The process of finding adequate ways in which to write about the land runs parallel to the process undertaken by the colonial culture in the physical domination of the land and its indigenous people. A number of commentators have discussed the links between these two psychological and cultural processes.
Brian Elliott, claiming that Australian poetry has been preoccupied with either “the landscape itself or the relationship between landscape and society” since colonisation, bases his The Landscape of Australian Poetry on the following premise:
The first need in any new country or colony must obviously be in one way or another to comprehend the physical environment. In poetry we find this reflected, in colonial times, in an obsessive preoccupation with landscape and description. At first the urge is merely topographical, to answer the question, what does the place look like? The next is detailed and ecological: how does life arrange itself there? What plants, what animals, what activity, how does man fit in? The next may be moral: how does such a place influence people? And how, in turn, do the people make their mark upon the place? How have they developed it? Next come subtler enquiries: what spiritual and emotional qualities does such a people develop in such an environment? In what way do the forces of nature impinge on the imagination? How do aesthetic evaluations grow? How may poetry come to life in such a place as Australia? (1967: 4)
A.D. Hope argues that “English literature will increasingly play for our writers the part played by the classics in English literature itself in the past, the part essential to the imagination of having some country of the heart and mind other than and essential to the comprehension of one’s own country”. (1974: 174) But he also outlines his understanding of the process of development of colonial literatures:
To a casual eye most colonial literatures seem to go through much the same stages of development: first one of provincial dependence on the home country; next, one of provincial self-assertion or “nationalism”, and lastly one of secure establishment and acceptance in which it ceases to be a colonial literature and becomes a national one…
The comparative isolation of these frontier areas will lead, for a time, to emergence of local traditions with a strong national flavour and bias as national sentiment develops. It will be a provincial literature depending on the homeland and initiating little itself because of the lower level of culture in the “frontier” regions. (1974: 86 and 89)
Gerhard Stilz engages with Elliott’s premise, and takes it somewhat further in his study ‘Topographies of the Self: Coming to Terms with the Australian Landscape in Contemporary Australian Poetry’. Stilz promotes a slightly more convoluted development process which he believes may justify Judith Wright’s optimism for the future of Australian poetry. He outlines a “sequence of attitudes” encapsulated as:
1 Fascination—‘how exotic!’
2 Fear and Horror—‘how strange!’
3 Appropriation—changing and ‘improving’
4 Historicisation—claiming and history-building
5 Enlarging one’s own self—focus on personal experience
6 Enlarging nature—focus on geographical age and history
7 Conservation, Land Rights and an Apocalypse—anti-urban, ecological and political themes. (1991: 55)
Stilz argues that his process is “more plausibly historical, because it is based on norms of behaviour and builds up in a dialectic sequence of cultural tradition and the innovative response of individuals”. It does not, however, take into account the political and social realities which play a part in the development of any culture; such as the rural poverty which created the space in which the swaggie figure could be created, or the living conditions of contemporary Aboriginal people which lead to the poetry of Oodgeroo.
Stilz also, rather illogically and without explanation, links into one discourse apocalyptic visions such as Dransfield’s with essentially optimistic rhetoric such as Oodgeroo’s on land rights.
His interpretation of the reorientation required of a post-colonial society appears to be limited to a “readiness to … learn from other cultures”, rather than a whole-hearted acceptance of the importance of indigenous cultures in the process of developing any sense of cultural or political cohesion.