Published in the year of my birth 1957
Voss, a foreign man, is announced and enters the room of Laura Trevelyan.
He was distressed by the furniture.
‘With rough persistence he accused her ofthe superficiality which she herself suspected.At times she could hear her own voice. She was also afraid of the country which, for lack of any other, she supposed was hers.
So identity is raised in the first pages. The light owernship of land and identity.
Of the possibilities of the land of Australia
Every man has a genius though it is not always discoverable. Least of all when choked by the trivialities of daily existence. But in this disturbing country, so far as i have become acquainted with it already, it is possible more easily to discard the iinessential and to attempt the infinite. You wil be burnt up most likely, you will have your flesh torn from your bones, you will be tortured probably in many horrible and primitive ways, but you will realise that genius of which you sometimes suspect you are possessed, and of which you will not tell me you are afraid.
To make yourself it is also necessary to destroy yourself
So Vos anticipates his own death
The troup
Topp – it is no country of mine except the accident of my being here
Turner (when sober) a native cunning
Palffereyman
Frank Le Mesurier, somewhat dandified, in nankeen trousers and agressive buttons (cut his own throat, his past poetry)
Palfreyman was sorry for the merhant who chewed beef more happily than words
Harry Roberts
The community of Europeans clustering in and around Sydney is intrigued by the arrival of Voss, a German explorer intent on crossing the continent for the first time.
Jane Austin moments
Willy Pringle – loosely made
a conflict of the ideal and the actual…
They realized, standing on the wharf, that the orderly, grey, past life was of no significance. They had reached that point at which they would be offered up, in varying degrees, to chaos or to heroism. So they were shaking with their discovery, beside the water, as the crude, presumptuous town stretched out behind them, was reeling on its man-made foundations in the sour earth. Nothing was tried yet, or established, only promised.
Vos: I detest humility. Is man so ignoble that he must lie in the dust like a worm
Unsentimental killing of his dog.
Kalikellett 