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was caught up in delusion of control and manipulation. His photography, rather than recording
the reality of Asia, was just a tool of his anxiety and desire (Nettlebeck, 18). The second, the
message of the Bhagavad Gita and the Gospels, is the import of his present individual action
on the future condition of the world. Jim Feng is no historian, but understands this
participation of each individual in the cosmic order. He remembers what happened to his own
family in revolutionary China, and yet recognises justification for much of its suffering within
the greater, cosmological picture, which deemed that, for those who had reneged on their
dharmic role, time should come to an end:
But even my father says that his class was no longer fit to rule. They had
failed the people: they did too little to stop the suffering. They had lost what
the emperors had lost: the Mandate of Heaven. (HW, 121)
It is a fate which Koch also shares among all the journalists who remain in Thailand after the
end of the wars in Southeast Asia. The professionalism of their jobs had required them to be
uninvolved, and they are therefore condemned to lurk, truly lost souls, on the edge of the land
of Dis (HW, 98).
In Western philosophy time is, along with length, height and depth, one of the cold
dimensions which delineate the universe. Koch’s characters live linear lives in Australia. Guy
Hamilton sees his news-room job in Sydney as heading only towards the grave. Billy Kwan is
travelling from one socio-cultural point to the next, never looking back to the past he has
rejected, finding satisfaction with the present, or reasonably hope to reach a destination in the
future. Mike Langford can only look toward his escape from the past and present represented
by Clare Farm. Only as children can Hamilton, Langford and Ray Barton experience time in
more Eastern terms of an elementary, active and non-linear force in the cosmos. Hamilton
grows up in his memories of his father and pre-war Singapore. Langford and Barton measure
time as a repetition of summers which free them from the rest of the year. All three shield
themselves from the Western time with their imaginations, aspects of their personalities which
are given more import by the dual Eastern concept of reality and which allow them to escape
time’s shackles. As grown men, Koch’s characters find similar comfort in Eastern time’s
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