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Chris Womersley’s Bereft: Ghosts that Dwell on the Margins of Traumatic Memory

This paper pays critical attention to the work of Chris Womersley, a contemporary Australian author who, despite winning several awards and being shortlisted for others, remains relatively unknown to the non-Australian reading public. The close reading of Womersley’s novel Bereft undertaken here explores the traumatic impact of horrific events on both the personal, familial level and the broader historical frame. Well-established trauma theories will be rehearsed for the benefit of readers less familiar with this zone of inquiry; these theories lend themselves fruitfully to an allegorical interpretation of Womersley’s novel. Contrary to what some critics claim, literature still has the power to articulate what has often been deemed ‘unutterable’, and, indeed, can contribute to exorcizing the individual and collective traumas of our ‘wounded’ or traumatized times – at the very least by embodying and implicitly arguing for individual and cultural ethical stances and processes of healing that encourage socio-political transformation. Dolores Herrero, Universidad de Zaragoza E-Mail: dherrero@unizar.es As Michael Robotham announces on the back cover of Chris Womersley’s novel, “Bereft is a dark, brooding story of war, family secrets and a man’s search for justice”. The narrative transforms a horrific incident in one man’s life into a reflection on grief, guilt, and shame, on the very nature of storytelling and its inevitable achievements and shortcomings, and on the ghosts that dwell in the dark recesses of our “imprecise, after all, not to be trusted” memory (Bereft: 34). In 1909, twelve-year-old Sarah Walker is murdered – the scene of the crime: the former gold-mining town of Flint; the alleged perpetrator: Sarah’s sixteen-yearold brother Quinn, who flees after being discovered hunched over the bloodied and abused body of his sister. Ten years later – and three years after his mother receives a telegram informing her that her son is missing, and most probably dead, in First World War France – Quinn, now a maimed Anzac, comes home, his face disfigured by shrapnel. Worse still, he was also gassed in the trenches, with the result that “the residual malevolent fogs still hovered about the hollow parts of his body” (Bereft: 13). His involvement in the war has also left him haunted by DOI 10.1515/anglia-2015-0044 Anglia 2015, 133(3): 511–527