ABSTRACT
In 1986 Graeme Turner argued in an influential assessment of Australian fiction in film and literature that:
The dominant myth of the Australian context sees the imperatives of the self surrender to the exigencies which are imposed by the environment … Regardless of whether that environment is a ‘natural’ one or a ‘naturalised’ one, there seems to be little that the individual can do to affect or change his condition … In narrative the result is most often the construction of the condition of enclosure, restriction and entrapment. 1
