The White Earth

Andrew McGahan

This is a coming-of-age story and family saga wrapped in the trappings of a Gothic novel. It’s almost Gothic horror in the way it flirts with the supernatural — but the true horrors are the ones instigated and carried out by mortal men.

Set in the ‘present’ of 1992, the story flashes back through history from the 1800s to the mid-20th century. The plot turns on real-life events including a devastating drought in the early 1990s, the legend of a lost cache of gold, and the court case of Mabo vs. Queensland — a landmark case in 1992 that gave Indigenous Australians rights to land and waters according to their traditional laws and customs.

The geographical setting is Dalby, a rural outpost in the Darling Downs. That’s in Queensland, on Australia’s east coast. Unlike the flat, dry outback, this area is notable for rolling hills and farmland. It’s called the ‘Salad Bowl of Australia,’ with deep, nutrient-rich black soil great for growing grains, cotton, and beef. Looming over the farmlands are the Bunya Mountains — and an ancient conifer rainforest with red cedar and the largest bunya pine forest in the world.

The Bunya Mountains were a sacred place to the Indigenous Australians in the area. They gathered there every three to four years for a celebration that included ceremonies, sports, trade, marriages, and eating the bumper crop of bunya nuts produced by the pines.

All of this — the ancient trees, the fertility of the land, indigenous rites — are more than background here. They’re essential to the story.

Fire is also a recurring theme in the book. and it literally opens with flames:

One spring date in late 1992, when William was halfway between his eighth birthday and his ninth, he looked out from the back verandah and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

What he witnesses is not a nuclear bomb, but a mundane, life-changing fire in the wheat field. His father, who we learn fairly quickly was not a successful farmer, has died in flames started by a damaged harvesting machine. There’s no bomb, but William’s life is incinerated just the same.

His mother is incapable of mothering; she has a nervous condition or migraines or something we only vaguely understand because William only vaguely understands. With their sole bread-winner gone and their farm in ashes, their only choice is to move to Kuran Station, the home of William’s great-uncle John. This previously unknown relative is obsessed with his legacy and returning the Kuran estate to its former glory.

The house was once a glittering showpiece, the physical representation of the surrounding farmland’s success. But young William’s first glimpse reveals the mansion’s changed fortunes. The roof sags; windows are smashed or covered with plywood. The once-grand garden is overgrown with weeds, forgotten laundry hangs between the lampposts, the swimming pool is empty and cracked.

Inside, it’s worse. Entire rooms on the ground floor are closed off. William and his mother huddle in their drafty, moldy apartment, meeting the housekeeper in the shabby dining room for grim, silent meals. Upstairs, behind locked doors, is his uncle’s study. A mysterious place William has been forbidden to enter.

Over and over again, the adults in William’s life let him down in unconscionable ways — even as they make plans in which he plays a pivotal role. They don’t care about him, but they need him. His mother, for financial security. His Uncle John, as an heir.

Author Andrew McGahan hits every Gothic note exactly right. The sublime landscape and oppressive heat. The beleaguered orphan. The curse that haunts this family. A wrath-of-god storm and unquiet graves. There’s even a creepy housekeeper to rival Mrs. Danvers in Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca.

The narrative is also threaded with sneaky social commentary and history lessons. The early signs of the climate crisis. Grim tales about the logging industry. The land rights fight. All shocking in their hypocrisy and casual cruelty.

But still, the book is beautifully written with thrilling adventure scenes and the sympathy that only an orphaned, unloved protagonist can engender. It’s a haunting story with a slew of metaphorical ghosts — and it’s a fascinating trip through two centuries in Australia.

Then there were the bunya pines. They were tall, straight trees that opened to a conical dome, often rising far above the rest of the forest canopy. For the loggers they promised many thousands of feet of timber, but for the Aborigines, in earlier times, they had promised food, because they bore large, smooth cones that made a superlative meal. These ‘nuts’ ripened every three years, when Aboriginal tribes from far and wide would converge on the mountains to gorge themselves in a great festival. The loggers did the same, roasting the cones and feasting on the almost over-rich, buttery kernels. And whenever they came across one of the old leviathan pines, they would see, running up its trunk to where the cones grew, a ladder of footholds, seemingly cut out by a stone axe, perhaps as much as two centuries earlier. All across the mountains there was no other clear sign that people had been there before white men — no dwellings or middens or cave drawings. There were only these notches hewn in the tree trunks, slowly disappearing. — Andrew McGahan

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