Subjects:
Houses play a very important role in both novels: 12 Edmonstone St and Tirra Lirra by the river. This is due to the fact that in both narratives, as Elisabeth Ferrier says, the main characters’ or narrator’s sense of orientation was learnt in the place where they grew up and this sense is connected to the inner lives. We can see this perfectly in the Maloufian child that discovers his first house room by room, creating his own map of the house, learning his sense of orientation, and getting in touch with the acknowledgment of his own body.
In Tirra Lirra by the river, that young little Nora tries to transform her reality (the world around her and her house) into his own world of art, beauty and fantasy very similar to the one in her books about Camelot, while she discovers her own sense of orientation which is not really understood by her until the end of the novel and his own end when she returns to her first house, her origins.
But as long as the characters acquire this sense of orientation they also get lost, this is to say, they have troubles orienting themselves in both their outer a
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For Nora in Tirra Lirra by the river, the boundaries are, apart from the house, the places she has been in. So these two novels seem two be similar as they both relate somebody’s memories of their childhood house.
In the other hand we have the house that, as Sykes and Haynes point, is a sanctuary a place where you are protected. This is to say that their memories of the places where Nora and the child spent their lives is now changed or doesn’t exist so it’s difficult to remember it, to bring it back to the memory (in Nora’s case the globe). Because, Nora, as the Lady of Shallot, believes that the world outside means dead or it’s related to it. In a few words, in both novels its main characters have to find their way through the spaces and, at the end, time, to get to know the real inner selves. As said by Whitlock, what Malouf does in this novel is a spatial progression through the structure, beginning at the entry and moving towards the private spaces.
Furthermore, the houses are the fulfilling of the gap, that even though is between the past and the present, is more a spatial gap than a chronological one.
A similar situation of this outer disorientation happens in Tirra Lirra by the river, at the beginning of the novel when, as Sykes points, she hardly saw “the real river half a mile from the house”, but also at the end of it when Nora returns to Brisbane and she gets lost in her own city while trying to find the same real river as a result of the changes that have occurred along the years she hasn’t been there.
But during her life, Nora tries to find this sanctuary in many different places: houses, flats, rooms, etc. Houses also give the Maloufian child and Nora the boundaries in where they will learn the sense of orientation and space that will serve them in the “later life”, and also in the acknowledgment of their inner selves. This is the interval that exists between the real local place (the house in Brisbane) and the fantastic and ideal place in Nora’s imagination which is Camelot that will be more real than the real local place itself just til she recovers this gap by remembering all her experiences and, in fact, her life before she left Brisbane. (Ferrier 40) In 12 Edmonstone St these boundaries are each room that the child goes on discovering till he reaches the “under the house” place which Malouf describes as a really dark forest where everything is possible, where there’s neither time nor language. She always tries to make it as comfortable as possible, as she herself says “I never once lived in an ill-proportioned room” (p.
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