Dirt Music

“After weeks of the virtual, it was queer and almost painful to be completely present.”

Georgie is confronted by a sudden surge of physical sensation as she swims nude in the lagoon with a stranger’s dog. Not only had Georgie isolated her emotional self from her declining affection for her spouse and stepchildren, but she had shut off her body to sensation. This rare encounter with the sea on a random November dawn brings Georgie into conflict with her reality. Totally exposed, she cannot hide from herself.

“In earlier times, when arson was a civic tool and regulatory gunfire not unknown at sea, the locals sorted poachers out with a bit of White Point diplomacy.”

The novel is set in White Point, a small fishing town tucked in the safety of a lagoon where fishermen primarily seek rock lobster (crayfish). Although the town has changed since the 1950s, it remains a locale regulated by and for the fishermen. A shamateur stands little chance in a town that survives off of legitimate fishing. Lu knows his boat will be sunk, his farm burnt, and his life in danger. Likewise, he knows no one will come to his aid.

“It takes a breath or two to digest the fact that Yogi, the little bugger, crossed himself going by as if warding off the evil eye.”

To the townspeople of White Point, the Fox Family represents bad luck. Both of Lu’s parents die while he’s young, and then all but one are killed in a car accident. They were poor, lived off the land and sea, and had little regard for civilization. As outcasts, they seem oblivious to their banishment, content to play music and enjoy life. This was unbearable to the locals, who despised the family’s inability to see themselves as the townspeople saw them.

“She only knew that love was impossible. It arrived and moved on like weather and it defied pursuit. Not just romance—and kind of love. The emotion itself was promiscuous and not to be trusted. She’d thought all this before and failed to learn from it. Story of her life.”

Riding with the shamateur toward Perth, Georgie is consumed with her recurring mistake, which is to love again knowing it will fade. Georgie fights to survive one dying love while another blossoms, ultimately realizing she must heal herself before she can be a partner to anyone. In part, this emotion comes with her impulsivity after long bouts of indecision and inaction. She has been lonely for a long time when she finally takes Jim’s car and leaves, only to return the next day. She was never really leaving, only playing with freedom. Eventually, she leaves for real, with a finality that shocks her. She learns from her mistake, at long last, and builds a life for herself alone, where she heals and finds contentment.

“Anything you could play on a verandah. You know, without electricity. Dirt music.”

Lu explains the type of music he used to play, citing blues, country, and folk but admitting it is none of that and all of that. The book gets its title from his description of earthy, old-time music that is of the land, honest and raw, just as Lu himself belongs to the land and the sea of White Point. Dirt Music begins as something played on verandas but ends in the jungles of northern Australia with Lu plucking taut fishing line and listening to the vibrations.

“She had never understood the grip that places had over people. That sort of nostalgia made her impatient. It was awful seeing people beholden to their memories, staying on in houses or towns out of some perverted homage.”

Lu explains that despite losing everyone and everything in White Point, he has stayed. This, to Georgie, is inconceivable. As an escapee prone to abandoning old lives that don’t suit her, this choice feels like a prison. Ironically, it is Lu who skips town while Georgie makes a life for herself in his abandoned farmhouse.

“She was no better than those bourgeois princesses who fall in love with tattooed prisoners. You had to ask yourself if this whole sordid episode of finding yourself caught between a big-knuckled fisherman and his hillbilly rival was anything more than a pointless and embarrassing perpetuation of her adolescent rebellion.”

Georgie is angry that Lu has left White Point, leaving her behind. After the death of her mother, she is questioning the reasons she made major life decisions. Here the author plays with Georgie’s characterization, oscillating between defining the woman by her abilities, strength, and grit, and displaying her interiority in opposing terms. A flawed and contradictory character, Georgie comes alive on the page specifically because she is an enigma. She is a reliable and believable character, though her changing opinions cast her as fickle.

“She missed the plainness of early childhood, the years when you lived without a mask, without acting your part.”

In an emotional stupor after the death of her mother and Lu’s sudden abandonment, Georgie copes with the pain by staying busy. When grief finally catches her, she is consumed by sadness and cries for her mother, but mostly for the feeling she has as a child which is in stark undeniable contrast to her life now. Georgie’s affair with Lu was a recreation of the maskless, unassuming sensation of childhood.

“He was just another symptom of her weird attraction to suffering.”

After Lu disappears and she buries her mother in Perth, Georgie returns to a life of quiet domesticity and believes her relationship with Lu was little more than an effort to fix broken men. She admits that this same impulse once drew her to Jim Buckridge, a widower with two children and a broken heart. She is angry at being abandoned and angrier still that she did not see it for what it was. In time, she will understand that this is how she felt about Jim, but her love for Lu was pure.

“The music hammers at him; he feels it at the back of his throat. Steely Dan, their best album. Full of angular licks and slick changes, lyrics that peck at you. But he doesn’t want to hear it. Music unstitches him now; he can do without it.”

For Lu, music and memory are intertwined. To listen to music is to feel the unbearable weight of his loss. He has avoided music for over a year, but on his journey north, he cannot escape. It begins with tapes played in the hippie’s car, progresses to meaningful, emotional music with Bess, and ends with a guitar in his hands with Menzies and Axle. In all of these encounters, Lu pushes away music for fear it will crush him. It is not until he is alone much later that he finds music will not unstick him but help to revive his weary soul.

“Russian bloke told me once. Said we all die. But you might as well die with music. Go out big. You see what I mean? She wants big music, Lu. And north is where you get it.”

In a classic hero’s journey, a mentor appears to reveal the essence of the hero’s quest. This mentor is Bess, a woman dying of cancer who has decided to live her last days to the fullest in a world of music, poetry, passion, and travel. This is unbearable to Lu, who must reject the call to adventure, in part out of grief and in part because he’s committed to the pain that has redefined him. He isn’t ready to heal.

“If you want to be left alone then clear out. Go somewhere clean. Some place with water and food so you’re not skulking at the margins to keep yourself alive.”

Lu has finally arrived in the north of Australia and regrets the year he spent in White Point after the fatal accident. He loves White Point precisely because it is laden with memory. The farmhouse, the paddocks, the lagoon, and the town streets are all memories of his lost family, and yet with them gone, he just wants to be left alone. Although he learns that he was wrong to live in the shadows in a town that had nothing to offer him, he is also wrong to sneak away in search of solitude when he so desperately wants love and belonging.

“She was drifting. Had been for years. There’s nothing like an institutional organization for dressing you up in an aura of action and hiding your aimless passivity.”

As Georgie thinks about luck, she chastises herself for once believing that luck was something that only passive people believed in. Luck resurfaces throughout the novel, in part because it goes in tandem with fishing, in part because the Fox family seems to have none of it, and in part because luck is often perceived as fatalistic. At this point in the novel, she finds she can hide from taking action by taking small steps in the kitchen and home, and in this way, she has lived an aimless three years in White Point.

“You don’t always get a choice, said Lu, between a right thing and a wrong thing.”

On a tape recording, Georgie hears Lu’s voice after many months separated from him, as he sings with his brother and sister-in-law. Georgie feels she is trespassing in his former life. For a man like Lu, choices have been sparse. Born into bad luck, to a shunned family with a doomed mother and father, he has lived a life of little choice.

“God’s good earth. Tilting away from him time and again, stealing from him. Sliding beneath the eyes of that old ute and then suddenly catching, biting enough for it to roll and send the kids out into the paddock like flung mailbags. The world is holy? Maybe so. But it has teeth too.”

Lu ponders the contrary views of his deceased parents, one who saw life as good and wonderful and full of gifts, the other who was wary, cynical, and disbelieving. After thinking about them, Lu decides he falls somewhere in the middle. He has experienced the good and the bad, and he has reason to believe in both.

“God knows, music will undo you, and yet you’re whacking this thing into a long, gorgeous, monotonous, hypnotic note and it’s not killing you, it’s not driving you into some burning creaming wreck of yourself—listen!”

After over a year of no music, shunning his guitar, his radio, the cassettes, and everything else—Lu finds music in the twang of a fishing line. As he plucks it, the beauty of dirt music returns to him, and he is shocked to find it isn’t undoing him. His happiest moments were with his deceased family, and those moments were always heightened with music. Now, with them gone, he finds the music holds.

“With this fullness, this ecstatic sense of volume, there’s only one regret and that is having no one to share it with.”

Having rediscovered music and having found peace and contentment on Georgie’s unnamed island, Lu is happy. He admits, here, that his only craving is for Georgie. Without her, the sensation of the music, the fullness of the island, all of it feels slightly diminished. At long last, he knows what he wants.

“The dead, he thinks, it’s always the dead. I’m hearing dead people and singing their words. I’m dreaming of them, that’s all I do. All my people are dead people.”

One night on the island, Lu has a feeling that Bess has passed away, and he listens to her death song play in his ears. At this, he realizes that much of his life is dealing with the dead. Everyone is gone but Georgie. She is all that is left in his world. On the island, Lu comes to many realizations, but learning to live despite the losses is the hardest, and in this flash of anger, he wishes he had more than ghosts to keep him company.

“Those evenings you knew what was holy. Just the smell of the night and the smiles on their faces and the chords slipping each to each.”

Although the townspeople think of Lu as unlucky, and his family as cursed with misfortune, Lu feels differently because he’s had dirt music in his life. Moments of holy happiness that cannot be explained, and that exist in the striking of chords and the whirling of notes. This joy, especially in contrast with the pain, suffering, and loss, is the soul of the novel, the author suggesting that whatever may come, moments of holiness among family are sustained like the reverberations of music in one’s soul, even after death.

“Music wants to be heard. Feelings want to be felt. He’d always wanted to be found, even if he didn’t know it. She had found him once. And that was in the dark. She’d just have to find him a second time.”

Georgie visits an abandoned camp of Lu’s and knows instinctively that Lu, who lives on emotion, did not come to the wilderness to die. Georgie understands that he wants love no matter how far away from it he runs. Lu is sensual, emotional, and caring, and he cannot hide from the desires that spring from a temperament centered on love. She knows she will find him precisely because he wants to be found.

“You know the Christmas tree from down our way, Red? Nuytsia floribunda. Big orangey-yellow blossoms on it—they flower in summer, you see ‘em all along the sandy country. Thats what this prick is like. All color and nectar. The bees come swarming.”

Jim describes Lu Fox as fishing guide Red Hopper, explaining him as a flowery thing that attracts bees. It is clear Jim does not like Lu, but he seems to understand that Lu exists in stark contrast to himself—the emotionless worker bee. The contrast between the two rivals is highlighted in various ways in the novel, but Jim’s assessment of Lu is telling because he appears to understand the man’s essence. In a similar vein, Lu seems to understand Jim, his assessment of his rival one of rage, cruelty, and danger.

“Christ, it’s like the past keeps at you. Whatever you do. However you change.”

Jim Buckridge spends the bulk of the novel trying to change himself, to change his family’s legacy, and to prove to everyone that he’s accomplished his task. Still, he’s stuck in a situation he feels responsible for, falling into fits of rage with his aim of proving he’s escaped his anger. The iron grip of family legacy is a central theme in the novel, and nowhere is it more harnessing than in Jim’s struggle to let Georgie go without punishing Lu, in full view of the townspeople.

“Georgie didn’t mind the loss of the fish, in fact she was glad of it. Something like that you wanted to share. For the rest of your life you’d need someone with whom you could bring it to mind with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.”

Georgie understands that her life with Jim is over and has no desire to share any moments of joy with him. Without Lu, she’d rather not have moments like this anyhow. In this thought, Georgie is firmly decided on her divorce from Jim, a welcome change after over a year of indecision and inaction.