Religion as Discourse: David Malouf's Conversations at Curlew Creek

Abstract

At the end of David Malouf's 'The Conversations at Curlow Creek (l996)', the central character Michael Adair, the officer who had been sent by the New South Wales colonial authorities to supervise the hanging of Carney, the bushranger, is about to embark by ship from Sydney to Ireland, but finds himself listening to a bizarre account of what was supposed to have happened to himself and Carney. It was an account based on rumour and spread abroad in New South Wales through the popular mind. Carney the bushranger, according to this account, did not die but was rescued at the eleventh hour and whisked away across an inland sea to 'a settlement of disaffected ticket-of-leave men and runaway convicts'.