The Turning

“He hadn’t hurt her, he knew that much, but he sensed she was in some kind of pain, something important that was out of his reach, the way everything is when you’re just a stupid kid and all the talk is over your head.”

In this moment, Vic Lang has just experienced a key coming-of-age moment—his first sexual encounter—but he is still too young to really understand the adult complexities of Melanie’s inner life. Melanie’s vacation is a break from hard, dispiriting work on the farm, while Vic lives a relatively promising life, has just moved to a new town, and he doesn’t have the emotional maturity to really grasp her disappointment. This will become a recurring motif of Vic’s stories, as he is repeatedly affected, sometimes in grave ways, by situations that are both out of his control and impossible for him to understand.

“Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognized from the old days, just confirmed what I’ve thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.”

A key element of this story is the narrator’s initial belief about the significance of time’s passage, but on returning home, the narrator starts to see that even though so much has changed, he is irredeemably linked to his past and, importantly, his guilt.

“It’s no fun wondering if your husband’s love could be another act of kindness, whether there’s something about you he feels you need to be compensated for, as if you too qualify as his sort of damaged goods.” 

This quote makes clear the underlying tension that Gail Lang is going through: her husband Vic’s history with Strawberry Alison and Melanie, both women who were marked out in his mind by their physical deformities, coupled with Vic’s desire to fight for the underdog, has led Gail to doubt the honesty of their marriage.

“His mother died of cancer. His father was there for it. Out of the blue, after twenty-something years. Two days of family and then the old man went back out bush and fell down a disused mineshaft. I only met him once at poor Carol’s bedside. He was so thin and proud. And sober. Like a man from another era.”

This quote addresses issues that the author doesn’t address in other stories, and it is crucial to understanding Vic’s breakdown in the stories at the end of the book. His father tells him in “Commission” that his intention on living where he did was to kill himself by falling down a mineshaft, and it’s likely that his death here is a suicide, or at least would be interpreted that way by Vic. The absence of his father, and his desire to understand him, becomes a defining part of who Vic is in the book. The desire is often unstated or under the surface of Vic’s narrative arc in other stories in the collection.

“And she knew where his real vanity lay, what it would cost him to be reviled by her parents. When Fay took off to leave them in the lurch again, how could he live here in town with them, meeting them at the school gate every morning. What would he be to them, the killer of their unborn grandchild?” 

Here, Fay is explicitly threatening Peter with the fear that he has felt about himself throughout this story: that he isn’t the good guy he thinks he is. He worries that his wife’s suicide reflects on him, and that he only was with her in the first place to get away from women like Fay. Fay telling her parents about the abortion they had would ruin his image with them.

“You’d have to imagine they were some kind of sleepwalker, that they were blind, incurious, too stupid to notice intimate things about your life. You’d have to not think about them, to will these intruders away. Or just be confident. Yes, I thought. That’s what it takes to be blasé about strangers in your house—a kind of annihilating self-assurance.” 

This quote illustrates Vic’s thoughts about the woman who has accused his mother of stealing and also brings the underlying class issues that the story grapples with to the forefront. It’s telling that Vic’s assumptions about the woman demonstrate a lack of empathy.

“But it’s weird, you know? There’s nothing left. It’s like there’s nothing left of him at all. And Mum’s too blind to see it. You can see this puzzled look on her face sometimes, like she can’t quite figure out how come everything isn’t alright now. She’s had her miracle—everything should be sweet. And I can’t stand it.” 

When Agnes Larwood’s father became sober, her mother thought that would be the answer to her prayers, but over time, it’s become clear that the problem was only amplified by alcohol, not caused by it. In a way, Agnes misses her father as a drunk, if only because he made sense to her.

“[…] she remembered a night from her childhood […] The whole beach strung with lamps and campfires, so many families out there in the dark dragging nets through the water and laughing. And out of the darkness a man singing. A high, lovely voice. So slowly around it, like the tide rising, the sound of others joining in, men’s voices, children, women, the whole night singing. But still at the core of it, that high sweet voice, her father’s, faceless forever in the dark.” 

Raelene is remembering a sweet time in her life before she arrived at this point in the story, sleeping next to an abusive man and leading a life without much goodness in it. Her interactions with Sherry are reminding Raelene of her worth and of the times in her life when she was happy. Sherry’s Christianity, specifically, is pushing Raelene to reconsider her values regarding masculinity.

“He smelled of death already, of burning, of bile and acid. He was crying and she did not pity him. He was gone and it didn’t matter when. Everything was new. In her dome it snowed birds as the van rocked, birds like stars. […] She was free. She had already outlived him.” 

Raelene is thinking this as she is being sexually assaulted by her husband; her experiences with Sherry and Sherry’s husband, along with the previous assault she has endured, have convinced her of her worth, and though she is not yet free from this awful situation, she knows that she will be able to escape it.

“He played football unselfconsciously and lived the same way. Until news of the old man’s death. The business of the funeral, and not going. It was about showing Max he didn’t care. That was what poisoned him; it got into everything, this business of showing them.” 

Leaper has walked away from his football career, and the central mystery of his character (and one that he’s still trying to figure out) is why. Seeing Max again helps him realize that he lost the interest in playing the game when he started doing it to prove who he was to other people, and that begins with him self-consciously not attending his father’s funeral.

“The reef was all over him but he held fast to his brother, hugging him to the board, hanging on with all the strength left in his fingers, for as long as he could, and longer than he should have.” 

A shark has attacked Leaper’s brother Max while they are surfing, and Leaper is trying desperately to save him, despite initially hesitating. Max and Leaper have a strained relationship, and Leaper has just been realizing that doing things for Max’s sake has been a poisonous impulse in his life since childhood. Whether Max lives or dies is ambiguous, and this act of heroism has the dramatic tension of that as well as Max and Leaper’s shared history of estrangement and abuse.

“From your parents’ window you look out on the strange town. Down there people are quietly stealing, cheating, lying. They’re starving their pets and flogging their kids and letting them hang in their wardrobes and burn in cars and choke to death in beachside toilets. And when legs are broken nothing happens, no charges are laid. It’s as if things like this are suddenly ordinary. You can’t believe how close you came to fitting in here. Everything you know and all the things you half know hang on you like the pressure of sleep.” 

This is Vic Lang’s thought as his father is coming undone at his job as a police officer. The town is falling into drugs, and the corruption at the center of his father’s work is becoming clear to Vic, though he’s too young to understand it. He is experiencing a loss of innocence well before he’s capable of dealing with it, which will come to inform his character going forward.

“You can’t leave the window. You’re not sure what to look for but you know you have to be ready. From here you have a long, clear view. Responsibility is on you now, formless and implacable as gravity. You’re just waiting for them to make a move. Let them. Yes, let them try.” 

The ending of this story makes Vic’s transformation clear; he loses his innocence, as he is now responsible for protecting his family from unseen danger. 

“Yet there was something impenetrable about her. She resisted intimacy. Beneath the mildness there was a hard-won pride, a kind of dignity that was intimidating. If she’d ever had a life beyond motherhood she wasn’t letting on to me, and the less of it she offered the less I came to enquire. In the company of this plain, quiet, grey-haired woman I became cautious, even defensive, conscious that I was not a mother, that I had no purchase.” 

Vic’s wife, Gail, has never been able to connect with his mother Carol, despite five years of marriage. This is partly because of Vic’s own desire to protect them, but it’s also Carol’s pride and inability to get close to others after Bob’s disappearance. “Reunion” is a story about this façade falling away, as Carol reveals who she is outside of motherhood.

“It’s not really about you, I said. I’m doing it for her.

I know that, he said hotly. But who’s she doing it for?

I’m buggered if I know, I said, but even as I said it I realized what it was. This whole expedition. It was her way of bringing the two of us face to face.” 

The confrontation between Vic and his father Bob after 27 years apart is tense, and Vic has been wondering why his mother even wants to see Bill again after her cancer diagnosis. Here, he realizes that what she really wants is for Vic to get the closure he needs because they all know that this is the last chance.

“But it’s all I ever wanted to do, you see, be a cop. And I hung on till there was nothing left of me, nothing left of any of us. Cowardice, it’s a way of life. It’s not natural, you learn it.” 

This is Bob Lang’s long-overdue explanation of what drove him to drink and eventually abandon his family. He has spent the last 15 years sober and in exile coping with the guilt of his cowardice.

“It wasn’t about her being young and pretty. He didn’t even think about her notebook and camera. It was about proving something. To her, to himself. That he was a policeman, someone you could trust. Head down, conscious of her panting behind him, he pressed on.” 

“Fog” is a story that takes place as Bob is first realizing how corrupt his police department is, and his drinking is starting to get out of control. He’s still wrapped up in the belief that he can make a difference, but he’s starting to realize that it’s futile, and he’s starting to give in to defeat.

“You couldn’t put your hands into the life of someone like this. Jesus, she was a kid, a cadet they’d sent out on a lost dog story. What the hell had he been thinking?” 

In this moment, Bob realizes that he truly has no one to turn to, and that seeing the young journalist he’s trapped in the wilderness with as a potential confessor is a terrible idea that would ruin both of their lives.

“I didn’t challenge the legend. On the contrary, I nurtured it. By nods and winks at first and later with outright lies. I told them what they wanted to hear, what I read in Cleo and Forum, the stuff I knew nothing about. It seemed harmless enough. We were just girls, I thought, fakers, kids making ourselves up as we went along. But the things I was lying through my teeth about were the very things these girls were doing.” 

Jackie is having her own understanding about the decline of Angelus in this moment, as she realizes that leaning into the gossip that’s circulating about her is far different from the experience of the young women who are actually engaging in that behavior.

“He looked beautiful in the firelight, as glossy and sculpted as the steel carving he’d given me. When the shark bellied up into the shallow wash, Boner limped into the water with his inch-thick spear and drove it through the creature’s head and a kind of exhausted sigh went up along the beach. The fire burned down. We drank and dozed until sun-up. Within two days I was gone and it was a long time before I looked back.” 

This is the last time Jackie sees Boner at his best, and a moment that might lead to a kind of redemption of their friendship if she wasn’t about to leave for school. The next time she hears from him, it’s when he is a fully broken man about to be committed. This moment of him victorious is his turning point toward utter defeat.

“All I knew was this, that I hadn’t been Boner’s friend at all. Hadn’t been for years. A friend paid attention, showed a modicum of curiosity, made a bit of an effort. A friend didn’t believe the worst without checking. A friend didn’t keep her eyes shut and walk away. Just the outline now, but I was beginning to see. They’d turned me. They played with me, set me against him to isolate him completely.”

Here, Jackie realizes that not only was she not there for Boner, she actively believed the things the police told her about him: the pornography that at his place with her picture pasted to it was likely staged, and their explanations for his commitment and the injuries he suffered were likely a lie. She was his only friend, and they manipulated her into hating him.

“I breathed in the smell of him, looked at his hands on the unread book. I thought of him crossing the quad to see me next week. People around us pulled down their luggage. When we came into the station there was a cop car there with its lights going. […] I never spoke to him again. This new war made me remember. It was the little sister in the hospital with meningitis. I heard all about it later. She died.” 

The narrator of this story is seeing Vic at what might be his last innocent moment, and she is thinking about the youthful flirtation that they might have while he is about to realize that his sister has died. It’s worth noting that Kerry’s death is almost never confronted head-on in these stories; the trauma of it is left unspoken by the Lang family, despite the fact that it contributed to the trauma that drives each of the Lang characters throughout the collection.

“We used to play these Aboriginal kids from St. Joe’s, he continued, unabashed. They always flogged us. So arrogant and graceful and hostile—just all over us—you know, and then somehow, chirpy as you’d like, they’d con us into walking them back to the hostel afterwards. I think they were afraid of the dark or maybe something they had to walk past.” 

Here is a moment where Vic, despite having a clear understanding of the danger that Angelus posed when he lived there as a child, is failing to see the ways he was spared the worst because of his race and class. The Aboriginal kids are likely afraid of not just criminals but the police, and Vic is unable to see that beyond the “con” of walking them home lies a very real threat that the Aborigine population of Angelus faces.