Bouquets of cliché

For a while it seemed that the reign of the saga novel, a form once so vital for narrating and propagandising the Australian past, was over. The pugnacious Xavier Herbert was now a wandering shade; Colleen McCullough had removed herself to Norfolk Island; Eleanor Dark and ‘M. Barnard Eldershaw’ belonged to a literary history known to too few. The saga had ceded its cultural place to the television miniseries. That summation held until very recently. Billy’s Tree, Nicholas Kyriacos’s first novel (a creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts, although it appears too unguarded to have come from that treadmill), bravely seeks to reinstate not only the saga form but its language and its valuation of what ought to matter to Australians who are alert to the burdens of their history.

Having taken on that task, this novel is a kind of museum of the dozen great Australian moments that every child should know about. Breathtakingly bad as it was almost bound to be, the book may become a classic of a sentimental ilk. Its setting is the recent past, the last years of the twentieth century in Sydney, when diehards and desperates who supported the South Sydney Rugby League Club (‘the cardinal and myrtle’ its heraldic colours) saw a ninety-year life snuffed out by the evil media empire of News Ltd, then miraculously brought back to a faltering existence. The novel’s assorted characters take some of their bearings – particularly in respectful ancestor worship – from the story of the battlers’ club and such inner suburbs as Redfern that nurtured it.