POSTCARDS FROM SURFERS
by Helen Garner, 1985

"Postcards from Surfers" is the title story of Helen Garner's fourth book. The title refers to Surfers Paradise, a subtropical beach resort in Queensland on Australia's east coast where visitors from the cooler south coast, like the characters in this story, go for their holidays.

Surfers Paradise has often been the butt of Australian satire about imported American-style commercialism, the crassness and vulgarity of a way of life at odds with a paradisial setting. Garner's story is typical in offering her own highly individual responses to the setting and in her construction of a family story that resonates with disconcerting insights into the values, attitudes, and ways of life of her own and her parents' generation. A major theme is the need, and the recurrent failure, to communicate within and between generations.

In a series of short scenes we are presented with flashbacks, direct observations, and flash-forwards from the point of view of a woman in early middle age who is visiting her father, mother, and aunt at their holiday house by the beach. Aspects of the setting—"turquoise towers" with names such as Capricornia, Biarritz, The Breakers, Acapulco, and Rio—intervene in the field of vision and give the place a surrealistic air. Images of internationalism and flux abound. For the first-person narrator the family seems to be a place of stability against such change. In the midphase of her own life, she watches the two older women come up from the beach: "I see that they are two old women, and yet they are neither young nor old. They are my mother and Lorna, two institutions." But her relationship with her father is more troubling. He has been a wool classer, and she knows him from his hands: "His big blunt hands used to fling out the fleeces, still warm, on to the greasy table. His hands looked as if they had no feeling in them but they teased out the wool, judged it, classed it, assigned it a fineness and destination: Italy, Switzerland, Japan." Her thoughts and reflections are magnetically drawn to the mystery she may have missed in this rough male who can be crass, intrusive, and even violent at times and whose taste and values she rejects yet whom she may in some ways resemble.

The postcards of the title introduce a shift of key in the story. The speaker's need for communion beyond her family and at some more intensely personal level is evident as she writes 12 postcards, all addressed to a single person, Phillip, the mysterious lover who appears in other stories by Garner and who seems to represent the woman's "lost loved one." With a dexterous appearance of randomness, as of cards dealt from a dealer's pack, Garner develops a sense of her character's intertwined psychological need for these two men, father and lover. In her quirky, humorous, offhand way, the narrator reveals her need for love, wondering at the way it can be represented casually in the "courtesies" of family discourse, Australian-style, or in the more intensely personal epistolary addresses to a lover that are totally different in style from a Petrarchan sonnet but that are designed to have much the same effect.

Garner's stories are not complexly plotted. Their complexities lie rather in subtle changes of mood, the interrupted rhythms of daily discourse, and occasional epiphanies. "Postcards from Surf-ers" is anticlimactic. The speaker, to whom the reader has been drawn through the intimate revelations of her mind and moods, decides not to post her cards. The story ends with a tableau of the daughter watching her father: "He stands out on the edge of the grass, the edge of his property, looking at the sea." This is a story about edges, margins, and boundaries and of contemplation of what lies beyond them.

—Bruce Bennett