Ash road, p.1
Ash Road, page 1
IVAN SOUTHALL was born in Melbourne in 1921. His first published story appeared in the children’s pages of the Herald newspaper in 1933. Southall left school at the age of fourteen, following the death of his father, and worked in various jobs, including as a copy boy at the Herald. He captained a Sunderland Flying boat in the RAAF during World War II and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross after sinking a German U-boat. (Southall was always grateful that forty-one members of the crew were rescued.) Many of his early books were based on his wartime piloting experiences.
Southall met his first wife, Joy Blackburn, in England, and the couple returned to Australia after the war and lived in various semi-rural Melbourne suburbs. They had four children.
Southall’s first children’s book, Meet Simon Black, was published in 1950, and he went on to write more than thirty works for young adults and several for adults. Ash Road, published in 1965, followed Hills End in exploring realism and a stream-of-consciousness style of narration—a new direction for Southall and for Australian children’s literature.
Southall’s books were published widely internationally and he won more than twenty international awards including the Carnegie Medal in 1971 and four Children’s Book Council of Australia awards in the 1960s and ’70s for Ash Road, To the Wild Sky, Bread and Honey and Fly West.
In 1976 Southall married Susan Stanton. In 1981 he was awarded an Order of Australia, and in 2003 the Dromkeen Medal for services to children’s literature. He died in 2008.
MAURICE SAXBY is recognised internationally as an authority on children’s literature. He was the first national president of the Children’s Book Council of Australia and has won numerous awards for services to children’s literature including an Order of Australia in 1995 and the CBCA’s Nan Chauncy Award in 2002. He lives in Sydney.
ALSO BY IVAN SOUTHALL
Simon Black series (nine books)
Hills End
The Foxhole
To the Wild Sky
Sly Old Wardrobe, pictures by Ted Greenwood
Let the Balloon Go
Finn’s Folly
Chinaman’s Reef is Ours
Bread and Honey
Josh
Benson Boy
Head in the Clouds
What About Tomorrow
King of the Sticks
The Golden Goose
The Long Night Watch
Rachel
Blackbird
The Mysterious World of Marcus Leadbeater
Ziggurat
Fourteen works of non-fiction
Seven novels for adults
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Copyright © The Estate of Ivan Southall 1965
Introduction copyright © Maurice Saxby 2013
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First published by Angus & Robertson Publishers, Australia, 1965 This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetting
Primary print ISBN: 9781922147493
Ebook ISBN: 9781922148537
Author: Southall, Ivan, 1921–2008 author.
Title: Ash Road / by Ivan Southall; introduced by Maurice Saxby.
Series: Text classics.
Subjects: forest fires—Australia—Fiction.
Australia—fiction.
Dewey Number: A823.4
CONTENTS
Baptised with Fire
by Maurice Saxby
Ash Road
Baptised with Fire
by Maurice Saxby
IN January 1962 the Southall family, living at Blackwood Farm, near Monbulk to the east of Melbourne, was imperilled by a bushfire that threatened their lives and forced them to flee.
Three years later, in 1965, Ash Road was published. The suffocating midsummer morning, the terror and sense of helplessness in an exploding world, and the frantic scramble to escape to a creek or a bare ploughed field described in the novel are drawn from Ivan Southall’s experience. So too are the protagonists. Southall knew each farm and person in the area; from these lives and from a deep insight into what motivates and drives human beings he created the characters of his story.
Ash Road was received with great acclaim, following the success of Hills End in 1962, and was awarded Australian Children’s Book of the Year in 1966.
Southall already had a large following of loyal fans. The nine air adventures of Simon Black, a kind of Antipodean Biggles, written in the 1950s, were very popular with young, mostly male readers. Ivan was in demand for school visits and was increasingly being asked to talk to teachers, librarians and students of children’s literature. On such occasions he could disarmingly mock his own persona by describing Simon Black as tall, dark and handsome—‘the heroic version of me’. He would act out a series of disasters, escapes and last-minute rescues to the delight of his audience, young or old. I was present on one such occasion and afterwards wrote a note of appreciation. He replied immediately, and we became lifelong friends.
In those early talks and lectures he spoke of his time as a bomber pilot with the RAAF, based at Pembroke Dock in Wales during World War II, and he was especially candid when describing the fear brought on by combat operations. Fear is a dominant theme in much of his writing and is a looming presence in almost every chapter of Ash Road, from Grandpa Tanner’s first sniff of smoke in the hot early morning air.
Ivan also described the difficulties of life as a soldier-settler farmer after the war. Crops were often destroyed by natural disasters, rabbits, or by plagues of insects. The episodes in Ash Road when old man George tyrannically drives both himself and his conscientious daughter Lorna in their desperate efforts to save the threatened raspberry crop and the sprouting baby carrots are taken from life: ‘It was a frantic season, a frantic struggle,’ he said.
In a lecture he gave at the University of Washington in 1974 titled ‘Real Adventure Belongs to Us’—a version of which I have heard him repeat locally—Ivan told of the epiphany that led to his exploring the inner strengths of kids in his writing. On a wet Sunday he and his wife Joy and their children were visiting his brother and family. With a head throbbing from the noise Ivan asked, ‘What would happen to these kids if we were not here to pick up the pieces, say, for a year or a month—or even a week? What would happen if they were left?’
‘They’d die,’ replied Ivan’s brother.
Ivan pondered; then came the lightning bolt: ‘Real kids, a group of kids like ours, as we used to be ourselves, would confront all the hazards, all the wonders of being alive.’
This was the genesis of a new direction in Southall’s novels. In Ash Road, Hills End and To The Wild Sky children face adversity on their own—not as super-kids, but as real children with strengths and frailties. The three boys, Harry, Graham and Wallace, who have set out on a bush camping trip in Ash Road are ‘old enough, surely, to take care of themselves and to keep out of trouble for a few days’. But before long they face an inferno, not only of fire but of guilt, anxiety and self-examination.
The novel is concerned primarily with the effects of disaster on individuals. Every character of whatever age, sex, or circumstance is pushed to the limits of their strength and, ultimately, to a deeper self-knowledge. The practical, down-to-earth Lorna George veers towards hysteria when her father collapses in the raspberry patch. Frightened and defiant, she shouts taunts at Wallace when he refuses to help, and orders him off the property. Wallace, ready to respond aggressively, hears his father’s voice warning him to hold his strength back, control himself ‘or you’ll bite off more than you can chew’.
Colin Thiele’s February Dragon, published in the same year, was also about a bushfire. Mavis Thorpe Clark’s Wildfire (1973) and, twenty years later, Roger Vaughan Carr’s Firestorm—dedicated to the memory of the children of South Australia and Victoria who lost their lives in the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983—have an exemplary sense of purpose. But it is Ash Road that best conveys the sense of panic caused by fire, along with the psychological repercussions of fear and guilt.
Southall achieved this by revealing the inner lives of his characters through the stream-of-consciousness style that he developed more fully in Josh, five years later. He also demanded that the reader maintain a hold on parallel stories told from the points of view of different characters in short dramatic episodes, something that was not common, even in Southall’s novels, until Ash Road.
Ash Road may be the most emotionally tense of Southall’s early novels. The sensory imagery is quietly controlled but has devastating force:
There were spirals of wind laden with leaves and dust, and the gate, off its latch, banged open and shut. And there were other sounds: giant trees along the roadside groaning mightily, and other living things that Peter could not see, screaming.
This was not how he imagined it would be.
Those spirals of wind become forces of change in the life of each character, but especially for Peter Fairhall. Overprotected and frustrated at the restraints on his freedom, when faced with the approaching fire he becomes fully aware of the situation: of himself, and of what could well be the plight of his Gran. And he runs as he has never run before—with elation at his newfound courage.
He knew, without being able to frame the words, that he was running into manhood and leaving childhood behind. He hated childhood. He ran away from it with joy. He was ready to prove himself a man; ready to be baptised a man with fire, whether he survived the ordeal or died from it. He didn’t care about the cost, except that his Gran should live to know—and that everyone should know—that her life had been given back to her by him.
I remember strongly identifying with Peter when I first read Ash Road. Rereading now after so many years—and so many terrible fires—I was struck afresh by the universality of all of Ivan’s characters. At this distance I can see more clearly bits of myself in almost every one of the characters in Ash Road. Each of those involved with the fire, not only the children but also the adults, face their own Golgothas—and do so courageously.
Despite all the acclaim, Southall was criticised for the novel’s potential effect on the nerves of children. But it is the nervous energy of the book that makes it so successful—the mayhem, the panic, the desperate muddling through in the realisation that danger is real and immediate, and the courage that emerges.
As a child of the Depression and a bomber pilot of many harrowing missions, Southall knew what it was like to be so fearful that rational thought gives way to blind groping. To press on in spite of such fear is, in Southall’s terms, true valour.
Ash Road
Author’s Note
For years I lived on a long hill on a winding country road. It wasn’t called Ash Road—or was it, I wonder? For all I know, it could have been called by that name once.
All the people who lived on that road I called my friends, and I still do; but I have peopled the Ash Road of this story with men and women and boys and girls who live on it only in my imagination. They are real in the sense that every character in a story must grow out of people the author knows or out of himself, but none of them is intended to represent an actual person.
Even Lorna—to whose memory I dedicated Ash Road with love—was another Lorna, a Lorna I knew first in my childhood and lost only a short time ago.
But the event upon which the story is based is not invented. When it started we all knew it had started, and when it ended we could not believe it.
I.S.
1
The North Wind
On Friday, 12th January, in the late afternoon, the three boys camped in the scrub about a mile from Tinley. It wasn’t the best spot to pick but at least there was water; and they were very tired.
They had escaped from the city for a glorious week of freedom in the bush. They had never done it before. They had planned it for months. At first their parents had said no, firmly no, but the boys had nagged and nagged. At last they had hit upon the ruse of encouraging the idea that Harry’s parents would agree if Graham’s parents would agree if Wallace’s parents would agree. In the long run the ruse had worked. The different parents—who rarely saw one another—were not anxious to be regarded by the others as overprotective. After all, the boys were all soon to be fourth-formers—old enough, surely, to take care of themselves and to keep out of trouble for a few days. Not so many years back boys of that age had been out in the world earning a living.
They caught a morning train to the hills, got out at Barkley station, hitched up their packs, and started walking. They felt marvellous, unrestricted, like young colts bred and raised in the home paddock for whom the gate to wide green pastures had been thrown open for the first time.
They were on their own. No one to say, ‘Do this’, ‘Do that’. No one to say, ‘Come here’, ‘Go there’. They smiled at one another, confidentially, conspiratorially, flushing with elation. They were too excited to speak logically; thoughts raced ahead of their tongues and confused their speech. Harry broke into song and Wallace whooped for the sheer joy of living. They wouldn’t have exchanged their week in the bush for two weeks or three at the beach with their families; they wouldn’t have wished to be anywhere on earth but where they were, striding up the road from Barkley towards Tinley.
There was a bus to Tinley, but they didn’t want to take it. A car stopped and the driver offered them a lift, but they waved him on. They wanted none of the trappings of the adult world. They wanted freedom from home, from reminders of school or study, from the endless round of errand-running, music practice, sisters, lawn-mowing, and hot showers. No dressing up for visitors or for Sunday. No shoe-cleaning or rigorous tooth-brushing after each meal. No going to bed while still wide awake. No getting up while still half-asleep. Graham, who had a flair for that sort of thing, made up a poem about it. It came out of the rhythm of his heels striking the road. For a single glowing moment he saw it as a whole, but when he tried to give voice to it, so that he could share it with Wallace and Harry, he lost it. It was one of those rare moments when all the things of heaven and earth are private and personal property, a moment so rare that it might come to him again only once or twice in his lifetime. It was a feeling, not really a thought, and the poem that belonged to it was never to be spoken or written down; it belonged wholly to the moment and would remain a part of the warm and personal mystery of realizing that he was someone different from everyone else in the world, someone separate from everything and everybody that ever existed. Separate, but not cut off. Separate, but belonging.
The north wind blew, gusting, a hot and oppressive summer wind, and there was not a cloud in the sky, and away to their right were the mountains hazed on the high horizon, not particularly grand and rugged, but a range of old mountains worn smooth, folded by numerous deep gullies, timbered by forests of great eucalypts, peppered with rooftops; slashed by the broad scars of the firebreaks, surmounted at the highest point by tall steel towers that transmitted television signals to the city on the plain in the west. On the foothills, the soil in places was thin and yellow and the trees were only twenty or thirty feet high. Farther up in the folds of the hills there were trees with enough timber in each of them to build a house; there were ferns three times the height of a man, and springs of clear water, and orchids growing wild and curious fungi and thousands of birds and tiny creatures and vegetation so dense that neither man nor boy could push through it. There were gentle slopes and saddles between the hills and other slopes that went up at very steep angles for a thousand feet or more. There were pockets of unspoiled country, wild, uninhabitable, where a boy could be king of the earth.
Perhaps this last thought had not occurred to Graham before. He had never really expected his parents to give way. His parents were straight-laced people, extremely old-fashioned about some things. Wallace might have been allowed to grow his hair a little longer than usual, Harry might have been able to wear casual clothes a little more ‘extreme’ than usual, but not Graham. Graham had to be respectable, neat and tidy, an example. He wearied terribly of having to be an example, because he was sure he wasn’t one at all. No one took any notice of him. In his own opinion he was a nobody. He often wondered why Wallace and Harry accepted him, but he didn’t wonder too deeply, in case he broke the spell and they stopped being friendly to him. It was good being near Wallace, because Wallace was a big chap, burly, almost as rugged as a man; a strong character, Graham thought. Harry, on the other hand, was clever, but no one sneered at Harry’s cleverness, because he was also the best runner for his age in the school. Graham was neither burly nor clever. All he had was sensibility, a feeling for other people, an unusual gentleness for his fifteen years, though he tried very hard to hide it. He often spoke roughly and laughed loudly so that others would think he was manly. And they did think it, too, when they bothered to notice him at all; they thought he was loyal and dependable and sensible. They weren’t completely wrong.
The boys walked on along the road to Tinley in the blistering heat of the sun, and their packs became heavier and their pace slower. Sometimes they sat in the shade to cool off and to ease their shoulders. More cars stopped to offer them a lift, but each of them they waved on. They were on their own. They wanted no one.
