Cloudstreet
..., as inclusive.' The symbols which people Fish's world are real - not magic - and the novel celebrates the fact that every-day happenings are often stranger than fiction. The message here is that being open to the extraordinary in ordinary life is essential to finding meaning in our lives. Central to this message is the notion of a return to childhood. In Cloudstreet, childhood symbolises innocence and grace, and all the characters seek nostalgically for the certainties they lost upon achieving maturity. Fish's simple nature is a reflection of this. He is the Lamb of God; his baptism by near-drowning, a form of rebirth. Aboriginal spirituality also figures in the novel. The Black Man who regularly appears to Fish, as well as to Quick and the others, personifies the identification Aboriginal people have with the land. Collective responsibility is also a central message in the book: 'it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us...there's no monsters, only people like us.' (p402) This profoundly moral view of the world encompasses Australia's debt to its original inhabitants, and a community's responsibility to all its members. Though Cloudstreet with its focus on the individual lives may be seen to prioritise personal concerns, its themes thus carry wider ramifications for Australian society and nationhood. A sense of history, too, forms the backdrop to the novel's twenty-year family saga, which runs from 1943 to 1963; and Cloudstreet is framed by two key events in world history, World War11and the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy. Under the prime ministership of Robert Menzies, the fifties in Australia were, for the most part, comfortable, conservative years, characterised by backyard barbecues, by wives - who were no longer needed for the war effort - consigned to the home, and by the growth of the Australian dream as exemplified by Rose Pickles's suburban aspirations. Peace had been purchased at the expense of freedom and excitement. Meanwhile, monumental crises were averted on the world stage, Sputnik was launched and television invented. These years are identified as a unique time of certainty - a watershed soon to be shattered by the Vietnam war and the 'revolutionary' era of the sixties. World events influence the Lambs and Pickles, but distantly, like an echo that sends ripples across the surface of their lives. The novel focuses on the domestic, and this serves as the filter through which history is measured. History only matters - is only 'real' - when it impacts on a household or community. The carnage of war figures only in terms of how it has affected the working-class heroes of the book. Similarly, the only historical character to make an appearance in Cloudstreet is the Nedlands monster, a serial killer who was apprehended in the early sixties; and he features because he threatened...