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discussion when he asks Guy Hamilton nonchalantly, ‘Have you read the Gita? No?’ (YLD,
81). In Turtle Beach, Blanche d’Alpuget acknowledges the significance of the Bhagavad Gita,
albeit through the back door. Ralph, the Australian embassy official charged with dealing with
the deplorable situation in the boatpeople camps, and who is suffering from severe stomach
ailments, laughs that Kanan says ‘collecting bad karma in the camps’ is the cause of his
sickness. Ralph says, ‘The bugger is so modern in some ways. But he lives by the Bhagavad
Gita, you know.’ Judith answers mockingly, ‘Whatever that means’ (TB, 224), perhaps quietly
alluding to the fact that, as a sacred scripture, the meaning of the Gita is open to debate, though
also commenting on the fact that Westerners have little idea of the Gita beyond its title.
D’Alpuget is critically exploiting the perverse humour that one’s own ignorance is funny so
long as that which is misunderstood can be sloughed off as mere pagan superstition and
mumbo-jumbo. Yet, Ralph is indeed dying, and d’Alpuget makes it clear that it is no more due
to his physical than to his spiritual cancer. The agony and frustration of his hopeless job
results from his inability to conform to the precepts of the Bhagavad Gita, specifically to the
counsel of Krishna to Arjuna, who is despairing over the coming fratricidal battle, to maintain
disinterest in his action. The heat, cold, pleasure and pain of the world of the senses are
transient, Krishna says, and ‘The man whom these cannot move, whose soul is one, beyond
pleasure and pain, is worthy of life in Eternity’ (Bhagavad Gita, 2:14-15).
Koch is less forgiving of his readership in its failure to read and heed the wisdom of the
Bhagavad Gita. He stops short of offering it as a panacea for Australia’s problems, but he is
clearly reading the Gita as a ‘sacred’ text. Both Koch and d’Alpuget focus attention on their
characters’ ‘preoccupation with normal self-interest, excessive concern for personal safety, and
uninhibited appetite for personal gain if chance should happen to bring it their way’ (Roskies,
37), themes which they share with the Gita. Koch, nevertheless, is not content to recite and
superficially compare, as a journalist/historian would, the various interpretations of the text,
which is what d’Alpuget does, and all he manages to do in his early novel, Across the Sea
Wall. In The Year of Living Dangerously—acting as what Robert Minor calls the ‘committed
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