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his files: ‘The Muslims can do nothing against you themselves, Sukarno, since the people are
still deluded by their god-king, their Ratu Adil. Yes, the Muslims need an instrument.’ Billy
Kwan has finally stopped being the philosophical photographer—the ultimate Peeping Tom—
and accepted his role as the instrument of God. Deciding conclusively to act for ‘a country
where love of God and freedom of the spirit can survive’, Kwan directly addresses his fiend,
Sukarno: ‘You talk of “swinging the steering wheel over”, to a new stage of revolution. I must
swing the wheel over instead: this will be my destiny!’ (YLD, 242).
8.4.2. Billy’s Spiritual Victory
Considering Koch’s attempts ‘at a definition of the Australian soul as one infected with
a dream of an ideal “Otherland”’ (this is the term Koch uses in The Boys in the Island to
describe an early version of his mythopoeic land), Paul Sharrad writes that ‘it is possible to see
Robert O’Brien’s journey (physical and spiritual) through India as an attempt to find a
philosophy that will prove compatible with a Western desire for structured beliefs and
meaningful action’. He compares this with other efforts, such as that of Patrick White who ‘is
intent on exposing the festering spiritual life beneath the surface of Australian society in order
to proffer the values of European enlightenment and mysticism to heal and control’, but argues
that ‘Koch is seeking a less “Austrophobic” answer’ from which will come ‘a faith resistant to
the dangers of a landscape that destroys neat historical and rational constructs’ and which leads
to the despair and destruction of people like White’s protagonist, Voss (Sharrad, 1984, 219).
Billy Kwan shares traits of these protagonists who are ‘scapegoats, outcasts from society who
suffer on its behalf to discover private bliss and a redemption unwanted by the community they
leave behind’ (Sharrad, 1984, 216), but moving Kwan out of the bush, which destroys men like
Voss, and into Asia gives him the chance to achieve that faith in the human spirit and will to
action.
Koch draws that sense of faith and action out of the Gita, in which Krishna tells Arjuna
that righteous action is true pleasure and will lead one out of pain, while the pleasures of
inaction or of desires, cravings and passion are the impure pleasures of darkness:
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