ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the poetry and novels of David Malouf, perhaps the leading writer in Australia in the authors’ time. It discusses a kind of prolegomenon to theology and a sense of why prayer is so central to the whole project of literature and theology. The chapter describes the history back to roots of the lie, where and in which moment is found also possibility of re-creation, when happiness becomes where nothing is: the nothing and the silence that is a Total Presence. As the keeper of words that fade from the world, the old fellow is both the centre of all things and at the same time on the very remotest edge of a universe, a liminal figure. The world, north and south, the old and the new, Europe and Australia, is kept in being by the words that name things: while the words of the old fellow remain silent, deeper than the freaks of modern scholarship.
