- 1 - INTRODUCTION A Sense of Place in Twentieth-Century Australian Life Writing In recent years, at both popular and academic levels, there has been increased talk about an Australian national identity. Events at home and abroad have sparked discussion about what it means to be “Australian”, and Australia’s role in world affairs. Such debates inevitably turn to a reassessment of traditional attributes of the “Australian character”, highlighted a few years ago by the controversy over the proposed insertion of the value of “mateship” into the preamble to the Australian constitution. For all this talk about national character and values, it is often forgotten that, on a more personal level, any identification with a nation or homeland must also involve a sense of place. What makes any of us Australian? Surely at bottom this has to begin with our dwelling in, having origins in, and retaining a continuing connection to this land mass we now call Australia. But what are the hallmarks of an Australian’s sense of place? How is it formed, nurtured and sustained? Does one’s sense of place change or alter depending on what part of Australia one lives in? As Simon Schama says in the introduction to his extensive study, Landscape and Memory, “it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape”.1 So, too, our sense of place comes not merely from the physical landforms we inhabit but also from within us, our mode of viewing, which is informed by culture and history. This thesis explores the sense of place formed during childhood, as remembered by adult Australians who reconstruct their youth through various forms of life writing. The term “reconstructions of childhood” is used to allow the inclusion of works beyond the limits of traditional autobiography, such as fictional autobiography, and in some instances, novels, where it can be seen that the setting and characters are drawn substantially from the author’s own experience of growing up. Of particular interest is the manner in which Australian writers import and transform traditional tropes of autobiography and conventions of representing the child figure 1 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Fontana Press / Harper Collins, London, 1996, p. 10. - 2 - into Australian contexts. Such tropes include nostalgia for the “magic” of childhood experience, now forever lost, and the use of the Eden mythology to convey the moral and psychological dimensions of the transition from childhood innocence to adult knowledge. The other major concern of this thesis is to offer a regional comparison of the sense of place formed through childhoods in different parts of the Australian continent. Joy Hooton rightly questions John and Dorothy Colmer’s conclusion that “the quest for personal identity involves asking fundamental questions about national culture and identity”, when she asserts that “there are many Australias”. 2 Indeed, Hooton believes that even the term “regional” is too prescriptive to convey the diversity across the field of Australian autobiography. Certainly, within any region offered for study, there will be variety as well as continuity and, admittedly, attempts to categorise Australia into regions will always be somewhat artificial: cultures, landscapes and settlement patterns will invariably transgress state or city boundaries. Yet, while acknowledging these limitations, this thesis aims to show that there is much to be gained from a regional study. In particular, it throws sharper focus upon local expressions of national mythologies of place, and also facilitates an examination of more peculiar regional mythologies that are often overlooked in studies that subsume texts under the general banner of “Australian”. Constraints of space make it impossible to offer an exhaustive analysis of all Australia’s regions, so three states have been selected for close attention. These are Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria. These three have been selected to offer the widest range of contrast, both in terms of physical climate and landscape, as well as patterns of human occupation. Western Australia and Queensland, to some extent, represent “frontier” societies. Both offer physical distance from the often-cited cultural centre of Australia, the Sydney-Melbourne axis, and both are more sparsely populated than these south eastern states. In the case of Western Australia, population is heavily centralised around Perth and Fremantle, whereas Queensland is the most decentralised of all Australian states and, while the majority of its people do live in the 2 Joy Hooton, Stories of Herself When Young, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, p. 341, quoting John and Dorothy Colmer, Australian Autobiography, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987, p. 7. - 3 - south-eastern corner around Brisbane and the Gold Coast, there is a far stronger network of regional centres extending up the coast through Rockhampton and Townsville, and inland to Toowoomba and Mount Isa. This brings to Queensland literature a stronger sense of rural roots. In climate and geography, too, Queensland and Western Australia offer good contrast, with Western Australia being dry and seasonal, while Queensland is moist and tropical. Hence, while both exhibit the comparatively slower, more casual pace of life, which contrasts with the “sophisticated” metropolises of the southern states, physical isolation and remoteness pervades Western Australian writing, whereas Queensland writers seem preoccupied more with the heat and rampant vegetation. Victoria has been selected as an example of more “central” Australian culture, offering the booming city of Melbourne as ripe ground for the exploration of suburban living. Melbourne’s position as the centre of Australian industry for many years has influenced the sense of place emerging from this city. Many accounts from working class backgrounds emphasize the drab conformity of the industrial suburbs, overwhelmingly portrayed as diminutions of rectangular structures in a geometric grid, boxing their inhabitants into a bleak unexciting future. Even narratives from privileged backgrounds betray the pervasiveness of this aspect of Melbourne suburbia: Chris Wallace-Crabbe smells the aromas from the Rosella jam and sauce factory in nearby “alien” Richmond from behind the protective hedges of his South Yarra garden; Barry Humphries is similarly aware of the distinction between himself and “The Poor” who reside over the back fence of his Camberwell home.3 In choosing regions for close study, New South Wales was avoided primarily because this most populous of states already enjoys increased critical attention, and Sydney as a region has been the subject of many books.4 It is not unusual for studies of Australian themes or even landscapes to focus mainly on analyses of Sydney, allowing these examples to speak for Australia as a whole. For example, Geoffrey 3 Chris Wallace-Crabbe, “My 1930s” in Melbourne or the Bush, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1974, pp. 59–64, p. 62; Barry Humphries, More Please, Penguin, Melbourne, 1992, p. 9, respectively. 4 See, for example, Richard Hall (ed), Sydney: An Oxford Anthology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2000; George Papaellinas, Harbour: Stories by Australian Writers, Picador, Sydney, 1993; Patricia Holt, A City in the Mind: Sydney – Imagined by its Writers, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1983; Elizabeth Harrower & Vivian Smith, Sydney’s Stories, Primavera Press, Leichhardt, 1994. - 4 - Dutton’s study of the beach in Australian culture and art, when examining the representation of particular beaches by the literary community, focuses on Bondi and Manly, and makes only cursory reference to Queensland’s Surfer’s Paradise, Melbourne’s Portsea, and Perth’s Cottesloe. His justification for focussing on Sydney beaches is “because the artists and the writers have also done so.”5 Yet, there are numerous descriptions of beaches in other parts of Australia that continue to go largely unnoticed in the critical arena. The decision to exclude New South Wales from this study6 thus aims to question the perceived “representativeness” of Sydney with respect to Australian experience. Indeed, while Melbourne is often lumped with Sydney by residents from less populated states when seen as the dominant strain of Australian culture, there is within Victorian writing a strong desire to define itself against the perceived dominance of Sydney. Distinguishing Melbourne from Sydney, of course, paradoxically reinforces Sydney’s iconic place in the Australian subconscious. This feature of Melbourne literature can also be seen as a regional expression of the wider Australian preoccupation with absence: Melbourne is different from Sydney because it does not have equivalents for Sydney’s beaches, harbour views, and edgy, fast-paced lifestyle. The resultant sense of lack, which pervades Melbourne writers’ often self-deprecating accounts of their home city, resonates with a more widely held, peculiarly Australian, note of cynicism. Therefore, while Sydney is not specifically a subject of this survey, it intrudes repeatedly, and is never far from consciousness. Sydney is, to the Australian regionalist critic, what “whiteness” is to the multicultural writer: the often invisible presumption embedded in so called “Australian” experience, and the point of departure from which all other identities are framed. The focus of this thesis is Anglo-Australian narratives, although some other voices are included at certain points. Indeed, as scholars have pointed out, all 5 Geoffrey Dutton,