DAVID ROWBOTHAM: NOVEL

THE MAN IN THE JUNGLE, a novel that was rare in its Australian thriller genre when it was published in London and Sydney in 1964, was to influence many forthcoming, younger Australian writers. It told, as the critic Dorothy Green said, a good story; it contained mystery, history, and a sense of country. The writers included Thomas Shapcott, Rodney Hall, David Malouf, Roger McDonald. Thomas Shapcott said then that, beyond the book’s immediate storytelling impact, it had the extra virtues of offering new discoveries everytime it was read.

What Dorothy Green noted, and what Thomas Shapcott observed, when added to the observations of Derek Whitelock, Lord Ted Willis and Douglas Stewart (below), supported David Rowbotham’s original intention of giving the novel the title of THE FOREST TAKES FOREVER, connoting its real theme, indicated as that still is by the epigraph from Emerson. The publishers insisted on a change of title to something concrete for commercial purposes.

In the eyes of these (then) Queensland writers the book was an achievement that they sought to emulate in their own way. For example, David Rowbotham reports, they knew they must write not only poetry. There was the world of the novel, and of the short story; and he, it seemed, had suddenly opened these worlds to them on their doorstep. They were to go on and become mainly novelists, devoting less time to poetry – one of the reasons for this being a very practical one: only through the novel could they hope to earn a wider literary reputation, and a living. They have admitted this. Between them they have produced many novels, a number of which became national and overseas prizewinners. How can emulators who have grown to this 'fame' properly acknowledge the mentor who served their youth? They have said to David Rowbotham in person, and print, that he was the first published author they ever knew.This, alone, was exciting to them.

The short stories that influenced them, and other writers such as Nancy Keesing, Ray Mathew, David Campbell and Hal Porter, had already been published in book form in David Rowbotham's TOWN AND CITY: Tales and Sketches (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956). Kenneth Slessor's review of this book, in part, is quoted below. David Rowbotham had indeed been influenced by Daudet, and Dickens, and by the American Sherwood Anderson of "Winesburg, Ohio". Most of his stories, a number of which made their way into Australian anthologies and the Oxford World Classics, had been first published in the Sydney Bulletin when Rowbotham was still in his 20’s. He was writing them at the same time as he was writing his verse. One Rowbotham story, "The White Cottage", attracted threats of litigation when it apppeared in the Bulletin, and was removed from the book. It appeared in The Bulletin, Sydney, August 17, 1955 (pp.20-23).

TOWN AND CITY, short stories, 1956: “Prose-sketches which can be compared with Daudet’s pastorals. They have the same regional poetry as Daudet’s and some of the snake-charming magic which Daudet shares with Dickens.” --Kenneth Slessor, SYDNEY SUN

“This powerfully written novel is a thriller of the sub-tropical Australian rain forest. Dank with rain and choked with vegetation, crawling with snakes and leeches, half mountains and half swamp, the forest is all but impenetrable. Yet here, in the previous century, an escaped convict found gold; here, more recently, a wild hermit took refuge; and here, now, because a small plane has crashed and a newspaperman has been lost searching for it, a search party must force its way into its tangled and mysterious recesses. There are Sergeant Milligan; Kokoda, the mule; Cam Richmond, the bushman; Packs, the ambulance man; two black trackers; Kathryn Carr, the glamorous young wife of the lost newspaperman; and Morden, from the opposition newspaper, who is in love with her. What happens, when the forest closes its gates on these people, the reader must find out for himself.” –

It is important to Australian literary history that David Rowbotham’s novel and collection of short stories, both books named for their “literary magic” and “powerful” writing style, should be put on record for their contribution to that history. The contribution has been overlooked due to the literary rush that occurred after his fiction was written. As well, he did not write enough fiction for it to be consistently considered as the years went by. But, for his living, he had to move on into journalism; which he always regarded as part-and-parcel of his practice as a writer. He has been a newpaperman, and evidence of that can be found in his literary work.

DAVID ROWBOTHAM obviously drew on his direct newspaper experience and historical research to create his novel’s place, event and the character of Morden: who, with other characters, is introduced in the following thematic extracts from his unexpected Australian “signpost” novel of the 1960s. The extracts are taken from Chapter 6, entitled "The Scoop", and Chapter 4, entitled "The Convict's Find".

It rose like a cloud gathering itself from the jungle floor, smokily, the night smouldering out beneath it to give it its emergence in a sunless mist of muggy warmth, and soundlessness. The bush creatures, if awakened, were sleepily lying in.

At first there was only the slow, soft seething of water moving in fern-walled streams, or dropping down from the soaked summits of the trees on to rocks and leaves among roots and undergrowth. Then vines and bushes seemed to breathe and stir and, in stirring, seemed to take on strange forms because of the creeping coils and carpets of mist that they met and moulded.

To Morden, as he opened his eyes in a haziness, this insinuation of the dawnlight came as a sort of hesitating restoration. He was faintly aware of uneasy movements, and of a spot of dull pain in his nose; but all that counted for the moment was the tranquillity, the peace to which he grew out of his unconsciousness. It was as though a misty quality of new light, a new dawn, had grown with him out of a black past that he could not remember.

He did, however, remember and recognise the jungle. He heard its water on the rocks and leaves and he breathed its steaminess; but now his lassitude seemed to protect him from his surroundings, just as it prevented him from remembering what had gone before, what had led to his annihilation. He would have to remember soon. In the meantime: rest, laziness, and the touch of dawn...and voices?

Morden heard the words clearly. But he could not answer; he was too deliciously slothful, like someone after a long sleep from which the body shifts refreshed but unhurried, the mind cool and calm but backward. Yet the character of the words reminded him of someone he had known in the past.

After a while he realised who it was; and this, along with the idea that he felt fresh and easy only because he had been through some crucial experience or illness, brought all memory back with a bolt of shock. The relaxed center in the back of his head snapped to attention with a click and he jerked into a sitting position. He stretched his arms rigidly behind him and his finger-nails dug into dirt. The pain returned acutely to his nose, his eyes opened widely, and his speech came explosively.

Now he saw the faces. He saw them so plainly that they might have been magnified by some strange lens-like effect of the grey mist and the green forest. He touched his nose; it was covered with cotton-wool and sticking-plaster.

The shock that had driven him upright disappeared; the fierceness in him seemed to fracture itself. He collapsed back on a hard support of rock standing out of the ground like a low-leaning, solid board. Swivelling his head, he traced out the shape of a caved-in hut among nearby trees, and, just beyond, the outline of what seemed to be a bending cross between two close tree-trunks. An ironical amusement rippled somewhere in him; he was at the Convict’s Find again. Last night he had come blindly back to it. A little more blind accuracy and he could have done his praying at the cross!

That was Jim. The kind aboriginal face with its apprehensive eyes was lowered towards him, and there was Packs’ broad brow under the ambulance cap. And there, to one side of them, was Milligan, looking edgy, disgruntled; and Cam Richmond with his moustache hiding his phlegmatic mouth.

He knew they were all friends, that their being there was just what he needed to reassure him, to give him relief, even freedom, from the feeling that what he had been through had put him in a lonely territory of grim illusion from which there was no return. They rescued him from isolation; he was back.#

After Morden’s astonishment had died down a little, the sight of the cross became the most resolving thing that had so far happened to him. As soon as he began to believe in it, in its existence, substance, shape, as he touched its squalid enduring wood, he also began to believe that everything unseen, unknown or inconceivable, was at last taking on a definite form, tangible and true. Too true. Everything at last was possible, probable.

Much less bewildering than a huddle of ants, a mutilated boar, a tracker with his throat cut, the cross was an acceptable permanent fact. It leaned about three feet out of the ground between two close trees whose roots must have flourished in the grave beneath. The trees, sappping the earth around it, had kept it free of vines, creepers, the consumption of scrub.

Morden saw its stark simplicity as a sane significant link between all that was weirdly primitive and unreal, and what was civilised. He felt that, after all, he was not so hopelessly and helplessly shut off from things that were familiar and understandable, even though there was small comfort in the thought that here probably lay the remains of a miner of the Convict’s Find, a miner who, entering the forest, had never walked out of it.

He guessed, as he stood beside Jim looking at the grave, that the old gold settlement or its ruins must be somewhere near. The trees, more than the mine shaft into which he had fallen,seemed to be evidence of this. Mine shafts could be anywhere, scattered widely from the real centre of the Find; and, according to Packs, popular fancy and the caution of bushmen in the jungle country, they were anywhere. But a cross could mean a centre. There could easily be more crosses, more graves, in the area. He and Jim might actually be standing on the burial ground of the Convict’s Find.

The two of them strode forward into the bushes. They searched and fossicked for some time, without success. Morden was just about ready to admit he had been wrong, that the grave was an isolated one, belonging to some prospector who had died and been buried in a spot away from the settlement. But Jim, who had wandered off, suddenly called to him.

Jim was stirring a slight regular-looking depression of earth and grass with his boot. The depression would not have been recognisable as a grave, but Jim had stirred up some bones covered with mud and granulated by age and rot. Human bones. Morden would have sworn to it. Over perhaps a century, they had been shoved up frm their shallow bed by that ghoulish habit that time and the earth had of laying bare what was buried, or of burying what had lain bare.

With this new discovery they became gradually, then rapidly aware of other signs around them. It was as though, to a couple of knocks, the forest had opened its doors of concealment, revealing what it had till then hidden camouflaged under their noses. All at once there were shapes in the trees, design in the ground, among a tangle of undergrowth, foliage, vine, bushes.

The streets, hacked out of the forest, had vanished under parasitic vine, weed and fungus. But beneath the grass were wooden and earthen floors, and behind the bloated meshes of creepers were some huddles of what originally would have been huts and cottages. Disused shafts, with iron rollers and rotting sprags and ropes, were sinking in their final throes into the earth, weighted by the grasses and years that had piled on them since the days when, worked out, the settlement had been deserted.

Where the horse-walks had been, remnants of skew rail fences ending in split or twisted cross-saplings ran from the shafts. A rawhide bucket under a lean-to that looked more like a gunyah rested shapeless on its side. A forsaken miner’s dollypot lay buried in the grass. Centipedes squirmed away from beneath an old bark stretcher that he and Jim overturned. Climbing roses, planted beside a miner’s hut, now consumed the space where, among his scanty bush-made furniture, his pots, pans and shovels, the digger once sat down to his meal of beef or mutton, wheaten flour, vegetables and tea.

In one place the decayed huts and buildings stood so close together that the vines climbed from roof to roof. The way in which the huts ran gave an indication of a street pattern. Along this way, before it became a street, when it was merely a patch in the jungle, had probably walked those very first ‘settlers’, the dozen or so survivors of the band of fortune and freedom hunters who, seeking the Convict’s Find, had undertaken their long trek from Port Jackson.

For a moment Morden thought of them, picturing them: desperate little spirits walking their island-continent more than a hundred years ago, plagued by starvation, thirst, fever, attacks from the tribes. Underdogs: former felons, ticket-of-leavers, and their women, all haunted by the Government arrow.

With those who followed, they had blazed the northern inland trail. They, or their descendants, when the gold ran out had withdrawn along this street, and along their forest track now grown over, to become pioneers in the Formartin grazing lands.

And a poor addle-pated convict started it all! An unprivileged bit of scum condemned to transportation by a stern-wigged English justice, perhaps for no larger crime than stealing a loaf of bread! What had been his name, that nameless man, who had wandered into the forest and wandered out again, clutching his nugget of gold? And then returned to Port Jackson and his Governor, and his end in solitary confinement.

Years afterwards, into the corner of closed-up ground where Morden now stood, the drays had probably been taken. And trailing along behind had come the penal-colony expirees, the Old World refugees, the renegades, desperadoes, all to make their fortune, to dig a renewal of their lives out of the forest floor. Many of them had dug their own graves. Now their old jungle El Dorado gave refuge only to an ageless maniac, the Swede, with a kettle of gold.#

[First publication on the Internet, with a historical perspective, of thematic extracts from David Rowbotham’s “magic” moral and philosophical thriller, THE MAN IN THE JUNGLE, a “signpost” Australian novel of the 1960s, being rare, then, in the serious thriller genre. It was originally called THE FOREST TAKES FOREVER, and published by Angus & Robertson, London and Sydney, 1964. All copyright is held by the author, David Rowbotham. January 10, 2001]