Gone

Author: Jennifer Mills
Publisher: University of Qld Press
Price: $27.23 (paperback)

Australian writer Jennifer Mills’s second novel is an eloquent and mesmerising tale of a disturbed hitchhiker’s journey across Australia and through his own dark past. After being released from a Sydney prison for an undisclosed crime, Frank, a mentally fragile man with no possessions and no identity, sets out on a 4,000 kilometre journey across the outback, intent on returning home after a fifteen-year absence.

With spare but evocative prose and a gathering sense of foreboding, Mills skillfully takes the reader on a journey that’s both psychological and literal: Frank slowly tries to piece together an increasingly disturbing series of flashbacks from his childhood as he hitchhikes out West with a succession of colourful strangers. It’s these flashbacks that ultimately provide the key to Frank’s true identity—an unravelling that is news to Frank as much as for the reader—and the reason for his return home.

There are many intriguing layers to Gone: it seamlessly marries the raw suspense of Frank’s story with a stark but lyrical portrait of Australia’s vast and forbidding outback, a place mapped with roads and horizons that seem to stretch into dusty forever. It reminds us that Australia is not the lucky country for everyone. Mills is from Alice Springs—she lived in a car on the outskirts of the town while writing Gone—and her familiarity with an Australia that many of us are too quick to forget, a place that hides ‘dead grass and dead cattle and empty beer cans’ and detention centres where refugees are ‘dumped like animals’, brings Frank’s story sharply into the social present.

Some of his benefactors are simply struggling to survive: ‘don’t worry, mate. I’ve got it,’ he is assured by a kindly train signal operator who offers to pay Frank’s bus fare to Alice Springs, but ‘the apologetic look the man has to give his wife,’ and the couple’s bare pantry, do not escape Frank’s eye.

But Gone is not a thinly veiled political rant or social commentary. It is as much a story of life on the road as it is an exploration of Frank’s psyche and the lesser-known side of Australia. Mills tempers the sombre weight of her subject matter with a cast of vividly rendered characters, from a pair of cheery English tourists to a senile woman in orange slacks with ‘the direct and curious eyes of the mad’ who asks Frank the same questions over and over again. There is a wonderfully laconic recurring joke about Frank’s chosen method of transport: it seems that almost everyone who offers him a lift can’t help but refer to famous stories of dead hitchhikers. ‘You don’t see many of you blokes around these days,’ says one man who offers him a ride; ‘too many murders I thought’. ‘You seen Wolf Creek?’ another driver asks him. Frank, quiet and wary, ‘wonders if murder and suicide and scars just come up like this all the time, in everyone’s conversation, or if it’s a highway thing’.

Through Frank’s measured internal reflections and his often cautious, understated interactions with those he meets—‘I’m just trying to get up the road,’ he tells a cop who finds him loitering at a service station—Mills deftly builds a compelling portrait of a man who has lost himself and must begin to reassemble what remains.

Years in prison have disconnected Frank not just from his own identity, but from the world around him. ‘Poisoned country,’ a driver remarks to Frank as they drive through Woomera, ‘only good for the refugees’. Frank can only shake his head in response. ‘Where have you been?’ the driver asks, mystified by his passenger’s lack of understanding. ‘Nowhere,’ Frank replies.

Paradoxically, it feels as though nowhere is where he is returning to. Frank’s vague awareness of his destination, his old family home out West, takes him through a powerfully evoked Australian landscape that seems as brutal and disheartening as his buried past. The outback is an overwhelming stretch of ‘rocky plains’ and ‘desert scrub’, either baked in sun or drenched in rain, with the highway ‘carving its bloody mark through the country like a bodgy tattoo done in private and later regretted’. The towns and roadhouses that Frank passes through are at once sad and menacing: an abandoned abattoir ‘squats like a clot in the artery of the road’; near Katherine, he passes a camping shop ‘with its doors wide open but the inside as black as night’.

The desolation of these landmarks mirror Frank’s fractured state of mind as he hovers between a hazy past and uncertain future.

Frank’s journey may be one with no clear beginning and no clear end, but in its ambiguity lies its power: the power of forgetting, of reinventing, of beginning again. This may be ‘country that cracks lives between its teeth and leaves the bones lying around’, but, as one driver remarks to Frank, the same country is also ‘so healing. It’s like it erases you. The desert wipes your hard drive clean’. For Frank, redemption may lie not in unearthing what has gone before, but in leaving it behind.

Carody Culver