Question 7

Physicist Enrico Fermi, “the architect of the atomic bomb,” argued that no intelligent life form existed in outer space because no evidence of them had ever been found; this is known as the Fermi Paradox (217). Leo Szilard and his fellow Jewish-Hungarian scientists, including Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” joked that they were the offspring Martians left behind to develop the atomic bomb.

H. G. Wells had been in part inspired to write The War of the Worlds by the history of the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Wells felt the colonizing Europeans invading Tasmania and killing the people there were analogous to the Martians invading Earth in his story.

Although most Tasmanian Aboriginal people were killed in the Black War, a few hundred survived to pass down their millennia-old traditions and language. Flanagan characterizes the British colonization as a form of sacrilege of a sacred place.

Flanagan reflects that even though the Jewish-Hungarian scientists joked that they were the Martians, they weren’t; “they were just one more people the real Martians exterminated” (221).

Flanagan draws a connection between the British goals of “obliteration” of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as analogized in Wells’s The War of the Worlds and the nuclear apocalypse in The World Set Free. Flanagan’s ancestor Thomas arrived as a “convict slave” in Tasmania and 110 years later Flanagan himself was born. His mother cried when she learned she was pregnant with him.

“Convict slaves” had to stay in the colonies after they were freed. In Tasmania, over time, the Aboriginal people and the freed enslaved people formed a hybrid culture even as racism and classism continued to impact their society. Flanagan characterizes this process as “a matter of question 7” (225).

After Flanagan father’s death, Flanagan found a letter from a cousin begging him to never disclose that their grandmother was of Aboriginal decent. Flanagan wonders if his father’s animist beliefs were a reflection of this heritage and what this means about his family’s cultural identity.

Flanagan describes Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” where prisoners are tortured with needles that inscribe their crimes on their bodies. He sees this as a description of Tasmanian history which is steeped in a colonial past that is denied or justified by the English who perpetrated it while simultaneously blaming white Australians for its repercussions.

Flanagan argues the “Martians” (referring to the English) forced European convicts into employment in a colonial system to persecute Aboriginal people. That same System was responsible for their own persecution. He tells the story of Black Mary Cockerill, an Aboriginal woman, who in 1818 turned her lover, the convict Michael Howe, into the authorities after he ran away from the farmer to whom he had been assigned. Howe killed Cockerill and then Howe was himself beheaded, and his head displayed on a pike in Hobart. The “shame” of the mob spitting on Howe’s head was carried by Tasmanians even though it “was not ours and […] would always be ours” (230).

Flanagan attended Oxford University. There, he heard supervisors and fellow students use slurs and criticize his work for its “feminism” and focus on Australian history.

Flanagan found England a depressing, grey, industrialized place without any “wild country” into which he could escape.

Flanagan describes a “law don” at his college who acted upper-class but was denigrated by the others as “the dirty little East End Jew” (232). The more the man acted like the Oxford upper-class, “the more they despised him” (232).

While he was at Oxford, the “Bullers” [members of the exclusive Bullingdon Club] dressed like “Nazis.” One Buller who later became prime minister [Boris Johnson] was shocked when Flanagan refused to support his run for Oxford Union president. Flanagan did not want to “pretend to be a Martian” (233).

Flanagan argues that the “true language of Oxford” was not the witty epigrams the university is known for but the slurs he heard students and faculty use.

Flanagan summarizes a Chekhov short story called “A Case History.” In the story, a doctor treats the daughter of a factory owner. He realizes her wealth is the cause of her illness. He argues that those who perpetuate injustice injure themselves as well. Afterwards, forgetting the events “is both forgiveness and vengeance, failure and freedom” (236).

Flanagan connects the writing of Question 7 with H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free and all of the related events in between including his father’s internment in a POW camp, the development of the nuclear bomb, and the bombing of Hiroshima.

When Flanagan was 21, he was working as a white-water kayaking guide on the Franklin River. His kayak got stuck between boulders at the bottom of waterfall.

Flanagan’s legs were pinned into the kayak, and he couldn’t get out. He had to fight the river to avoid drowning.

Flanagan was trapped in the kayak and thought he was going to die.

Another kayaker, P—, tried to free Flanagan by moving the kayak for hours, but he was unsuccessful.

Eventually, P— got a rope and tried to have the rest of the group pull Flanagan out of the kayak, but that did not work either.

After some time in the cold water, Flanagan realized he was dying.

Flanagan focused on “the weight of existence” to fight the pull of death (250).

Flanagan thought of his parents and an ex-girlfriend, J—. These thoughts gave him courage to keep fighting.

Flanagan heard a helicopter above him and thought about how his story would be “a suppertime snuff story” on the evening news (251).

P— continued to try and free Flanagan, but P— was running out of strength.

Flanagan told P— he was “going.” P— refused to accept it and then disappeared from Flanagan’s sight again.

After P— left, Flanagan prepared to die. He felt “ready to return to the sky and the sea” (255).

P— told Flanagan he was going to try again to free him.

P— was finally able to lift the kayak. When the angle was right, the group pulled on the rope to free Flanagan. He popped out of the kayak.

Flanagan was swept through the rapids and resurfaced, naked, in the middle of the river.

When Flanagan closed his eyes, he felt he was still in the kayak, so he reopened them in panic. He wondered if he had actually died.

Flanagan was carried out of the water, naked, unsure if he was alive or dead. He thought what was happening to him was “just a hallucination” (258).

Flanagan and P— drifted apart after P— saved his life. Flanagan later apologized to P— for this, but P— understood that “any form of gratitude for having your life saved feels inadequate and false” (260). One drunken night at a bar, Flanagan told J— he had thought of her as inspiration to fight for his life while almost drowning. She was kind but did not really understand.

Afterward, Flanagan did not want to talk about what he had been through.

After surviving, Flanagan visited places and people he thought he “would never see again” (261) and found it comforting. He was grateful for their kindness and love.

While recovering from the ordeal in the hospital, Flanagan felt he was “still stuck screaming in a distant, wild river” (262). He left against doctor’s orders and went to the bus stop.

Flanagan kept returning to kayak the Franklin River even though he would get nightmares in anticipation of his visits that ended after he passed the rapids where he had almost drowned. It took him decades to realize he had died that day. His first novel was about his experience.

One night at a bar, a woman told Flanagan she had slept with the protagonist of his first novel and that she had heard the author was “an arsehole” (266). Later, another woman called and accused him of stealing details of her best friend’s death for his novel.

Flanagan’s parents never asked him about the accident. Later, when Flanagan won a scholarship to study at Oxford, his parents had a muted response to the news. He imagines his father was simply content that Flanagan was “alive and [he] wanted to live” (267).

Flanagan remembers being four years old and listening to the sea. He worried the sea would overtake take them. In the morning, he ran to the beach and saw the ocean was still far away.

As a young man, Flanagan went camping near the Forth River which led to that beach he’d visited as a child and thought about how there was a life before and after he died. He felt the world had a new “extraordinary clarity.”

Flanagan laid there watching the stars and feeling a connection to the Earth. Despite the speed of the Earth’s rotation, he decided to hold on for dear life.

After his time at Oxford, Flanagan returned to work as a guide on the Franklin River. He looked at a fork in the river and felt “poised between [his] past death and [his] future life” (275). He realized it was time to begin writing.