Law of dispossession

Dodge Rose ... Dead end plots in an extraordinary story combining property law, succession, squatters, dispossession, and colonial banking history ... Destitute in Kings Cross while sheep fatten at Yass ... An end to the grand piano ... An alternative consideration of New South Wales ... Review by Max Shanahan 

The common refrain from readers (and some reviewers) of Jack Cox's Dodge Rose is something along the lines of: ???? Bewilderment abounds - as the story goes, even the publisher suspected he was the victim of a literary prank à la Ern Malley. 

First submitted as a Sydney University masters thesis, Dodge Rose earned comparison to Joyce, Beckett and, indeed, almost every other modernist, when it was picked off the "slush pile" at Dallas publisher Dalkey Archive. 

Helped no doubt by the elusiveness of its author, at the time of its publication Dodge Rose prompted much whispering amongst those in the market for contemporary Australian modernist literature. 

An enjoyable read is not portended. In his acknowledgments, Cox gives most prominent thanks to Attorney-General v Brown, A.R. Buck's The Making of Australian Property Law and (as he now is) Justice Geoff Lindsay's essay on the history of deeds. 

While succession and its associated dramas have forever been ripe pickings for novelists, rarely has the topic been approached primarily through its legal framework. 

Of the many dry and dreary topics I sat through at law school, Real Property seemed the one with the most prospect for literary creativity with its family feuds, betrayed promises and broken relationships. 

Yet Cox does not pursue this - his focus is on the nature and character of Australian property law itself, more a jurisprudential inquiry on real property than a drama about the characters who populate it.

Yet, from an exasperating pastiche of dead-end plot points and nigh-impassable stream of consciousness on topics including colonial banking history, a work emerges that with its sheer strangeness one is carried through its more dense parts in search of what surely must be contained within. 

As far as plot goes, it can be roughly sketched like this. In 1982, twenty-something Eliza arrives from the country to sort out the estate of her unknown and estranged aunt – the eponymous Dodge. 

At Dodge's Potts Point apartment in the upmarket Kingsclere building, we meet the equally unknown Max, presumed to be Dodge's daughter. Together, the duo set about Sydney trying to claim their anticipated windfall. 

Author Jack Cox: the new BeckettThings go awry – an incompetent Woolloomooloo (or: woolloomoolethal, woolloomoolibertine, woolloomoolittoral) solicitor has lost Dodge's will, and no birth certificate – nor any record – can be found for Max, including the property records. 

Thus begins a farcical quest around Sydney in an attempt to flog off the contents of the flat - a ramble from Potts Point down to Circular Quay and onto the Manly Ferry with a bookcase on a trolley is one spitted instance. 

The second part, set in the same flat in the symmetrical year of 1928, takes Dodge as an unreliable narrator of her own childhood. Joined by her companion, x, Dodge stumbles through confused, punctuation-less recollections of department stores, country visits and the social and sexual world of her parents. 

It is faintly unnerving to come across scenes of Sydney in print, and the city itself is an important character. The route from Martin Place, through the Domain and the gardens, into Woolloomooloo appears often, and the Garden Palace fire is a recurring motif throughout the first part. 

Lost on her arrival in Sydney, Eliza is guided through the gardens in the direction of Bourke St by a stranger, who foreshadows the themes to come:

"... the basement was turned into a store for government records. Land deeds, the census. The 1888 census went up in smoke, so they say it was arson. To get rid of the stain you know. You go up and back and the family is begun in bondage ..."

Scenes of the city provide relief from the otherwise heavy going reading as Cox traces the characters' movements around the streets, parks and public transport with a Joycean precision, which is pleasing to the local reader but must leave anyone else even more disoriented. 

"The built shelf of Potts Point, stacked to an inch of its limited, mineral life by the archived middle class to repulse the rising slum below, appeared itself as an eburnation of biscuit."

Reading Dodge Rose is an investigation. At first the soliloquy on property law - delivered to Max and Eliza by a lawyer in the cafeteria of the "no man's land" between the Federal and Supreme sections of the Queens Square courts - the separation described incomprehensibly: 

"... the separation of jurisdictions was considered so important that it needed to be physically delineated ... It was surely not obvious to a visitor but there existed barriers that servants of the law and its residence knew were literally impossible to cross." 

Having finished the novel, armed with a copy of Buck's The Making of Australian Property Law and secure in the knowledge of compensation for my expedition into property law, its resonance begins to emerge.  

Much of the disquisition is concerned with the 1847 case of Attorney-General v Brown, in which the Crown sought to enforce the terms of a land grant it had made near Maitland, which reserved coal veins and mines for "Our Said Lady the Queen". 

Cox follows Buck in emphasising the "coherent and even compelling" argument of Brown's counsel, Richard Windeyer, "that to maintain the grant of Crown land with all its statutory reservations and restrictions would be to maintain all the old principles of feudal slavery which the Statute of Charles II abolished". 

Alfred Stephen: unheld the principle of "feudal slavery" Whereas the notion of the Crown's radical title existed as an effective legal fiction in England, in the colony it was "treated as sied a mainmise in living memory".

Famously, Stephen CJ found against Brown, affirming the Crown's title over colonised lands, against Windeyer's potentially radical arguments, setting a precedent that continued until Mabo in holding: 

"If the feudal system of tenures be, as we take it to be, part of the universal law of the parent state, on what ground shall it be said not to be the law of New South Wales?"

Cox lands upon the essential paradox which underpins the novel: that the feudal system, effectively done away with in England in 1660, "had a greater force in NSW than even in England".

In this view of NSW as a fundamentally feudal state, the silent theme of Indigenous dispossession emerges. 

On a visit to the family sheep station near Yass, Dodge's parents - her father a prominent banker - intimate at getting an Aboriginal servant for the "slow" Dodge: 

"... legally bound for up to four years. we have tried the established channels, said mother, but its difficult now to get a. yes, its become the case all over the state ..." 

Round the back of the local church, a priest hands over a girl, x, "hair cut short like the assistants at hordens". The priest's warning: "she hasn't been through cootamundra" is the novel's most overt reference to the existence of Indigenous Australia. 

As Alys Moody observes in the Sydney Review of Books: 

"... the deep significance of our 'still-colonial' status haunts Dodge Rose ... Lying behind the expansive accounts of the history of property law in Australia is the nagging awareness that the system as a whole, its imposition and its malformation, turns on the erasure of the country's Indigenous inhabitants."

This silent, avoidant reference to Indigenous Australia stretches to such an extent that the main twist of the plot is missed by all but the most eagle-eyed of readers. 

The novel concludes with five pages of ecstatic onomatopoeia as x takes to the family's grand piano with a golf club. 

In an easily-missed aside earlier in the novel, Max reveals that "mother" smashed up the piano, which remains sitting in the flat. Thus, Max, shown to be Indigenous, is seen, on reevaluation of the first part, to be shorn of her anticipated inheritance by an absentee landlord and the state's bureaucratic erasure of her own existence and identity, and is dispossessed once more by the operation of Australian property law. 

While the novel does not explicitly say as much, Eliza will return to her "two million worth of sheep" on stolen land at Yass - Max's putative country - while Max is cast out, penniless and homeless in Kings Cross.  

On this reading, informed by property law textbooks, case law and every review of Dodge Rose ever written, the novel has a deep and affecting resonance, providing an entirely alternative view of New South Wales as one retraces the characters' steps up and down Sydney's obscuring hills. 

Yet, in the act of reading rather than studying, one is almost completely bemused. To the extent that one is willing to invest the time to unpick its mysteries, Dodge Rose is both unique and memorable. Although I still don't know what was going on with the 13-page sentence on colonial banking regulations.