In spite of this obvious and stated preoccupation, my contention is that another, more subversive, tradition in the development of Australian poetry lies in the fact that white Australians, and white Australian poets, have a vested interest in not understanding the landscape of this country.
This has set up two distinct historical discourses, one represented best by Jindyworobaks such as Ian Mudie (see 4.2.3), who wrote in 1941:
We are merely aliens in our own land, and nothing else. In 153 years we have failed to become adjusted to our environment.
(Hope, 1974: 45)
The rebuttal, from defense counsel for the other side of the debate, A.D. Hope, was as scathing as it was telling:
The answer is that wherever we have settled in those 153 years, we have adjusted the environment to ourselves just as we have adjusted ourselves to the environment. We have created a new European country in Australia and we belong to the European nations even though we do not live in Europe. (1974: 45)
In fact both sides are arguing within the same general discourse. They don't actually want to understand the Australian landscape. The Jindyworobaks, in particular, want Australia to be a frontier, they want it to be mystical and unreal, and this aspiration is evident throughout the development of Australian poetry.
According to the Penguin Dictionary, a frontier is "the boundary between the known and the unknown", and "the region that forms the margin of settled or developed territory". Having a frontier on our doorstep provides us with a convenient spiritual boundary which we must then feel compelled to cross.
A nationalist poetic tradition needs a Holy Grail, and the dramatic tradition of grappling with an understanding of this wild and untamed land gave Australian writing a theme with which to concern itself for generations. Stilz calls this the "quest for a spiritual homecoming". (1991: 69) Yet a great deal of the land, at least that which is seen by most urban poets, has been ‘tamed’ for generations.
Those of us who live in the cities (that is, most of us) insist on the existence of a frontier beyond our fences. When our cities have sprawled all over the hinterlands, we turn to the desert like Voss to find the true meaning of an unexplained country and a national inner-life. We are frontier tourists. We like to know it’s there, even if we never visit, and those of us who have been ‘there’ attain a peculiarly Australian mystical aura.
Many commentators have argued that the existence of a frontier is part of the development of the so-called urban myth, the bushie myth, the outback myth. We can see equivalent traditions in the development of the cowboy legend in the literature of the United States (continued to this day by writers such as Cormac McCarthy) and the frontier literature of another Commonwealth post-colonial nation, Canada.
But has there been any discernible development at all? Hodge and Mishra (1991) contend that urban white Australia relates to the outback in the same way that the early white settlers related to Europe. The need for some other, mystical, place to which you are connected (but where you can never belong), is the same. Only the subject of the connection has shifted.
I would argue that this attraction to the idea of distance (rather than the "tyranny" made popular by Geoffrey Blainey) leads to the obsession with wanting some singular form of national identity, but in fact inhibits the development of a real and accessible cultural life. It has, for example, excluded the vast majority of Australians (urban-dwellers, women, Aboriginal people, and those from differing cultural backgrounds) from the discussion by concentrating on the development of a national character which is based on an imaginary white male outback character.
Until recently, there has been little debate over questions such as whether or not Australians actually need one cultural identity, and to what use such a thing might be put. There has been little (at least academic and literary) acceptance of the multitude of cultural identities which already exist in this community, although current public debates around racism, multiculturalism and reconciliation are obvious signs of a social shift towards this recognition during the 1990s.
Most importantly, the traditional debate around national identity has hitherto excluded discussion of one central question:
Can an adequate understanding of the country exist in a society which cannot and has not come to terms with the cultures it dispossessed?
Many European Australians tend to think that colonisation is something that happened two hundred years ago, that we are now happily post-colonial, along with Canada, India, New Zealand, many African and Pacific nations, and other remnants of European colonial powers.
This is not true. White Australia is still in the process of colonising this country. Its hold on the country is ambivalent. Even the giant mining and pastoral companies have had their right to profit threatened by High Court decisions on native title and public insistence on environmental safeguards.