Patricia Wrightson's Pastoral: The Nargun and the Stars

When Patricia Wrightson published her award-winning novel The Nargun and the Stars in 1973, she was breaking new ground in Australian children's literature and in her own work, for she had written the first successful Australian fantasy for child and adolescent readers (Niall 5). Part of the reason for that success is that she had discovered, during the writing of An Older Kind of Magic (1972), creatures of Australian Aboriginal folklore little known at the time. In An Older Kind of Magic, these creatures appear as the oldest and most effective embodiments of one of several kinds of magic; by contrast, in The Nargun and the Stars their magic is central. As she explains in the article "Ever Since My Accident," Wrightson had long known that in an Australian setting she could not make use of the amalgam of European myth and legend and the conventions of what Jane Langton calls "Once-Upon-a-Time," the kingdom somewhere in "northern Europe sometime between the fall of Rome and the invention of the internal combustion engine" (437), tropes that underlie the fantasies of such writers as Alan Garner, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, and, to a lesser extent, Ursula Le Guin.¹

The magic, folklore, and myth of European peoples are alien and unbelievable in the emphatically non-European setting of Australia, and Wrightson's fortunate accident was to discover the Aboriginal folklore (as distinct from religion) that provides a believable entry into an Australian supernatural world. From the opening to the closing sentences of The Nargun and the Stars, the reader is aware of the Nargun, a creature of immense age and frightening power, while lesser supernatural figures also take part in a completely new celebration of distinctly Australian magic. Nevertheless, while the isolated setting obviously supports the novel's "Australianness" and the credibility of its spirit creatures, the major function of that setting and of the figures that inhabit it is to link The Nargun and the Stars to the power of a European literary tradition—to the long-established strand of pastoral that has until recent times been strong in Australian literature both for children and for adults.

In her interest in the resources and resonances of bushland settings, Wrightson resembles the majority of Australian writers up to the present day. Richard N. Coe's study of descriptions of Australian childhood led him to assert in 1984 that a common feature in the childhood of Australian writers is "a passionate, an overmastering love for the 'magic' and the mystery, for the haunting antiquity above all, the tangible 'timelessness' or 'agelessness' of the Australian bush" (135). Australian authors continue to be fascinated by the bush and to use rural settings even though, as T. Inglis Moore noted twenty-five years ago, by 1961 Australia had become the most highly urbanized nation on earth (68-69, 71-72). That they should also use the conventions of pastoral is not surprising; from its beginnings in the work of Theocritus, Longus, and Virgil, pastoral has been a product not of rural life, but of an urban sophistication that transfers characters into a world that became in Virgil's Arcadia a country of the mind—what Bruno Snell calls "a spiritual landscape" (281). Its transformations have continued over two millennia in European literature, but Jon Stott's description catches almost all its essential features:

It is a natural, pure, calm setting in which truth, tranquility, contentment, and innocence dominate, a contrast to the sullied, artificial, complex world beyond its borders, a world in which the more evil aspects of progress—especially greed, anxiety, and ambition—are found. The pastoral setting is an oasis which, except for the rhythms of nature, seems eternal.

(145)

Naturally, Australian writers have produced distinctively Australian versions of their country of the mind, "the unique Australian world that is the possession and kingdom of our imagination" (Eldershaw 219). For early writers such as Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall, and Marcus Clarke, the bush was a place of death and desolation as well as beauty; for writers of the mid-twentieth century such as A. D. Hope, Patrick...