Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan Page A

long gone. But it’s not. The past isn’t ever over, otherwise why would I be starting to get that pain back in my guts just watching Ruth and Boy? And if the past doesn’t matter, why was Boy getting so angry?
    I can see that now he knows the lie, he hates the way it came between him and Rose, the way it always kept them separate despite his love, the way it always made her despise as dirt the one she loved above all others, and inevitably left him unhappy when he was with her. But the angrier he gets, the less any of it makes any sense, and though he knows the answer he asks the question.
    â€˜Then why the hell is the family such a pack of bloody snobs if they’re only the whelps of an old crawler?’ Boy asked Ruth.
    â€˜Because they are the whelps and the whelps of whelps of an old crawler. Because to get somewhere we had to make up a new world to replace their old world, because there was no hope for any of us in that old world. That’s what old Eileen taught us, and she was right. And if part of that new world means being a bit superior and putting on the plum - well, so be it. I admire the family for making something of itself out of nothing. Cos having nothing and wanting something meant pretending to have everything.’
    Ruth paused. He had played piano for some difficult crowds at Ma Dwyer’s and he had learnt the value of the pregnant pause. Boy looked up at Ruth, expecting him to say more, then looked away when no more came, then looked back and said, ‘But you can’t go around denying your own blood.’
    â€˜Why not? Look, the whole country does it. We pretend we’re gentry and we’re not. And you think it’s bad. But do you ever wonder why they renamed Van Diemen’s Land Tasmania? They wanted everyone to forget, that’s why. And everyone wanted to forget with them. Whether they were convict or policeman, none of them thought it was worth remembering.’ Ruth was an educated man. He had, after all, finished high school. And Rose had often told Boy how, if he had not followed his path in music, he would almost certainly have become a school teacher, so clever was Ruth. He was a great reader and owned over fifty books, all of which he kept locked in a big battered green trunk in his bedroom. Boy found it hard to say anything that came close to matching the cleverness of what Ruth was saying. But without being able to analyse and reply on equal terms to Ruth, he felt - as he sometimes felt when he saw a piece of timber and, without using a level, without even raising it to his eye, felt so strongly that he knew - that something in Ruth’s logic was warped.
    And the next morning when Ruth arose late and said that he had drunk so much that he could remember nothing of the night before, then Boy knew that what he knew was right.
    A river can grant you visions in an act at once generous and despicable, but even a river like the Franklin in full flood cannot explain everything. It cannot show me where, for example, after Rose’s death, Harry’s three older sisters were sent into domestic service in Launceston, cannot even show me what their faces were like, and that is a cause for sadness for which the river seems to try and compensate by showing where his baby sister Daisy was sent, the town of Strahan, a small port on the remote and wild west coast of the island, to there live with Boy’s mother, her grandmother, known in spite of her many and varying blood relations only as Auntie Ellie. Nor can the river’s waters reveal to me why Boy was at such a loss what to do with Harry, or why, when the snaring season opened, he felt impelled to take Harry with him, but I can only assume that he too must have had some vision, some premonition of his own mortality.
    The river does show me that the father and his son spent two weeks packing their gear and food into the remote hut. They walked through the last of the farmland, the boggy,