After four full days in Melbourne, I'm back in Shepparton with my sister. Going inland two hours and a half, feeling the population thin out and seeing the variously watercolor-colored eucalyptus trees (called gum trees here) pass by, I felt like I was doing something dangerously countercultural. Bear with me here-- it's just a week since I arrived--but one thing I think I've learned is that coastal Australia, the Australia of the big and also most of the small cities, is a different world than an inland starting just a few miles in. Indeed, Coastal Australia partakes of the world across the seas more than it does this inland world.My sources for this hardly novel view are a new friend, who described Australia as among the most urbanized of societies (with all the cities on the coasts), and David Tacey's Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia, a fascinating critique of Australian culture recommended to me by an Australian priest I met in at the Parliament of the Worlds' Religions in Barcelona in 2004. Tacey's "edge" is the coastal cities, and his argument is that Euro-Australian culture has refused to form a real relationship with the land, which it imagines as barren, strange and dangerous. Tacey quotes as representative a James McAuley who describe Australia's outback as "a futile heart within a fair periphery."
As an American who sometimes describes himself as "bicoastal"--raised in Southern California, resident now in New York City, who can count on the fingers of one hand significant stays into the region between--descriptions of Australia's coastal cities made it sound familiar, but I'm starting to wonder. We coastal Americans (especially New Yorkers and people conscious of being on the Pacific Rim) are more cosmopolitan than the rest of the land, and define ourselves against it, but we're defining ourselves against people, the "heartland," what many see as the true America. From Tacey I get the impression the situation here is quite different. If a true Australia there is, it's coastal, and defined against a heart which is landscape (and Aboriganes seen--or not seen--as part of it), shunned as hostile and incomprehensible. As illustrations Tacey discusses novels like Patrick White's Voss and Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock. Seems to me that, by contrast, the American land (with the possible exception of places like New Mexico) is too domesticated and Europeanized, its indigenous populations and cultures too decimated and displaced to represent an other in this way.
This may be nonsense, but it's an interesting set of hypotheses to start out with!
