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The Mango Tree

Author: McKie, Ronald
Year: 1974
Type: Novel
Edition: Collins, 1974

Synopsis

“Jamie watches the Queensland town beneath him from the sheltered branches of the mango tree. Through days of shimmering heat choked with red dust to days of rainstorms bringing the mud to the mangroves, everything is as it should be - the sights and sounds and smells are as familiar to him as the everlasting childhood in which they appear. Then everything changes overnight when he falls in love. A tender, fumbling first love that flowed and ebbed just as suddenly. And in its wake came death, the sudden shocking death of someone he loved.” (publisher's blurb)

Narrative Locations

The Coast, Bundaberg region, Queensland  

Temporal setting: Circa 1910-1920

Location notes:

Jamie twice journeys to the coast during the novel.On the second visit, dialogue reveals the beach to be Sandhills Beach. Until 1921, the town of Bargara thirteen kilometres east of Bundaberg was called Sandhills. Coordinates have been given for Bargara.

Quotes

“The day after full moon was a Saturday. The left with the sunrise and drove in the borrowed dogcart along the south road before turning towards the sea. The town still slept but cane cutters were moving. In heavy boots and battered hats with their lunches in carrying bags slung on their backs or tied to the handlebars. They were clean and shaved, but in the afternoon would ride back to town, dog weary, stinging from the cane slashes, black as kanakas [Pacific Islander labourers] from the burnt trash. All except their eyes.

They saw the sea glitter from near the Mount down a mile-long avenue of waving cane topped with violet feather duster flowers and took another track south between the low walls of morticed stone the kanakas had built with craftsmen's hands fifty years before as they planted the first cane.

'Where are we going?' she asked.

'Sandhills Beach.'

'Lovely. Miles from nowhere.'

'That's why I picked it.'

[...]

Sandhills Beach was a crescent of butter-coloured sand between brooding basalt headlands, and beyond the points the sea broke gently on splayed reefs. Behind the beach the sandhills climbed steeply and on their sides crests perched breadfruit trees whose parchment leaves clashed in the breeze, and on the slopes sand-vines trailed their tick saucer leaves and pale blue bell-like flowers. Beyond again, where they left the dogcart and hobbled the horse, was a grove of she-oaks.”

(p. 191;192)



Town, Bundaberg region, Queensland  

Temporal setting: Circa 1910-1920

Location notes:

The Mango Tree is a fictionalised account of the authors childhood and adolescence, growing up in Bundaberg, North Queensland. The town is never named in the novel, though other geographical narrative markers, such as its northern location and distance from the coast and The Coral Sea, support Bundaberg as the geographical setting.

The novel is set around World War One, as protagonist Jamie comes of age during the period. 

Quotes

“From down river where the mangroves grew thirty feet above the mud, from upstream beyond the second rapids where the cattle hills began, from near Black Scrub where the flying foxes camped in millions, from farms along a coast of golden bays and tumbled basalt where the breadfruit trees were spiders on the headlands. And from further out, Tara and Emu Creek and Nut Hill where the tribes had gathered under truce not so long ago when the trees were bearing to share, in suspended enmity, nature's gifts.”

(p. 4)


“The Germans came first [to the Royal], and never a minute before or after twelve. Descendants, most of them, of emigrants from the political troubles of the eighteen forties, they still spoke the dialects of homeland principalities, still taught them to their children, still worshiped in the bleak Lutheran chapels of their grandparents' youth. Yet they were fiercely Australian, too fiercely some, at a time when their ancestral homeland was at war and 'Hun' or 'Boche' worse than an insult. They suffered the hurt and nostalgia all immigrants feel who are torn between the traction of new life and old blood, of ancient ways and harsh beginnings. And the hurt was compounded when, early in the war and at Kitchener's call, some of the young men had volunteered and had been rejected because of their origins. During those years of war, many kept to themselves on their farms and avoided the towns as much as possible, except at Christmas and Easter. The drunken insult, though rare, happened.”

(p. 6)


“The Chinese waited until the German farmers had finished heir second glass of ale and had left to rejoin their families. The German women never appeared. he Germans ignored the Chinese and seldom patronised their shops. No meeting ground, no common empathy, existed between the two races. To the Germans, and to most older Australians, they were Chinamen or Chinee or Chinks or Chows and inferior. Even townspeople who did business with them and liked them, did not mix. Chinatown was a ghetto, physically and in most minds.”

(p. 7)


“To a Chinatown made more secretive by the smell of cooking and smouldering sandalwood in back rooms. The road to the coast through fields walled with stone by the kanakas [indentured Pacific Islander labourers]. The track that slipped down to the creek and the shack where Tom the old blackbirder lived [a person who kidnapped and trafficked Pacific Island labourers]. The Professor's tin and cardboard gunyah beyond the town's perimeter. And on the sullen scrubs upriver. And on again to the hills.

But the half-mile he walked from his first day at school had never lost its meaning. The road was a puzzle game he played with his grandmother. And the discoveries and inventions were his own, part of the hidden life, too secret to be shared, wrapped in brown paper inside his head and tied with string.”

(p. 29)


“But to Queenslanders Sydney, New South Wales, was almost another country. So far away and so divorced from the north, for most of the long span since the first convicts were sent up the Brisbane River, that to most people it was foreign. Sydney was a wicked city with strange goings on. To see once in a lifetime if you could afford the fare. On a honeymoon perhaps. And Melbourne was too far away to even think about and Adelaide and Perth in other countries. Life in those places and what happened there in the dim past, with no associations and few family links, meant little a thousand miles and more north, and less another thousand. And so the town, except for rare individuals, seldom gave January 26 a second thought.”

(p. 119)





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