How I would use David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe as a related text with Raymond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father for the Advanced and Standard HSC English Area of Study

David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976) explores the concept of belonging by showing readers that in order to belong we must first understand ourselves. The protagonist, ‘Meat’, narrates a series of anecdotes, vignettes and insights that give readers an insight into the world of blue collar camaraderie in Australia in the mid-1970s. At one point Meat writes despondently that “They would age, and one day never come again. No one would remember their faces, or write their story.” Such is Ireland’s skill that ‘their faces’ are rendered vividly in stories of archetypal characters whose deeds, heroic or otherwise, form a gripping narrative: we follow ‘The Great Lover’ on his peccadilloes; we barrack for ‘The King’ as he weighs into opponents with his fists and sometimes his “slippers”; we empathise with “Alky Jack” as he drinks himself to death; we share Meat’s love for his “Darling”; we worry about young Sibbley, the intellectual. Each character is the subject of one or two eponymously titled chapters. The sense of belonging in The Glass Canoe is informed by a strong connection to place, The Southern Cross Hotel, Rydalmere. Meats picaresque narrative is an attempt at “writing the Southern Cross on paper.” The pub gives refuge to those within it, defining their community and protecting them from harm: “The dark, a live monster, leaned on the roof and tried the glass doors. Its eyes were black, fathomless as death.” The problems of the world are personified, a sinister force held at bay by the building and by the community within it. When the world of work and family became too real, says meat, “we lit out for the pub, where we belonged.” The colloquialism reeforces the authenticity of the narrative voice in the novel. The strident, vernacular language in which the story is told emphasises a sense of cultural identity. Ireland does not describe a grand hotel, he describes a homely establishment which, like Gaita’s Frogmore, gives shelter and succour to the men within. The worst fate, the worst punishment that can be meted out to the men at ‘The Cross’ is to be barred, to be excluded “like black men forced to leave their sacred places and water holes and become strangers in another tribe.” Like Gaita’s ‘Romulus’, who “called himself a gipsy and later, in Australia, an Aborigine”, Irealand’s ‘Meat’ draws explicit parallels between himself and the traditional owners of the land. Ireland’s comparison is, perhaps, dated, but it does at least show an ability to accommodate other sub-cultures within an otherwise parochial narrative. When confronted by youths with fashionable haircuts, meat wonders:

. . . what sort of a tribe did they have. Did they drink? Did they fight? A fight now and then might stir them up to live, to have solid enjoyment, bright eyes, quick muscles and life on every face.

Maybe. Maybe they had those things, but if so, how? I only knew the way of our tribe.

Whether these questions are speculative or rhetorical, they suggest that it is only through attempting to understand others, to understand their sense of place and community, that we can truly find belonging for ourselves.