“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps”, Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, tells his readers.
I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all looked like that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there”. (2016/1899: 7)
Marlow, of course, does go to one of those “blank spaces on the earth” when he grows up, and much of the rest of the novel muses on the idea that what Marlow had thought to be a “blank space” was, rather, “the heart of an immense darkness” (2016/1899: 77) — a place Marlow perceived as scarred irreparably by the crimes of European colonizers and native Africans alike.
Heart of Darkness, written as it was at the height of the British Empire, speaks to the sense that cartography and colonialism are intertwined. Moreover, this passage especially hints that the impulse to colonize is born of the impulse to fill in “blank spaces”, or places lacking the colonizers’ influence, on maps — in other words, to see the map extend teleologically. It is my belief that we, as readers, have the same type of desire with literary narratives of crime. We read them as we watch the map because we want to see the narrative resolved, the story or the map made whole and complete, neat and compact. Much as Frank Kermode argued when he postulated that “fictions of the End”, or apocalyptic fictions, “satisfy our needs” (2000/1967: 5) as readers, it is my contention that narratives of both crime and cartography in literature tie into our Enlightenment expectations of progress and satisfy a need to see a narrative reach its seemingly logical end. Depictions of historical colonial crimes and cartographies in contemporary literary texts function as prisms through which we may view the malignant residues of empire. I contend that when we are attentive to literary depictions of crime and cartography, those crimes can explicitly or implicitly expose the routine violence associated with the present and past structures of colonialism.
In this article, I will argue that these modes of understanding the world are inherently linked, that crime narratives and depictions of mapping share the same root, that we read and enjoy crime stories for the same reason we find maps satisfying: because we wish to “solve” the crime in the same way we wish to see the “blank spaces” of the map inked in. This article will look at this impulse for completion, neatness, and order — which I am terming the colonial compulsion — and how it manifests in two contemporary texts that focus on historical depictions of colonialism, each dealing with cartography and crime: Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980) and Paul Howarth’s novel Only Killers and Thieves (2018). The colonial compulsion, as exhibited in literary texts, refers to an underlying desire for wholeness — to see the map completed, the crime solved — and demonstrates how this desire can both act as a crime in and of itself and lead to violent acts and crimes committed upon vulnerable populations. Ultimately, I hold, though it may seem regressive or indeed, imperial, to examine this impulse, the type of contemporary literature which ties together cartography, crime, and colonialism urges the reader to think through and against the violence concealed behind what appear to be neat and orderly maps and landscapes. These types of readings help the reader understand how some of these same impulses, and the crimes that resulted from them, remain present in the world today.
Variant kinds of violence are masked behind the catchall term of “crime”. Crime is figured in these literary texts both as resistance to colonialism that is criminalized by the imperial power, and as the oppressive acts of the empire itself, cartographical exercises included. Moreover, the colonists in both texts capitalize on perceptions of crime — sabotage and murder — in order to consolidate their imperial power. Though definitions shift within and among texts, and authors strategically play with heterogeneous crime tropes, the constant theme is violence: physical, geographical, and epistemological violence enacted by the colonizers, as well as more covert “criminal” (or sometimes, fabricated) resistances from the colonized. Edward Said postulated that “imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence” (1994/1993: 225−26) arguing that imperialism is primarily expressed cartographically. Translations and Only Killers and Thieves offer readings of this “geographical violence” and its effects as forms of crime. It is largely accepted as fact now that geography and its exercises (mapping, cartography) are culturally determined and wield power over physical, cultural, and political landscapes. What is telling is that many of the claims associated with power differentials, imperialism, and mapping could also be applied to the same categories and crime.
Like what gets placed on or left off a map, what is labelled a crime and what is not has to do with delineations of power. Imperialism is often legal, though it is violent and retroactively figured as a crime by later generations.
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On the other hand, non-violent acts are often categorized as crimes because they threaten, however slightly, to shift the axis of power. Because of the intrinsic ties among power, crime, and imperialism, postcolonial narratives that are concerned with crime are uniquely well suited for exploring how past colonial crimes have shaped, or mapped, our current physical and literary landscapes. Contemporary texts that focus on historical instances of colonialism neatly encapsulate cultural and aesthetic reactions to both imperialism and crime. Emile Durkheim noted that crime “consists of an action which offends certain collective feelings which are especially strong and clear-cut” (1982/1895: 99). Similarly, Jean and John L. Comaroff build on this notion of the collectivity or the social construction of crime by arguing that crime, in the twenty-first century, “has become the metaphysical optic by means of which people across the planet understand and act upon their worlds” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2016: 8; emphasis in original). Understanding and processing crime collectively, through discourses like literature, provides a matrix for thinking through the social ramifications of large historical processes like colonialism and imperialism.
I am taking a loose view of crime literature and defining it to mean any literary text that contains a central act that is generally accepted as unlawful, either deemed so at the time by colonial powers or retroactively understood as such by contemporary readers (after all, even Hamlet is essentially a crime story). In other words, this article will more precisely look at crime in literature, rather than a strictly defined genre of crime literature. To give just a few prominent examples from recent years, Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), while generally classified as literary fiction, hinges on a violent murder, and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) is not generally understood to be a crime novel, yet it consistently focuses on murder and the international drug trade throughout. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) plays on (unfounded) Western fears of refugee and migrant criminality, and the action in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) swirls around a shocking death and the crimes that follow in its aftermath. All of these texts, as well, look at mapping space in great detail: NW is deeply concerned with the geography of northwest London, while A Brief History of Seven Killings focuses on charting the spaces between Jamaica and New York City. Exit West, via magical realism, remaps the routes many refugees and migrants take when leaving the Middle East or Africa for Europe, and The God of Small Things encourages its readers to imaginatively chart the cartography of a small village in Kerala, India, as they read. These texts, like Translations and Only Killers and Thieves, have easily recognizable crimes at the centre of them. The colonial compulsion reading lens invites readers to pay attention not only to such acts but also to other acts of violence which the texts portray as crimes, but may not be classified as criminal under colonial laws and codes.
Both Translations (1980) and Only Killers and Thieves (2018) are contemporary (late twentieth and early twenty-first century) texts that examine colonial mapping and settlement projects of the nineteenth century. Though the situations in the Ireland of 1980 and the Australia of today are hardly one-to-one parallels, both countries in their respective time periods were and are negotiating the legacies left by nineteenth-century colonialism, particularly mapping and cartography projects. Cóilín Parsons compares the colonization of Australia to that of Ireland by writing “it is impossible […] to imagine the ‘discovery’ and conquest of Australia [and, by extension, Ireland] without the advances in cartography over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (2016: 20). These cartographical advances enabled the British to consolidate and expand their power in both Ireland, what is often called the first British colony,
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and what Elleke Boehmer refers to as the “dystopic founding of Australia as a British penal colony in the late 1780s and 1790s” (2009/2005: 210). Mapping made it possible to reach Australia; chart and Anglicize Ireland; and carry out linguistic, cultural, and physical violence on both soils.
Several intriguing connections exist between Ireland and Australia in the context of postcolonial studies and empire: the first European colony in Australia was populated by Irish convicts who were forcibly shipped there by the British, and after this original involuntary migration, many Irish emigrated to Australia by choice, changing their status from colonized back home to colonizer in the new space. In both places, the British engaged in mapping expeditions to consolidate their empire, and extensions of British power resulted in destruction of both Australian and Irish indigenous communities, languages, and cultures. Though Ireland is not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations as Australia is, both countries retain strong ties to the United Kingdom in terms of language, culture, immigration patterns, and literary exchange. Translations and Only Killers and Thieves, as twentieth and twenty-first century texts that cast a retrospective glance at the solidifying of their respective countries in the nineteenth century at the height of the British Empire, offer a method of interpreting how we can understand the interlinked tropes of cartography and crime in postcolonial societies. At the time of each text’s writing, Ireland and Australia were at particularly fraught crossroads in reckoning with their colonial pasts. By comparing these two texts, readers can gain a comprehensive understanding of what empire and its legacies wrought in two different colonial spaces. Especially because each text is set in, but written long after, the nineteenth century, the readers (or viewers, in the case of those who see Translations on stage) of each have a clear sense of the violence that will follow in the subsequent years. Having this knowledge means readers anticipate the ways in which the narrative will play out, the crimes will be enacted, the map inked in.
Mapping and crime are intrinsically linked concepts, and the concept I introduce here, the “colonial compulsion”, is intended to act as a way to yoke mapping and crime together to understand them concurrently in light of this tendency in postcolonial literature. It is my contention that by looking at texts in which crime and mapping are central concerns, we can probe the human impulse to see maps completed and crimes neatly sewn up to uncover buried histories and lasting remnants of imperialism. Tracking the crimes this impulse leads to, as well as analysing the ways in which these texts understand the compulsion itself as a crime or a violence, will assist readers in understanding how to combat painful and harmful legacies of this impulse, and colonialism in general, that persist in ostensibly “post”colonial spaces today.
“Is there something sinister in that?”: Brian Friel’s Translations
In the first act of Translations, set in pre-Famine Ireland, two British soldiers and their Irish interpreter enter a County Donegal “hedge school”, or a somewhat secretive educational institution for Irish Catholics, and ask to speak to the pupils about British horses and equipment that have been stolen or destroyed in acts of anti-colonial sabotage. One of the soldiers, Captain Lancey, decides to take the opportunity to explain to those assembled what he and his colleague, Lieutenant Yolland, are doing in the area. As they speak no Irish and those assembled speak no English, they must rely on their interpreter, Owen (who is from the area and whose father runs the hedge school), to relay their words to the class. Lancey begins his explanation by “[speaking] as if he were addressing children — a shade too loudly and enunciating excessively”, according to the stage directions. He explains:
We are here — here — in this place — you understand? — to make a map — a map — a map and — … A map is a representation on paper — a picture — you understand picture? — a paper picture — showing, representing this country — yes? — showing your country in miniature — a scaled drawing on paper of — of — of… (Friel, 1980: 32)
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Comedic dimensions of the scene aside, Translations is invested in picking apart Lancey’s simplistic, child-like explanation of what a map is and what it does. Written and first performed in 1980, Translations is set in 1833, during the time of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The British undertook the Ordnance Survey to map Ireland, both for taxation and military planning purposes, throughout the 1830s. The mapping project often relied on translating Irish place names into their Anglicized counterparts. In the world of Translations, the village of Baile Beag becomes known by a name more recognizable to English speakers, Ballybeg. The survey takes place alongside other modernization efforts: for example, one of the hedge school’s pupils, Maire, demands to learn English rather than Latin and Greek (24). Meanwhile, the hedge school master’s younger son, Manus, gets a job at the new British-sponsored national school. Not only is attendance and the English language compulsory there, but he will be compensated with actual currency (British pounds) rather than via a barter system, as was the practice at the hedge school. These additional signs of rural Ireland’s conscription into the larger British imperial project are presented with a fair amount of melancholy. As Marilynn Richtarik indicates, “In Translations, Irish stands for the whole Gaelic culture that was rapidly disappearing by the 1830s, and place-names stand for the entire Irish language” (2001: 42). The loss of culture and language is reflective of the overall colonial situation, according to Declan Kiberd: “the struggle for power to name oneself and one’s state is enacted fundamentally within words, most especially in colonial situations” (1995: 615). The building of the map, then, is a symbolically violent act meant to strike at the Irish citizens’ power. Although the survey’s larger ideological effects are not immediately apparent to many of Ballybeg’s inhabitants (save Manus), we, as contemporary viewers and readers, are keenly aware of the effects of this sort of mapping and the ways in which it may lead to the kinds of violence we now understand to be criminal.
Brian Friel was writing Translations at a time of great upheaval in Northern Ireland. The country was struggling with the worst of the Troubles, the decades-long (1968-1998) conflict in Northern Ireland. This was fought between the mostly Catholic republicans, who wanted the British to leave Ireland and for the North to be reunited with the Republic of Ireland, and the mostly Protestant unionists, who wished to retain British rule in the northeastern corner of Ireland. Friel, as a Northern Irish Catholic and a member of the Field Day theatre group, was writing in a milieu that was fairly staunchly anti-imperialist and that viewed the Northern Irish conflict as, generally speaking, an anti-colonial uprising.
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As Catherine Nash points out, Friel was
part of a broader cultural exploration of questions of identity in Ireland since the 1970s, prompted by the inadequacies of romantic and exclusive versions of Irishness in the face of armed conflict in Northern Ireland and the modernization and secularization of Irish society. (1999: 458)
Translations, given the historical and political contexts of its writing and first performances, can often be viewed, in the words of Friel’s Field Day colleague Seamus Deane, as “a parable of events in the present day” (qtd. in Richtarik, 2001: 49). This is true even though the play, as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford states, “avoids mention of the Protestant tradition and evokes the binaries of Carthage and Rome to indict the British destruction of Gaelic culture” (1996: 228). This was a particularly heady political project during the violent nationalist upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s.
I hold that through all the valuable critical ink that has been spilled on this play, the commentary is missing one important dimension: the element of crime, and how imperial criminal actions and definitions of crime are utilized to justify violent British actions and reify imperial power through the utilization of mapping and cartography. In other words, the British mapping project is the instigator that leads to anticolonial violence, which in turn leads to imperial warfare. Both the resistance and the asymmetrical warfare are depicted as crimes, although the shifting definitions are understood differently by different characters in the play, as well as the viewers or readers. The Translations cast consists of ten characters who get stage time and lines.
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However, there are two characters who are often referenced and drive a great deal of the plot and action without ever appearing on stage. The Donnelly twins, whose first names we never learn,
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are engaged in what seems to be fairly comprehensive sabotage of the British soldiers and the Ordnance Survey crew. The increasing violence of their actions leads to ever more authoritarian actions on the part of the British, demonstrating the colonial compulsion in both the forward progression of their colonial mapping and their ramping up of efforts to solve the Donnellys’ crimes. We, as twentieth and twenty-first century readers and viewers, know more or less what is coming, but cartography and crime work together so that the narrative can reach the end we know it logically must reach. In other words, the teleological narrative of the play matches our grim sense of anticipation.
The Donnelly twins are first mentioned in Act 1, when Manus asks Doalty if the twins are planning to still attend lessons at the hedge school. Doalty, faking casualness, says he doesn’t know and that they are “not about these days”, following up this barely-disguised lie with “whistling through his teeth”. “Suddenly”, Friel writes in the stage directions, “the atmosphere is silent and alert” (15). Manus presses on: “Aren’t they at home?”
Doalty:
No.
Manus:
Where are they then?
Doalty:
How would I know?
Bridget:
Our Seamus says two of the soldiers’ horses were found last night at the foot of the cliffs at Machaire Buidhe and… (She stops suddenly and begins writing with chalk on her slate.) D’you hear the whistles of this aul slate? Sure nobody could write on an aul slippery thing like that (15).
The obvious tension that discussion of the Donnelly twins instigates is intensified in the second act, when Yolland asks Owen their whereabouts. We are told that Lancey wants them for questioning, and, as viewers and/or readers, our antennae naturally go up, even though Owen casually notes that they probably did something minor, like steal someone’s fishing nets (44). It is clear that the Donnelly twins are engaged in a project that the British, Owen, and Manus have no or just an inkling of knowledge about. All we know is that what they, and probably the Baile Beag villagers and sympathetic people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, view as resistance to colonial violence will be understood by the British as a crime and treated as such.
The undercurrent of the Donnelly twins subplot comes to a head in the third and final act, the morning after a town dance. Yolland has walked Maire home from the dance, and the two have fallen in love despite not being able to speak each other’s languages. In the morning, Yolland can’t be found, and Bridget (who seems to be unable to keep a secret to herself) lets slip: “If you want to know about Yolland, ask the Donnelly twins” (75).
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This prompts Doalty to, once again, begin whistling through his teeth, which seems to be this character’s particular “tell” for when something deeper is going on.
On the heels of this once again awkward conversation, Doalty, who is staring out the window of the hedge school, suddenly exclaims, “Cripes, they’re [British soldiers] crawling all over the place! Cripes, there’s millions of them! Cripes, they’re levelling the whole land!” (76). Lancey enters the hedge school and, through Owen, communicates to the pupils that if the soldiers do not find Yolland or receive information about him in the next 24 hours, the army is prepared to “shoot all livestock in Ballybeg”,
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followed by “embark[ing] on a series of evictions and levelling of every abode in the following selected areas” in 48 hours (80). Lancey then reads off a series of place names that are slated to be destroyed, while Owen translates into Irish for the hedge school:
Lancey:
Swinefort.
Owen:
Lis na Muc.
Lancey:
Burnfoot.
Owen:
Bun na hAbhann.
Lancey:
Dromduff.
Owen:
Druim Dubh. (80−81)
And so on and so forth. The play closes without a clear resolution: we do not know if the Donnelly twins have killed Yolland, and we do not know if these places are destroyed by the British Army. Contemporary viewers can, however, fill in the lack of an ending for themselves. Anyone with even a slight working knowledge of Irish history knows that the British stayed in Ireland and their power became more entrenched, leading to further destruction and violence. Cóilín Parsons writes that, “There is, in one reading of the play, no practical or epistemological distance between naming a village and razing a village” (2016: 18). However, that is not the argument I am making here; instead, I argue, colonial mapping as a form of geographical or epistemological violence leads to the crime of razing of the village, spurred on by the Donnelly twins’ original “crime” of anticolonial sabotage. The colonial compulsion is the engine that motors the play along. Because we want to see the narrative close the loop and finish what it started, the logical end necessitates what we, contemporary readers and viewers, know to be true; we have to see the criminal bloodshed that the original crime engenders and that we know is waiting to be triggered. It is not that there is no difference between physical bloodshed and linguistic/cartographical violence; it is that both are inextricably tied up with contemporary and colonial discourses of crime.
As the Donnelly twins’ actions become more and more pronounced, the level of violence enacted on the village, on the Irish language, and on the local landscape becomes commensurately more explicit as well. If cartography and place names are how we make sense of or map the world around us, changing them would, in a sense, change our local contexts and understandings of those contexts. Crime snakes through the background of Translations barely perceptibly, yet the British capitalize on instances of it to intensify their attacks on the colonized people and land, exhibiting the colonial compulsion. The British wish to solve the escalating crimes in much the same way they wish to continue to troop through the landscape and bring it under control to serve their ideological purposes more cleanly and effectively, from setting up national schools to levying taxes and other forms of capitalism to insisting on the use of English. Their actions give the lie to Owen’s lighthearted scoff at the beginning of the project: “We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that?” (52). There is something sinister in that, since the act of colonial mapping can lead to violence, cultural destruction, and the shattering of community. Though Owen may not see it, the audience and readership certainly does.
The play’s evocations of past British injustices fairly screams for its contemporary (1980s) viewers and readers to draw connections between the world of 1833 County Donegal and their situation in Northern Ireland, which at the time, was struggling with one of the bloodiest periods of the Troubles. As Ian McBride notes, “In Ireland, as is well known, the interpretation of the past has always been at the heart of national conflict” (2001: 1). Moreover, according to Declan Kiberd, “When Translations was first staged in Derry in 1980 […] Irish theater critics had no doubt that […] Friel was another canny northerner who chose a remote historical event to throw an oblique light on the present” (1995: 614). Friel’s play is just one interpretation of that past and that “remote historical event”. Yet the way the text asks us to consider how crime and cartography might be linked calls to mind more recent British incursions into life in Northern Ireland: 1971’s Operation Demetrius allowed British security forces to intern anyone suspected of helping the Irish Republican Army without trial. In 1972, Bloody Sunday saw the British army killing 14 protestors, and then claiming that they had to out of fear for their own lives. Finally, in Margaret Thatcher’s 1981 speech in Belfast about imprisoned IRA hunger strikers, she claimed, “There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing, or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing, and criminal violence” (1981: n.p.). From these three examples alone, we can see that in the years leading up to and immediately following the publication and early performances of Translations, the British continued to capitalize on crime or claims of crime to justify imperial intervention into Ireland and Northern Ireland. In Only Killers and Thieves, a historical drama set in the Australian bush, crime is also utilized for violent cartographical and imperial purposes, though to different ends.
“A wheat field, ripening in the sun”: Paul Howarth’s Only Killers and Thieves
Paul Howarth’s Only Killers and Thieves (2018) opens with a bleak and forbidding image of the colonial Australian landscape. Howarth writes:
They stalked the ruined scrubland, searching for something to kill. Two boys, not quite men, tiny in a landscape withered by drought and drenched in unbroken sun. Vast plains pocked with spinifex and clumps of buckbush, grass brittle as old bone, red soil fine as gunpowder underfoot. There’d not been rain for a year. The whole bush smelled ready to burn. (2018: 1)
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The two young boys, Billy and Tommy McBride, are scouring the landscape for something to hunt and bring home to their family. It is 1885, and a drought is gripping their native Queensland, where their family works a small patch of land in the shadow of the local wealthy squatter, John Sullivan. Though the landscape is parched and desolate, the McBrides and John Sullivan are not the only ones existing on it; we learn that “what remained of the mob [Aboriginal group] was down valley, closer to the creek, where the water ran in a trickle through a trough of dry mud and the surrounding floodplain offered the last of the feed” (1). At the moment, however, the space is dry and vast, a place where “only the flies were moving; there was nothing for the brothers to hunt” (1).
The novel’s action is set in motion when Tommy and Billy accidentally cross over into John Sullivan’s territory and subsequently encounter a riding party. This party travelling across the drought-ridden landscape consists of Sullivan; a policeman named Edward Noone; three chained Aboriginal men; and three members of the Native Police, a vicious British colonial invention charged with using Aboriginal recruits to kill their fellow men and ensure the rights of white European settlers. Tommy and Billy, seeing something is amiss, hide themselves in the bush, and witness one of the members of the Native Police shoot and kill one of the chained men who has fallen and is holding up the convoy. The brutal scene is underscored by Sullivan’s words after he spots the boys and explains Noone and the Native Police’s presence by saying, “their business is the dispersal of those who don’t belong” (10). Sullivan threatens the boys with a similar fate if he ever finds them trespassing again, and, terrified, the boys set off for home as quickly as possible. Howarth’s novel proceeds much in the manner of an American Western, set on the fringes of the settler colonial project. Soon, Tommy and Billy’s family is murdered, and Sullivan capitalizes on the opportunity as an excuse to push further westward, supposedly to find the killers, as part of his effort to claim and tame more land, while disposing of those who “don’t belong”.
Though Australia seems a world away from Ireland, there are multiple imaginative and political links. Joe Cleary explains: “eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish nationalists looked mostly to the white settler colonies to highlight their own grievances” (2002: 108). As such, populations like those depicted in Translations would have felt a kinship with white settler Australians. This connection, expressed as anticolonial in the Irish context, takes on a different meaning in Australia. Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra argue that “Australia was founded on a double guilt: the dispossession of the Aboriginal people and the excessive punishment of large numbers of British and Irish people, mainly from the poorer classes, for crimes against the property of the ruling class” (2001: 332). “[C]rimes against the property of the ruling class”, it must be noted, could have included such actions as those undertaken by the Donnelly twins; Australia’s colonial foundation is built on the crimes both of the British Empire and of the Irish colonized, who are translated into colonizers in their new land.
Much as in Ireland and Translations, characters in Australia and Only Killers and Thieves capitalize on “crimes” performed by the colonized in order to spur on geographical violence and other forms of imperial crime. Readers of Only Killers and Thieves, like the readers and viewers of Translations, know roughly the ending of the imperial story. Due to this knowledge, we readers are aware that the only way to complete the narrative is to see the settlers solve the supposed crime and simultaneously fill in the blank spots of the map: the novel’s teleological progression is stimulated by the colonial compulsion. We logically know that colonial oppression is coming, because we know history, and that the white people will most likely commit a great deal of violence against the Aboriginal peoples and conquer the land in the process. The crime supposedly performed by Indigenous Australians — in this case, a murder — acts as the impetus to carry out these actions. Kay Schaffer, in explaining the Australian national narrative, writes, “the dominant mythical structure out of which concepts of national identity arise is figured with reference to the white, native-born, Australian male and his battle with the land/Aborigines/‘others,’ framed against the English parent culture” (2001: 369). Meanwhile, Graham Huggan has specifically singled out Australian postcolonial writers as being particularly fascinated with the object of the map, arguing that maps have been
shown to have operated effectively, but often restrictively or coercively, in the implementation of colonial policy, and to conceptual (metaphorical) maps which are perceived to operate as exemplars of, and therefore to provide a framework for the critique of, colonial discourse. (1989: 115)
This is a layered understanding of crime and of mapping in the Australian literary tradition, as well as the understanding of the Australian nation as being “white versus Aboriginal” with “the white man” ultimately “succeeding”. It speaks to the dichotomy drawn in Brian Friel’s Translations and the way that play depicts mapping and crime as being born of the same colonial impulse. The reading experience both audiences have is impacted by their contemporary knowledge of the way history must play out.
While the violence against the Irish in Translations is largely cultural and linguistic in nature (at least what happens within the timeframe of the play), Only Killers and Thieves is disquietingly physically violent. Richtarik notes that while “the tragic aspect of [Translations] is that it tells a story without villains in any obvious sense” (2001: 31),
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the same can certainly not be said for Only Killers and Thieves. In fact, Mark Athitakis argues in The Washington Post that the two main villains, Sullivan and Noone, are so sharply drawn that it is “tempting to roll your eyes” at them, as if they “were twirling their mustaches, begging us to hiss at them” (2018: n.p.). When Tommy and Billy’s parents and sister are murdered, the two rush immediately to Sullivan’s home, as he is the closest (and only other) farm in the vicinity. Sullivan, hearing that a revolver belonging to Joseph, their Aboriginal farmhand, has been left at the scene of the crime, convinces Tommy and Billy that they must go out with Noone on an expedition across the landscape to find and kill Joseph to avenge their parents’ deaths. Tommy is reluctant to do so, thinking that something doesn’t add up and Joseph would not have murdered their family. Billy is much more disposed to buy into Sullivan’s narrative and wholeheartedly agrees to the quest and the subsequent violence it engenders.
The narrative thus proceeds cartographically; we know that when we run out of space to traverse, the narrative will similarly come to a close. As the group moves forward, we sense we are similarly closing in on solving the mystery, mimicking our knowledge of white Australian settler violence against Aboriginal peoples. As the narrative spools out and we get closer to what we sense must be the necessary end, the reader, like Tommy, is not satisfied with Sullivan’s silky explanation of the crime. There seems to be insufficient motive for Joseph to have killed the family, and, especially as twenty-first century readers, we are not as prone to automatically believe the colonizer’s racist version of events that implicates the colonized.
Sullivan’s pronouncement on the crime and the need for the journey into the interior is straightforward: “And now this, killing whites in their own home — it’s an act of war, boys, we can’t let it stand. If we don’t retaliate, if we don’t impose the law, well, we might as well pack up and run back to the coast tomorrow at first light” (111). He articulates the colonial compulsion quite cleanly, speaking of the need to capitalize upon this instance of crime as a way to continue the colonial project. If they don’t, he says, the land is lost and they must retreat and cede what they have conquered. Like the British soldiers in Translations, this Australian party has seized on crime or what they term as crime as an excuse to conflate law enforcement with colonial and racist violence and criminality. The crime committed or supposedly committed by the colonized becomes an excuse to bring the land into “the discourse of modern white history, habituation, and utilization” (Moslund, 2015: 156; emphasis in original). The colonial compulsion ties together the urge to see the crime solved and the map completed, or the land brought under colonial control.
When the party sets out to find Joseph and his mob, the group consists of Tommy and Billy, Sullivan, Noone, his aide Locke, and four members of the Native Police. As they proceed across the landscape and continue to map their colonialism onto it, Tommy grows ever more discomfited with the mission, even as Billy seems to be buying in ever more fully. As the racism of the colonial project becomes more and more clear to Tommy,
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his personal cartography of the land becomes more complicated. While, in the early stages of the journey, he muses that “all his life he’d feared it, the uncharted west, looming like a shadow on the edge of their world” (142), this straightforward fear begins to change into a sense of unease that he is trespassing onto land that does not belong to him as they move further west. Tommy thinks at the start of his journey that “the center was filled with legends such as Burke and Wills, who had tried to cross the country and died along the way” (142). However, over time he begins to cast off such colonial narratives in favour of wondering what Aboriginal legends must exist about the places he sees, thinking of one location “it looked like the kind of thing children would have built, giant children playing giant games long ago. But then it didn’t feel much like a playground. Nothing joyful here. It reminded him more of a graveyard, each cairn a marker, each rock a protruding bone” (158).
Tommy’s increased sense of foreboding, cast onto his perceptions of the space that surrounds him, is validated by the party’s eventual brutal murders of two different groups of Aboriginal people. The second mass murder, in which the white men, Tommy included, and the Native Police kill the entirety of the Kurrong mob, changes Tommy’s perception of the landscape entirely. Instead of the dry, empty, vast scrubland he previously saw, when he wakes up the morning after the massacre, we see through Tommy’s eyes:
Daylight peeled open the crater. A slow-moving crescent of shadow drawn west to east by the sunrise. The sodden ground steamed. A churned and bloody stew. Crimson soil, crimson wet. The steam whispered through the scrub and over the bodies and parts of bodies sunken there. Some still moved: inching through the slurry, dragging themselves along, raising a supplicant hand. A chorus of low moans underpinned the irregular popping of waddy and rifle butt, as the posse roamed the crater, finishing off its task. Pop, pop, pop. Not unlike the sound of a wheat field, ripening in the sun. (225)
Cruelly, the massacre of the Aboriginal people seems to give a perverted sense of life to the landscape. A new day breaks; steam is present instead of dry air and dust. There is wet in the soil, a hunt is happening. Tommy compares the sound of the slaughter to that of a ripening wheat field. The sheer horror of the event is underscored by the similarity of the stated role of the Native Police; the colonized must be “dispersed” so that rights for Europeans can be guaranteed. Aboriginal people must be slaughtered to give the Europeans’ landscape life, which seems a grim confirmation of what the reader mostly knew about Australian colonial history even before starting the novel. The circle is complete; the colonial compulsion has done what we knew it would do. The need to traverse, mark, and map space has matched onto the eliminationist impulse that marks the Australian settler colonial project. The violence visited upon Australia is a far more violent and nauseating version of the Anglicization of Irish names in Translations, but both call to mind the idea that crime or “crime” by the colonized may be used as an excuse for violence from the colonizer. The colonized and their landscapes, their maps, must die so the colonizer and its maps and cartographies may live. In Only Killers and Thieves, the true horror of the colonial compulsion, the urge for neatness and order and completion, is made explicitly clear to the reader and to Tommy. We knew the crime invented by the colonizers would lead to a form of colonial mapping; we knew this colonial mapping would lead to criminal violence; we may not have known the specifics, but we knew the prototypical narrative.
Though the narrative of Only Killers and Thieves centres on the shattering of white colonial innocence, its larger project, by mapping a geographical exploration ostensibly set up to investigate a crime created by an Aboriginal man, is flipped on its head when Tommy finally realizes that the murder of his family was orchestrated by Sullivan and that Joseph was never involved in the least. He realizes, too, that he has been complicit the whole time, both in the cover-up of the crime of his family’s murder and in the larger national narrative about the landscape and what constitutes true crime and violence. Sullivan, Tommy thinks, had made both he and his brother “complicit in the lie and in the deed” (275). This is a sentiment which rings true for the larger Australian settler colonial position. The McBride murders, being “an excuse to clear his [Sullivan’s] station [land] and the surrounding land, to finish the Kurrong altogether, see the last of them burn” (275−76), are a stand-in for the larger national project undertaken throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The colonial compulsion, in this historical and settler colonial context, acts to signal to the contemporary reader that the crime has never been fully accounted for, that actions like those depicted in the novel are responsible for creating the nation in which Australians (or Canadians, or Americans, or New Zealanders) currently reside. The impulse to move forward, in space and in the narrative, is rewarded with disquieting discoveries about the complicity of whiteness and heritage in the Australian national project.
This reckoning in the Australian context is sorely needed. As Translations responded to the Ireland of the 1980s and its postcolonial moment, so does Only Killers and Thieves respond to a moment of crisis in twenty-first century Australia. The current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of Australia is three per cent of the total population (a sign of the violence of colonialism by itself), but vast disparities in health, education, treatment by police, and other categories are often reported. Even 50 years after the end of the “Stolen Generations” period, when Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their parents as part of a larger assimilation project, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in many places lack the basic nutrition, education, and housing that many white Australians take for granted, not to mention the often brutal treatment of Aboriginal people by the police and the much higher incarceration rates. Given the shocking inequalities that persist after the initial era of settler colonialism, it seems a reckoning with the violent past is far past necessary. As Luke Pearson writes in the Guardian, Aboriginal activists are not angry about the fact that “Captain Cook landed here over 200 years ago”; rather, the anger stems from “everything that has happened since” (2016: n.p.). Only Killers and Thieves unearths past injustices in an attempt to draw a parallel to the ongoing colonial project.
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Both these texts speak to their contemporary audiences, whether that be Ireland in the 1980s or Australia now, about imperial violence and how the damages and crimes of the nineteenth century can carry forward into the twenty-first. Translations and Only Killers and Thieves speak to what we think of as well-trodden history. A 1980s audience, especially in Northern Ireland, would know the broad contours of the history of the British Empire in Ireland. Meanwhile, in the twenty-first century, most Australians would know about the bloodshed many of their forefathers visited upon the Aboriginal population. But Field Day, and Translations, were broadly speaking to the colonized, while the majority audience for Only Killers and Thieves would be the descendants of the colonizers. Though the intended readership or viewership is different — one is encountering a silenced history, the other negotiating his or her complicity in oppression — both read or view their texts with a sense that they know what is coming. In other words, they are alert to the fact that the narrative, which is instigated and powered by crime or perceptions of crime, has to reach a particular, historically-determined end in order to be considered complete and done. We read, as the characters act, through a sense of colonial compulsion, a need to see both the map and the crime reach what we see as their logical ends.
This compulsion, when enacted by actual historical characters or characters in a story, leads to chaos and violence and, often, death. Although genocide of Aboriginal peoples or the razing of Irish villages may not have been seen as crimes in the nineteenth century — in fact, these actions were often legitimized by the supposed need for British imperialism and expansion — they are now, in retrospect, and we can see this clearly when we read historical fiction or drama set in the colonial time period. The colonial compulsion is set into motion in these and many other texts when a colonizer seizes upon a criminal action or makes up a criminal action. This compulsion can act as a crime in and of itself (the Irish countryside is destroyed and people are murdered in order to complete the Ordnance Survey map), as well as leading to further crimes visited upon the colonized (the genocide of the Kurrong, carried out in order to solidify British control of the land). Maps and mapping, crime and definitions of crime, and imperial power all work as a matrix of power to demonstrate to contemporary readers and viewers the violence behind contemporary society, as well as the danger inherent in these tools of power consolidation.
