Graham Seal, author of this invaluable new survey of Australian folklore, hopes this book will ‘explode the pernicious and persistent myth that Australia has no folklore’, a cultural lie he illustrates on the opening page by trotting out a familiar scapegoat in the form of a visiting Englishman carping about the lack of folksong in this country. This seems to me to base the book on an unnecessary and even false premise. Most Australians, I would have thought, are aware either consciously or subconsciously of a national body of folklore – it’s just that assiduous nationalists have hacked away the corpus by single-mindedly promoting the paraphernalia of the bush mythology: the pioneers, the bushrangers, the heroes and anti-heroes of sport and war.

Elizabeth Riddell quipped about Kevin Brophy’s first novel, Getting Away With It (Wildgrass, 1982), that he hadn’t! I do not recall anything else of her review, but must confess that it also replaced my own estimation of the book. With hindsight, it’s clear that the novel has too many attributes to be disqualified, however wittily. Furthermore, Brophy’s new novel, Visions, recovers the best of his earlier novel’s operations, advancing them this time in an entirely coherent and often marvellous manner.

Collections of new Australian short stories by a single author have become a regular feature of Australian literary publishing in recent years. They are a welcome addition to the range of new writing available to the reading public. Collections that have unity of style, are thematically coherent and present a linked set of perceptions from the one creative source offer the reader much more than a light or fragmentary experience. Instead of the sustained characterisation of the novel, they can achieve a dazzling variety of episodes and moods. Robert Drewe’s Body Surfers and Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers are outstanding examples of how good the best collections of stories can be. It was a great delight to pick up I am a Boat by Sally Morrison and find that, although it is only her second book, in style, originality and literary quality, Morrison is fast approaching the Drewe and Garner class.

The eleven stories in I am a Boat explore intense, concentrated moments in the lives of her protagonists. They are moments of crises: of madness, of love realised or lost, of betrayal, or of sudden understanding. Through the crisis, the whole life of the central character is illuminated. Thus the stories are wonderfully dense in narrative, and Morrison’s economical, elegant style is absolutely right.

The stories are linked through the nature of the crises: they are all to do with love – in most cases, the ending of love. A woman tries to reach into her friend’s insanity to touch her with a gift; she fails, but through a haze of self-hatred becomes aware of her own madness. Renata faces the failure of erotic love. Her passionate young lover, Adam, shrinks and changes into a sullen, rejecting child. In the most pessimistic of the stories, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear’, three kinds of bad marriage are exposed and the best alternative to misery and violence is the barren and banal.

In Sally Morrison’s stories there are many failures. Men fail women, women fail men, men and women fail themselves. And women also fail women. ‘Crackers on the Corner’ is an agonisingly accurate account of a woman who finds herself increasingly repelled by her friend Pam’s eccentricities. Her discomfort at the realisation of her own intolerance and superficiality is made worse by the awareness that it is the presence of a new male lover in her life that has accelerated this betrayal. Despite the guilt, she proceeds to trick and scheme her way out of the connection. Women readers will find this story particularly searing. Abandoning an embarrassing girlfriend for a man is an act of treachery most of us first commit in our teens. Some women never get out of the habit.

The titular story, ‘I am a Boat’, is the best in the collection. It is a brilliant poetic allegory tracing the journey from the outset of a man’s love for a woman through its various stages: from initial enchantment, to total absorption, to restlessness, to difficulties and to final abandonment. The images of the allegory are wonderfully fresh and persuasive. It starts:

On a day when the Black Sea was not black, but shimmering shades of mystical blue and green, the poet Catullus bought himself a boat. She was shaped like a bean pod; pretty.

And it continues thus throughout this sad tale. The end, however, is not tragic. It is a triumphant getting of wisdom. Concluding this way, the collection, for all the pain it contains, is not a downer. What is learnt is worth the cost.

I am not sure whether there is much to be gained in discussing these stories as ‘women’s writing’. Certainly the perceptions, the eroticism, the nuances of observation come from female experience. Male readers however may also recognise the following point in the first stage of love: 'By the end of the day, the boat knew a lot about Catullus; but Catullus knew nothing at all about the boat.'

Perhaps the following tender description of sexual love could have only been written by a woman:

I would like to distil him and keep him in a jar of milky glass, lifting the smooth, round lid in desperate times, to listen to his sounds, fondle his shapes and have his smell about me like a cloak.

But perhaps not.

In any case, male or female lovers of the fresh, the sensitive, the complex will delight in these stories. The publishers, McPhee Gribble, have produced a characteristically elegant paperback, with an intriguing cover and generous typeface. If I am a Boat is a sample of what they have in store for us under their new independent colophon, the future looks brighter for readers and writers of fine Australian fiction, as well as for McPhee Gribble themselves.

Are you (as I am) conscious of suffering from what they call the postmodern condition? You know, the spiritual and moral void within commodity culture, the isolation of individualism, the lack of meaning and all that. Since reading this book, I have begun to think that we should all spend time in Sparkes Creek. Havelock Ellis, who became the great British psychologist of sex, went there over a hundred years ago, as a boy of nineteen:

I met no woman there, or man either, who meant anything to me, but I was to find there one who must mean more than any person: I found there myself. This year 1878 was to be in all exterior relationships the loneliest, the most isolated of my life. But it was also to be for my interior development the most fateful, the most decisive, of all my years.

Henry Havelock Ellis was sixteen and on a voyage round the world with his sea captain father, when it was decided that for health reasons he should stay on in Sydney. A thin, delicate English lad, a dedicated bookworm, he had finished school with no clue as to what he would do in life – which worried him. Acquaintances fixed him up with a teaching post in Sydney. Then he went as a private tutor to Goongerwarrie, beyond Bathurst, where he stayed a year. Finally, he was sent by the NSW Council of Education to teach in Sparkes Creek, 100 miles by rail from Sydney to Scone, then eighteen miles on horseback into the bush. By the time he arrived there, with his little bag and tall silk hat, Havelock, ‘at the threshold of the creative period of manhood’, felt very forlorn.

His humble dwelling was the schoolhouse, built of rough-hewn slabs with a shingled roof through which he could see the stars at night. On the first night he heard ‘wild beasts of some kind’ scampering noisily in the chimney. His bed, a flimsy construction consisting of two flour sacks stretched across four poles, collapsed on the floor. In the morning he surmised that a small animal had curled up in his silk hat, leaving behind a ball of fur. Later, he discovered the tawny snake living under his verandah. Fortunately, he had inherited some of the sea captain’s unflappable temperament.

He stayed on for the whole twelve months. Outside teaching hours, he hardly saw the other people in the valley. The Education Council Inspector, his only visitor from the outside world, was shocked that the young man has been sent to such a godforsaken spot: ‘How little [he] knew of the gateways to Heaven!’ comments Ellis. His existence was as ascetic as a monk’s: his staple diet tinned fish, his mirror the windowpane. The one luxury was a crate of books ordered from England. On long walks he reflected, brooded and hankered after love. He gratified himself with knowledge, gorging himself on poetry, the Bible (although not a believer), philosophy and biography: ‘I had acquired the power of seeing the world freshly’, he writes, ‘and seeing it directly, with my own eyes, not through the dulling or disturbing medium of tradition and convention.’

Geoffrey Dutton contrasts Havelock Ellis and D.H. Lawrence: ‘Lawrence on Australia appeals to those Australians who suffer from the cultural cringe, and to those foreigners who like to patronise an Australia of which they are mostly ignorant.’ He points out that Lawrence stayed only three months in this country (in 1922) and wrote Kangaroo (‘a fascinating but deeply flawed novel’) in six weeks. Havelock Ellis, on the other hand, ended up staying four years (1875–79) and experienced, says Dutton, a ‘love affair with Australia’.

Is it right to make this claim for Havelock Ellis? I think not, although, certainly, he was singularly receptive (for an Englishman) to the beauty of the bush, which he describes with passionate lyricism. Ultimately, though, Australia was merely the setting for a drama which took place within him. He says himself that ‘the element of external stimulus was of the slightest kind’; it was not people in Australia who induced his state of ecstasy. Yet within the solitude and silence of that ancient, unchanging spot, he underwent a ‘great spiritual revolution’, akin to a religious conversion. Later in life, Havelock Ellis associated religious and spiritual excitement with sexual conflict – an idea congenial to Freud, who admired his work. The nineteen-year-old kept a diary, somewhat sporadically. This is an impressive indication of his erudition and ease with the English language. Eight years later, inspired by his love for Olive Schreiner (whose book The Story of an African Farm tells similarly of solitude and rapture in lonely bushland), Havelock Ellis wrote the only piece of fiction he ever attempted, the short novel Kanga Creek, based on his time in Sparkes Creek, but with a whole episode – the central romantic episode – invented. Later in life, as a mature man who had made sex the object of his life-study, he wrote an autobiography, My Life. In his diary and novel Havelock Ellis writes with virginal innocence; the question of sex – which we horrible postmodern readers see all too clearly – is in abeyance. In his autobiography he goes back and explores with quite different eyes the vigorous stirrings he felt in that mysterious, exotic and solitary place.

Geoffrey Dutton presents all this material with a lively and illuminating introduction, which reveals his fascination for the subject. The collection’s only flaw is that, because the introduction quotes liberally from the diary, novel and autobiographical extracts which follow, it risks becoming repetitive. But Ellis and Dutton are good storytellers, and the play of perspectives holds our interest. I can recommend this book as a tonic for the soul.