Their Place in the Country

Tree Palace
by Craig Sherborne
Text Publishing, 2014, 327 pages, $29.99

“Trants” are itinerant people, and Craig Sherborne’s Tree Palace describes the lives of a family of them from their outset in nomadism and its dislocations to a resolution where some settle­ment of spirit and material circumstance are in prospect. Here is a novel of resourceful, well-paced comedy and I found myself engaged by it as I had been by a previous Craig Sherborne story of people at the exposed margin of a society, the vibrant memoir of his parents, Hoi Polloi.

This trant family owns as many surnames as it does members. But Shane, Moira, Midge, Zara, Rory and baby Mathew (who never quite accomplishes a surname) form a domestic entity nonetheless, and one turbulent with what happens in families and to them. They take possession of a vacant farm among the long, straight roads of Victoria’s Mallee-Wimmera region and this they adapt to their particular needs with additions of caravan, tent and a chandelier that they hang from a tree, so dubbing their home “Tree Palace”. For they are home-makers, and the novel, as unashamedly and as warmly as Steele Rudd’s accounts of Dad, Dave and family in On Our Selection, is about how homes are made and, more searchingly, the sense of resolute identity that accompanies this.

Morals are looser than among Steele Rudd’s hayseeds. The surnames indicate how fornication has been casual, thieving is encouraged as opportunity, though fire-raising is wrongful and Moira’s disapproval of bad language, piquantly, is the one bourgeois aspiration of the book. Shane and Midge pursue a clandestine business stripping the valuable furnishings from abandoned properties. Teenage Rory, rejecting school, wanting adult acceptance, plays with fire and attracts adult vehemence instead. Fifteen-year-old Zara rebuffs her newborn child in an interval of surly downcast and wild living before taking up a supermarket job found for her by the resourceful Moira and, from this, moves towards maturity and some prospect of becoming an effective mother.

But it is Moira we come to know best of the group, who is the bravest and canniest in dealing with the impedimenta faced by rootless people. Deftly, intelligently Sherborne takes us into the workings of her mind. She is rehearsed in lies and excuses, now fawning, now fierce in her defence of those close to her. She can “perform” her emotions to dramatic effect, but she is also the character whose feelings make her most vulnerable, most morally astute.

Critically, Moira is illiterate, and ranged against her is literate Australia, the police, the Indian supermarket proprietor, and later the prison wardens. So we witness her deviousness, her moments of desperation, of hurt, as she improvises the needs of day-to-day. And these are needs often focused upon issues of identity. To appease bureaucracy she must accrue “points” by presenting birth certificate and driving licence, precisely those tokens of legitimacy that rootless people might be deemed too feckless to provide. But then, amazing her own sense of herself and emergent from her panic at watching her daughter carelessly abandon her infant, Moira experiences late in life “the bloom”, those bodily changes and well-being that come as a result of her taking up the care of this infant. This is but half her story, for Moira must in time then find the moral reconciliation to foil this physiological well-being and return the babe to Zara, allowing the natural processes of life to resume when they are ready to do so. Craig Sherborne illumines here a fine if unsensational human progress, a woman of instinctive humanity, unassisted to that compassion by the prompts to sensibility of books and letters.

And to this end, here is narrative attentive to the minutiae of human reactions and exchanges. There are, maybe, occasional longueurs in the placing of effects, but Tree Palace is wide-awake, intelligent writing. More than anything, Sherborne shows a journalist’s verve for the intrigue of the everyday together with a patience for that naturalism. His story takes its significance from within the ordinary; it works with the necessities and expectations of life’s unexceptional fabric, but vitally so.

The allusiveness of this “ordinary” can easily be overlooked. Here is a “family” where hunter-gathering is the livelihood, where the ingenuity, improvising and opportunism of hunter-gathering are shown to provide the vital ethos for these folk at the margins of an economy, and naturally one brings Australia’s first itinerant people to mind. Certainly there is no actual discussion of race in this book; there does not need to be. Sherborne’s six people move in a milieu where miscegenation is likely, but not an issue as they connect with their “selection” and discover their land rights. The wellsprings of identity arise from loyalties and reactions that are sui generis within the group. Shane is protective of his asthmatic, semi-crippled son, Midge. Moira mothers her daughter’s child, makes of the “family” a unitary enterprise and so demonstrates its actuality and her own largeness of spirit.

There is no lack of immediate drama and exchange in Tree Palace. Indeed the novel is a page-turner at that level of suspense where the reader engages sufficiently with its characters to hope for their good. If there is one difference between Sherborne’s characters and Rudd’s Dad and Dave it may be that the latter inhabited a place and time where they could be trusted to recognise The Good for themselves, while those of Tree Palace, encountering modernity’s waste and confusions, cannot be so trusted in the first instance. One process of this most accessible novel is that we are shown how the characters, each in their way, grow towards their self-possession, their place.

For if this is a novel of action, it is also one of meditation, and behind its concern with identity is this moral consideration, “How locate that ground where people may be valued without being compared.” It is chimaeric ground, but sustains a resilient presence in this novel. For instance, we watch Zara’s self-destructive behaviour. Refusing the wherewithal of life to her infant, she sequesters herself, puts herself in moral hazard at the rough end of town, predictably suffers the consequent humiliations. Why should anyone bother with her? Yet we watch how she is bothered with, tolerated through her phase of repudiations. Similarly we watch as the “family” censure Rory for his fire-raising, then applaud him on an occasion when he behaves with much more direct danger to life. We are endeared to Midge in his basic decency for all that Darwinian competition would make short work of an asthmatic ex-jockey whose mobility has been forever damaged by accident. Value establishes itself between people in the very impulses of the everyday, the humanity of this given vibrancy by how close to feral conditions their lives come.

Here is the novel doing its job. As with works by, say, Austen, Waugh or Garner, Sherborne finds story in his close scrutiny of manners. His particular folk live at the friable edge of a society; nonetheless he unfolds how individual lives are felt and lived in relation to a social whole. Tree Palace is thorough­going in its imagining of this “trant” culture, sure in the physical and moral setting it integrates. May the book flourish.