Trap

Satire gone out of style and out of print

It's a kind of Quixotic quest reading books out of print. It can also be like staring over the edge of a cliff. You sometimes wonder if you can fly, or alternatively accelerate your oblivion. We all end up out of print, I suppose. So there's a little personal need to bump books along, keep them alive; keep me alive. Like this one that explores a very Australian history, that of the unwanted, mongrel history of this place as it was in 1960s.

Trap the novel has disappeared. It’s been out of print for some time. It’s one of those forgotten stars in some deep corner of the galaxy. It’s still luminous. Its language can be fabulous, rich, playful and never dull. I occasionally lose my way in it, show more but then lost in space is just part of the journey of so many stories going back to Homer. I use the space and galactic metaphors partly because when this book was written and published, the world was in thrall of space flight, it was possible, accessible in 1966. We humans were reaching for the stars, or at least the moon, or at least making flights in rockets with people in them to reach the outer atmosphere and orbit the earth. And of course, we were ignoring more earthly problems as well. This book was published in 1966. It won the biggest Australian literary award of the time, The Miles Franklin Award. It’s an interesting award because it aims to reward authors who look to Australian subject matter, a very earthly matter. The award itself comes from Miles Franklin, the pseudonym of Stella Franklin who had to write as a man to be accepted. Stella was a women’s activist in the early 20thC when it mattered to get the vote and rid the country of ancient impediments to women’s rights in law brought over with English law.

Rights are also one of the backdrops of this novel. Its protagonist is Jack Trap, a mixed race man, part indigenous (Australian), part indigenous (Terra del Fuegan) part Irish, English. His genealogy is one of the narrative threads recounted in the book going back to early 19thC England. This racial mix comes across as typical of the early colony. This mixing also takes us into the 1960s when Australia was re-mixing itself with a new range of Europeans, Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavians, Dutch, Ukrainians etc. While Australia was mixing it up, the indigenous population had only just been allowed to vote in 1962. Symbolically, Australians think that year was 1967, the year of a national referendum that overwhelmingly and belatedly gave equivalent rights to indigenous people. Prior to that, the recognition of indigenous Australians existed in various colonial acts from the 19thC that equated them with the local flora and fauna (I kid you not). The Australian constitution even had section 127 that expressly excluded indigenous people from census counts since they were for people. In a statistical sense, Trap doesn’t exist. Or at least part of Trap doesn’t exist. Depending on how he’s viewed, or views himself. Trap himself is ambivalent about how dark he chooses to be in a world hostile to its darkest. Here is how Mathers explores this idea of identity:

”One day in early autumn a swarm of flies took Jack as their host and for a week they plagued him. He got used to them. A Dane named him the Lord of the Flies. A publican said it was unnatural to see a man’s shadow in the air; hard on him, too. So Trap got a ration of bottles and the Dane was convinced.”

A narrator tells Trap’s story. A man called David - who is employed by a shadowy social-economic group - closely connected to the powers that be - and goes about collecting information about Trap, creating a kind of dossier. That is basically the story told in long and short sections, sometimes by an old friend or associate of Trap’s, sometimes by the information gathering narrator, often Trap himself cynically with the promise of drink. This method places us in the institutional setting of Australia in the day – a white authority telling the story of a mixed race man who lives a maverick and troublesome existence outside social norms and customs. Trap is always defined by his various narrators:



”Trap, I realise, is an anti-social black racialist bent on destroying the power of civilization.”

”I realise I have never described his colour. He is brown – somewhere between milk and energy chocolate, and this colour is inherited from his similarly coloured mother, and his father, who, although quite pale, was the son of a darker father and a mother who was brown but not Australian. Trap’s grandmother was born in Tierra del Fuego. Trap’s voice is soft and gentle. I asked him did he sing. No”

This man Trap is a – never mind – it’s enough to say that his family is large, his dwelling squalid, his wage low. He has a criminal record. Apparently one can never work out the real criminality of Trap. I've never met the man. All I have is hearsay. He is what I’d call a real bad egg. But I feel I can do something with him.

It’s because David the narrator only sees the darkness in Trap, that he can only understand the man through a set of pre-existing narratives. It's a cleverly constructed novel that way.

I love the prose. It plays with syntax, language (I'm sure there’s a bundle of neologisms in there) and rhythm enough to make it a fancy modern book. A few samples of the rich and varied prose style:

“Turnbuckle ushered him into his inner office and showed him his coloured prints and his seven stuffed (parrot) specimens. One of which hung from the ceiling on strands of clear gut, swaying on effusions, trembling on gush, it’s open beak miming forest cries, its emerald and red underplumage making the blue rug drab.

The cleaner was a thin, elderly man. Except for the few tufts of hair behind his small ears, he was bald. Age-brownness mottled his scalp. He had a thick nose, cunning eyes and a jaw made huge and pointy by lack of teeth. His toothlessness also gave him his first nickname, Gummy. And Gummy soon gave way to the ore lasting one, Som (an old name carried with a certain pride), the best known variation of Sodamjohn.

I was a year old when this book was published. I feel the passage of time as it lays waste to people. I lost an old friend and colleague to Covid recently, the author Peter Mathers died ten years or so ago, the book is out of print. Perhaps that’s the affinity I feel lately for forgotten books – despite their merit – forced into their grave of forgottenness. Yet the issues haven’t gone away. Australia still trots out opinions about the indigenous and foreigners for some political agenda – Muslims one day, Chinese the next and we still incarcerate indigenous people at an alarming rate for crimes which ironically I learned in school were similar to those that could send a person to Australia’s penal colony - a loaf of bread in 1800, a chocolate bar in 2022. It still happens. The poor and the Irish back in 1800s, the 15 yo indigenous boy at the corner shop in 2022. Indigenous children are still being taken from their families today at rates that were shameful until discovered in commissioned reports twenty years ago. So books keep coming around, they never stop being important even if they are forgotten. And the action of the book opens in Fitzroy, one of Melbourne's early suburbs in streets I know well, close to home and my early adult years. It feels immediate, too, because good writing can do that, it isn't stuck in the dimension of time.

Coda
The problem of a westerner writing about indigenous or other races will always have a complication, a question mark – why write about such things if it’s not your direct experience? I may analyse this further one day if I get the time because it’s an interesting question when applied to this book. But Mathers has already partly answered it here: our narrator obsessively looks for what he already knows and thinks of Trap and his lot. This then becomes the subject. Trap echoes back in a way that mocks his narrator and his ideas, categories, values and by extension the whole nation that holds them. David, the narrator, is collecting all this Trap information as a kind of affirmation of the values a white society holds. It’s satire. Marvellously constructed, beautifully told. show less

A wild, angry book about the state of aborigines in Australia in the 1960s, which opens up into a history of Australia itself. Peopled by vivid characters and fueled by furious dissent from average suburban life. Why is this book out of print?

Hmm, a disappointing Miles Franklin winner from 1966, Trap by Peter Mathers. To see my review, please visit http://tinyurl.com/2amwtpa