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He waited in the darkness behind my chair. The calm voice waited on the
tapes, and my grief was ambiguous. Reason said he was probably dead, but
emotion said he might still be alive: it was just possible, and the mixture of
affection and bafflement that he'd stirred in me as a boy was back again. It
reached out to me now from that tropical kingdom of Dis he was lost in,
beyond the Thai border. (HW, 66)
Yet Dis is not only the ‘infernal region’ to which Langford is condemned in death. He
was already there when he was living his cameraman’s life, covering the Southeast Asian wars,
a land astride the looking-glass, where reality and irreality, and where good and bad dreams,
flow together. The surviving journalists are unable to leave Southeast Asia even though the
wars are over, Cambodia is closed tight, and there is little more to do than hang out in bars.
They are all caught outside of the mandala of time, and even applying the term ‘surviving’ to
them is to be done with attenuation. Ray Barton comments that they should, like the ageing
gunmen of the old Western movies, ‘hang up their arms’, but that they cannot forsake the high
induced by death (HW, 98). This is the same high in which the Goddess Kali herself gets
caught up—the bloodthirsty rampage begun to fight against the demons, and which must be
brought to a halt by a blood sacrifice before she destroys all of the cosmos.
Koch remains optimistic that the cycle of time will continue to turn, and the universe
will be re-created with the return of the holy Krta Yuga. For while Barton senses Langford in
‘a region of Dis beyond the Thai border’, where ‘a row of crosses rises from the paddy field’s
red earth, in the motionless and terrible heat’, he also believes him among ‘hidden voices’
which ‘murmur among bright leaves’. Here Langford escapes the ‘choking essences’ of the
fire’s heat. It is a homeland, protected and illuminated by cool nature: ‘Walled and roofed by
green, by a green like light itself, he hangs in a blessed coolness; the underwater cool of the
hop glades (HW, 450-51). It is in such a lost, forbidding place as Dis that the Australian is to
experience a rebirth of spirit. ‘It is only in exile, at the edge of the known world’, David Tacey
writes, ‘that the voice of revelation and guidance is heard’, and one is returned, like the
Israelites of Moses, to his spiritual homeland. Koch especially identifies this metaphor with
his native Tasmania as with Asia, and seems to compose his images to Tacey’s specifications:
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