ABSTRACT
Kay Schaffer begins by asking questions which permeate this book ‘What does it mean to be an Australian? How has the idea of Australia functioned as a force of desire for white Western explorers, settlers and adventurers from European discovery to the present?’ (p. xi). These questions are particularly interesting for feminist theorizing since, like Judith Fetterley on American literature,1 Schaffer notes that ‘Women have been considered to be absent in the bush and the nationalistic bush tradition. Yet they are constantly represented through the metaphors of landscape. Women carry the burden of metaphor’ (p. xii). In line with much work in Britain on the way that the notion of national identity is central to discussion of cultural practices2, Schaffer sees that the definition of national identity as male is a central part of cultural practice in Australia. A theoretical analysis of national identity in Australia is particularly important in the light of the 1988 bicentenary celebrations and the contestations, by women, aborigines, and members of ethnic minorities, of the homogeneous images presented of Australian identity. This work is obviously necessary when one considers the masculinist nature of Australian society, and the way that women are almost, as Schaffer puts it, ‘a national joke’ (p. 8). She faces some of the central problems of this construction of Australian identity: ‘The Australian tradition is a kind of ghost tradition… one that is easily recognised, sometimes seriously and with a sense of pride, but more often with a gamut of emotions which run from amusement, to embarrassment, to hostile rejection’ (p. 4). Schaffer counters this ‘cultural cringe’ by taking all manifestations of Australian national identity seriously.
