Harland's Half Acre by David Malouf

First published: 1984

Type of work: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: From early in the twentieth century to the mid-1980’s

Locale: Southern Queensland, Australia

Principal Characters:

• Frank Harland, an artist
• Phil Vernon, a personal friend of Harland
• Walter (Knack) Nestorius, a Polish antiquarian
• Aunt Roo, Phil’s aunt

The Novel

Against a broad sweep of Australian twentieth century history, Frank Harland, an artist, lives a life that is emblematic of that country’s evolving social identity, even though he remains an outsider, set apart by his calling.

Harland lives on the fringes of society but seeks an artistic identity rooted in society—more specifically, in his sense of family. A family-tied, worldly undertaking symbolizes that spiritual pursuit: From the early decades of the century until his death in the 1980’s, Harland quietly buys up the farmland that had been worked by his forebears until, during the nineteenth century, it was lost at a card table. That loss dispossessed those ancestors and, in a sense, all the Harlands who came after.

Only occasionally, as Harland’s renown increases, does the reader hear of his land purchases. They betoken his gradual acquisition of a spiritual, artistic landscape. From youth, Harland has endowed his ancestry with a modest kind of mythical quality, and by the time he dies, he has supplemented this with a personal artistic mythology that he has constructed through his life and work.

Harland lives most of his life on the road, gathering impressions of Southern Queensland. Then, approaching death, he is content to inhabit a series of rough-hewn enclosures on an almost uninhabited island. Yet the half acre of the title does not refer specifically to the small plot of sheltered land of his last days, which is repeatedly wracked by violent storms, nor does it necessarily describe Harland’s ancestral farmland. Rather, it is the small patch of identity that Harland carves out against the steep odds posed by a world hostile to beauty.

After an apprenticeship with a graphic artist, and with the coming of the Great Depression, Harland takes to the road. He adapts, spiritually as much as physically, to that life, submitting to enormous economic hardships in pursuit of art. Yet he contends that the purpose of life is, simply, to seek happiness. Misery, he says after living through it and witnessing from afar the devastation of Europe by war, is too easily attained.

He befriends the family of Phil Vernon, who is a youth when he meets Harland just after World War II. That connects him with a broad familylike group of people from many sectors of Australian society. The family suffers tragedy and personal ruin. Harland is often driven to return to a state of virtual homelessness, which appears to be a state suited to him. His development into an itinerant, ascetic artist was foreshadowed during his childhood, described at the beginning of the novel. His father, for example, is renowned for his tall tales and daydreaming.

Before he dies, Harland tries to patch the tattered fabric of his family. Yet it is the artistic drive that is most powerful. He is content to fight the elements as he paints in his rough-hewn shelters. In this way, he returns to the influence that has been as great as family and society: the land. Like his father’s tales, then, his art is “woven out of his life, out of the countryside and the past of their family.”

The Characters

Frank Harland is a curious character. His extraordinary impressionistic art demonstrates how sharply but obliquely he sees the land and people around him. Yet he is also reticent, self-effacing, and uncomfortable in social settings. Moreover, he is in every way unsophisticated. His simplicity is, however, an illusion: He is a supremely disciplined artist of profound cultural engagement. He lacks a milieu such as the fine salons and galleries of Europe, but between stints of isolation, he cultivates people of widely varied social backgrounds: tramps on the railroad, families such as Phil Vernon’s, surfers who happen upon his island, whoever crosses paths with him.

Harland is, in fact, so steeped in the everyday world of Southern Queensland that he appears never to enter so alien an institution as an art gallery. He never frames his canvases, and he sends his work, through an agent he appears never to address personally, to Sydney, which during most of the twentieth century was Australia’s closest approximation to an artistic capital.

Elements in the characters of many of Harland’s relatives and acquaintances bring into sharper focus his much more fully developed artistic sense and serve to emphasize how great his sacrifice is. Several, such as his father, the teller of tall tales, have artistic qualities or aspirations. Phil Vernon’s Aunt Roo longs for a life in the theater and, until she attains it, designs her less glamorous existence as an ongoing spectacle, complete with massive fits of melodrama. Two characters provide the sharpest counterpoints to Harland: Phil Vernon and Knack.

During his life, Knack, a pseudonym for Walter Nestorius, has been a philosophy student, a soldier, a black marketer, a playboy, a fugitive, and a refugee. During the time Harland knows him, he is an antiquarian living in Brisbane, a port of call for United States military personnel and refugees fleeing war-torn Europe. He embodies experience that is beyond Harland’s reach because it is so far removed from Australia’s history and culture. While Harland is a student of the land and its people, particularly of society’s fringe-dwellers, Knack, himself a fringe-dweller, is learned: He is trained academically and as a musician. He is an impressive speaker. He has lived through events that shock Harland when he sees them on wartime newsreels.

Knack is nevertheless the character most similar to Harland emotionally and in sensibility. He is the inverse of Harland. He is driven from his homeland by war and persecution and expresses himself in torturous, impassioned playing on the piano. Harland chooses exile primarily as a necessary condition of his calling and creates art that, despite its nonrealism and rough appearance, is controlled and considered.

If Knack is a dark version of Harland, Phil Vernon is the lighter, socially adapted version. He shares the older man’s keen eye for artistic detail, and he eventually becomes Harland’s adviser in legal and other worldly affairs. Yet, unlike Harland, Phil is firmly rooted in a middle-class life-style, even though he does not in all ways toe the family line.

Critical Context

Malouf deals in this novel with themes that he has addressed in earlier fiction and poetry: exile, belonging to the land or to a society, and hopelessness that is expressed through suicide. For example, an earlier study of an artist separated from his society is An Imaginary Life (1978). It recounts the life of the Roman poet Ovid and describes his achievement of a spiritual communion with the region along the Danube River, where he has long been exiled. In Johnno (1975), the title character and a friend nicknamed “Dante” leave Australia in search of identity. Harland, in contrast, is utterly steeped in the genius of his own locale. Yet he, too, ponders at times the rich historical and cultural heritage of Europe that Australia lacks.

Johnno and Harland’s Half Acre have other elements in common. Like two characters in the later book, Johnno commits suicide through despair and emotional instability. This second characteristic is one he shares with a number of the minor characters in Harland’s Half Acre.

Both novels also include carefully drawn evocations of Southern Queensland at earlier times in this century and of the characters’ family lives. With this technique, Malouf places his characters in social contexts that suggest some of the prevailing characteristics of the Australian national identity. He suggests that the foremost characteristic of those who have tried to shape that identity has been an urge to escape the incipient society long enough to reorient it and refine it.

Malouf does this most ambitiously in Harland’s Half Acre. Often the cogs of his grand construction grind audibly, but the work was greeted as the strongest to that point in his career.

Bibliography

Adams, Phoebe-Lou. Review in The Atlantic. CCLIV (October, 1984), p. 126.

Choice. XXII, January, 1985, p. 681.

Christian Science Monitor. November 23, 1984, p. 34.

Gorra, Michael. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XCI (October 14, 1984), p. 9.

Hamilton, K. G., ed. Studies in Recent Australian Fiction, 1979.

Jose, Nicholas. “Cultural Identity: ’I Think I’m Something Else,’” in Daedalus. Winter, 1985, p. 311.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, July 1, 1984, p. 592.

Listener. CXII, July 5, 1984, p. 27.

Los Angeles Times. October 24, 1984, V, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVI, July 6, 1984, p. 53.

Times Literary Supplement. June 15, 1984, p. 658.

Vogue. CLXXIV, September, 1984, p. 575.

Waldhorn, Arthur. Review in The Library Journal. CIX (September 1, 1984), p. 1687.

Washington Post. September 26, 1984, p. D1.