Death of a River Guide

By: Richard Flanagan

Narrated by: Humphrey Bower

Widely regarded as a classic in Australian literature, Richard Flanagan's debut novel takes us on a swirling journey into Tasmania's past and our river guide's own violent ancestral secrets.

Beneath a waterfall on the Franklin, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, lies drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears.

In the rainforest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking. As the river rises, his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of his past Aljaz discovers the soul history of his country.

Richard Flanagan's 1994 debut about a mythical Tasmania dazzled audiences around the world, and is now recognised as one of the most powerful and original Australian novels of recent decades.

©1994 Richard Flanagan (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Critic reviews

"Haunting and ambitious." ( The New York Times Book Review)

"A torrent of a book - take the plunge." ( The Independent)

An immersion in Tasmanian collective unconscious

Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

The narration of Richard Flanagan’s 1994 debut novel on Audible, in Australian vernacular made the book wonderfully three dimensional. The entire book is a narration of a river guide Aljaz Cosini’s life and ancestral being through a series of visions as he lies drowning beneath a waterfall. It is in essence a history of the collective unconscious of Tasmania, forged in the violent meeting of colonial and indigenous culture and manifest in the life and fate of an individual with aboriginal and convict ancestry, largely pushed into the shadows. In our hyper-rational western culture, we live largely unaware of how our psyche and emotional body has been shaped by our ancestors' lives, lived and unlived.

Flanagan through Aljaz Cosini’s final moments shows how we are not separate, and these unconscious forces largely determine our fate. We see Cosini’s life reviewed through his dying eyes like a branch on the maelstrom through a gorge in the Franklin River, as he is carried forward by the dark depth of inter-generational trauma anchored only by the intuitive survival instinct of family cohesion regardless of dysfunction.

“And now I am being washed into the Ho family past. Without wishing it, I should add, for frankly I have no desire to see any of it - but this newly acquired capacity of mine to witness the past means that the stories of the dead weigh like a nightmare on my still-living brain.”

Like his raft on the swollen river current shooting the rapids, he is only able to influence his destiny with slight nudges of his paddle.

“And I am not pleased about that, about the way the river is shoving my mind and heart about, pushing my body, forcing open parts that I thought closed forever.”

He intuitively understands the river, he can read it, but cannot overcome the terrible fear that has been passed down through his Tasmanian lineage. In his final moments in a magical realist scene with all his Tasmanian ancestors assembled he understands the love and humanity that they share. I have visited Tasmania and found the descriptions of environment, its people past and present rich and engaging and a horrific reminder of the genocide of an indigenous people and the brutal penal system that was ‘Van Diemen’s Land’.