Trap

by Peter Mathers

Jack Trap is an awe-inspiring mixture of Irish, English, Aborigine, and even Tierra del Fuegan. But he looks Aboriginal.
Admired by a few, hated by many, he is needed by more than care to admit it. Trap affects everyone. He is a shifting product of the back streets, passively resisting poverty and racialism, occasionally indulging in bursts of aggression.
Peter Mathers knows Trap, as he knows his background. Out of Trap he has fashioned Trap the symbol - around which lurk a variety of characters who represent the different aspects of an oppressive society. There are entertaining tales of his unlikely forebears; his father Wilson, who was unlucky enough to look white; his grandmother from South America; and his cedar-cutting grandfather, Armstrong Irish Trap.
Peter Mathers deals gently with the underdog, reserving his most vitriolic satire for the affluent conformists. His original style and humour make Trap a biting, very funny novel.
(From the dustjacket of the first edition).

Genres: Australia

298 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Peter Mathers (1931 in England – 8 November 2004 in Melbourne) was an English-born Australian author and playwright.

Mathers completed his first novel, Trap, in 1966. It won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, an inventive and often comic novel concerning the escapades and family history of Jack Trap, an urban mixed-blood Aborigine in what was then a society racially divided by the White Australia Policy. His second novel, The Wort Papers (1972), ranged across the country in rural settings from the Kimberley to dairy country in northern New South Wales, and further established his reputation as a stylistic innovator and satirist.

Mathers wrote radio plays, articles and published many stories in magazines, journals and newspapers before beginning a substantial playwriting career. He lived in Melbourne for many years prior to his death in 2004.

Reviews

[zed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trap is the eponymous antihero whose story is told in the first person by the doltish David David, the epitome of the dithering bureaucrat sent by the authorities to find out what Jack Trap is actually up to. With that we get the life and family history of the infamous mixed-race part Aboriginal, Irish and Tierra Del Fuegian as personally told to David by Trap himself. David presents the story in diary form. We find that trap is everything that the authorities distrust and fear, and an individual that outraged the nation and those that knew him. Trap was everything from a hangman to a green activist and plenty in-between. He had contempt for all in certain parts of society.

Winner of the 1966 Miles Franklin Award and now seemingly long forgotten. I found a much worn copy at Liflelines Bookfest. It is the only time I have seen it anywhere and in such poor condition was this copy it fell apart after 20 pages. I had to glue the spine to make comfortable reading.

Why is it seemingly long forgotten? Lisa at the ever superb ANZ Lit Lover blog may nail it with the following comment, “I found this prose style wearisome after a while, and the plot is hard to follow. Mathers is so busy having a go at the objects of his scorn that he leaves the hapless reader floundering in a morass of characters and sub-plots from Trap’s sordid family history. The book was probably innovative in 1967 and it had an important message for its time – but it hasn’t worn well, in my opinion.”

And fair enough, in fact it is very hard not to disagree that the prose style is rather overtly idiosyncratic, the plot is hard to follow and the author’s scorn? Scornful sums this book up. Be that as it may, I personally think this to be a hidden gem. Fiercely satirical, dripping with sarcasm and wildly comedic, it had me laughing out loud several times. This is one almighty attack on the idiotic policy of White Australia and Terra Nullius so entrenched in Australia at the time of writing. Author Peter Mathers smashed this inane doctrine to smithereens, with no fears as to whom he may have offended. Maybe that was the attraction to the judges.

Interestingly, where Lisa found the book dated I thought that there was a lot I could relate to modern Australian society. The race and migration debate seems little changed to me from the 60’s (and 70’s). Australia just seems to have just changed the names. No longer Italians and Greeks to be sneered at, we have just moved on from East Asians and at this point in time we fear now those from the Middle East. And as to the Chinese and the UN being a threat to our way of life? If one read the only national daily these fears have not much changed. At one point Traps interrogators condescendingly enquire of him.

…..Trap, man, it has been rumoured that you are organising a threat to the country. First, by petitioning the United Nations; second, by signing a secret agreement with the Red Chinese. Do you admire the United Nations? Do you see yourself a Red Agent?…….
…….Ours is happy land, strife free and rich. (They coaxed.) Please help us keep it that way.

Lisa’s outstanding review gave me food for thought when giving this book consideration and I recommend it and her outstanding blog. https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/07/18/t...

I will try and reread Trap one day. Most enjoyable.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Satire gone out of style and out of print

It's a kind of Quixotic quest reading books out of print. It can also be like staring over the edge of a cliff. You sometimes wonder if you can fly, or alternatively accelerate your oblivion. We all end up out of print, I suppose. So there's a little personal need to bump books along, keep them alive; keep me alive. Like this one that explores a very Australian history, that of the unwanted, mongrel history of this place as it was in 1960s.

Trap the novel has disappeared. It’s been out of print for some time. It’s one of those forgotten stars in some deep corner of the galaxy. It’s still luminous. Its language can be fabulous, rich, playful and never dull. I occasionally lose my way in it, but then lost in space is just part of the journey of so many stories going back to Homer. I use the space and galactic metaphors partly because when this book was written and published, the world was in thrall of space flight, it was possible, accessible in 1966. We humans were reaching for the stars, or at least the moon, or at least making flights in rockets with people in them to reach the outer atmosphere and orbit the earth. And of course, we were ignoring more earthly problems as well. This book was published in 1966. It won the biggest Australian literary award of the time, The Miles Franklin Award. It’s an interesting award because it aims to reward authors who look to Australian subject matter, a very earthly matter. The award itself comes from Miles Franklin, the pseudonym of Stella Franklin who had to write as a man to be accepted. Stella was a women’s activist in the early 20thC when it mattered to get the vote and rid the country of ancient impediments to women’s rights in law brought over with English law.

Rights are also one of the backdrops of this novel. Its protagonist is Jack Trap, a mixed race man, part indigenous (Australian), part indigenous (Terra del Fuegan) part Irish, English. His genealogy is one of the narrative threads recounted in the book going back to early 19thC England. This racial mix comes across as typical of the early colony. This mixing also takes us into the 1960s when Australia was re-mixing itself with a new range of Europeans, Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavians, Dutch, Ukrainians etc. While Australia was mixing it up, the indigenous population had only just been allowed to vote in 1962. Symbolically, Australians think that year was 1967, the year of a national referendum that overwhelmingly and belatedly gave equivalent rights to indigenous people. Prior to that, the recognition of indigenous Australians existed in various colonial acts from the 19thC that equated them with the local flora and fauna (I kid you not). The Australian constitution even had section 127 that expressly excluded indigenous people from census counts since they were for people. In a statistical sense, Trap doesn’t exist. Or at least part of Trap doesn’t exist. Depending on how he’s viewed, or views himself. Trap himself is ambivalent about how dark he chooses to be in a world hostile to its darkest. Here is how Mathers explores this idea of identity:

”One day in early autumn a swarm of flies took Jack as their host and for a week they plagued him. He got used to them. A Dane named him the Lord of the Flies. A publican said it was unnatural to see a man’s shadow in the air; hard on him, too. So Trap got a ration of bottles and the Dane was convinced.”

A narrator tells Trap’s story. A man called David - who is employed by a shadowy social-economic group - closely connected to the powers that be - and goes about collecting information about Trap, creating a kind of dossier. That is basically the story told in long and short sections, sometimes by an old friend or associate of Trap’s, sometimes by the information gathering narrator, often Trap himself cynically with the promise of drink. This method places us in the institutional setting of Australia in the day – a white authority telling the story of a mixed race man who lives a maverick and troublesome existence outside social norms and customs. Trap is always defined by his various narrators:



”Trap, I realise, is an anti-social black racialist bent on destroying the power of civilization.”

”I realise I have never described his colour. He is brown – somewhere between milk and energy chocolate, and this colour is inherited from his similarly coloured mother, and his father, who, although quite pale, was the son of a darker father and a mother who was brown but not Australian. Trap’s grandmother was born in Tierra del Fuego. Trap’s voice is soft and gentle. I asked him did he sing. No”

This man Trap is a – never mind – it’s enough to say that his family is large, his dwelling squalid, his wage low. He has a criminal record. Apparently one can never work out the real criminality of Trap. I've never met the man. All I have is hearsay. He is what I’d call a real bad egg. But I feel I can do something with him.

It’s because David the narrator only sees the darkness in Trap, that he can only understand the man through a set of pre-existing narratives. It's a cleverly constructed novel that way.

I love the prose. It plays with syntax, language (I'm sure there’s a bundle of neologisms in there) and rhythm enough to make it a fancy modern book. A few samples of the rich and varied prose style:

“Turnbuckle ushered him into his inner office and showed him his coloured prints and his seven stuffed (parrot) specimens. One of which hung from the ceiling on strands of clear gut, swaying on effusions, trembling on gush, it’s open beak miming forest cries, its emerald and red underplumage making the blue rug drab.

The cleaner was a thin, elderly man. Except for the few tufts of hair behind his small ears, he was bald. Age-brownness mottled his scalp. He had a thick nose, cunning eyes and a jaw made huge and pointy by lack of teeth. His toothlessness also gave him his first nickname, Gummy. And Gummy soon gave way to the ore lasting one, Som (an old name carried with a certain pride), the best known variation of Sodamjohn.

I was a year old when this book was published. I feel the passage of time as it lays waste to people. I lost an old friend and colleague to Covid recently, the author Peter Mathers died ten years or so ago, the book is out of print. Perhaps that’s the affinity I feel lately for forgotten books – despite their merit – forced into their grave of forgottenness. Yet the issues haven’t gone away. Australia still trots out opinions about the indigenous and foreigners for some political agenda – Muslims one day, Chinese the next and we still incarcerate indigenous people at an alarming rate for crimes which ironically I learned in school were similar to those that could send a person to Australia’s penal colony - a loaf of bread in 1800, a chocolate bar in 2022. It still happens. The poor and the Irish back in 1800s, the 15 yo indigenous boy at the corner shop in 2022. Indigenous children are still being taken from their families today at rates that were shameful until discovered in commissioned reports twenty years ago. So books keep coming around, they never stop being important even if they are forgotten. And the action of the book opens in Fitzroy, one of Melbourne's early suburbs in streets I know well, close to home and my early adult years. It feels immediate, too, because good writing can do that, it isn't stuck in the dimension of time.

Coda
The problem of a westerner writing about indigenous or other races will always have a complication, a question mark – why write about such things if it’s not your direct experience? I may analyse this further one day if I get the time because it’s an interesting question when applied to this book. But Mathers has already partly answered it here: our narrator obsessively looks for what he already knows and thinks of Trap and his lot. This then becomes the subject. Trap echoes back in a way that mocks his narrator and his ideas, categories, values and by extension the whole nation that holds them. David, the narrator, is collecting all this Trap information as a kind of affirmation of the values a white society holds. It’s satire. Marvellously constructed, beautifully told.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel about Jack Trap, who is part white and part Aborginal. Jack Trap, unlike his father, Wilson, looks like an aborginal. Jack is a bit of a loose canon, getting into fights and finding himself doing short prison sentences for most of his life! We also learn about Jack’s parents and grandparents. He has some Irish blood and his father Wilson passes as a white man. Jack is an independent loner who finds work easily but does not stay employed for long periods. He gets up to mischief on a regular basis. His skin colour makes him the target of abuse by police officers and white men. Jack is not the type of man who can turn a blind eye, usually preferring to confront the generally racist comment made to him.

This novel jumps around in time a lot and not always very smoothly!

This book won the 1966 Miles Franklin Award.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trap, by Peter Mathers (1931-2004), is not an easy book to read. Published in 1966, it won the Miles Franklin award, which is why I have it in my collection, and why I chose it as a title for the 2010 Classics Challenge, which I like to do with all-Australian titles. However (and it pains me to say this) I did not enjoy reading it at all.

Mather’s landscape is an Australia familiar and yet remote. In 1966 Robert Menzies had finally retired (my mother wept!) and Australia had its first new Prime Minister since 1949. There was conscription of boys too young to vote yet there was electoral support for the war in Vietnam. Aborigines had yet to be recognised in the Constitution, much less as the indigenous owners of any land because of the bizarre legal fiction that prior to European settlement Australia belonged to no one (terra nullius) . Post-war migration had brought European migrants, but they were expected to assimilate rather than retain any aspects of their culture. Asian, African and Pacific Islander immigration was restricted by the White Australia Policy. Australia was insular in more ways than one.

Into this claustrophobic society comes Jack Trap, an enigmatic figure about whom the narrator, David David has been assigned to compile a dossier. An urban mixed-race Aboriginal, Trap is both dispossessed and powerful because he refuses to conform to expectations. He is notorious, but unknowable.

To read the rest of this review, please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

[Jarmby · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t finish the book
Having got a third of the way into it it became a labour
Rambling storyline that had some amusing scenes and quips and some acerbic observations but the points of enjoyment became less frequent