Journey to the Stone Country

Journey to the Stone Country

By Alex Miller

Winner of the 2003 Miles Franklin Award

Like a net cast across the nexus of time, space, politics and history, not to mention inter-racial relationships, this book spoke to a huge range of issues in Australia.

The plot remained fairly simplistic: woman is betrayed by her husband in Melbourne, she flees to her homeland in remote Northern Queensland, there she rekindles a relationship with an indigenous man from her childhood and they fall in love while discovering how intertwined their families once were. Whilst romance and landscape each play a part here, Journey to the Stone Country is about much more.

Interwoven within this story is the history of an Aboriginal tribe, the Janggas, and thus a depiction of Australian Aboriginals in general. Also, political themes of white men and big mining and cattle stations juxtaposed with one of the oldest cultures on Earth were present. Moreover, the "stone country" traversed by the book's characters represented not just a part of remote Australia, but an inner landscape which we all must travel and explore. It is a story of our own journey - of coming to terms with our past - individual and collective.

Only because I’m a slave to my quest of reading a wide genre of book types, I picked up this novel because it was particularly relevant to my surroundings now. It was a good book, but fiction is not what I tend to gravitate to, so…….I guess it was Ok. Probably wouldn’t recommend it.

She stood listening. There was a sound with her in the room. She had been hearing it on and off for some time. …. It was in the air around her. Close by. She realized then that she was hearing the termites. She put her ear to the books and closed her eyes, listening. A faint rustling from within the volumes. A nervous suspirations, like a vast army of pilgrims shuffling across a landscape of infinite extent, persistent and continuous, embarked upon a journey with an end in obedience to a restless urge to be on the move. Millions of white ants at their blind work, recycling the world and returning it some kind of cosmic dust, heartless, unconscious and inert…She was holding her breath. P. 181

“I don’t know what I mean!” Bo said, raising his voice angrily. “You don’t have to know what you mean to mean something.” P. 233

The mystery of sleep and the unconscious that we take for granted, that vast region where our longings and fears appear to us in the form of visions, the voices of the oracles, ambiguous and obscure, arising from our own depths. In our dreams the whispering voices of our gods. P. 301