Pitching Ethical Resonance: Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth

Abstract

In presenting Andrew McGahan with the Miles Franklin Award in 2005 for his novel The White Earth, the judges note that the author “subjects postcolonial Australia to a searing analysis”. As they go on to say the work “draws on the full resources of the novel as an imaginative form to explore some of the most urgent social and political issues haunting Australians today”. In the short paragraph published on the Award’s website, they mention the two main characters—nine year old William and his patron, his great uncle John McIvor. Throughout the novel the boy carries a festering, almost numbing wound in his ear. “William’s disease”, the judges observe, “is literally the burden of the past”. This essay traces an ethical register in McGahan’s novel, and argues that the historical index entwined in the novel relates not so much to “the burden of the past”, but rather to the burden of a present.