Archive of Desire: The Souvenir in Eve Langley's Australian Novels

Fidelity lies in accumulating things - which appear, mostly in the form of fragments or ruins (Susan Sontag).In Eve Langley's unpublished manuscript, 'Wild Australia', which chronologically follows her second novel, White Topee, Langley's female narrator returns to the alps for work in the hop fields.1 Anticipating the end of one hop-picking season, Steve and her sister Blue wander down to the field where some workers' tents are erected, and discuss the potential for salvageable items once the workers have moved on and the tent sites have been abandoned:'Good lot of tents over there, Steve,' said Blue.'Too right. We'll go through them when the pickings over, Blue.''Sometimes you wonder why they leave such a lot of lids around, don't you?''Meat tins, too.''And the grand impression that their bunks have made on the grander and more lovely earth.''Wish they'd leave the blankets instead of the grand impression.''A tent that's been pulled up is a marvellous thing, I reckon, Steve.''To me the space that's leftis glorious [...] I could dream out his life, that owned the tent, the shadow where the bunk lay, the tea tree under the mattress . . . ' (248-9)In this typically comedic exchange between Steve and Blue, Steve's 'dream[ing] out' of the life evoked by the trace of the tent resonates beyond the humour of the passage. Physical traces of previous activity pattern Langley's novels: at one stage her protagonist comments that 'over the clean floor, sometimes muddy boots trod and leftdark healthy marks' ('BancroftHouse' 205), and at another time she notes the mark in the grass leftby her brother-in-law, seeing it as a 'huge spread pattern [...] like a large horse lying there' ('Dublin Street' 369). Langley's narrator often accords these traces a positive and vivid presence. Always incomplete, the trace suggests both an antecedent and subsequent context of events or description. The backwards glance suggested by the trace or fragment evokes a creative impulse in which the observer is drawn to imaginatively reform the whole suggested by it. As Steve says, by looking at the traces leftby the pulled up tent, she 'could dream out his life, that owned the tent'.In this essay, I focus on a pattern of traces of activity expressive of other places and times in the six novels that Langley sets in Australia: her two published novels and her first four unpublished manuscripts.2 These novels, which chronologically follow each other, will be treated here as one continuous narrative. Throughout Langley's Australian novels, her narrator Steve travels widely through the countryside of Victoria as an itinerant field hand and self-styled rover, but she regularly returns to her mother's house. On these visits home she invariably brings with her evidence of her adventures and it is the nature and employment of these souvenirs that I explore here. The souvenirs brought back to Mia's house by her daughter, Steve, articulate a way of life that is situated beyond the social and physical space of the house. However, the souvenir also speaks of where it is and the person who owns it. While it embodies previous activity, at the same time it also speaks of the present. In this article I will consider the placement of the souvenirs in Mia's home as an intersection of the domestic space with that which articulates a refusal of the domestic. However, as my examination of the souvenir in Langley's novels moves from the study of the souvenir as an individual artefact to an interrogation of that artefact when it is presented as part of a collection, the 'refusal' of the domestic by the souvenir is seen to be complicated, and even undermined. Consideration of the souvenirs as a collection will illuminate the performativity of the placement of the souvenirs within Mia's home and in so doing will unsettle the representation of 'home' and 'away' as oppositional positions. Following this, the connectedness of the spaces of home, community and nation in Langley's novels will be evaluated. …