Question 7

Flanagan died on the Franklin River [in western Tasmania] when he was 21 years old. He wonders if the book he is writing is a ghost story as a result.

Flanagan reflects on how quickly his parents’ faces changed after their death. He wonders if his own face changed after he “died” in his kayaking accident.

Flanagan wrote about his death in his first novel, but he didn’t understand at the time that what had happened then was still taking place. He feels that truly good writing “stands outside” of time.

When he was writing his first novel, the only writer he knew was M— [Margaret Scott]. She had spent time with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Cambridge in the 1950s. When he told her that he was planning on writing about her, she “sighed.”

While doing press for his first novel, the interviewer asked Flanagan if it was based on a personal experience of drowning. In response, Flanagan said simply “mmm.” He decided not to talk about it because it made him feel like “a wretched liar” (102).

Flanagan reflects on how words quickly become outdated and lose their meaning, and yet they are the only tools writers have to describe the world.

Flanagan’s mother admonished him not to be a “crawler” [convict] as a child. As a young man, he saved up to buy a laborer’s jacket called a “bluey,” based on the old convict uniforms. Despite this emphasis on Tasmanian history, he asserts that no one talked about the genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

The cottage Flanagan’s father was born in was on land originally granted to John Batman, who ran a death squad that massacred Aboriginal people.

Flanagan reflects that he has forgotten most of his life except for fragments. He remembers capturing and riding a Clydesdale horse bareback while camping with his family and how fun it was.

Flanagan only remembers bits and pieces of his family’s lives, such as when his sister returned home from teacher’s college wearing pedal pushers, a sign of her new freedom compared to the conservative Catholic school she’d attended previously.

Flanagan remembers when one of his older brothers got into a fight with his parents about the Vietnam War. The brother explained to Flanagan that their eldest brother would go to fight in the war even if he didn’t want to, but that he refused to do so.

Later, the eldest brother had a breakdown. During that time, they went camping together and his brother told him about his dream of building a kayak. Later, Flanagan ends up doing so himself. He thinks he was inspired by the death of the Tasmanian wilderness photographer Olegas Truchanas, who died trying to photograph the Gordon River to protect it from damming.

Flanagan asks his brother, now an old man, about his dream of building a kayak. His brother can’t remember saying it, but describes the feeling of driving home from school while snow was falling and feeling safe and content at being homeward bound.

Flanagan describes Leo Szilard a Hungarian-Jewish refugee who loved to think in the bath. On September 12, 1933, he ran a bath in the Imperial Hotel in London.

Szilard was an “independent” scientist. He had planned to attend a talk the day before in Leicester by Lord Ernest Rutherford, a physicist and colleague of Frederick Soddy, but he was too sick to attend.

Szilard was a “disciple” of H.G. Wells’s view of the possibility of science to transform the world and usher in a “new world order” run by scientists and intellectuals (117). Szilard was friends with Einstein. They first met in Berlin in 1920.

In Berlin, Szilard was a student and unafraid to challenge intellectual giants like Max Planck and Einstein. He was fascinated by science. He left Berlin for London following Hitler’s rise to chancellor in 1933.

In the bath, Szilard read news of Lord Rutherford’s pronouncement at his talk the day before that splitting the atom on an industrial scale was “moonshine.”

Szilard remembered The World Set Free by H.G. Wells and the imagined potential of what could happen if industrial-scale atomic fission was achieved. Szilard thought writers could see things more accurately than scientists and that he could use similar techniques. He felt “science was above all a product of the subconscious” (122).

Szilard went for a walk in London and looked at the street lights switching on and off. He was struck with inspiration.

Looking at the lights, Szilard realized it could be possible to find an element that would cause a chain reaction of nuclear fission where one neutron splits which causes two more neutrons to be split and so on.

Szilard recognized that a nuclear chain reaction would make industrial scale atomic energy possible and allow for the creation of an atomic bomb. He worried that if such a thing was possible that the Germans would build it first and “use it to enslave the world” (125).

A few months later, Szilard patented his ideas for atomic chain reaction and turned the patent over to the British Admiralty [today the British Department of the Navy] so it would be classified as a state secret. He tried unsuccessfully to make his dream of industrial scale atomic energy a reality, but he refused to share his secrets, in part because he was afraid of them falling into Germans hands. By winter 1938, Szilard was living in New York when German scientist Otto Hahn in Berlin demonstrated a nuclear chain reaction using uranium.

After learning of Hahn’s demonstration, Szilard unsuccessfully tried to persuade other scientists not to share their findings publicly because Germany could use them to build an atomic bomb. On April 29, 1939, the Nazis began an atomic research program to try and build their own atom bomb.

In July 1939, Szilard and his colleague Eugene Wigner found Albert Einstein at a vacation home in Long Island. They gave him a letter to deliver to an intermediary to give to President Roosevelt advocating for the US to make an atomic bomb before the Germans. In October 1939, the US government began to develop an atomic bomb through what became the Manhattan Project.

Szilard clashed with the antisemitic General Leslie Groves who ran the Manhattan Project. While Groves had Szilard surveilled, Szilard discovered that pure graphite could be used as a moderator to slow down the neutrons enough to ensure it hit the uranium and create a chain reaction. He knew how dangerous this finding was “because [he had] read a book written by H.G. Wells called The World Set Free” (134).

The Germans never succeeded in building an atomic bomb and surrendered in May 1945. The US then set its sights on using the atomic bomb on Japan, which Szilard felt was wrong.

President Roosevelt died before Szilard could attend his scheduled meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt to voice his disapproval. He gave a letter to James Byrnes, incoming secretary of state for President Truman, voicing his concerns but it was never delivered. Scientists from the Manhattan Project also signed a petition in protest of plans to bomb Japan, but it was delayed and classified by General Groves. On July 25, 1945, Truman approved plans to drop an atomic bomb on Japan.

Pilot Captain Paul Tibbets of the Enola Gay was given cyanide capsules to give his crew in the event they were shot down. When the bomb was dropped, the radiation caused the crew to light up. The bombardier Thomas Ferebee asked over the intercom if he would be able to have children.

Following the bombing, American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was lauded as a hero, but Szilard felt it was “one of the greatest blunders of history” (138).

Thomas Ferebee had four sons and died in 2000. Flanagan says there is no justice to be had for Hiroshima but rather “Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen” (139).

Once, three Japanese women came to Tasmania to apologize to Flanagan’s father for his treatment in the POW camp. Both the women and Flanagan’s father were apologetic for the death inflicted on either side of the conflict, and their meeting was a form of “liberation.”

Flanagan describes Ferebee’s body lighting up as an example of how “the suffering of the dead illuminates the living” (141).

Flanagan describes a memory of being two years old and the village flooding. His mother seemed excited about the prospect.

Flanagan describes driving with his family to their new home in 1963 to Rosebery, a small mining village in western Tasmania. It was a wild, rainforested place.

Flanagan describes how over time the rainforest was destroyed by development and industrialization leaving behind “a wet gravel desert” (147).

The family’s home in Rosebery was on the edge of a rainforested valley with a river winding through it that fascinated him. They had a small television that occasionally picked up shows like Reg Lindsay’s Country Hour [a square-dancing show] that the family would dance to, the only time Flanagan remembers his father holding him.

Soon after they moved to Rosebery, the town was the rainiest in Australia that year, or so Flanagan remembers.

Flanagan recalls one of his father’s friends named Bunny who was a drunk who lived in a lonely, isolated hut an hour away in Parrawe at the edge of a grassland created by the Aboriginal people. Flanagan feels the hut was the entrance to a place to which he is now traveling.

One night in 1966, Flanagan’s parents were driving him home at night when they stopped in the rain because they thought they saw a Tasmanian tiger in their headlights. The Tasmanian tiger was declared extinct in 1982.

Flanagan describes a strong memory he has of something that may have never happened. He remembers being in Williamsford, a small mining town, with his mother and being shocked at the poverty of the women there, one of whom stared at him.

Aboriginal people lived on Tasmania for over 40,000 years until the European “invasion.” Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer and scholar who coined the term “genocide,” described what happened to the Aboriginal people on Tasmania as a genocide. In the 20th century, when Tasmanian Aboriginal people tried to advocate for themselves, European settlers insisted they had gone extinct and therefore didn’t exist.

Flanagan’s father loved words, in part because his parents were illiterate. Every night, Flanagan’s mother would read to them, followed by evening prayers where the children would compete to list as many members of their family as they could remember. Then, Flanagan would fall asleep and dream of the stories in the books and of his family.

When he was four, Flanagan decided he would become a writer. Although he could barely write, he created a book that he had his mother send to his older sister at teacher’s college. From this, he learned that “the words of the book are never the book, the soul of it is everything” (161).

Later, Flanagan studied history at Oxford University. He feels that the teleological, linear European historical narratives he learned there don’t apply to Tasmania where history is a circle to which everything returns. He describes himself as “the issue of a genocide and a slave society” (162).

When Flanagan first wrote novels as an adult he wrote with the European modernist “tropes” of cities and crowds, even though when he first arrived in London at 24, he found these things frightening. Eventually, he realized that he was meant to write from his childhood experience of the wilderness and the destruction of that world.