The Incredible Journey

The Incredible Journey is not the one about two dogs and a cat crossing Canada, so anyone waiting for a courageous Labrador to appear may wish to adjust their expectations. Catherine Martin’s journey is across the Australian desert, its travellers are two Aboriginal women, and the danger comes not from bears, rivers or an inability to read road signs, but from the activities of supposedly civilised men.

Iliapa’s young son has been taken by a white man and carried far away from his home. Refusing to accept this as one of those unfortunate colonial inconveniences everyone else would apparently prefer her to endure quietly, Iliapa sets out to recover him. She is accompanied by Polde, an older woman whose knowledge, endurance and practical wisdom prove considerably more useful than all the official power possessed by the people responsible for the situation.

Together they travel through immense and unforgiving desert country, guided by their understanding of the land and driven by a determination that makes the word “incredible” feel less like publishing enthusiasm and more like a sober assessment. This is not an expedition equipped with porters, engraved flasks and a gentleman explorer posing beside a dead shrub. There are no railway timetables, convenient inns or helpful representatives of the Empire handing out sandwiches. There are only two women, an abducted child and an enormous distance that has somehow become their responsibility to overcome.

Originally published in 1923, the novel was remarkable for placing Aboriginal women at the centre of its story and treating their courage, grief and devotion as matters worthy of serious literature. Catherine Martin said that she wanted to record the heroic love of a woman robbed of her child, and she does so with a striking mixture of adventure, landscape, mythology and moral anger. Inevitably, it remains the work of a white Australian writer of its period, and modern readers may occasionally hear the early twentieth century creaking in the background, but its sympathy is unusually clear: the supposed savages are recognisably human, while civilisation arrives in boots and promptly steals somebody’s son.

The journey itself has the force of legend. Martin draws upon Aboriginal beliefs, customs and knowledge of country, while the desert becomes both an actual landscape and a vast test of resolve. Iliapa and Polde are not wandering picturesque figures included to decorate somebody else’s adventure; they are the intelligence, emotion and momentum of the book. The men with authority may possess horses, weapons and a reassuring belief in their own importance, but the women possess the inconvenient determination to keep going.

This Pandora edition, published in 1987 as part of the recovery of neglected writing by women, returned Martin’s final novel to print after decades of undeserved obscurity. It is both an Australian classic and an early fictional treatment of a horror that would become grimly familiar in the history of the Stolen Generations. Yet it is not merely an historical document placed on the shelf to improve everybody morally. It is a compact, gripping adventure about love made stubborn, courage made necessary and two women declining to cooperate with the arrangements made for them.

A fascinating choice for readers of Australian literature, rediscovered women’s writing, colonial history and journeys undertaken without the assistance of talking household pets. It is serious, unusual and quietly radical—although, being published in 1923, it naturally had to wait more than sixty years for the literary world to remember where it had put it.

This copy is in Good condition, showing the ordinary evidence of having made a substantially less incredible journey through previous ownership. The pages remain present, the text remains readable and no desert crossing should be required to retrieve it. Sold by Crappy Old Books, where forgotten classics are rescued with rather less difficulty, although sometimes almost as much dust.

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