Fly Away Peter

by

David Malouf

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Fly Away Peter makes teaching easy.

Ashley Crowther Character Analysis

A wealthy twenty-three-year-old man who returns to Australia after years of expensive British schooling. Ashley takes pleasure in the “ragged” and unfinished qualities of the land he has inherited, making a point to let the property exist as it is while still finding ways to use and enjoy it. When he finds Jim Saddler birdwatching on the premises, he doesn’t ask him to leave but instead offers him a job, liking that Jim can tell him about the many creatures that fly through his property. Ashley likes to hear Jim name the birds they see as they move through the swampland together. He also likes to deliver long-winded speeches that are inarticulate and hard to follow, though he doesn’t mind sitting in silence, either. Before leaving for World War I, Ashley gets married and has a child. When he joins the military, he enters as an officer and finds that he is well-suited for this kind of command. Although he survives the war, he is wounded in the same battle that claims Jim’s life.

Ashley Crowther Quotes in Fly Away Peter

The Fly Away Peter quotes below are all either spoken by Ashley Crowther or refer to Ashley Crowther. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Language and Naming Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

It was a new presence here and it made Jim Saddler uneasy. He watched it out of the corner of his eye and resented its bulk, the lack of purpose in its appearance and disappearance at the tree line, the lack of pattern in its lumbering passes, and the noise it made, which was also a disturbance and new.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther, Bert
Related Symbols: Bert’s Biplane
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:

He had a map of all this clearly in his head, as if in every moment of lying here flat on his belly watching some patch of it for a change of shape or colour that would be a small body betraying itself, he were also seeing it from high up, like the hawk, or that fellow in his flying-machine. He moved always on these two levels, through these two worlds: the flat world of individual grassblades, seen so close up that they blurred, where the ground-feeders darted about striking at worms, and the long view in which all this part of the country was laid out like a relief-map in the Shire Office—surf, beach, swampland, wet paddocks, dry, forested hill-slopes, jagged blue peaks. Each section of it supported its own birdlife; the territorial borders of each kind were laid out there, invisible but clear, which the birds were free to cross but didn’t; they stayed for the most part within strict limits. They stayed.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther, Bert
Related Symbols: Birds, Bert’s Biplane
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:

Ashley was too incoherent to have explained and Jim would have been embarrassed to hear it, but he understood. All this water, all these boughs and leaves and little clumps of tussocky grass that were such good nesting-places and feeding grounds belonged inviolably to the birds. The rights that could be granted to a man by the Crown, either for ninety-nine years or in perpetuity, were of another order and didn’t quite mean what they said.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: Birds
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

But for Ashley this was the first landscape he had known and he did not impose that other, greener one upon it; it was itself. Coming back, he found he liked its mixture of powdery blues and greens, its ragged edges, its sprawl, the sense it gave of being unfinished and of offering no prospect of being finished. These things spoke of space, and of a time in which nature might be left to go its own way and still yield up what it had to yield; there was that sort of abundance. For all his cultivation, he liked what was unmade here and could, without harm, be left that way.

Related Characters: Ashley Crowther
Page Number: 11
Explanation and Analysis:

It was a landscape, Ashley thought, that could accommodate a good deal. That was his view of it. It wasn’t so clearly defined as England or Germany; new things could enter and find a place there. It might be old, even very old, but it was more open than Europe to what was still to come.

Related Characters: Ashley Crowther
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:

His voice was husky and the accent broad; he drawled. The facts he gave were unnecessary and might have been pedantic. But when he named the bird, and again when he named the island, he made them sound, Ashley thought, extraordinary. He endowed them with some romantic quality that was really in himself. An odd interest revealed itself, the fire of an individual passion.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: Birds
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

[T]hey moved with their little lives, if they moved at all, so transiently across his lands—even when they were natives and spent their whole lives there—and knew nothing of Ashley Crowther. They shocked him each time he came here with the otherness of their being. He could never quite accept that they were, he and these creatures, of the same world. It was as if he had inherited a piece of the next world, or some previous one. That was why he felt such awe when Jim so confidently offered himself as an intermediary and named them: ‘Look, the Sacred Kingfisher. From Borneo.’”

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: Birds
Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Jim regarded it in a spirit of superstitious dread; and in fact these machines too, in the last months, had entered a new dimension. After just a few seasons of gliding over the hills casting unusual shadows and occasionally clipping the tops of trees, new toys of a boyish but innocent adventuring, they had changed their nature and become weapons. Already they were being used to drop bombs and had been organized, in Europe, into a new fighting arm.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther, Bert
Related Symbols: Bert’s Biplane
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

There were so many worlds. They were all continuous with one another and went on simultaneously: that man’s world, intent on his ancient business with the hoe; his own world, committed to bringing these men up to a battle; their worlds, each one, about which he could only guess.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: The Old Man and His Garden
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis:
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Ashley Crowther Quotes in Fly Away Peter

The Fly Away Peter quotes below are all either spoken by Ashley Crowther or refer to Ashley Crowther. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Language and Naming Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

It was a new presence here and it made Jim Saddler uneasy. He watched it out of the corner of his eye and resented its bulk, the lack of purpose in its appearance and disappearance at the tree line, the lack of pattern in its lumbering passes, and the noise it made, which was also a disturbance and new.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther, Bert
Related Symbols: Bert’s Biplane
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:

He had a map of all this clearly in his head, as if in every moment of lying here flat on his belly watching some patch of it for a change of shape or colour that would be a small body betraying itself, he were also seeing it from high up, like the hawk, or that fellow in his flying-machine. He moved always on these two levels, through these two worlds: the flat world of individual grassblades, seen so close up that they blurred, where the ground-feeders darted about striking at worms, and the long view in which all this part of the country was laid out like a relief-map in the Shire Office—surf, beach, swampland, wet paddocks, dry, forested hill-slopes, jagged blue peaks. Each section of it supported its own birdlife; the territorial borders of each kind were laid out there, invisible but clear, which the birds were free to cross but didn’t; they stayed for the most part within strict limits. They stayed.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther, Bert
Related Symbols: Birds, Bert’s Biplane
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:

Ashley was too incoherent to have explained and Jim would have been embarrassed to hear it, but he understood. All this water, all these boughs and leaves and little clumps of tussocky grass that were such good nesting-places and feeding grounds belonged inviolably to the birds. The rights that could be granted to a man by the Crown, either for ninety-nine years or in perpetuity, were of another order and didn’t quite mean what they said.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: Birds
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

But for Ashley this was the first landscape he had known and he did not impose that other, greener one upon it; it was itself. Coming back, he found he liked its mixture of powdery blues and greens, its ragged edges, its sprawl, the sense it gave of being unfinished and of offering no prospect of being finished. These things spoke of space, and of a time in which nature might be left to go its own way and still yield up what it had to yield; there was that sort of abundance. For all his cultivation, he liked what was unmade here and could, without harm, be left that way.

Related Characters: Ashley Crowther
Page Number: 11
Explanation and Analysis:

It was a landscape, Ashley thought, that could accommodate a good deal. That was his view of it. It wasn’t so clearly defined as England or Germany; new things could enter and find a place there. It might be old, even very old, but it was more open than Europe to what was still to come.

Related Characters: Ashley Crowther
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:

His voice was husky and the accent broad; he drawled. The facts he gave were unnecessary and might have been pedantic. But when he named the bird, and again when he named the island, he made them sound, Ashley thought, extraordinary. He endowed them with some romantic quality that was really in himself. An odd interest revealed itself, the fire of an individual passion.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: Birds
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

[T]hey moved with their little lives, if they moved at all, so transiently across his lands—even when they were natives and spent their whole lives there—and knew nothing of Ashley Crowther. They shocked him each time he came here with the otherness of their being. He could never quite accept that they were, he and these creatures, of the same world. It was as if he had inherited a piece of the next world, or some previous one. That was why he felt such awe when Jim so confidently offered himself as an intermediary and named them: ‘Look, the Sacred Kingfisher. From Borneo.’”

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: Birds
Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Jim regarded it in a spirit of superstitious dread; and in fact these machines too, in the last months, had entered a new dimension. After just a few seasons of gliding over the hills casting unusual shadows and occasionally clipping the tops of trees, new toys of a boyish but innocent adventuring, they had changed their nature and become weapons. Already they were being used to drop bombs and had been organized, in Europe, into a new fighting arm.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther, Bert
Related Symbols: Bert’s Biplane
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

There were so many worlds. They were all continuous with one another and went on simultaneously: that man’s world, intent on his ancient business with the hoe; his own world, committed to bringing these men up to a battle; their worlds, each one, about which he could only guess.

Related Characters: Jim Saddler, Ashley Crowther
Related Symbols: The Old Man and His Garden
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis: