'For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.'
Fly Away Peter
Narrative and Structure
It is not by first person narrative that we learn Jim’s story but rather an omniscient narrator gives us many external perspectives.
Structured in two parts with two contrasting settings of pre-war Qld and post war France
The Environment
In Fly Away Peter, Malouf maps Jim and his environment in the zoological terms of habitat:
He moved always on these two levels, through these two worlds: the flat world of individual grassblades, seen so close up that they blurred, where the ground¬feeders darted about striking at worms, and the long view in which all this part of the country was laid out like a relief-map in the Shire Office-surf, beach, swampland, wet paddocks, dry forested hill-slopes, jagged blue peaks. Each section of it supported its own birdlife; the territorial borders of each kind were laid out there, invisible but clear, which the birds were free to cross but didn't; they stayed for the most part within strict limits. They stayed. Then at last, when the time came, they upped and left; flew off in groups, or in couples or alone, to where they came from and lived in the other part of the year, far over the earth's rim in the Islands, or in China or Europe. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2983, pp. 2-3)
Essay Questions
"So they all became partners, all three..."
What does Jim gain from his partnerships with Ashley and Imogen?
After meeting Ashley, something "made Jim believe there could be common ground between them, whatever the difference." In what ways are Jim and Ashley alike and dissimilar? What was their common ground?
Throughout the war scenes, there is a clear message that men created this experience, this disaster, just as the partnership of Jim, Ashley and Imogen created the sanctuary in South Queensland.
What is Jim's understanding of the world?
What is Jim's relationship with his family and how does his childhood develop his character?
Describe the relationship between the characters.
The central preoccupation of the text is what meaning life can have given the inevitability of death
Journeys
The text could be described simply as a journey of discover. Evaluate.
Jim's journey to enlightenment
Which picture of reality do you accept - the sanctuary at South Burleigh or the European battlefields?
Study closely the passage that begins ‘Water was the real enemy...’ [p.81] and ends... ‘upside down.’ [p.82] What do you think this passage illustrates about the novel as a whole—narrative, characters, setting, language, themes?
‘That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature.’ [p. 132] Argue a case that this statement sums up one of the major themes in the novel.
‘Fly Away Peter focuses on the place of Australia in the world. It is a different kind of Anzac story.’ To what extent do you agree with this view of the novel?
‘Malouf is ... interested in the sharp shock of deja’ vu... a process of recognition... moments of breakthrough.’ [Leer 1985] What moments of recognition occur in Fly Away Peter?
‘The representation of a physical exile in terms of a psychological journey...’ [Bishop 1984]. Is this an accurate view of Fly Away Peter?
Plot and Action
We are considering
In the trenches Jim encounters ‘rats in the same field-grey as the invisible enemy... They were familiars of death, creatures of the underworld, as birds were of life and the air.’ [p.81]
Much of the action in Fly Away Peter happens through these encounters with opposites. The experience of the reverse side of things generates understandings about time, place and self—about reality.
Character, style, theme, events, context, setting, structure, language
Themes and Concepts
Is this the real world, the world that Australians do not know, where nature has turned against humankind?
life in Australia was and perhaps still is divorced from reality
Growing up and Coming of Age
Malouf, that:’... the readiness of Australians to involve themselves in that unnecessary conflict was a pathetic one—a craving for acceptance from the big boys in the playground..’3
The naive adventurousness of young Australians happy to join up to see the world was destroyed at Gallipoli and many other battlefields since.
Binary Opposition
Imogen thinks that ‘she might take a photograph of this new thing’, the surfer. [p.134]
In the encounter with Wizzer Green, he discovers in himself the kind of violence that he loathed in his father.
Innocence and Experience
peace and war
Transformation and Change
biplane, ‘a clumsy shape’, makes ‘slow circuits of the air’
Except for the accidental link of blood he saw nothing in common between his father and himself... There was in his father a kind of savagery that Jim kept at arm’s length... because he didn’t want to be infected. [pp.5-6]
Life and Death (through air and water)
Approaching the front, the site of the battle, he sees a new. landscape, ‘newly developed for the promotion of war’. [p.67]
David Malouf's novella Fly Away Peter is a narrative which questions essence. Its content entails many of Jean-Paul Satre's ideas on existentialism. Firstly that our existence precedes our essence, we are born as a "blank canvas" without purpose. This is in contrast to animals whose essence is purely instinctive. The second main idea is the existential life cycle; from perfection to innocence to awareness to dread to acceptance of our fait accompli, inevitable death. In a nutshell the moment we are expelled from the womb, is our "most perfect" form, "the blankest canvas", thereafter, life only approaches death regardless of any life choices. A state of "Blissful ignorance" succeeds, followed by cognition and the dread of inevitable death, finally its acceptance, then death itself. Malouf's succeeds in constructing a "good story" which made me think and accept the outlook, which in the words of Robert R. Diggs "We must accept, life is nothing more than animated death", through the application of plot structure, metaphors and binary opposites.
ignorance and knowledge
The title of the novel is derived from a well known nursery rhyme:
Two little dicky birds
Sitting on a wall
One named Peter,
The other named Paul
Fly away, Peter!
Fly Away, Paul!
Come back, Peter!'
Come back, Paul!
The war destroys life at all levels, turning the power of the elements such as air and water against humanity. Water becomes ‘the real enemy’[p.81]
The same ‘impressive expertise’ that destroys the farms and fields of Flanders, that kills hundreds of thousands of people, that turns water, light and air into enemies, can also create the reverse reality, a sanctuary.
happiness and sorrow
light and dark
Physical and Spiritual Journeys
and Migration
natural and man-made
Personal Growth, Innocence and Experience
migration and permanence
On the battlefield in Flanders, Jim notes in his diary ‘larks, singing high up and tumbling, not at all scared by the sound of gunfire’. [p. 107] At Ypres, ‘he saw great flocks of birds making their way south against the moon. Greylag geese. He heard their cries, high, high up, as they moved fast in clear echelons on their old course.’[p.l07]
Before his death, he has a visionary dream a ‘grand sweep’ like that of the birds he watches over the expanded map he now holds in his head:
He saw it all, and himself a distant, slow moving figure within it: the long view of all their lives, including his own - all those who were running... his own life neither more nor less important than the rest, even in his own vision of the thing, but unique because it was his head that contained it and in his view that all these balanced lives for a moment existed. [p.116]
past and present
individual and group identity
An old man prepares the soil in Flanders for winter sowing while around them young men use their diggings, the trenches, to kill each other, ‘the inversion of all that was normal’. [p. 106]
alien and familiar
youth and age
In dying, Jim senses the wholeness of life, its continuity, and an affinity with nature and the earth.
The Human Condition - Existentialism
Jim’s death was a waste, that is, ‘all those days...had been gathered towards nothing but his senseless and brutal extinction’? [p. 13 1]
undisturbed, free flight of birds. This image of the birds demonstrates the continuity in nature, a cycle of life, and the birds’ presence enables Jim ‘... to make a map in his head of how the parts of his life were connected ...’ [p.61]
"A life wasn't for anything. It simply was."p132
Jim could never have imagined the different world he encounters in Europe. He felt as if he had taken ‘a wrong turning in his sleep, arrived at the dark side of his head, and got stuck there’. [p,58]