![]() ![]() All the same, I recognised Golding's terrain, which is a moral wilderness. Neither was it afloat in the Pacific, like the one on which the planeload of schoolboys was wrecked. ![]() My island, however, was cool, not tropical, scantily populated but not deserted. In the sweaty summers we were all flyblown and, like dogs infested with fleas, exhausted ourselves in brushing them off. In Tasmania, we certainly had the flies, which didn't confine themselves to swarming on putrid meat, as they do when they consume the pig's severed head in the novel. We spend our days either committing acts of violence or recoiling from them hatred surges through our undeveloped bodies like an electric current. As children and adolescents, we have an intimate acquaintance with evil. An hour in a school playground is an education in the bestiality of young males, who instinctively form packs and taunt those who don't conform or – in a variant of the war-whooping chant repeated by the boys in William Golding's novel as they hunt wild pigs on their desert island – bash them up. ![]() That life had been short, and quite a bit of it was nasty and brutal. W hen I first read Lord of the Flies at school in Tasmania 50 years ago, I thought – as most boys probably do – that it was simply telling me the story of my life. ![]()
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