Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

found as the reality of her American opportunity. With this story would have come a multitude of
female others, obscured by the fortunate lifestyle makeover narrative that underscores masculinised
ideological constructions of migrant experience in America. They are promised by Pybus in her
detailing of how women migrants were 'processed' at Ellis Island, and thus established as essentially
other to the American dream, as they were stripped down and probed for deficiencies in language,
body, and mind. Such would have been Lillian's entry point into the country, as it was into Pybus's
story. In both settings, Lillian stood as representative of thousands who looked over their shoulders
back to home when they no longer recognized themselves in the culture that dominated them. It struck
a chord with me, living in Australia, watching Rabbit-Proof Fence, recalling writers like Nugi
Garimara, Labumore, Glenyse Ward, and Monica Clare, and wondering where Pybus might have taken
her trip if she had had a bit more empathy, and a lot less sympathy. An impossible demand perhaps,
given that the bourgeois woman engaging in confessional narrative to affirm a ready-made worldview
travels an altogether separate path.
Even as I yearned for Raven Road to go much further with the connective histories of women displaced
from their homelands, and make Lillian and Pybus both representations of the recuperative power of
storytelling, I also acknowledged the vast differences that assured their inevitable estrangement. There
was no way, according to sources cited by Pybus, that Lillian could have got across the Yukon on foot,
let alone over the Baring Strait to Siberia. Yet the doubt, 'or could she?' that drives Pybus's writing is
somewhat subsumed within the more immediate frictions played out by Pybus with her (former) friend
and driver, Gerry. Lillian tends to slip out of the historical centre yet again, just as Gerry eventually
ends up driving off and leaving Pybus to the more accommodating company of proper strangers.
Through the bulk of the text that precedes this parting, however, Pybus points out the contrasts between
her worldview and that of Gerry, where the non-academic traveler is constructed as unsophisticated,
bulimic, and self-deprecating. Somehow Lillian's presence emerges out of this projection to emphasise
the differences between a journey undertaken in desperation and terror, and one made as a romantic
quest for self-affirmation where class and home advantage ensure a perpetual safety net.
When it does not profess to be revising history, or recuperating the story of a woman who was clearly
from an entirely different world, this confessional mode of storytelling is, as Pybus says, 'frank and
funny.' Appropriating into such narrative the stories of women who risk their health, their safety, and
their lives because they hope for a better future seems from a left political standpoint, rather sad. Pybus
undertook her adventure in subarctic wilderness with the aid of a large research grant, a Nissan
Pathfinder chauffeured by Gerry, a selection of gourmet food items, some earnest librarians in
Tasmania, New York and Vancouver, and a doting husband hanging by the telephone back home in
Tasmania (The irony of the presence of these props emerges clearly but, it seems, unprompted by the
narration.) Pybus charted a course through Canada to Alaska in pursuit of 'the truth' about Lillian. The
resulting Raven Road is a series of journal entries turned chapters that are sometimes reflective of the
process of working as a historian with a factually flawed archive on a historical figure with
comparatively low cultural exchange value. It is more often, however, an account of the baggage
(intellectual, personal) that goes with anyone into a research project, and how the subjectivity of the
other emerges laden with that baggage.
Lillian, for instance, was a Polish Jew branded lunatic by the telegraph line workers, police and
reporters who ran across her as she walked across the Yukon and, later, by Pybus who remarks:
The more I try, the less success I have in finding a credible explanation as to why Lillian should seek to
return to Russia. But as I say, the woman was clearly unhinged. (184)
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