Summary
Narrated in the past tense from a third-person limited omniscient perspective, Past the Shallows opens with a brief epigraph in which the narrator describes the novel’s island setting on Australia’s Tasmanian coast. Past the sandy-bottomed shallow bays comes black and cold water whose rolling movement creates paths on the sea floor. Treasured abalone live wherever rock and reef rise out of the deep water.
Harry stands on the sand, looking down the wide, curved Cloudy Bay beach. He wishes he wasn’t afraid that his brothers Miles (the novel’s protagonist) and Joe are leaving him again to go surfing. Harry knows his fear of the water isn’t just because he is the youngest: he knows how he feels about the ocean will never leave him. After asking his brothers what he should find, Harry runs down the beach to search for a shark egg, at Miles’s suggestion. He encounters a white cormorant that has just landed and he wonders if it is sick, but the bird spreads its wings and flies again. Harry enters the dunes. He lifts an abalone shell from a pile of old sea detritus and feels in his guts that people had been standing on that spot before, people who are long gone, just as he will one day die. Harry returns to the shore and finds his brother Joe taking off his cold wetsuit. They eat cheese and chutney sandwiches. Harry says, “This place is old,” but Joe isn’t really listening.
The narration shifts to Miles’s perspective as gets in a dinghy with Martin, Jeff, and Dad at dawn. No one speaks. It is the first day of school holidays and Miles must man the boat while the men dive for abalone. Miles is old enough now to fill the gap Uncle Nick left. Miles pilots the boat, named Lady Ida, and which the bank owns, through the deepest part of the channel. He knows this is where Uncle Nick would have been dragged out, alone in the dark where the riptide runs strongest. He was never found; only the dinghy floating loose. Miles’s father said Nick must have gone to check the moorings, and that he could never forgive himself. Dad and Nick were at the pub the night of the big winter swell, and when Nick wouldn’t stop worrying about the boat’s anchoring, Dad told Nick to shut up and check on it. Everyone forgot about Nick because it was also the night of the crash—the night everything changed.
Martin touches Miles’s shoulder and says it’ll be all right. Dad and Jeff are staring at Miles. He slips on a baggy yellow windcheater jacket, rolling up sleeves and putting on gloves. The light comes up on the water’s surface. He can see where the current rises over hidden hazards. The rocks below the surface are known as The Hazards of Bruny. The narrator comments that there are things about the water which you either understand or don’t, and no one can teach you how to read them. Miles knows about the water; he can feel it. And he knows not to trust it.
The perspective returns to Harry waking up in the cold and quiet house. He puts his bare feet in his sneakers and makes peanut butter toast in the kitchen. There is only enough peanut butter for one slice, so he toasts two and puts them together to make a toast sandwich. He thinks about how he should get dressed in the navy blue parka Aunty Jean gave him for Christmas because she will be there soon to take him to the Regatta. During the drive, Harry tries to focus on the radio voices so as not to think about the road, particularly the thin bit where the road curves around Mount Wellington, where his ears pop and he gets carsick.
Aunty Jean parks on the grass near the cenotaph. With time before the wood-chopping demonstration, they go to the rides. But instead of getting on a ride, Harry uses Aunty Jean’s money to play a game where he has three pennies to try to throw into jars which hold banknotes. On his third try Harry lands a penny in a five-dollar jar, but the man running the stall says it doesn’t count because he bounced the coin off another jar instead of throwing it straight in. Aunty Jean takes Harry away from the stall. Harry’s face is hot. He stares at the ground, and people’s feet, many of which are in gum boots. He sees a woman’s foot step on a twenty-dollar bill. Harry picks up the muddied money. Aunty Jean tells him to pocket it before someone says they dropped it. She advises him to save it. He fantasizes about what he can spend it on as they go off to the wood show.
The violent sight of axes hacking at wood and wood chips flying makes Harry feel sick. He tells his aunt, who agrees that he looks pale. She tells him to go get some fresh air. Harry leaves the wood show tent and spends his money on show bags full of chocolate, candy, coloring books, and toys. He has $4.50 left. He eats American-style donuts and drinks lemonade and thinks about which of the bags he’ll give to Miles. He then enters one of the animal sheds, passing a bull on his way to the goats. A man in overalls offers to let him hold a baby goat. Harry remembers when the time he came to the show with his mother and they had sat in the hay and the goats had licked their faces. Harry tells the man his aunt is waiting and runs out to find her. She remarks on all the show bags he has and he says they’re not all for him. She mentions lunch, and he decides not to tell her about the donuts and lemonade.
At lunch, Harry puts his $4.50 on the table and offers to pay. Aunty Jean closes her eyes for a second and tells him he’s so much like his mother. He focuses on eating his sandwich and tries not to look at her because he knows she is crying. On the way home, they do a big shop at the grocery store. Harry asks for peanut butter. At Harry’s house, Aunty Jean unloads the bags but leaves them at the door so as not to come in and see Dad. She and Dad don’t speak anymore—not since she made Dad buy Nick’s share of the boat and he had to get another bank loan.
Inside, Dad barely nods when Harry tells him about the groceries. Harry goes to Miles’s room and tells him excitedly about the show bags of candy. Miles, lying on his bed, shushes Harry and says Dad has a headache. Harry notices Miles’s hands are red and swollen; Miles says he just has to wait for the blisters to heal. Miles and Harry quietly unpack the groceries and put them away. Harry is excited by all the food but Miles seems unfazed. Miles brings their Dad a beer from the fridge. They go to Miles’s bed and Harry plots how he will eat some candy now and save the rest for later. When Harry asks why Miles doesn’t want to eat any of his, Miles says he’s just tired. Miles tells Harry he is lucky he gets seasick because it means he won’t ever have to work on the boat.
Analysis
After establishing in the preface the novel’s island setting, Parrett begins Past the Shallows by introducing the characters through whom the point of view will be focalized: the two brothers Miles and Harry, who are at the beach with their older brother Joe. The scene introduces young Harry’s fear of the water. Instead of surfing with his brothers, he sticks to the shore in search of driftwood and a dried-up shark egg.
With the perspective shift to Miles, the novel’s primary protagonist, Parrett establishes the novel’s formal conceit of short, unnamed, unnumbered chapters that alternate between Harry’s and Miles’s points of view. Thirteen-year-old Miles has just begun his winter holiday from school, but his Dad makes him do unpaid labor on the fishing boat, manning the boat while Dad, Jeff, and Martin dive for abalone. Miles does not see the injustice of his situation: instead, he focuses on not provoking his father’s anger by acting helpful and keeping quiet.
While piloting the boat across the channel, Miles reflects on how his Uncle Nick died by drowning on the same night of the crash—the night everything changed. With this piece of backstory, Parrett subtly introduces the internal conflict that Miles will wrestle with throughout the novel. As more of his traumatic memory resurfaces, Miles will recover a complete picture of his memory from the night his mother and uncle died.
Miles’s relationship to the turbulent ocean and the hazards hidden beneath the surface have a symbolic connection with the way Miles relates to his father. Parrett writes that Miles doesn’t know what to expect from the ocean, but he does know not to trust it. In the same way that Miles is on guard while driving the boat, anxiously trying to read the currents and make moves that will avoid calamity, Miles is forever in a reactive state around his unpredictable and violent father; just as he reads the currents and hidden hazards, Miles reads his father’s mood and navigates away from anything that will provoke Dad’s rage.
While Miles is on the boat, Harry goes to the Regatta with Aunty Jean. Throughout Harry’s time with her, Parrett drops clues about what happened to Miles and Harry’s mother: Harry becomes carsick when he drives down a particular road and Aunty Jean weeps when she thinks about how much Harry resembles her sister (his mother). Given that Miles has already reflected on the night of the crash—the night everything changed—it becomes evident that Mum died in a car crash the same night Uncle Nick disappeared. With these details, Parrett introduces the thematic concern of depicting an array of responses to grief.
