The Power of Place

Laura Flynn on Romulus My Father by Raimond Gaita

Raimond Gaita migrated from Poland to an Australian landscape for which his father felt a deep contempt. The narrative, which follows Romulus Gaita’s life through the lens of his son, is pitted with heartache and desperation, insanity and freedom, morality and depravity. It’s a story of hope in the face of adversity and isolation.

Since reading the memoir, I often think about this passage:

The key to the beauty of the native trees lay in the light which so sharply delineated them against a dark blue sky.

I first experienced the memoir through Helen Garner’s essay on Raimond Gaita — ‘From Frogmore, Victoria’. In the essay, which focuses on the book’s adaptation to film, Gaita says, ‘I needed the film-makers to understand how utterly fundamental to the story the landscape was.’ Romulus: My Father centres on the Australian bush and its isolation. The plot revolves around it. Everything is set in relation to it.

As Gaita grows, we see Frogmore change with him. We see him fall in love with the landscape for the first time, during the giddiness of teenage-hood:

… my perception of the landscape changed radically as when one sees the second image in an ambiguous drawing.

We see how his father’s vulnerability affected him and his views of Frogmore:

In his sighs, I heard our isolation and for the first time, I felt estranged from the area.

We see how the isolation brought insanity and suicides from everyone Gaita loved: his father, his mother, Mitru. When his father is hospitalised for insanity, Gaita describes how the hospital ‘presented a foreign world’ to him. It set him apart from Frogmore, from everything that he understood about the world.

I could no longer see my father’s illness just from the perspective of our life at Frogmore. Strange though it may sound, my sense of that life, of the ideas that informed it, was given intensity and colour by the light and landscape of that area.

I think about how the Australian bush feels in its seasons. Winter is harsh and cold, the air tastes like wattle trees and wet grass from frost. Summer in the bush smells like soil and precipitation and gum nuts. It makes me think of home, a place where distance is a comfort. I think of these places and it feels suddenly strange to me that I don’t use location as a tool or a character in itself more in my writing. All too often I am told to ‘describe the scenery more’ or to ‘delve into the setting’. Gaita’s work proves to me, in its generous and understated way, just how effective location can be.

Thoughtfully using place and setting grounds the story. It provides the narrative with an anchor that secures the reader in the on-going story when heavier material converges.

Brenda Miller, in Tell It Slant, articulates the importance of location as a writing tool:

Nonfiction writers use place frequently as a primary subject. Even if you never do, however, the place where a story unfolds plays a vital role.

Romulus: My Father is so thoroughly founded in place that it reminds me of something my father told me when I was suffering a particularly nasty bout of homesickness: ‘Indigenous people are right when they talk about connection to country. The place where you grow up never leaves you.’