Kenneth Cook and PJ Harvey: parched rural menace

Many writers have praised the vast desert that colours in Australia’s coastal outline, including poet Dorothea Mackellar, who loved this “sunburnt country”. But others have found the emptiness of the outback rather more horrifying. Kenneth Cook brought this horror vividly to life in his 1961 novel Wake in Fright, in which his “monster” is an outback town called Bundanyabba. PJ Harvey’s scorched earth of an album, 1995’s To Bring You My Love, is equally as unforgiving.

Long before Wolf Creek, Kenneth Cook recognised the menace in the desert. In Wake in Fright, his schoolteacher protagonist, John Grant - who hails from the coast, where “Nature deposited the graces she so firmly withheld from the west” - gambles away his train fare to Sydney and is marooned in “the Yabba”. Dependent on the generosity of the eccentric Yabba locals, Grant descends into a nightmarish haze of endlessly shouted beers and strange sexual encounters, ending up on a brutal kangaroo hunt.

Grant’s disdain for the harshness of the outback, where even the stars become “flickering light from dispassionate worlds unthinkable distances apart”, transfers onto the character of its inhabitants; for who would choose to live in such a godforsaken place? In just a few days, Grant unravels so far that when his attempt to escape by hitch-hiking sees him mistakenly dropped back at the Yabba, he tries to end his life – though the merciless Cook denies him even the relief of death. This is a chilling picture of life in the outback.

English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey parlayed the royalties from her first two albums into a house in the country, where she wrote To Bring You My Love. Of the house she said: “I have no neighbours. When I look out the window, all I see are fields. And I think you can hear that when you listen to the album.” The empty fields certainly give the album a lonely feel, although Harvey’s parched voice conjures a desert more than the picturesque English countryside, which is what makes it such a good bedfellow for Wake in Fright. On the title track Harvey caterwauls about having “cursed God above” and ”forsaken Heaven”, and Meet ze Monsta and Long Snake Moan continue this aggressive vocal style.

It’s when Harvey goes quiet that things really get sinister, however: on Teclo, she morphs her voice into a saxophone, expanding to fill the space that the song’s instruments leave. Working for the Man has her mumbling the lines, as if we’re eavesdropping on an intimate conversation. Down by the Water was the biggest hit from the album and it delivers the most terror: her seductively hoarse voice draws you in over a rasping organ bassline, then she sucker-punches you in the chorus, with wraiths of whispered vocals appearing to tell of a woman who drowns her own daughter.

For a novel and an album that contain so much space, Wake in Fright and To Bring You My Love are claustrophobic experiences. Wake in Fright uses the remoteness of the Australian outback as a prison for Grant, one from which there will be no early release. For To Bring You My Love, it’s PJ Harvey’s slithering voice that’s the captive, bouncing off the walls of the sparse musical arrangements. Both will leave your throat dry and your hands clammy.