Caught in the fork

Near the end of this biography of Frank Moorhouse, author Catharine Lumby tells a story that will strike retrospective fear into the heart of any male reader who has ever climbed a tree. Watching an outdoor ceremony in which a cohort of Cub Scouts was being initiated into the Boy Scout troop to which he belonged himself, and having climbed a tree to get a better view, the young Moorhouse ‘slipped, and he slid a couple of metres down the trunk of the tree with his legs wrapped around it. He came to rest on a jagged branch, his crotch caught in the fork.’

The resulting injuries to his genitalia, sustained while watching a ritual initiation into masculinity, were serious enough to require hospitalisation, stitches, and at least a month of bedridden recuperation. As an adult, Moorhouse regarded this accident as a turning point in the formation of his personality and the direction of his life: ‘Moorhouse often speculated about whether the event was, in Freudian terms, the fulfilment of an unconscious wish or whether it was an incident he later chose to reinterpret as a touchstone for his own ambivalence about gender. Certainly, it became bound up with his relationship to the bush …’ Looking back from the vantage point of his mid-seventies, Moorhouse wrote of this accident ‘I have experienced an extraordinary incident with primeval overlays with great import for me … It is about landscape bonding – what we use landscape for – and about the amazing intricacies and workings of the mind as it makes a “self”.’