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Finally, the Eastern view is an interwoven ‘vision of action with a consciousness of its
meaning’. Mascaró writes that ‘the outer world, the world of action of the Immanent’ is the
focus of the Vedas, while the inner world, the world of knowledge of the Transcendent Spirit’
is treated by the later (from c. 800 BC) Upanishads (Mascaró, xxi). Herein lies the crux which
so fascinates both Koch and d’Alpuget, who explore the ‘harmony of action and knowledge, of
the immanent and the transcendent’ as necessary for ‘reaching the inner meaning of
things’(Mascaró, xxi). They engage their Australian protagonists in unexpected processes of
inward discovery provoked by their willing confrontation with an outward reality they hardly
understand.
This puts them squarely in line with Australian literary tradition, which seems to dove-
tail well with Eastern tradition in this effort. The Australian hero has typically departed from
the European tradition of the ‘larger than life, legendary figure, endowed with great, even
superhuman strength, courage or ability’, in favour of an essentially innocent individual, the
pioneer, the bushman, either man or woman, who proves himself to be a survivor in the face of
extreme adversity, or even the outlaw, rogue or rebel who escapes the shackles of authority and
forges into a new, hard but free life. (Bennett, 1991, 123) It is perhaps for this reason that the
Australian hero is sometimes able to come to the realisation made in ancient Indian literature
of the necessary interdependence of action and thought: ‘Into deep darkness fall those who
follow action. Into deeper darkness fall those who follow knowledge’ (from the Isa
Upanishad, Mascaró, xviii). The poets of the Upanishads were singing the transcendent in the
human experience, but their motivation must have been similar to the Australian’s, for whom
action without thought, or thought without action, could suddenly mean death.
The hero in Australian culture has partly for this reason often been overshadowed by
‘the phenomenon of the masked or decapitated hero’, as the harsh land proves more than
humanly bearable (Bennett, 1991, 122). D’Alpuget and Koch’s novels are marked by
decapitations and other forms of physical dismemberment, not to produce the sort of
degenerate or fallen heroes which typify Western 20 th century literature—though these do
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