Wake In Fright

KENNETH COOK was born in Sydney in 1929, and attended Fort Street High School. He went on to work as a journalist, among other jobs. In
Wake in Fright,
his second novel, Cook drew on his observations of Broken Hill, in New South Wales, where he spent a couple of years in the early fifties working for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
Wake in Fright was
published in 1961 to high praise in New York and London, and launched Cook’s writing career.

Wake in Fright
was made into a film a decade later, arguably the greatest film ever made in Australia. It starred Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty and Jack Thompson in his first screen role. Lost for many years, the restored film was re-released to acclaim in 2009.

Cook was not only a novelist but a political activist and a romantically impulsive entrepreneur. Opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, he stood twice unsuccessfully for federal government on an anti-conscription ticket. One of his proudest possessions was a congratulatory telegram he received from President Ho Chi Minh. Later, on a whim he opened a butterfly farm on the Hawkesbury River, installing his kids and friends to attract tourists and insect lovers. Needless to say it failed. His chain of poor luck was broken by the success of his comic bush stories written soon after this, including
Killer Koala.

Cook wrote twenty-one books in all, along with screenplays and scripts for radio and TV. After separating from and then divorcing his first wife, Patricia, with whom he had four children, he married the writer and editor Jacqueline Kent in 1987, a few months before his death at the age of fifty-seven.

PETER TEMPLE is one of Australia’s finest writers. His novel
Truth
won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Temple has written nine novels and has been published in more than twenty countries.

DAVID STRATTON is co-presenter of
At the Movies
on ABC television and film critic for the
Australian.
He has also served as a President of the International Critics Jury for the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals, written three books and is currently lecturing in Film History at the University of Sydney.

ALSO BY KENNETH COOK

Eliza Fraser

Stormalong

Blood Red Roses

Wanted Dead

Take This Hammer

The Wine of God’s Anger

Stockade

The Film Makers

Letter to the Pope

Money Menagerie

Bloodhouse

Tuna

Pig

Killer Koala

Wombat Revenge

Frill-Necked Frenzy

Cover Page

About the Author

About the Introducer / Also by

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by Peter Temple

Wake in Fright

Dedication

Afterword by David Stratton

Text Classics

Wake in Fright
was first published in 1961 when Kenneth Cook was thirty-two. It was his second novel, the first having been withdrawn because of a threat of legal action. It was a publishing success, appearing in England and America, translated into several languages, and a prescribed text in schools. It might be forty years since the novel appeared yet it retains its freshness, its narrative still compels, and its bleak vision still disquiets.

The film version, directed by American Ted Kotcheff and with a cast that included the evil-exuding Donald Pleasance, also met with critical approval on its release. Outside Australia, the film was called
Outback
(and probably set Australian tourism back at least twenty years). Its opening sequence remains in the mind—the 360-degree panorama of a flat, empty landscape, the lonely, flyspotted and comfortless pub, the toy train inching across the plain, the open-faced young man waiting on the crude platform.

Wake in Fright
is about a young teacher’s five days in a rough outback mining town called Bundanyabba (‘the Yabba’ to the locals). John Grant doesn’t plan to spend five days there; he is passing through, staying overnight before catching the plane to Sydney, 1200 miles away. He has already come six hours by train from his one-room school in Tiboonda, a name bestowed on a pub and two ant-eaten shacks floating in a dust sea.

In the words of Grant, at the beginning of the story, in places like Tiboonda ‘a man felt he had either to drink or blow his brains out’. (It has not crossed his mind yet that choosing the former will not preclude the latter.)

One night to pass in the Yabba. One hot night. Then the plane to Sydney, the sea, civilisation, six weeks to impress the delectably unobtainable Robyn. But, on this hot night in the Yabba, Grant goes into a pub, smoky, raucous.

A few feverish hours later, he has nothing. He is stone broke. He has gone from being a man with a cheque for six weeks’ holiday pay and twenty pounds in cash in his pocket to being someone who has two shillings and eleven cigarettes to his name.

In the morning, hungover, Grant eats his paid-for hotel breakfast, takes his cases and wanders the streets. By 9.30 a.m. the mullock heaps wobble in the haze, the tar is beginning to
bubble. Desperate, guilt-ridden, panic in his throat, he goes into a pub, buys a pony, the smallest measure, plans to nurse it. A middle-aged local befriends him. He accepts a beer. A second beer.

The next few days pass as if in a nightmare, an alcohol-induced fog in which Grant is in the company of shadowy strangers whose actions and motives are a mystery to him. When the mist lifts, the educated, Sydney-bred John Grant is no more. Now there is a self-loathing man in a threadbare park, dirty, red-eyed, breath of half-raw rabbit, sitting against a tree and looking at a rifle, one bullet left.

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating once said of his home town: ‘If you’re not living in Sydney, you’re camping out.’ The sentiment draws a clean, derogatory distinction between the two Australian worlds, between centre and periphery.

Kenneth Cook was born in Sydney, where he attended Fort Street Boys’ School. His fictional town of Bundan-yabba is based on Broken Hill where he spent some time as a journalist.

Cook’s experience of both Sydney and camping out fixed in him a view that there were two Australias (and two kinds of Australians, two species almost). One is represented by John Grant and by middle-class, white-collar Sydney: urban,
educated, sophisticated. The other is the interior, the crude, heat-smacked, beer-swilling blue-collar world represented by flyspeck Tiboonda and by Bundanyabba, both in the middle of nowhere:‘somewhere not far out in the shimmering haze was the state border, marked by a broken fence…further out in the heat was the silent centre of Australia, the Dead Heart.’

John Grant is in the outback because it is the only way he can pay out his teaching bond. He is as much in exile as any English convict. His teaching he looks upon with all the hopelessness of the missionary preaching the gospel to people who do not understand a word he is saying. He combines a deep distaste for the landscape and climate of the inland with a contempt for the white inhabitants. This dislike is spelled out from the opening pages:‘Another year in this apology for a town, himself an outcast in a community of people who were at home in the bleak and frightening land that spread out around him now, hot, dry and careless of itself and the people who professed to own it.’

Cook will have nothing of what historian Richard White called ‘the familiar iconography of outback Australia—the homestead, the sheep, the lonely gum and the proud Aborigine’. For him, the place is a variation of hell. And the ability to be at home in the ‘bleak and frightening land’ is a flaw in the outback’s people. There is something wrong with them
for enduring this harsh place, They are not the innocent victims of the lonely, arid land; they have made an unnatural choice to live in it that reflects their own stunted, even perverted, nature. Their epitome is Cook’s character Doc Tydon. Only in the outback could the drunken, vaguely sinister dispenser of stale beer and benzedrine be accepted.

Of course, Australian writers (and others, notably D. H. Lawrence) have always been unkind about the Australian character in general. In the 1940s, the poet James McAuley wrote:

The people are hard-eyed, kindly, with nothing inside

them, The men are independent but you could not call them free.

Cook’s lip curls as cruelly as anyone’s in his distaste, but it is reserved for the white inhabitants of the inland. His character John Grant is a ‘coastal Australian’, something that sets him above the people of the inland. Sydney, civilisation, escaping the heat and the glare, these are the things in Grant’s dreams. And the sea, above all the sea: lying in the sea, soaking out the dust of the outback. ‘The sea, twelve hundred miles to the east, had swelled and fallen in its tides, day in and day out, for a year, and he had not seen it.’

Grant’s longing for the sea, for the coast, is a familiar one
in Australian writing. The coast symbolises home, women, a place where people are civilised, genteel, read books and talk about ideas. It is not like the inland, which is alien and male and devoid of anything resembling cultural life. From the coast the ships sail, and for a colonial to put a foot on the deck of a ship bound for home is already to be home.The sea joins all coasts; thus the coast is tied to the old country; to leave the coast is to stretch further—and possibly to break—the cord that joins the exile to the mother country, to the world.

Once upon a time, London had Sydney. It had lots of Sydneys, one in each colony. The Sydneys aped the colonial metropolis, affected its customs and mores, cloned its buildings and its institutions. And then the Sydneys gained their own possessions—their Yabbas, their internal colonies. Men went to these places to seek their fortunes, dug holes, endured heat, froze. Womenless, they found ways to live with the absence of permissible affections. The law that followed them punished the indigenes to its letter. But it laid its truncheon lightly on whites who followed the unwritten rules. What would be jailable offences in the Sydneys were tolerated or looked away from.

And so the Yabbas, like places of incarceration everywhere, near-total institutions, became their own worlds.The people in them first stopped looking outwards, then they looked
inwards, then they stopped looking.They simply
were.

It is a place like this that Cook captures so well in
Wake in Fright.The
Yabba is a city of men, isolated on the endless empty inland plain, its houses clustered on a slight eminence. At night, from afar, the author sees the town’s lights as looking like those of a fleet of ships standing in a vast, dark roadstead. And the Yabba is like a ship—there is nowhere to go, it is an enclosed world with its own rituals, customs and punishments. No one on board can stand aloof. Not to be absorbed, not to seek absorption, is to give offence. It is this desire of the Yabba’s people to suck in strangers, to process them, to homogenise them, that the city-bred John Grant finds hard to understand.

But he knows instinctively that he must try to keep these people at arm’s length or they will take him over, colonise him.

In a pivotal scene, Grant succumbs to the generosity of his pub benefactor,Tim Hynes, and goes home with him. Here all is stuffy, suburban lower-middle-class normality—the darkened sitting room, the thick carpet, the armchairs, the cigarettes in an ornate box on the coffee table. Polite Mrs Hynes prepares a meal. Silent Miss Hynes is a dutiful daughter, makes polite conversation with the guest. But for the heat, it could be a home in Double Bay.Yet we feel immediately
that it is not an ordinary petit bourgeois household: Tim Hynes’s hospitality seems too insistent, too demanding; Miss Hynes may be a succubus.The last thing John Grant remembers is someone asking, ‘How do you find the Yabba, John?’

John Grant is finding the Yabba too much by far. But the transient’s ordeal is not over; Grant has some way to go before he knows he is at the bedrock. Still to come are the most memorable—disturbing, haunting—scenes of the novel.

When
Wake in Fright
was first published, the respected American critic Anthony Boucher, writing in the
New York Times,
called Cook a ‘vivid new talent’. Overall, Boucher was impressed, but he disagreed with the publisher putting the book in ‘the genre of the taut novel of suspense’. Boucher saw
Wake in Fright
as ‘a perfectly straight mainstream novel of growing up’.

He was half-right about this. It is not a novel of suspense as most people would use the term. It is a novel of
menace:
the land exudes menace; the people seem always half in the dark, exchanging glances, concealing their real intentions behind shows of generosity. There is also the menace that accompanies John Grant’s hubris. He is arrogant and disdainful and for this we know he must pay a price.

And what of the ‘novel of growing up’ that Anthony Boucher identified? In some way, the five days in the Yabba
do amount to John Grant’s passage into adulthood. He is profoundly changed by the privation, temptation and degradation he experiences. What is more interesting, however, is Grant’s regression. Cook, like many Australian writers before him, has no confidence in the durability of civilisation’s armour. Grant may be clothed in all the trappings of a more civilised culture but beneath them he is just another brutal and lustful upright animal. Cook recognises that some black flower sleeps in the human heart, waits for the right moment to open its blood petals. In war, many men have found this awful bud bloom in themselves, succumbed to it and been haunted by it even to old age as they limp in medal-chinking columns to honour their own dead.

Wake in Fright
is a young writer’s work: romantic, at times naive. It also suffers from some uncertainty of character and there are problems of balance. These are flaws but they are outmuscled by the writer’s strengths. Cook can make us feel the heat, see the endless horizon, hear the sad singing on a little train as it traverses the monotonous plain: ‘The homesteads were just yellow patches of light in window-frames, but the train driver sounded his whistle just the same and, in the darkness, there were children waving just the same.’

And Cook has range too. He captures the icy, flooding charm of the first beer on a heat-struck day. He knows what
it feels like to catch luck’s eye and hold the gaze across a smoky room, to feel the irrational
deservedness
of it, to hear fortune singing sweet in the veins. And he knows dark things—the frightening chasm that opens when certainty disappears, the savagery in the human heart.

Wake in Fright
has the power to disturb, a rare thing in any novel.