“Every Move You Make,” the title story of David Malouf’s most recent collection, awakens some interesting Australian echoes. The story centers around Jo, a woman in her 30s who came to Australia from Hungary as a child. But while she grew up in the country, Mr. Malouf writes, “no one would have called her a country girl.” This ineradicable foreignness, this sense of being on the outside of Australia trying desperately to peer in, is a quality that Jo shares with many of Mr. Malouf’s protagonists. Although the writer himself was born in Brisbane, in 1934, his unusual background – Lebanese Christian on his father’s side, Jewish on his mother’s – has given him an energizing estrangement from his country. Almost every story in “The Complete Stories” (Pantheon, 508 pages, $27.50), certainly all the best ones, can be read as fables of that estrangement, which in Mr. Malouf’s hands transcends nationality and becomes a symbol of the human condition.

Jo’s longing to plunge into Australianness is what prompts her to fall in love with Mitchell Maze, an architect who embodies all the country’s virtues. Above all, he represents to Jo its casual alluring beauty: “His charm was physical. It had to do with the sun-bleached, salt-bleached mess of his hair and the way he kept ploughing a rough hand through it; the grin that left deep lines in his cheeks; the intense presence, of which he himself seemed dismissive or unaware.” The spell is deepened when Jo discovers that, under another name, Mitchell had been a child actor, the star of a movie that she loved as a 10-year-old and that helped smooth her assimilation to her new homeland: “In that darkened picture theatre in Albury, her heart had melted. Australia had claimed and conquered her.”

But if Mr. Malouf makes it clear – even too clear, with his typically foursquare symbolism – that Mitchell is Australia, his last name hints that neither he nor his country are as straightforward as they seem. Mitchell is indeed a maze, forever eluding real intimacy. He shies away from Jo’s passionate, self-dramatizing nature, which is somehow too European, too Old World, for his taste. He cheats on her, without admitting it; he disappears for days at a time; he never tells her a word about his family or his childhood. He is exactly like the houses he is locally famous for – airy, improvised, unstable, never quite finished.

Then, abruptly, Mitchell is gone, dead in a construction accident; and only now does his true story emerge. For when Jo goes to his funeral, she learns for the first time that Mitchell – whose real name, it turns out, was Bobby – had a mentally retarded younger brother. Josh, their mother explains, “doesn’t mean to be a trouble, and he’d never do me any harm, but he’s so strong – I can’t handle him.” His brute strength – “hulking was the word that came to her” – goes along with his frighteningly outsized, uncensored emotions. At Mitchell’s grave, only Josh can express what everyone is feeling, with his “animal understanding” that issues in an “incommensurate roar.”

It is this part of Mr. Malouf’s allegory, the hulking, impaired, unmanageable brother, that stirs echoes. Last year, Peter Carey – an Australian writer much better known in this country than Mr. Malouf – published “Theft,” a novel about a painter, Michael Boone, and his retarded brother, Hugh. Hugh, like Mr. Malouf’s Josh, is unsocialized in a way that seems threatening but also authentic – more authentic than the ambitions and pretensions of his artist brother.

“Hugh the Poet and Hugh the Murderer, Hugh the Idiot Savant” runs deeper than Michael, though it is Michael who has the world’s respect, and must interpret his brother’s impressive mumbles. Then there is Les Murray, the great Australian poet, whose verse novel “Fredy Neptune” also features a hero who has custody of a retarded boy, who is eventually put in a mental hospital by a “police-hearted” Australian bureaucrat.

Reading Mr. Malouf, it becomes clear why this relationship – the elusive, articulate brother and the rooted, tongue-tied one – serves all these Australian writers as an important parable. For if Mr. Malouf’s real subject is his country – how to know it and belong to it and write about it – the figure of Josh expresses one of his persistent intuitions: that the real Australia is somehow both excessive and defective, and that it represents a peculiar burden he cannot honorably refuse.

In story after story, Mr. Malouf hints at all that Australia is lacking – ancient history, ingrained refinement, a wide and deep culture, all the European amenities whose absence Henry James deplored in 19th-century America. Yet these absences are always overbalanced, for this deeply reverent writer, by numinous presences: the strange beauty of the natural world, the people’s sense of chivalry, the openness and promise of a young nation.

One of Mr. Malouf’s early stories, “A Traveller’s Tale,” makes sly comedy out of the familiar Jamesian indictment. Mr. Malouf’s more mature stories seldom have first-person narrators, but this one does – Adrian Trisk, a sad-sack arts bureaucrat, who goes to small Australian towns to lecture on painting and poetry. He is all too aware of the uselessness of his work, attempting to make a cultural desert flourish with a watering can: “Usually there are no more than a dozen in the audience; sometimes, in bad weather or when my appearance coincides with a meeting of the Country Women’s Association, just two or three.”

So he is all the more excited when, on a visit to the dismal town of Karingai, he is approached by Mrs. Judge, an old woman who claims to have information about Alicia Vale, a legendary 20th-century opera singer. Trisk, whose fan’s familiarity with every aspect of Vale’s life looks like another sign of his triviality, is glad to hear the woman’s story. But as Mr. Malouf relates it, this looks more and more like the traveler’s tale of the title — that is, like a lie.

Although Mrs. Judge lives in rural poverty with a taciturn, uncultured husband, she claims to be Alicia Vale’s daughter by a Russian Grand Duke. A Romanoff by blood, she fled the Russian Revolution as a child, only to embark on an Arabian Nights-style odyssey. She was sold as a girl bride to an Indian prince and gave birth to a son at the age of 12; she met her famous mother again in Bombay, and escaped with her to Sydney; there she encountered Rasputin, who wasn’t killed by the boyars as history claims, but escaped to further adventures.

Mr. Malouf delightedly elaborates this farrago, which is just the kind of story a man like Trisk desperately wants to believe could happen in Australia. It has royalty, intrigue, exotic settings, high culture – all the things that the New World signally lacks. Yet it is so plainly ridiculous that even Trisk hesitates to accept it: “Oh yes, she is appropriate all right, our Mrs. Judge. Too appropriate. She puts me to the test.” Mr. Malouf seems to be taunting the part of himself that also longs for foreign colors to enliven the local monochrome. Nothing marks the provincial more clearly, he suggests, than the pseudo-sophistication of his dreams.

Yet the acerbity of this early story is not typical of Mr. Malouf. More often, his stories build toward rich affirmations of Australian history and nature. At moments, they are too affirmative and too rich: Mr. Malouf has an unfortunate tendency to enunciate ideas he has already dramatized, and his prose can grow static with reverent description. But in the best pieces in “The Complete Stories,” Mr. Malouf’s allegories and glowing descriptions work together to create his distinctive mood: dreamy but precise, full of human compassion but open to mystical intimations. These include “War Baby,” in which the Australian nostalgia for the Second World War fosters a dangerous idealism in a Vietnam-era teenager, and “Great Day,” a bustling family comedy about a venerable politician and his children and grandchildren, which concludes with a perfect image of Mr. Malouf’s Australian hopefulness:

“Down in the cove, the bonfire, which had collapsed in on itself, a shimmering mass, revived, threw up flames that cast a flickering redness over the sand. … Till here, as on other beaches, in coves all round the continent, round the vast outline of it, the heat struck of a new day coming, the light that fills the world.”

akirsch@nysun.com