Unspeakable acts from Down Under

`Bob McCartney" is sitting across the table. He is drinking red wine in the sunshine and talking about his recent trip to Portadown.

But what can this be? "The old Protestant relatives were a bit fazed when they found I was a Catholic," he smiles, and the truth dawns that this tall and lean white-haired man is merely the doppelganger for the leader of the UK Unionist Party.

In fact he is Liam Davison, the rising Australian novelist, who was in Dublin recently as the recipient of the "Suspended Sentence" award, given by the James Joyce Foundation in Sydney, Australia. The award, an exchange fellowship, involves two months living and working in Joycean haunts, such as Dublin, Paris and Zurich. Earlier this year the reverse trip, in which an Irish writer goes to Australia for a similar period, was won by novelist and Irish Times journalist, Mary Morrissy, author of A Lazy Eye and Mother of Pearl.

There are some similarities in the writing of the two winners. Theirs is modern literary fiction of a spare elegance, psychological but delicate, absorbing and haunting. Davison (42) has written four novels and is completing a fifth. Loss and landscape are the twin themes which pervade his work. His fourth novel, The Betrayal, follows prize-winning historical/psychological narratives such as The White Woman, which retraced one of the many expeditions to recover a shipwrecked white woman believed to have been abducted by a western Victoria tribe of aborigines in the 1840s.

Davison delicately charts the territory of the unspeakable act. In building up atmosphere he reminds the reader of a fellow countryman working in another medium, Peter Weir, who directed Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave.

It is not easy to get his books here but the last-published, The Betrayal, published by Penguin, is in Irish bookshops now. Previously he won acclaim for The Velodrome, Soundings, The White Woman and a collection of short stories, The Shipwreck Party. In France he is published by Editions Actes Sud.

The Betrayal has a split time frame, half the action taking place in contemporary Australia, at the Victorian spa town of Daylesford, and half in the Vaucluse region of France in 1967. Judith Maloney, suffering from a disease which seems to be arthritis, gets an unexpected letter from her daughter who she considers abandoned her by leaving with her father when the marriage broke up nine years earlier. The daughter's plan to visit France and the area where Judith was at the scene of a terrible crime becomes an instrument of reconciliation.

"Australia is a land of lost opportunity, which steals the children and steals the future," Davison says, reflecting on some of the real incidents which have inspired him. One of these is the disappearance of three children from a family called Graham who lived in Daylesford in the 1880s. The bodies of the children were found eight months later but the details of their fate were never established. "One hundred years later a scholarship was established in their memory, and in the area there is a series of cairns that trace the route the family followed," Davison says. "The story of the lost children has become part of the way local identity is established."

He is a gentle and easy-going man, without artistic pose or pretension. He started his working life as a schoolteacher, after going through the bonded studentship system (the state pays for your training, then you have to pay it back through working in the state schools for a number of years) prevalent in Australian education at the time. He still teaches writing part-time, but managed to escape from the full-time profession in order to write a decade ago. It is now a living, but still not the high life. David Malouf, Davison says, is one of the few Australian writers who has made it big enough to make a comfortable living out of the craft. There are some, like Peter Carey whose money has mostly come from other sources, mainly his advertising work. Davison admires Carey, but feels that his Booker Prize-winner, Oscar and Lucinda, was almost too perfect. "I prefer one of his earlier books, Illywhacker, which is less even but more charming."

THE latest hot ticket in Australian fiction is Eucalyptus by Murray Bail, whose earlier works included Homesickness, the (to me) oddly unsatisfying story of Australians on a whistle-stop world tour.

Eucalyptus is a type of fairytale, in which a landowner offers the hand of his beautiful daughter in marriage to the man who can identify correctly the hundreds of different types of eucalypt (a popular symbol of Australia) which grow on his land. Davison says he cannot quite join in the general applause - although this might be that coincidentally his own new novel, his first "waterless" one, he says, deals with different varieties of orchid. His trip to Portadown, to visit the ancestral Davisons, was one of the highlights of his sojourn in Ireland. "They were very hospitable and welcoming, but I think they were a little taken aback to find that we had become Catholics somewhere along the way," he says.

The Betrayal is published by Penguin.