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The family of Kanan, Judith’s Indian lover, is founded on stereotypical behaviour. The
auntie, the de facto head of the household, hounds Kanan, the titular head, with disparagements
like ‘alcoholic’ and ‘cow-eater’ when he spends an evening out with friends. Meanwhile,
Kanan’s wife is entirely controlled by the other females.
C. J. Koch works with clichés and stereotypes, though not as blatantly as d’Alpuget. His
Colonel Henderson, the finicky yet stern attaché of The Year of Living Dangerously, resembles
d’Alpuget’s Colonel James, both vestiges of colonial days. D’Alpuget uses the character as
comic relief and to develop her theme of the animalistic nature of men. Koch’s colonel
demonstrates the better, although still anachronistic, side of the old guard’s discipline, order,
and self-esteem, as well as its limits. He is an ideal character to develop Koch’s theme of the
difficulty and necessity of letting go of the past. At the pool frequented by embassy officials
and rich locals in Jakarta, Henderson is served his drink by the ‘plump-jowled, always smiling’
Indonesian steward:
‘What’s this?’ His voice, always resonant, had now an extra incisiveness.
‘Gin-tonic, sir,’ the steward said. ‘You order gin-tonic.’
‘Yes — I ordered gin-tonic. Did I order ice?’ It was the tone of a
headmaster about to administer a dressing-down.
The glass was indeed crammed with ice. ‘Gin-tonic always have ice, sir’
the steward said, and attempted to smile.
The Colonel’s voice now rose to an intimidating level. ‘Gin tonic does
not always have ice,’ he said. ‘Americans always have ice — and I am not an
American.’ (YLD, 63)
To deflect the reaction to his behaviour, Henderson delivers a cliché about Americans:
‘Ice in everything’, he said. ‘Barbaric habit. Well, we don’t all have to drink like barbarians’
(YLD, 64). The man who wears his uniform shoes even to the pool and is described
derogatorily as pukka sahib by his admirer, Guy Hamilton, still represents the good old days of
the British Empire in Asia, but he looks, sounds and acts pretty much like one would expect of
an imperial relic—which an Aussi would call ‘a whinging Pommy’.
4.5. Poor Super Women
D’Alpuget’s female protagonists, Judith Wilkes in Turtle Beach and Alex Wheatfield in
Monkeys in the Dark, have to deal with these male chauvinist clichés, but at home, where they
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