia. Not one. So we’ve been deprived of the third great modern experience” (Davidson 276). Although Picasso had ushered in a new world pictorially with Les demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907, in Bail’s Australia the gum trees of Hans Heysen and Albert Namatjira still held popular sway—a hegemony subtly called into question decades later in Eucalyptus. Certainly it was no longer the 1950s, “when the country was at its most reactionary, actually corroded by contempt and philistinism” (Chisholm 41), but the energising impulses Bail craved were not to be found in R.G. Amen’s “lucky country” (Horne).

Six years spent abroad (1968–1974) brought a flood of liberating, thought-provoking impressions and laid the groundwork for Bail’s career as a full-time writer. The period conforms at once to the typical maturity-conferring Australian rite of passage, played out overseas, and to the more traditional model of achieving mastery in a craft, which called for a lengthy apprenticeship followed by Wanderjahre, years of travelling and working as an itinerant journeyman before assuming a permanent place in a professional guild. Bail garnered material aplenty, first during two years based in Bombay and then during four in London, from where Europe and the United States were appreciably closer. The Indian subcontinent is credited with answering his need for “grey,” or complexity, and significant life experience (Bail, “Indian Notebooks” 13–25). Correcting the proofs of his early tale “Life of the Party” in Bombay brought home its quintessentially bourgeois, ephemeral content, whereas “there’s not much that’s trivial going on in poor countries,” or so it “seemed to [Bail]” (Davidson 269). Everywhere, too, he worked hard to overcome unproductive habits, from pedantry to purely formalistic ways