REVISITING THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE: TRANSMILLENNIAL CONJURINGS

The Geographical Review

VOLUME 90 January 2000 NUMBER 1

REVISITING THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE: TRANSMILLENNIAL CON JURINGS“

J. M. POWELL

ABSTRACT. Ever anxious about real and apparent “identity” crises, Australians have in recent years been increasingly better served by interdisciplinary academic writings. A common theme is the clarification and resolution of recurrent national uncertainty. Others, intimately related, include the divide between indigenous and imported conceptualizations, especially notions of sacredness, together with broadly targeted historical interpretations of environmentalism, environmental management, and violent social clashes on settlement frontiers. Although these academic writings represent welcome additions to civic scholarship, they are also variously influenced, and their purchase on the public imagination lim- ited, by the effects of current intellectual trends. While it might be expected that fictional exemplars would address place-making and place-securing in rather more comfortable fashion, they have not been immune to similar destabilizations. Nonetheless, one intriguing, problematical work makes a useful civic point in dealing creatively with Australia’s epidemic of premillennial doubt. Keywords: Australia, fictional exemplars, interdisciplinary revisions, national identity, prernillennial uncertainty, sense ofplace, transmillennial evocations.

R o u t i n e international caricatures and the dictates of opportunistic Olympics pro- moters to the contrary, the evolution of the modern Australian condition disputes flippant references to unreflective dispositions, hearty hedonism, and similarly cas- ual stereotyping. Hushed intimations of pervasive secrets have been pivotal in the problematical adaptation of European immigrants. Withheld, as it were, until the closing stages of European “discovery,” the continent itself then proceeded to taunt and confound the intruders: only the merest outlines of its strange physiognomy were charted before the latter half of the nineteenth century. From the initial British incursions in 1788 until the Great War, the newcomers were in turns attuned to and assailed by surfeits of mystery: Australia was endowed with putative inland seas, lost civilizations, “missing links,” and overland routes to China; ruminative stabs at the origins of the incomparable groundwaters of the Great Artesian Basin chose Papua New Guinea and the Andes, the Himalayas, and the Bay of Biscay; wishful descrip-

* This essay was prepared at the University of Kyoto, Japan, in the autumn of 1999, when I was serving as a visit- ing professor of geography. Sincere thanks are due to my Kyoto colleagues and students, and especially to Profes- sor Akihiro Kinda, for his warm hospitality and wide professional expertise.

40 DR. POWELL is a professor emeritus of historical geography at Monash University, Clayton, Vic- toria 3168 Australia.

The Geographical Review go (I): 1-17. January zoo0 Copyright 8 2000 by the American Geographical Society of New York

2 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

tions of precise cycles of drought and flood were snapped up by the colonial newspa- pers, yet, as in the United States, it was also said that rain would “follow the plough.” And above all, conspiracies of silence, concerning the “convict stain”and the brutali- ties attending the dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants, in themselves provided abundant intimidation to nurture the kinds of tough taciturnity for which the bush pioneers have been admired. The very idea of Australia, place and people, is ripe for revision. The process is now well under way, fomented, appropriately, in Australia itself.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century the only nation on earth in possession of an entire continent is being asked not only to mark the centenary of its (somewhat premature) federation but also to seek greater acceptance in its Asian neighborhood and cast off a redundant link to the British monarchy. All of that, in the midst of a global epidemic of doubt, when Western intellectuals everywhere seem fatally drawn to the revisionists’ scalpels. The repeated paring back of a treasured “Austra- lian experience’’ might call out the black dog of pessimism, were it not for the balance of ingrained iconoclasm and especially, in the context of this review article, a timely conflation of geographical and historical imaginations.

Conflation as catalyst, authors as latter-day shamans: as the central thrust of my brief selection suggests, this may be the rare efflorescence that enhances and har- nesses mystery. And the most fruitful of these millennial anticipations are often self- consciously civic in purpose-in a country so blessed and cursed with secrets that they seem custom designed, so extravagantly to say, to ensure the simultaneous un- earthing and grounding now required.

Explored in cultural or environmental treatises and in complex combinations of those elemental emphases, and whether in reaction to a spectacularly failed invest- ment in secularism or as earnest emulations of postmodernistic flourishes in the wider world, the new viewpoints maybe brusquely or elegantly argued, Yet some appear deceptively folksy or whimsical. A good deal of this material contrives to hint at a freshly acquired reverence for indigenous insights and concerns and notes the urgent need for improved dialogue between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Austra- lians. And fittingly, the divide between academic and nonacademic writing now sheds substantive meaning by the day. Still in the making, the product valorizes rather than neutralizes recent anxieties. Certainly it promises a far richer appreciation of place and time, although it remains to be seen whether the Australian nation as a whole will feel at ease with its signaled maturation.

DESERT INTERIORS, SACREDNESS RESISTED Two books introduce these trends reasonablywell. Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, by Rosslyn Haynes (1998), recovers ancient and modern imagery focused on Australia’s deserts. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, by Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs (1998), debates the extraordinary influence now wielded by fresh perceptions of Aboriginality and what they discern to be its envied embrace of “sacredness.”

REVISITING THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE 3

It is a trifle unfortunate that Haynes’s overview commences with a note on “Some Facts about Australian Deserts” (pp. xiv-xv). The bulk of the book is wholly concerned with the vastly more accessible theme of representations. Its first section, “Encountering the Desert,” includes seven chapters that discuss the links of the great Inland with European fears and aspirations, with exploration and the wider imperial project, with the desert’s literary gendering and therefore with a “destiny” to be unveiled, penetrated, and made fruitful by heroic expeditioners. So Haynes writes of European desert myths; the “hideous blank”; presumptuous explorers (“Geography is never innocent”!); exploration art; the desert in emergent national- ist art, ballads, literature, and poetry; the empire’s “ripping yarns” about desert ad- venturers. But all of these transactions with ineluctably European scribbling are prefaced by a chapter that is simply entitled, “The Land Is a Map: The Aboriginal Relationship with the Desert.”Strategically, it does enough to underline the danger- ous nalvett of the very late, very white arrivals; its resonances are different in the book‘s closing chapters.

Part 11, “Apprehending the Desert,” suggests ways in which an evolving Austra- lian culture has progressed toward a more sophisticated and more satisfjmg grasp of its desert interiors. Alert to interiority’s psychological-philosophical clout, Haynes tracks that perception through populist travel literature, the development of dis- tinctively Australian contributions to modern art, and revisionist accounts of my- thologized explorers and the exploration process. These fresh inspirations, continued in the writings of Nobel Laureate Patrick White, recast the Centre as the opposite of a “hideous blank.” Under White’s pen, for example, it might even bear witness against a materialist majority huddled around the easy fringe (White 1957). But another umbilical bound White, artist Sidney Nolan, and others to the motifs of the past-to portrayals of heroic failure, strangely compelling to the Australian imagination, and most notably to the old morality tales in which ennobling endur- ance, redemptive suffering, was ranked above the expeditioners’ scientific and other goals. In the same light, the geography of the present was manifestly city- and coast- based, and while the deserts proclaimed great sacrificial deeds, the corrupted coastal masses were condemned to the hell of crime, politics, racial unrest, drugs, and the gamut of distorted sexual appetites.

For the most part, therefore, the alternative “desert-as-howling-wilderness” or “desert as desolation” theme was a European inheritance. What Haynes is striving to propose is that the older image loses some of its credibility as the immigrant nation improves its grip on the purloined territory-which may or may not be the same as saying “becomes more Australian.’’ Seeking the Centre makes more of the erosion of this Eurocentrism than of a small but palpably expanding talent for accepting and even enjoying ambiguity. The rich (but admittedly problematical) scientific line is subordinated to artistic interpretations. A single chapter, all too short, traces the influence of evolutionary biology on changing the “ways of seeing” deserts. Begin- ning with the “red in tooth and c1aw”visions of postwar artist Clifton Pugh, Haynes moves on to the chronic failures of settlers to come to terms with their own culpabil-


ity in the visitations of drought and to Russell Drysdale’s evocatively pinched, bone- strewn landscapes, which elevated drought to a “suitable subject for art” (p. 251)-

providing the entrke for Nolan and other internationally acclaimed painters. Just as the iconic scientific expeditions had often included gifted artists, so in the postwar era, in a not wholly dissimilar fashion, enduring artist-scientist partnerships brought fresh desert perceptions. Biology’s window introduced a special sense of dynamic that rejected the established imagery of a static, “timeless” land-which, as she elaborates, had become associated with ideological imperialism and its argu- ments for changeless millennia before the arrival of an advanced technological society.

Haynes’s beautifully illustrated range of case studies (including many fine re- productions of “European” and indigenous art) extends from nineteenth-century explorers’ tales to cultish road movies like the Mad Max trilogy (Miller 1979,1981; Miller and Ogilvie 1985; cf. Priscilla, Queen ofthe Desert [Elliott 19941). Too much is made of the fact that colonial expedition artist Ludwig Becker survived, vision and purpose intact, where the action men “failed,” leaving neither-a despairing plug for the humanities, now embattled on Australian campuses? Elsewhere, Haynes re- turns us to Aboriginality and the idea that “identification with Nature cannot be made through an act of will. Aboriginal knowledge is conceptual rather than per- ceptual, derived not from observation but from initiation into tribal values that are intimately linked with the idea of the sacredness of the land” (p. 278). Then we are given the example of Brad Collis’s book The Soul Stone (i993), in which a mission priest is assisted toward an appreciation of the desert’s ineffable spirituality by local Aboriginal elders. He chooses to bear initiation cicatrices on his chest, like stig- mata.

The crux here seems to be that, if cultural encounter is newly critical in modern Australia, the desert insights of Aboriginal communities may promote the kinds of re-vision required for the establishment of a genuinely Australian presence in the former Great South Land. Haynes is not alone. She builds on David Tacey’s (Jungian, New Age environmentalist) The Edge ofthe Sacred (i995), which calls for a more “authentic” rapprochement of the sacred and the modern world in which Aborigi- nal spirituality provides the model. And Seeking the Centre is complemented by Un- canny Australia, a diagnosis from literature-cultural studies specialist Ken Gelder and cultural geographer Jane Jacobs.

Essentially, Uncanny Australia starts from much the same renewal premise, but it is less sanguine in its expectations and provides a bolder social-political twist. The authors note that, over the space of a mere two decades, indigenous claims for the sacred have become crucial to the ways in which modern Australians are redefining their relationships with place. They are uneasy about the surprising power exercised by recent discourses on the sacred-sufficient to draw both sympathizers and oppo- nents, and so significantly altering political visibilities in an immigrants’ democracy that “minorities” and “majorities” become blurred, are repeatedly re-sorted. They choose to label this very modern predicament a “postcolonial” phenomenon, in


which claims for sacredness are themselves potently catalytic. Above all, the sense of unease is connected to another consequence of Aboriginal articulations of sacredness: the transformation of a barelywon sense of home into “something less familiar and less settled” (Gelder and Jacobs 1998, xiv).

“Uncanny” partly borrows from Freudian notions of anxieties about the threat- ened sense of place in a changing world: about, we are advised, the unsettling simul- taneity of being in place yet not of place; the disturbing interdigitations of the familiar and unfamiliar, when home itself becomes unheirnlich. So this ambitious little book proposes to navigate through the maze by means of a series of dead reck- onings taken from “radiating”sites of cultural negotiation. Each site is revisited with the intention of recovering the emphases on an overly charismatic sacredness in all manner of (implicated, interrelated) texts, whether the sources be Aboriginal communities, the mining or pastoral industries, feature films and documentaries, the multidisciplinary barrage of academic writings, political debate and reportage-all producing a moment of decolonization in which “what is ‘ours’ is also potentially [or always has been] ‘theirs’: the one is becoming the other, the familiar is becoming strange” (p. 23).

The list of cases noted includes recent Native Title judgments, mining intru- sions-in what became part of Kakadu National Park, ensconced in unreservedly Crocodile Dundee country of the Top End (Faiman ig86)-the repatriation of sacred objects from museums and research institutions, disputes over secret “Women’s Business” blocking the construction of a developmental bridge (bringing a backlash against reportedly mischievous “feminist anthropology”), and explications of Abo- riginal narration modes that erect formidable barriers because they appear to admit no concept of “fiction,”as that difficult term is usually understood in modern, non- indigenous societies.

Uncanny Australia seeks, finally, to incorporate this rolling challenge to moder- nity into the Australian democratic experience, making it part of our “postcolonial narrative.”Except in an intellectual, academic sense, itself culture bound and grandly encompassing rather than receptive in the indigenous sense of “listening,”perhaps it misses the connotation of inspirationally enigmatic, suprahuman experience in the sacred: that is, a fascinating, absorbing, yet somehow frightening mystery that indigenous communities intuitively know as an immeasurable reality. I have been drawing upon Veronica Brady’s more optimistic critique, “Truths, Illusions and Col- lisions,” which argues instead for humanity’s common ground of need and imagina- tive capacity (1999). If “uncanny”suggests unease, Brady’s reply is, essentially, “What of it?”The Aboriginal perspective may indeed require revisions of what is meant by the Australian nation. So be it. We must be more prepared to enlarge the frame of possibility. In fact, Brady finds here yet another plea for beleaguered arts programs:

This is an important point for those of us concerned with the arts which work to re- new and expand the forms and range of language and to privilege the sensuous and intuitive, But it is also crucial to the problem we are concerned with here, our culture’s inability to deal with the AboriginaI other. If “truth” is a matter of discovery,


then part of this discovery is to discover ourselves as being in the world physically and claimed by the world and by physical and intuitive realities-as Aboriginal people generally know themselves to be. (Brady igg9,26)

Bradyhas a good argument, but it is time to return this commentary to one of its in- troductory themes, timeliness.

A REINSTATED CORE Problematical representations of “Aboriginal Australia” are now pivotal to most credible discourses on Australian identity, but throughout the iggos Australians were also obliged to examine the encroachments of a wider world riven by ancient tribalisms, struggling with the calculated asphyxiations of rampant “globalization,” and alienated by the disturbing negativities of the extremist proponents of our own latter-day cultural studies. Never seriously positing remoteness as a shield, antipo- deans seem nevertheless perturbed to find themselves absorbed into every major fra- cas. Furthermore, susceptible to international sirens, modern Australia finds itself freshly assailed by self-doubt at a civic moment that should be peculiarly auspicious, one that warrants a dramatic recharging of the public imagination.

National identity debates address insecurities related to the repeated endorse- ment of “multiculturalism” and “multi-ethnicity” by federal and state governments of every political stamp. Even on skimming inspection, the demographic mix in the bigger capitals and in certain provincial and rural centers has become far more markedly cosmopolitan than hopelessly outdated overseas stereotyping allows, with the transformation anything but tension free. These linked perceptions under- pin Miriam Dixson’s earnestly provocative The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and Identity (1999).

Refreshingly, Dixson dares to look to old parameters: indeed, that perspective is passionately recommended, for reassurance and stability. Undeterred by recent lamentations and ex cathedra condemnations, she prefers a reorientation toward well-aired social, cultural, literary, political, and psychological emphases on the idea of nations as “imagined communities’’ (Anderson 1983). Locked away (she says) in Australia’s sidelined Anglo-Celtic inheritance is a badly needed “core culture”: amid a swirling discourse sprinkled with implicit taboos about multicultural enrichment and the exogenous violence done to Aboriginality, that battered foundation continues to offer invaluable cohesion.

Dixson’s credentials in the identity game are well established-The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia (1976) is a feminist classic-and The Imaginary Aus- tralian appears well briefed on the (somewhat overdrawn) contrast between an ethnic or non-Western model of the nation, founded on recognitions of communities of birth, descent, and culture, and the Western or civic model. The latter designa- tion, she argues, requires individuals to belong to a nation while accepting that the choice is ours, and it is therefore unsustainable without the maintenance of a civil society perpetuating national bonding. Recruiting Anthony Smith’s rejection of the innovating roles of intellectuals in favor of preexisting ethnies (1986,1991), Dixson


asserts the necessity for a grounding in popular feeling and condemns the negativity in Australia’s current identity discourse. It must be confronted by the Anglo-Celtic “core culture”: “Cut from English diffidence and spliced with Irish ambivalence, Australian patriotism has never been as explicitly self-affirming as that of, say, the USA or France. But there is a real sense in which, warts and all, Australian patriotism is a work of popular art, a piece of high creativity by the common imagination” (Dix- son iggg,12).

The core Dixson treasures and promotes originated in the English-Irish relationship that suffused the colonial period. Exported with the initial convicts and later in the cultural baggage of free settlers, this was a stubbornly entrenched ethnic conflict or cultural “collision” (following O’Farrell1987, iggo), in which most matters of local importance derived, like the newcomers themselves, from remote sources. In this representation the Irish supplied the key dynamic, and the resolution was a type of compromise that respected equity and was subsequently en- shrined in the vernacular “fair go.” This large but scarcely far-fetched claim for the cultural-social bases of distinctive character traits is less speculative than Dixson’s extension to the Australians’ ambiguous (or only ambiguously expressed?) attachment to their country: “An historical, often profound, contrast between the two major original European ethnic actors contributed foundationally to the forces which are discouraging expression of attachment to country today-right down to the unique shy-violet profile of the national flag” (igg9,95).

If the Western model of civic identity is to endure, it must come to terms with that part of its “attachment”which is tied to imagined roots. Hence the need for as- sisting “integrated” habits of thinking to improve our historical-geographical purchase, so as to move forward from a cohesive base while reducing negativities and preserving our democratic institutions. The Anglo-Celtic legacy remains, for Dix- son, the foundation of civil society; poststructuralism is undoubtedly its enemy; and poststructuralists are considered to be aligned with globalism in an assault on citi- zen agency (1999,167). Back to the psychiatry: vamped by the new orthodoxy, history and literature specialists deny or relegate the Anglo-Celtic core, repressing their underlying affection for it, and since there has been no call for its mourning, oppor- tunities are missed for normal psychological growth. Despite its displays of generos- ity and humanity, the new intellectual class resists self-analysis, and that resistance is profoundly “self-serving”-ultimately aimed at the group’s territorial aggrandize- ment within the academy (p. 169).

The savage undermining of the core culture became essential to the intellectuals’ own sense of identity: unchecked, Dixson says, it is bound to reverberate with disas- trous consequences. The recent revisiting of Australia’s oldest historical legacies has seemed so unidimensional in its gloomy negativities. Convicts; the poorest Irish; all the struggles of the pioneer farmers and graziers; the disorientated colonial middle class; hostile frontier environments; racial conflict-refashioned by a new intellectual elite, the bonding experiences and memories represented in each of these legacies were briskly shelved by a host of new citizens. And yet tellingIy, according to


Dixson, completeness of context and comparative perspective were given short shrift by the hot evangelists. Is the Australian (“Colonial British,” “British-Austra- lian”?) record on race more representative than unique (that is, is it peculiarly ab- horrent?), and is it, like the chronicle of environmental management and misman- agement, more adequately understood as further evidence of the moral status of the encompassing modern project in toto? In Dkson’s brave account, Australia’s intellectual culture remains curiously mute on such matters. Without question, this is a usefully provocative addition to our literature on “foundational histories” (Neu- mann, Thomas, and Ericksen 1999).

This present essay emerged during an enchanting and deeply instructive so- journ in Japan. Experience of similar overseas adventures throughout my alleged career caution that no such composition is unaffected by the immigrant’s sense of debt to an adopted country. Owning up immodestly solicits the concession of the following small, linking allusion: sequestered, by choice or inclination, in an elegantly screened tatami room, many of Australia’s intellectuals may have become reduced to a mannered sharing of clever guesses about passing shadows. A wider world emanates style, brings benchmarks and a sense of exile; proximate Australia seems monotonal, flat, its occupants utilitarian, too easily satisfied with externali- ties-all surface, no depth. Feeling cheated and undernourished, the intellectual withdraws still farther from the old Anglo-Celtic affirmations (and blames them?). The core itself remains, however, and today’s primary scholarly task (pace Haber- mas and ilk) is, rather, supposed to produce a strain of “integrating” synthesis (of positives and negatives) that will restore confidence in the sustaining foundation.

I hope that restatement is reasonably faithful to Dkson’s ardent remonstration. To the extent that she offers supporting case studies-convict origins, the blight of racism, transparently opportunistic insertions of a reconfigured European offshoot into the neighboring Asian realm (before the economic tigers had their teeth pulled) -they are very briskly drawn. Her broader discussion offers timely therapy, but a more substantial revisionary sampling is required to weigh her condemnations. And in any event, does she not herself invest in the same delusion of self-importance as that elite group she castigates? The distancing of intellectuals from “ordinary” Australians is fundamental in this upbraiding. Arts and social science faculties and the like beware. Other academic writers manifest that concern, as we have seen; but the therapy they seek, and seek to offer, now takes more accessible forms. Neither “descriptive-analytical” nor “narrative” does them justice. Rather, they are “bridg- ing” attempts that start from a common ground of events and trends that have al- ready attracted considerable public interest.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPERATIVE While Seeking the Centre, Uncanny Australia, and The Imaginary Australian each in its way admits the existence of an environmental fulcrum, their driving contexts are quite narrowly anthropocentric. Amid much hand wringing and an obsessive cir- cling of wagons that still characterizes this identity angst, one espies an infrequent


intuitive admission that (to adapt a once-potent American exclamation), at the end of the day, “It’s the environment, stupid!” And part of the problem is, of course, that the cuing perception is neither duly entertained nor well pursued in the nonsci- entific imagination-as a few of Haynes’s artists did eventually realize, to their credit (and profit). The window supplied by science, together with technology, its offsider, is undeniably a priceless aid in the interpretation of the Australian experience, and it is unfortunate that the public arena is so seldom entered by local scientists and tech- nologists.

Those who did so during the iggos appear to have been easily persuaded that educational texts, polemics, autobiography, and coffee-table adornment cover the full complement of acceptable justifications. If that has hardly abandoned the field to glib popularism, the crop is decidedly mixed. Latterly, the local history of animal domestication has been recounted in expert if stolid style in The Australian Ark: A History of Domesticated Animals in Australia (Parsonson 1998). Land degradation has received more of the standard “overpopulation” spin in poet-novelist Mark O’Connor’s This Tired Brown Land (1998; partly following a best-selling line in Flan- nery i994), and suburban furniture groans under such splendiferous overviews as Listen . . . Our Land Is Crying: Australia’s Environment: Problems and Solutions (White 1997; albeit unequivocally an “identifier” with pedigree, this). Related, chronologically proximate excursions from social science are similarly well inten- tioned but not, alas, wholly convincing. For example, Australian environmentalism has suffered notoriously from a shaky cultural base: loosely anchored in the public imagination, it has seemed intent on lurching from one crisis to the next-all present and future, without a grip on the larger public domain of collective memory. That situation is being rectified, very slowly, by interpretations of the evolution of environmental concepts and environmental awareness or sensitivity, the interrelated lineages of resource appraisal, technocratic “wise-use” conservationism, and the colonial and early-twentieth-century anticipations of modern preservationism and environmental management.

Sadly, the most comprehensive of recent attempts to build a cultural anchorage fails to recognize the complexly braided, inclusive nature of the historical back- ground. A contribution from Drew Hutton and Libby Connors entitled A History of the Australian Environment Movement (they do not explain how the environment “moves”) decides to find more than dormant seeds of today’s highly organized activism in the colonial era, yet brushes aside very skimpily reviewed pioneering scholarship that raised the possibility of other types of continua in thought and action (1999). Arguably, it is that same miserly staking and want of historical depth that leaves many environmentalists impotently polarized from groups with longer legacies of professional and public involvement. Notwithstanding these late bifurca- tions, it is surely poor research and poorer political strategy to parade ignorance of the exemplary activism contributed by early foresters, water managers, soil conser- vationists, and the like. The omission of the closely textured story of improvements in specialist and lay forms of environmental science is similarly regrettable. In con-

10 THE! GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

trast to Hutton and Connors, Libby Robin’s recent study, Defending theLittle Desert: The Rise ofEcological Consciousness in Australia (1998), puts back some of the science. It is right to promote a broadened base of public participation, wrong to invent definite early origins for a recognizably modern movement. And it is unsatisfying and ultimately unproductive to base so much of the narration on the wins and losses of a comparatively young political phenomenon-which remains unsteady, unpre- dictable, and as much given to loss of vision, external manipulation, and fractious immobility as it is to the collective acts of impassioned willpower with which it occasionally stirred the nation. What this otherwise disappointing history pulls out of the hat is a convenient record of environment-related campaigns, and it supplies some of the perspective to which our earlier discussion referred-if only for those readers who have unaccountably missed the standard alternatives (Gilpin 1980; Mercer 2000).

No PLACE FOR CHILDREN? If, at minimum, our last reading yields fresh evidence of a yearning for place- rootedness, then it has to be admitted that in Australia a conjuring of the genius loci involves the type of transcendent discipline that works on and for the public imagination, with or without rarefied academic inputs. That is why an attempt has been made to ensure that the scope of this review includes writings which have tried to take or excite the national pulse, regardless of convenient academic categorizations.

At this point I wish to introduce an enterprising effort to evaluate one of the most common recurring nightmares in colonial and modern Australia. Where adults were swallowed up by the wilderness, some familiar explanations, entirely co- gent for the time and place, could be cited-heroic or foolish exploration, frontier fossicking, masculine waywardness, and so on. The disappearance of precious young offspring was infinitely more disturbing, and the haunting persisted. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999) is an evocative, partially flawed account of changing “lost child” representations in diverse Australian media over the latter halves of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Peter Pierce advises that the uninspected developments in the intervening years essentially consolidated the outcomes of the first period.

Alive to the charge of privileging the Australian case-witness episodes from Charles Dickens, the brothers Grimm,HuckleberryFinn, and the rest-and by extension, one supposes, to critiques about excisions from the broader modern project ventured by authors such as Dixson, Pierce nonetheless divines a special aura in the pervasive Australian lamentations. That applies with some force to the later colonial era, when the motif (or warning?) accrued extraordinary literal and metaphorical weight. Proceeding from an admission that children of European immigrants were actually physically lost, sometimes irretrievably, in the awesome “void” of Australia’s strange bush, he observes that such tragic events very readily took on urgent sym- bolic status in colonial art, literature, and poetry. The lost-child theme dramatized the white settlers’ unresolved anxieties (and guilts): had they been wise in cutting


home ties; would it ever be possible for families to feel truly secure in such ominous surroundings; how malevolent, inhuman, was this relentlessly alien terrain? Con- versely, the same representations contrived glimpses of hope: the community bonding provided by the inevitable search process; the same, from the collective mourning, where the most intensive efforts discovered not a trace-or were agonizingly “too late.” Frequent recourse to Aboriginal trackers, in real life as in fictional narra- tions, was more than a despairing lunge. Much more than grudging respect for sin- gular, inexplicable bush prowess-conceding that the country’s secrets were less ma- liciously withheld from its ancient brethren-it hinted at a certain unrealized mutuality, or as Pierce prefers, an early chance for reconciliation of the two races.

After World War I1 the figure of the lost child returned in different guises to hound a nervous public. Innocent children were less often devoured by an alluring, hostile bush. Usually, the agency was now Australia’s human milieu, not the domain of nature, which was fast becoming the object of a more positive valorization. The new theme is the child abandoned-scandalously, by welfare institutions, lately sen- sationalized but possibly with maximum displacement for individual consciences; to criminal abuse and neglect within the family, the very cornerstone of the young nation; in newspaper reportage of abductions, murders, and brutalizations “so se- vere and disturbing.. . that it can seen that a kind of national death wish has over- come Australia” (Pierce 1999, xiv). Inordinacy aside, the relentless tally would be harrowing in any community. Still puzzled by the narrow targeting, however, I find a minuscule portion of solace in a first personal reaction that cannot be unusual: “Even in Australia!”

Pierce has a slightly better footing when referring to the successful stoking of public debate on the ancient topic of natural versus human agency in some modern films. They include Picnicat HangingRock (Weir 1975, from a 1967 fictional account) and Evil Angels (1988; released in the United States as A Cry in the Durk [Schepisi 1989]), regarding an eerie vanishing in 1980 at the Centre’s interrogatory Eyre’s Rock (now “Uluru”) and a posited dingo attack. Above all, the book finds telling closure in two poignant stories about the shoveling out to Australia of thousands of British children (“Orphans of the Empire”) and the damning expos6 of a systematic abduc- tion of Aboriginal children by appallingly misguided governments and complicit church and secular groups. But however heart wrenching, most accounts remain open to balancing interpretations, including messages of hope (Read 1999).

WAR, RACE, AND MEMORY Perplexing times, these, for all but the most naive Australian patriots. They are nonetheless grist for the mill of a bustling history industry alert to the hazards in apper- ceptions of historicizing as “public process”-increasingly shaped, that is, by the ambitions and sensitivities of influential interest groups and articulate minorities who want to claim and publicize their own niches in the national mosaic. In the in- terim, the better scholarship has maintained serviceable lines with only minor con- cessions to fashion. For instance, skirting the more precious discernments of


Australian sacredness, Ken Inglis has delivered Sacred Places (iggg), another elo- quent statement, probably the definitive one, on the distinctive memorialization of national wars by urban and rural communities.

The Australian scene is not, on the whole, encouraging toward standard Euro- pean and American approaches to landscape history, but inscriptions observing Australian engagement in overseas wars make the emphatic exception. All but the most blinkered overseas visitor remarks on the presence of monuments to World War I in our cities and towns and to the prodigious lists of names they commemo- rate. In the merest hamlet bereft of pub and church, they have a habit of suddenly turning up, bringing to mind the startlingly different landscapes of Gallipoli, of the Somme. A number of communities added solemnly elongated plantations they called “Avenues of Honour”: each sturdy tree, the ultimate stretcher bearer, carrying a soldier’s name. Essentially, the practice or ritual of commemoration began during World War I and is still largely identified with that abomination. Australians now have more than 4,000 war memorials, most of them repeatedly renewed after each new sacrificial war, each conscientiously acknowledged anniversary-they are “re- membrances” linking the generations, giving the lie to the stereotype of surface- dwelling secularism. And the most robust foundation, the heart and soul of them all, drowning out the bleats of doubters everywhere, is the ritual of Anzac Day, 15 April; it is designed to summon a national calling-to-mind of the blooding, or bloodying, of the newly federated nation in 1915, at Gallipoli.

Inglis explains the backgrounds of the several types of memorials, including the (sometimes revealing) contemporary debates over their construction, location, and function. As for the diligent renewals by subsequent generations and the fascinating late-twentieth-century surge in public interest, his main argument identifies a growing desire to share a common national past, understandable in a community that feels challenged by increasing polyethnicity, in anticipation of the need to knuckle down to the construction of a common future. So the Anzac Day parades of the late iggos accommodated ex-service personnel from all points of the compass- commonality indeed, though regrettably the change has discomfited a few of the older (principally Anglo-Celtic) veterans-and further relaxations have encouraged children to march. Good again.

But because it is the memorialization process and its potential for useful history making that most attracts Inglis’s writerly skills, he extends this line of applied scholarship into a plea for commemorating the frontier violence between settler and indigenous communities-smack inside Canberra’s hallowed Australian War Me- morial. Something to “stir the possum” (an unexpected entry, inciting debate), but purists have sniffily replied that the actual memorializing in the great shrine is spe- cially dedicated to recording those who were killed on service in the armed forces. That need not rule out another form of record of the conflict within the galleries of the main building.

Other prominent historians have been relaxing the drumming i’uccuse! that left many Australians so exhausted, feeling tormentedly useless, their self-confidence in


smithereens. Even our arch conscience blaster Henry Reynolds is now more prepared to come halfway to assist those who have elected to confine themselves to blaming their own ignorance of the narrative of racial conflict on earlier teachers and researchers. After a pioneering series of fiery tomes (notably Reynolds 1981, 1987,1989), he has produced a patient summation of the evidence of some early en- lightened concern, This Whispering in Our Hearts (“How is it our minds are not satisfied?”-this from a Sydney barrister, in 1842-in Reynolds 1998,21), and Why Weren’t We Told?A Personal Search for the Truth about Our History (i999), a type of painstaking guide to both the violence and the infrequent confessional acknowledg- ments, some from unexpected quarters.

This sampling does broadly indicate a strengthening intellectual commitment to engage the Australian public, a partly implied but occasionally trumpeted resolve to which the mangled old term “civic”is not wholly misapplied. The finding is more sanguine than Dixson and others might allow. But making a difference requires both diagnosis and prescription, and the Australian academic culture still needs to make advances in both areas. There are important discernments of insecurity about time and place that seem real enough, and the analyses of several of these writers, positive or negative, should not be lightly dismissed. They deserve to contribute to the local maturation of the identity discourse.

EUCALYPTUS EMBLEMATICA? The gradual shift toward more universal tertiary education promises augmented audiences for pointed academic intellectualizations. None of that is to suggest, however, that the influence of highly readable fiction will diminish, and every member of Australia’s small academy could do worse than to pin the following hot blast from the enduringly popular poet and writer Henry Lawson (1867-1922) above the study desk:

I leave you alone in your cultured halls To drivel and croak and cavil: Till your voice goes further than college walls Keep out of the tracks we travel.

(Lawson 1897)

Well and good, but the 1990s showed a tendency to produce some irascibly equivocating or downright opaque fiction that gives the widest of berths to civic clarifications and resolutions-and so disqualifies them here, the nub of this com- plaint. But Nicholas Jose’s The Custodians (1997) is relevant, because it packs in more representatively Australian pairings than any ordinary paperback can stand- town/bush; here/overseas; beach/home; female/male; Catholic/Protestant; Black- fellamitefella; Canberrahhe rest of us; sport/culture; family/friends; vocation/ job; new Australians/Australian-born. And so on, all parceled into a minisaga cen- tered on growing up, growing into responsibility, and growing apart from a small group. The Custodians’ formulaic sampling may ensure a readership in Australia’s fast-changing state capitals, but its parochial content probabIy gives it a restricted international reach.


Not so the far more off-beat Eucalyptus (1998). Murray Bail’s prize-winning novel seems in turns briskly confident, hesitant, lyrical, downright clumsy, need- lessly irreverent, or cynical; and some of it must surely be set down as cheeky leg pulling. Quite an accomplishment for one small book. A more considered response, still incomplete, discerns and relishes the fundamentally decent, unembellished good humor of rural Australia, spiced with the occasional prank, unable to disguise its frightened sense of siege. Frankly, one wonders whether this is indeed a “novel” according to commonplace definitions. That is one of its charms. Narrative may be its heart, but Bail succeeds in converting most of that to ambience, and in a matter- of-fact air confesses only dubious confidence in the tale and its teller.

Eucalyptus is perfectly named. Perhaps it is about essences: about iconic ele- ments in the Australian landscape. It may also address our flawed human capacity to capture those essences, to see the wood for the trees (though even the laid-back Bail would balk at taking that liberty). Certainly it is experimental, and “essence” allows that conjuring. Set in some recognizable but unfindable part of rural Australia in an unspecified period earlier in the twentieth century, it commences by introducing an eccentric widower who is able to apply a (cornily won) cash prize to the compilation of a spectacularly comprehensive collection of eucalyptus (“gum”) trees on his new property. Note the widower’s name, “Holland”: is the connotation comprehensive landscape crafting a la Low Countries, or the stale jibe about disappointinglymono- tonal Australian culture? The early part of the book is devoted to an exhausting list of individual variants of the trees and their immediately knowable and potentially figurative characteristics. When his daughter-“a speckled beauty,” “covered in small brown-black moles”-becomes famously, irresistibly attractive, the tree-daft parent takes the plunge, declaring her off limits to any prospective son-in-law who is incapable of identifymg every one of his blessed gums (p. 32).

Corny again, and brazenly so. It produces a procession of suitors, hilariously in- ept or reputedly expert, failures to a man until a fresh contender arrives from Ade- laide and proceeds steadily across the paddocks, unerringly reeling off the names. Then the cornered daughter is confronted by this entirely different visitor who also knows about trees but concentrates only on her, offering a string of little stories- “There was once a man from Tangambalanga . . .”-that sort of thing: one after another, unfailingly, captivatingly. When the Adelaide expert-a Mr. “Cave,” another clue, duly noted-is on the verge of claiming his prize, the despairing maiden takes to her bed and starts to fade away. Only a therapeutic story will save her, but the myste- rious no-name narrator holds off.

Whether Bail’s frequent “good bloke” punctuations will win universal approba- tion seems one of the larger unknowns. While appreciating its rejection of unctu- ousness as nostalgically “old Australian” (like the proverbial perfume on a sleeve) and as another welcome place marker, and enjoying his folksy jousts with postmod- ernity, I expect that in other reading contexts they may irritate or mystify. Even so, one dares to commend his insinuated misgivings about the whole literary project, including his complicity in it. The book sustains indeed a number of readings, is


multileveled (“Like an apartment block, or like an onion,” I hear him whispering). Leisurely, he follows each of his own botanical leads to assorted destinations. For example:

Some people, some nations, are permanently in shade. Some people cast a shadow. Lengths of elongated darkness precede them, even in church or when the sun is in, as they say, mopped up by the dirty cloth of the clouds. A puddle of dark forms around their feet. It’s verypinelike. The pine and darkness are one. Eucalypts are unusual in this respect: set pendulously their leaves allow see-through foliage which in turn produces a frail patterned sort of shade, if at all. Clarity, lackof darkness-these might be called “eucalyptus qualities.” (pp. 14-15)

A hint, there, about the crying need to try, at least, for an honesty of sorts. And then, lips barely open, fixing us in the eye:

Anyway, don’t you think the compliant pine is associated with numbers, geometry, the majority, whereas the eucalypt stands apart, solitary, essentially undemocratic?

The gum tree has a pale ragged beauty. A single specimen can dominate an entire Australian hill. It’s an egotistical tree. Standing apart it draws attention to itself and soaks up moisture and all signs of life, such as harmless weeds and grass, for a radius beyond its roots, at the same time givingprecious little in the way of shade.

It is trees which compose a landscape. (p. 15)

Elsewhere, at another break from the main meandering yarn, Bail reminds him- self, and us, that one’s “1andscapeperceptions”are often scarcely that at all, since they may be stitched into us as we stumble through life’s oblivions:

At the same time (be assured) strenuous efforts will be made to avoid the rusty traps set by ideas of a National Landscape, which is of course an interior landscape, fitted out with blue sky and the obligatory tremendous gum tree, perhaps some merinos chewing on the bleached-out grass in the foreground, the kind of landscape seen during home-sickness and in full color on suburban butchers’ calendars handed out with the sausages at Christmas (“Pleased to meet, meat to p1ease”etc.). Every country has its own landscape which deposits itself in layers on the consciousness of its citizens, thereby cancelling the exclusive claims made by all other national landscapes. (p. 23)

The central far-fetched yarn is regularly enfolded in these opinionated submis- sions: take them as explanatory pauses, drink breaks on the veranda, getting people onside.

Superimposed on landscape is art. And what a hectic, apparently essential en- deavour it is!

Art is imperfect, unlike nature which is casually “perfect”. To try to repeat or even convey by hand some corner of nature is forever doomed. And yet the strange power of art lies in our recognition of this attempt.

The artist, yes, humanizes the wonder of nature by doing a faulty version of it; and so nature-landscape, the figure-is brought closer to us, putting it faintly within our grasp. . . . The brush-marks, the insects stuck in the paint, thumbprints,


the signature and so on are signs of human effort. When these are not there, as in photography, the result remains parallel to nature, opportunistic.

Otherwise, a given landscape such as Holland’s continues to cry out for conversion into human terms. (p. 131)

What, then, to conclude about a “conversion” that could be judged to have been made all too human by its littered undergrowth of confessional asides? Call the daughter Nature in its Australian garb. Then, if the briskly confident expert is Sci- ence, Fiction wins the day. Or try this: the empiricist Holland,landscape author (like the rest of us), holds out a challenge to all comers-Read thisplace. The prize, com- panionship with Australia, warts and all, goes to one who works intuitively to address the human essence amidst the pointillistic paddocks. An acknowledged expert, named perhaps for cloistered academia, doesn’t really have what it takes. These are plausible destinations, rounding off the present essay. They might bring a breezy “As you please,” one imagines, from a writer who knows verywell that there are individuals for whom the most profoundly experienced senses of place may neither require nor inspire the artifice or intervention of communication, be it fictional or nonfictional.The rest of us, however, are grateful for all the assistance we can muster.

But then again, I write as an immigrant. Australia is my country of choice. I am spared much (not all) of the anguished place-seeking suffered by those who are Aus- tralian by mere accident of birth, with confusions woven into every christening robe. And this highly selective commentary on Australian senses of place was begun in the ancient shrine-and-temple city of Kyoto, where the arts and sciences of living seemed more stimulated than confounded by the juxtapositions of sacred and secular. A few of the local Zen inscriptions easily out-mystified the late-twentieth- century gabblings of the high priests of humanities and social science in the West, but for my present intentions one of those inscriptions seems both clear and perti- nent: “I learn only to be contentedPThat, it seems to me, gives purpose enough for any amount of writing and reading-and for a kind of place-making that acknowl- edges but does not succumb to confusion.

So I am reduced, finally, to offer only this: if fantasy does occasionally illuminate a search for sacredness, still you must make what you will of the ethereal tale, with its own rough speckling of supplementary (molish) insights and pretty whispers into a lonely damsel’s ear about a wider, more human world. Bail’s laconic set is not proof against epidemics of intellectualism, but in its own curious Australian way Eucalyp- tus incorporates and survives the doubting.

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Documents

REVISITING THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE: TRANSMILLENNIAL CONJURINGS