A Pastoral

The city is represented as a threat to the emotional and physical wellbeing of Luke and Anna. The decision to move to the country to escape the pollution and financial stranglehold is the key to a pastoral text. It appears on the surface to present the largest change that Luke and Anna must face, however the simplistic rural life also has unexpected challenges. On one hand, it will present the tranquil life and an opportunity to commune with the more natural environment, on the other hand, it will show that the natural environment can be harsh and unforgiving. The change of life will also mean that Anna and Luke will have to face that even though they have exchanged exterior landscapes, their interior landscapes have followed them.

The initial settling in period seems to have proved to support their decision. Through describing the landscape as uncultivated and being ‘out of time’, Luke and Anna can ‘live, and simply be’. Far from the trappings of the city, their new weatherboard homestead is personified as having been ‘waiting for them’. Luke and Anna become increasingly grounded. One way they achieve this is through preparing a garden by ‘digging in the garden until they have calloused hands’. They realise they are working soil that has been worked for a long time, helping them become part of an ongoing part of nature. Luke’s adjustment appears to be easier; he immediately defines himself as an ‘observer’ of nature and spends time tracking birds. Anna’s adjustment is not so rapid.

After some time, the biblical allusion of two people cultivating a Garden of Eden is accompanied by the understanding that paradise can be lost. The natural wonderland is threatened by drought and fire. Biblical allusions are paralleled in Teves’ memoir The Land that is Desolate: an Account of a Tour in Palestine where the desert of Judea is a ‘mean country’ and the town of Bethlehem is ‘un-reedemably ugly’. Drought and fire, accompanied by the symbolic snake, foreshadow a trying time for the couple at the hands of the nature they had craved. However when Anna spends time in the city she soon longs for the natural world again showing that they are becoming a part of the landscape. Coupled with this is the fact that Anna and Luke have not fully escaped the city. Luke’s father visits and reminds Luke of a ‘wasted degree’ and disrupts the harmony of the couple’s relationship with Gil. Anna also invites the old life into the homestead by constantly watching news reports from around the world. Nature, in the form of their lost child, had already been harsh to the couple but they thought they had moved on.

Ultimately, nature responds with the fire. Foreshadowed by Anna’s discussion with Gil and her research into she-oaks revealing that certain species need a fire to regenerate dormant life, Luke and Anna survive and become closer through the event. They have no doubts about their place in the landscape and settle about rebuilding the community.

Pastoral Quotes

Once out on the open road they felt free again: the further away from the city they drove, the more the world expanded into a mysterious limbo, a potential space waiting to be filled. (Anna and Luke) Chapter 1

They felt that in some essential way it was uncultivated, a landscape out of time, and as such it could not define them. Here they could live, and simply be. (Anna and Luke) Chapter 1

Even Nature itself disappoints him, and his description of the biblical landscape is unremittingly bleak. (Teves in The Land that is Desolate: an Account of a Tour in Palestine, the book Luke is reading) Chapter 1

In the claustrophobic spaces of their dark little apartment his appearances were erratic and unpredictable, but once out on the freeway they would glance behind them and there he would be, lap-sashed on the back seat and with an inquiring look on his face. (about the boy) Chapter 1

Nature is out of whack, thinks Anna; even the birds can’t read the signs. Chapter 2

The world is spinning away from her. Something is dying, something is leaching away from them; some once vivid hue in the inner landscape of her consciousness is beginning to fade. (Anna) Chapter 2

This child of their loins, only seven and a half months old, dead in the womb; their dearest boy whose heartbeat had one day stopped, lapsed into silence, with his parents unawares, thinking that all was well, that nature was taking its course and that their lives were going along just fine. Chapter 3

Friendship and Community

One diversion from the parallel of Teves’ description of his time in the Promised Land is that he found the place to be unfriendly whereas Luke and Anna find a strong community at Garra Nalla. Although they have café friends in the city, Luke and Anna soon find themselves a part of a new and genuine community. The combination of neighbours represent the missing elements in their lives. The Wattses, a part of the ‘coastal tribe’, live in harmony with nature and are endeavouring to become more green. Their young children are symbolic of the couple’s own torment. Gil, a solid local, is a father figure to the couple, replacing the stiff and inaccessible Ken Worley. The couple have secrets, as does Gil, but ultimately they are there for each other. The fire eventually highlights the community bond the couple now shares.|

Friendship and Community Quotes

In the weeks that follow they ease into a friendship with the Watts, one that might always have been there in their lives. (Anna and Luke) Chapter 2

He is thinking of that awful false mateyness his father deems it necessary to assume. (Luke about his father) Chapter 2

She smiles woozily, and looks over to where the men are clustered, like a flock of birds, at the edge of Alan’s unlit barbecue stand, their elbows resting on the warm brick. She sees how intimately they lean in toward each other … (Anna) chapter 3

Grief

Beneath the natural landscape of their new life hides an unspoken pocket of grief, one that each of the couple are dealing with separately. Luke becomes engrossed in a dusty book by a long-dead explorer, a man whose account of wandering the Promised Land is marred by deep sorrow. Anna constantly seeks the boy and believes he is siding with his father. At night she surfs the cable news channels seeking connection with the outside world. However, Anna and Luke never meet to confront their grief. Likewise Ken, Luke’s father, has also buried the grief of losing a potential grandson and cannot name the event when discussing it with Luke referring to it as ‘that other business’. Luke sees that his father is grieving but the two never discuss it, suffering in their own way in the same way Luke and Anna are like ships in the night.

Garra Nalla provides an occasion for Luke and Anna to more carefully examine their own feelings and finally communicate. Before this happens, however, the unspoken grief drives a wedge between them. Anna senses a distance between herself and Luke, resenting his apparent ability to move on and integrate with the landscape. Anna ponders the meaning of life past everyday survival and this induces a sense of vertigo, a dizzying sense of disorientation, as if she is about to fall.

It is only when the landscape is stripped bare through fire and the two are vulnerable that a connection is made to heal the couple.

Grief Quotes

For days she felt weepy and vulnerable, as if she were no longer the person she thought she was, or had willed herself to be. (Anna) Chapter 1

But in the numbness of their grief, no name presented itself and thereafter they had come to think of him as ‘the boy’. It seemed so much more intimate than any given name. Chapter 3

Luke is standing there, just inside the back door, and she sees that he has been crying. ‘Is it that bad?’ she asks. She has never seen Luke cry, not even once.
He shakes his head. ‘Not the fire,’ he murmurs. ‘Not the fire.’
‘The boy?’ He nods, unable to speak, and stands on the spot, as if to take another step is entirely beyond him. (Anna and Luke) Chapter 3