It was a critically acclaimed, unsettling play, but does The Visitors work as a novel?
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FICTION
The Visitors
Jane Harrison
HarperCollins, $32.99
In January 2020, Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison debuted her play The Visitors at the Sydney Festival, unsettling audiences with her fictionalised account of the day, 232 years prior, when the First Fleet dropped its anchor in Warrane (Sydney Cove). The round-table melodrama follows seven elders as they debate the pros and cons of letting “the aliens” in – a drama refracted through the colonisers’ language and their ancestral attire, the suit.
Jane Harrison has turned her critically acclaimed play The Visitors into a novel. Credit: Janie Barrett
Harrison has now found a home for this momentous story in the special formal strategy of the novel. None of the play’s immediacy, lightness or perturbation has been lost.
Harrison’s use of the third-person present tense gives each of the seven major characters a temporary, albeit erroneous sense of serenity. By representing the immediacy of experience, we are forced to confront history as it might have been – what if the aliens were not welcomed?
The Visitors by Jane Harrison.
The question of “what if” lies at the heart of every historical fiction, and Harrison does not elude it. Seven men across seven nations hold an emergency meeting in the high summer to determine how they should respond. The number of “huge nowees” (ships) are growing by the hour.
Harrison makes a smooth transition into a literary representation of that fateful day when the visitors arrived. At this moment, they are still “only visitors”.
Just 11 years earlier, Captain James Cook stopped by “Gwea” (Botany Bay) but didn’t stay. The first sighting of the fleet this time is seen as “a dark speck on the horizon”. One of the younger characters is jolted by the same anxiety he gets when he “senses an animal while hunting”. “The speck represents disorder; it is an aberration, a disruption, a schism.”
Harrison’s depiction of speech is striking. Dialogue is written out as in a script (Lawrence: Who are they and why are they here? Gary: I’d have to see it. For myself. That’s all) and their conversations expand and contract. The men have journeyed for days to gather, and their intuitions have never been tested this way.
Obvious comparisons can be made to Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men, but I was also struck by the tonal similarities to Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel Women Talking, where a group of women in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia come together to strategise upon discovering they have been repeatedly raped by the men in their village during their sleep.
Harrison relies on her readers to recognise the psychological and logistical complexities facing the characters. She does this without compromising their common mortality, or individual aspirations. Most of them look upon the speck on the horizon with hostility — a “ghostly apparition” that is “a blot on the landscape.”
Yet, some express a duty of care to strangers. “Us mob exchange knowledge all the time, why not with them?” asks Walter, the most generous elder. “Perhaps where their knowledge meets ours, something new and unique can be created?”
Post-referendum, this line is heart-shattering to read. Nevertheless, Harrison imbues her new storytelling formula with surprising lightness.
The prose is candid and delicate — the environment is treated with gentle fervour. This is a land where its people measure time by looking at shadow lengths; where the sky is filled with “clouds dark grey” like “caterpillars across the expanse”, where lobsters “skulk” and mudflats come “alive…with creatures” and ducks “slide through the water, leaving silver arrows in their wake”.
In the end, the initial question – “How to repel the aliens?” – has become obsolete. They have exhausted their talking. The question was never really a question, but a stasis of reckoning with the inevitable.
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