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Aubrey Hardwick expresses the conventional idea of historical time, held by those who
see Australia as existing out on the fringes of civilisation. Australia was so far outside of the
civilised world that history did not occur naturally there, but only when forced to from the
outside:
History’s a game that’s played for keeps, in my sort of work—and it will be in
yours. But for most Australians, it’s a dimension of reality that’s only found
on TV—don’t you agree? The reason Australia’s half asleep is that it’s outside
history. The Japanese nearly woke us up, but they didn’t quite get there. So
we went on sleeping. I wonder who will wake us up? What do you think?
Sukarno? The Communists in Asia? Is the domino theory true or false? (HW,
91)
Ray Barton, the novel’s narrator, avocational historian and, sometimes at least, Koch’s
personal mouthpiece, reluctantly concurs with this theory when he ruminates about Tasmania,
the farthest part of far-off Australia, to which he, Mike Langford, and Christopher J. Koch are
native:
People from elsewhere say it’s a place where nothing happens. I say a hundred
and fifty years have happened; but there’s a sense in which they’re right.
Battles, revolutions, concentration camps, bombing raids and the many other
consequences of history are far off in another hemisphere. (HW, 15)
Harvey Drummond offers another theory of history—one which gives the novel its name
and seems most to express the position of C. J. Koch on the inevitable surge of time which is
slinging not only Australians but everyone else as well beyond a cosmic edge of reality, and
making Australia a fitting metaphor for the puzzling nature of time and space:
Highways! How they lead us on: we for whom the present is everything, yet
never enough! Highways have always brought me joy: highways on which we
move at speed, and which go out across flatness to some edge that’s beyond
the possible, as this one was doing. (HW, 222)
Ray Barton repeats this symbol as he discusses the bidirectional continuum formed by past,
present and future, a leitmotif in the novels of C. J. Koch:
So far off now, 1965! It begins to seem almost as far as 1848. Yet neither of
these years is as distant as we think: unfinished roads stretch from them both,
and run to where we stand. (HW, 146)
Billy Kwan, another of Koch’s historians, had to learn two vital lessons while he was
recording history with his photography of the present. The first is that his view of the world
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