Table Of ContentEcCentric Visions
This book is part of a series of semio-ethnographic studies of English-speak-
ing post-frontier cultures. In its challenge to uniformitarianism, it is also a
test case in ethnographic theory. Its aims, in other words, involve both
description and (albeit implicitly) interpretation. Multifaceted, formally
recursive, using methods ranging from the hermeneutic through the structu-
ralist to the psychoanalytic, it deploys the self-evidence of communal life and
language to establish not only that all cultural phenomena, manifest or pro-
paedeutic, are "patterned," but that this patterning is unique to and consis-
tent across the entire system. As such, it is also generative with respect to
individual responses, whether public or private. Imprinting every aspect of
the social fabric from soap operas to political behaviour, lurking behind or
within both folk tales and "official" histories, it not only influences but con-
strains the way the Australian conceptualizes, codifies, and expresses his/her
existential position. The result is a kind of omnipresent structuredness that
cumulatively signals being-in-the-world. Particularly notable in this regard
is the national predilection for icons of intermediacy: the verandah in archi-
tecture, the bush in literature, the beach in folk culture, the middleground in
landscape painting, the pub in everyday life. The concatenation is not acci-
dental. The identification with buffer zones between inside and outside not
only mimics the Australian's real bracketing between desert and ocean, but
more importantly embodies his/her sense of disablement vis-a-vis both cul-
ture and nature, art and techne, superego and id, all of which are coded as
"feminine."
Gaile McGregor is an itinerant scholar whose research falls somewhere near
the juncture of Cultural and Communication Studies, Sociology of Culture,
and Cultural Anthropology. Following on graduate degrees in both Literature
and Sociology, her recent appointments include a Canada Research Fellow-
ship at York University in Toronto and a Fulbright Fellowship at Rice Univer-
sity in Houston. Now affiliated with the Anthropology Department at the
University of Western Ontario, she is currently completing a book on North
American culture and society entitled Signs of Difference: Cycles, Markers
and Mythos.
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EcCentric Visions
RE CONSTRUCTING AUSTRALIA
Gaile McGregor
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
[wuT
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
McGregor, Gaile, [date]
Eccentric visions : re constructing Australia
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88920-229-X
1. Australia - Civilization. 2. Australian
literature - History and criticism. I. Title.
DU107.M34 1994 994 C94-930356-9
A version of Chapter 2 appeared as "Marker Traits in Australian Literature" in Austral-
ian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1, 1 (1989). Some of the material in Chapter 3,
subsection entitled "Television: Copping It," appeared in "Imitation and Resistance:
The Differential Assimilation of American Popular Culture," Australian-Canadian Stud-
ies 8, 2 (1991).
Copyright © 1994
WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
N2L 3C5
Cover design by Jose Martucci,
Design Communications
Cover photograph by the author
Typeset by Adams & Hamilton, Toronto
Printed in Canada
foo)
EcCentric Visions: Re Constructing Australia has been produced from camera-ready pages
supplied by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or
used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior writ-
ten permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing
in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to
the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario
M5V 3S6.
C O N T E N TS
PREFACE IX
I
INTRODUCTION I
2
IMAGE/SELF-IMAGE 9
Methods and Models 11
Marker Traits in Australian Literature 13
Comments 31
3
COMING INTO THE COUNTRY 33
BRISBANE 35
Class, Education, and Self-image 40
TOWNSVILLE 46
Sprawl, Urban and Otherwise 50
"THE OASIS" 53
SF and Fantasy 57
CAIRNS 63
Man against the Land 67
MOUNT ISA 72,
Ideology and the Press 78
"HOMESTEAD" 82
Women Writers, Women Written 8 5
ALICE SPRINGS 90
Ned Kelly: The Ambivalent Hero 9 5
PORT AUGUSTA IO2,
Adventure Fiction 106
KALGOORLIE IIO
V
VI CONTENTS
Making Connections 115
PERTH 119
War, Masculinity, and Violence 125
BROKEN HILL 131
The White Man's Aborigine 137
ADELAIDE 141
Voss: The Ordeal in the Desert 149
HOBART 155
Tasmania as a Subculture 159
MELBOURNE 165
Modernism in Australia 171
CANBERRA 176
Leaders 180
ARMIDALE 183
Television: Copping It 189
SYDNEY I 193
The Question of Regionalism 200
SYDNEY II 2O4
A Quick History of Australian Film 209
SURFER'S PARADISE 216
Decoding the Beach 219
BRISBANE 223
4
ALTERNATIVE READINGS 22p
The Legend of the Nineties 237
Lion and Kangaroo 244
National Fictions 254
The Lucky Country 264
5
AFTER WORDS 275
APPENDIX A:
"Voice in the Wilderness":
A Note on Grounds and Precedents 287
APPENDIX B:
Notes on Selected Australian Novels 298
BIBLIOGRAPHY 3IO
INDEX 331
Theoretical space replaces geographical space. We write now of the inversion
in the European mind represented by the antipodes long before their actual
discovery, the myths of disappearance linked to the journey "inward" from
the safe coast "surface" on which we cluster - for example, the myths of
Burke and Wills, Voss and Azaria Chamberlain, the dominant role of the
cinematographer in figuring the landscape and other flirtatious nihilisms
which could have been uttered by a Joseph Conrad or a Jean Baudrillard. Per-
haps our greatest paradox, indeed, is that while Australia is so patently an
artificial culture, so continuously recolonised and so ambivalent about its
past and present, its culture maintains an imaginative purchase on the
future, a potential for storytelling and stock-in-trade of... self-images.
Paul Taylor, "A Culture of Temporary Culture"
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P R E F A CE
What this book represents is, quite literally, a "slice" of (white) Aus-
tralian life. Though broad-ranging, that is, it makes no claims to
inclusiveness. All first-hand observations were made during one
four-month stint in mid-1986. Even those historical reconstructions
which draw significantly upon secondary sources are time-specific,
since they depend entirely on the texts available during that period
and on the opinions of the scholars who provided me with my
"leads." This isn't to say that the portrait I am proffering here is nec-
essarily any less representative than the kind of compilation one
might come up with using "hard" (statistical or archival) data. It's
merely arrived at differently. Instead of exhaustively documenting
"key" aspects of national culture (which would mean prejudging the
importance of given factors), I have constructed a model by noting the
patterns and parallels that emerge when one randomly samples social
phenomena of widely varying types. Though this process may appear
to be somewhat impressionistic, the validity of my conclusions can
easily be gauged by the extent to which all the different pieces of the
puzzle "fit."
The evidence per se is presented for the most part in Chapter 3.
This section is made up of two different texts - a journal or memoir
recounting my own experiences in Australia plus a series of mini-
essays on different topics which were prepared later from books and
other research materials collected during my trip. I have not, on the
other hand, made any attempt to maintain a strict division between
these contrapuntal strands along categorical lines. Some books, for
instance, especially in the areas of art and architecture, were read dur-
ing my stay, and as such were instrumental in guiding my responses
to more immediate kinds of phenomena. Discussion of these thus
forms part of the journal narrative. Complementarily, it is obvious
that my first-hand experience would have influenced the way I
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