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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 15
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| Or she is in the kitchen making 'thick hot winter soup'
(in contrast to his father's passion-fruit wine), or is in the rock
garden tending 'the gold and pearl trumpets called angels' tears', or she
is in the sitting room with the family photographs. The 'brown-filmed
photographs' link her with the possessive mother on the 'gully farm' who
tries to hold Odysseus at home, and the 'macrocarpa windbreak' of that
farm links it with the 'old house shaded with macrocarpa' from which
'rises my malady'. Thus in Baxter's symbolic world, his mother
and her places are associated with family conflict, the rebellion of the
adolescent, his struggle to get free of the maternal net. The most
painful associations are with the hillside below the Bedford Parade house
where, fleeing a 'difficult session' with his mother over his leaving the
university, Baxter, like Horse, sat 'on the bare earth under one of McArthur's
gum trees,' and wept, gripping 'the huge smooth bole of the tree as if
it were a human body'. However, he is calmed when
he looks down on the river, symbol of the flow of Time (and his own life),
the flow that inevitably carries him on to adulthood and independence.That
hillside looks down not only on 'the beer-brown somnolent wave / Of the
brackish river' and the cattleflats beyond it, but also on the 'narrow
tumulus' of The Giant's Grave standing between hillside and river.
The area is associated with childhood memories: racing 'sledges down the
hill to the Giant's Grave over dry cowpats to the slimy swamp at the bottom,
while the grassheads threshed at your knees'; fishing for eels; sailing
flaxstick boats. Fear then seemed irrelevant:
Nothing made us afraid. No, not fear of drowning, drawn
down in weedy arms,
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