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Koch makes much of the objects of this world which are left when an individual passes
into that ‘Otherworld’ which is recognised as death. In Volkov’s room, for example,
A white shirt and a pair of pale blue cotton trousers hung on a chair, dropped
there carelessly; a pair of sandals was by the bed. The terrible mute voices of
objects abandoned for ever! They speak much more distinctly than anything
else, at a death. (HW, 361)
It is such articles of material reality which expose the illusion of what we call the ‘real world’,
and imply the truer reality of such as Volkov’s soul.
Volkov is one of the victims of the Land of Dis which is found in all the Asia novels of
d’Alpuget as well as Koch. He, Billy Kwan and Mike Langford are those ‘who cross
boundaries and commit themselves to individuals or to the people generally in Asia’, and
‘whose sympathy proves fatal’ (Koh Tai Ann, 31). Of the major characters, Judith Wilkes,
Alex Wheatfield, Wally O’Sullivan and most of the others indicate their antipathy to Asia by
hanging on to the material figments which come out of their experience there. Guy Hamilton
is one of those who manages to benefit from Asia without being sacrificed to it, though he
literally gives up an eye—as one of the sense organs, the individual’s attachment to the
material—in doing so. The material symbolises the depth of commitment each has to his
experience in Southeast Asia, which, as Koh Tai Ann writes, exists ‘as an extension of the
Australian imagination, providing the drama and background for the white protagonists to
explore their identity, find (or lose) their direction and work out their destiny’ (Koh Tai Ann,
31).
As such, Koch and d’Alpuget are writing patently Australian novels, whose basis in
historical fact need not be especially considered in judging their success. And while these are
not novels ‘about Asia’, they are built upon a fundament of Asian symbol and metaphor. The
old, well-defined colonial opposition of Great Britain/Australia is gone, and for Koch this is
replaced by a new and as yet unexplored polarity of the real world and the dream world, both
of which are seen not only to be ‘real’ but to be double aspects of one reality. His characters
are driven by Wordsworthian childhood memories of a better world which, with adulthood,
seems to have fallen, and in which self-identity has become entangled in delusion, and should
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