ABSTRACT
It is clear from its continuing influence on contemporary literature, popular culture and media that the idea of the bush and the images associated with it have ongoing significance for Australian discourses of nation and identity. There has been, since the emergence of the legends of the bush, a contestatory relationship between the city and the bush. Indeed, the inter-dependence of the two that is one of the often noted ironies of the tradition itself is exemplified in Graeme Davidson’s suggestion that the myths of the bush were ironically ‘born of urban experience’ and that the projection of the values associated with the bush – such as the anticlericalism, nationalism, bush sentiments and racial prejudice identified by Russel Ward – ‘must be understood in terms of a concurrent movement to establish the “city” as a symbol of their negation’ (Davison 1992: 196-197). But the bush is not a stable signifier: as Whitlock and Carter suggest, it is a cultural symbol ‘which has been used by many different individuals and social groups for a wide variety of diverse, sometimes contradictory, purposes’ (Whitlock and Carter 1992: 177). It is not surprising, then, that contemporary Australian women writers are still contesting some of these cultural constructions in their fiction. It has already been argued that the discourses of Australian national and cultural identity exclude difference, whether it be that of women in the man’s world of the bush, or of its indigenous inhabitants silenced and relegated to the position of ‘shadows’, or of those from migrant cultures other than AngloCeltic. As Patricia Grimshaw et al. have suggested, ‘The process of creating a nation . . . always involves conflict in the encounter between diversity and the incitement to national uniformity’ (Grimshaw et al. 1996: 2). Both of the novels discussed in this chapter try to find a space for those excluded from the national imaginary: in Grenville’s book, each of her three main characters is in some way trying to live up to an impossible degree of perfection. Much of this pressure emerges from ideas about gender and ‘place’, both in the sense of location (the setting of a country town or, more generically, the bush) and in the sense of role (within a national mythology that determines roles for men and women). Sallis’ novel has a specifically ‘multi-cultural’ perspective in its central metaphor of an Arabic
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3
country that has become the staple of so many Australian texts of selfdiscovery. In undertaking and surviving the rigours of this journey, her central character, Hiam, is, for the first time, able to feel ‘at home’ in Australia. Significantly, in their particular focus on the need of their culturally-marginalised protagonists to find a way of belonging, both these novels are silent about indigenous Australia, though, as a later chapter will show, for some women writers the desire to belong is inextricably linked to notions of indigenous culture.
