Fiona McFarlane is known for her gripping narratives of psychological complexity and haunted Australian spaces.
Her debut novel, The Night Guest (2013), was set in a small coastal town where Ruth, a retired widow with dementia, begins to sense a tiger in her home, as Frida, a supposed government caregiver, gradually takes over Ruth’s life.
McFarlane’s next novel, The Sun Walks Down (2022), revisited the archetypal Australian story of a child lost in the wilderness. Set in 1883, its tale of colonial unease highlighted violence toward Aboriginal people and the exploitation of their labour. Notably, the race politics of its rural setting were discussed on a book club podcast hosted by former prime minister Julia Gillard.
In Highway 13, her new collection of short fiction, McFarlane delivers stories that are as complex as they are haunting. There are no Aboriginal characters, but the collection’s disturbing themes and unsettled mood resonate with Jane M. Jacobs and Ken Gelder’s argument in Uncanny Australia (1994) that post-Mabo Australian fiction has explored the unsettling idea of the nation and one’s own house becoming unfamiliar.
Review: Highway 13 – Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin)
Highway 13 depicts settler houses that have been inhabited, sometimes renovated, but then abandoned or demolished. Cars, service stations, hostels, highways, parks and forests, even more than houses, are also sites of anxiety about colonial identity and place. Hitchhikers, backpackers, tourists, immigrants and a man who stalks, captures, rapes and murders haunt these places.
The disturbance in these stories arises from comings and goings along footpaths, highways and skyways in and beyond Australia. It also stems from travel in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States. Moreover, it arises from discontent and hostility within supposedly settled groups.
The collection has 12 stories centred around a series of murders. Each title consists of one or two words and a date, such as Hunter on the Highway (1996) and Abroad (2011). The stories are arranged out of chronological order, creating a fragmented narrative. This structure is crucial to the series of strange encounters and re-encounters in the collection, enhancing the sense of unease.
Highway 13 opens with Tourist (2008), set in a place ominously nicknamed “Murder Town”, adjacent to “Barrow State Forest”, the first of many echoes of the backpacker murders.
Intriguingly, while the collection is titled Highway 13, it contains neither a story nor a highway by that name. The presence of only 12 stories raises the question of whether Highway 13 is the untold story.
There is also no story set in 1992, yet that year haunts the collection. 1992 was the year real-life serial killer Ivan Milat was arrested. Paul Biga, McFarlane’s fictional murderer, resembles Milat in several aspects. Milat was the son of Croatian immigrant Stjepan Milat and was raised in impoverished circumstances in Sydney’s western suburbs. Biga is the son of Polish emigrants, raised in similar circumstances in the same area. His victims, like those of Ivan Milat, are backpackers, hitchhikers and tourists.
In the opening story, Lena Derwent becomes the target of her co-workers’ ridicule. Events unfold from the perspective of Joe, a lifelong resident of “Murder Town”, who drives to work through Barrow State Forest every day. Initially, he joins the others in mocking Lena, but soon finds himself drawn to her. One evening, he offers her a lift home. She entices him to stop the car and walk through the forest with her.
As the first story in a collection echoing the murders of travellers in a state forest, Tourist (2008) is surprising. The “tourist” in this instance turns out to be different from what you might imagine.
Hostess (1986) is narrated by a retired flight attendant, who remains nameless. Only 26, he had been encouraged by the airline to make a “graceful exit by the age of thirty-five”. He rents a room from fellow flight attendant and retiree Jill in a remote beach town on the north coast of Western Australia. The “single place we could afford to live was a tropical town so remote you could justify flying there only if you had an ex-employee’s airline discount,” he notes.
Half in love with Jill, who merely abides him, the narrator spends his days watching her languish in a hammock. She rests under the shade of a custard apple tree to escape the excessive heat of the tropics while she waits for her much younger sister – only schoolgirl age – to visit.
The story is told by a man, yet resonates with the melancholy feelings of an ageing woman. While the narrator waits for Jill to love him back and Jill wistfully awaits a visit from her beloved sister, who never arrives, Jill discovers that her sister intends to marry a taxi driver, whom the reader connects to Paul Biga. She tries to halt the wedding, to no avail, and the reader is able to recognise another victim.
Adventures and entitlement
Hostel (1995) is told from the perspective of a married woman, who reflects on life in Newtown, an inner-city suburb that is “grimy but beginning to gentrify”. She describes a Newtown populated by University of Sydney students mingling with tourists on King Street and recalls her friends Roy and Mandy.
The narrator of Hostel (1995) perhaps comes closest to the voice of McFarlane herself. Wryly humorous and reflexive, she implicates herself in the grisly retelling of stories of horrific murders for entertainment. She describes how Roy and Mandy liked to recount their youthful backpacking adventures. “Weren’t we all once sweet, oblivious amateurs,” she notes. “There’s a night on a roof in Marrakech that I’ve told my husband about; another in Penang, in a hotel full of Belgian doctors, that I haven’t”. She continues:
Everywhere I travelled in the early 1980s, I found Australians in short shorts carrying copies of Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. We all stank, thought we were poor, and none of the sex we had was interesting enough to talk about within two years of coming home.
Apart from reliving their backpacking adventures, Mandy and Roy had a favourite story. It was about the night they found a “weeping” tourist near a hostel and took her to their Newtown home. They learned that the girl “was Swiss and eighteen, but her name was unusual enough, or her accent heavy enough, that all they could be sure of was that it started with an S”.
Roy and Mandy thus referred to her as S. They consoled her and took her to their house, where she stayed the night. They allowed her to sit on one of the “chrome bar stools” at their “kitchen island”. Mandy had imagined her future child sitting on one of these stools – “crayons gripped in chunky fists while she made dinner” – but by the end of the story, she and Roy are divorced and he is living in Paddington.
When the body of Sabina, a Swiss backpacker, is found in Barrow State Forest, Mandy and Roy hear her name on the news and assume it is S. The entitlement of newly graduated university students, soon to become affluent professionals, takes a disconcerting turn as their thrill in retelling the story of S heightens. “S” and “Sabina” are likely references to one of Ivan Milat’s victims: Bavarian backpacker Simone Schmidl.
While Tourist (2008) implicates a class of professionals who, once adventurous backpackers, now enjoy grisly stories of murder intertwined with their own lives, Democracy Sausage (1998) provides a perspective on foreignness and eastern European immigrants. It is narrated by a progressive politician and third-generation Polish immigrant who is running for office, describing the candidate barbecuing sausages on election day for voters.
Days before the election, Paul Biga has been arrested. For the politician Biga, sharing a surname with the murderer Biga has become an “appalling liability”. Reflecting on this, he recalls his daughter’s pride in their Polish heritage and the pain of its association with a murderer. He admits he “had never given the collection of syllables that is his surname a second thought” until his youngest daughter did a school project on Poland. He reflects that
there should be a correlation between our name – and that man – so that this one thing that’s always been slightly special about her, the weird name no one knows how to pronounce, which I foisted on her without thought but which she’s since embraced and made her own…
This story about a Polish-Australian man and his concern for his daughter is striking. It highlights the predominance of white-European or Australian perspectives in narratives about infamous murders.
When the narrator of Hostel (1995) asks “hasn’t every Australian nineteen-year-old had backpacking adventures?”, the story hints at a sense of entitlement associated with a certain class of educated youth – an entitlement not extended to Lucy, the subject of the final story in the collection. Lucy (1950) is set thirty years before the others. In this story, another perspective emerges, different from the predominantly white-European or Australian viewpoints.
It imagines 12 years in the life of Lucy, who grows up in an impoverished family of alienated immigrant Poles. The line “the passenger door swings open, as if by magic” seems like a hopeful ending. It describes the young woman leaving her situation of entrapment and isolation to marry Jan.
But the sentence takes on a sinister meaning. In another story, Demolition (2003), a character named Eva, who is in a wheelchair, watches from her upstairs window as the neighbouring “Biga house” is demolished. The story reveals that the house once belonged to the murderer Paul Biga and that one room in that house holds memories both dear and shameful to Eva. It also reveals that the murderer’s parents are named Lucinda (or Lucy) and Jan (John) Biga. The seemingly hopeful conclusion foreshadows darker events in the future.
McFarlane’s Highway 13 is a thrilling collection that explores an uncanny restlessness haunting the Australian psyche. Its crystalline prose and keen observations about everyday life open up new ways of thinking about the historical crimes that underpin our collective unsettlement.
Monique Rooney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
