Confronting the Joint Legacies of the Holocaust and Colonialism in Alex Miller’sLandscape of Farewell

Abstract

The aim of this article is to apply the concept of synergy to the workings of memory in Miller's Landscape of Farewell (2007) by focusing on the relationship between its two main characters, Max Otto, a German professor of history, and Dougald Gnapun, an Aboriginal elder. It does so with a view to analysing the way in which fiction can weave connections between different histories of violence-in this case the Holocaust and the colonisation of Australia-while simultaneously pointing to the risks of downplaying the specificities of each case. Both men are burdened by traumatic memories of past atrocities: for Max it is his father's complicity in the crimes of Nazism, while for Dougald it is the 1861 Cullin-la-Ringo massacre of white settlers, allegedly led by his great-grandfather. Max and Dougald meet through Vita McLelland, a young Aboriginal academic visiting Hamburg, who invites Max to a conference at the University of Sydney and then to visit her uncle Dougald in Queensland so that the professor can learn about the history of Australia's indigenous people. Though far from one another in terms of geographical and cultural background, a close friendship develops between these two men whose only initial link is their being descendants of perpetrators. I argue that by confronting the joint legacies of the Holocaust and colonialism through Max and Dougald's synergistic and transformative friendship, and by placing their stories/memories in a broader transnational and transhistorical context, Miller's fictional recreation of these historical events engages with the complex relationship between victimisers and victims, perpetrators and descendants, history and fiction, remembrance and appropriation, which, as in the case of Max and Douglad, suggests the possibility of reconciliation with, and a letting go, of traumatic pasts.