ABSTRACT
From all accounts, the first three decades of the settlement of Sydney by the British were one long nightmare. As a means of getting by, the desperate souls that made up this primitive colony cultivated a love of talk and a deep suspicion of language. Language, as reflective practice, had to be put aside in their daily effort to survive and make do. While the early twentieth century saw individual artists and a handful of psychiatrists and psychologists expressing a deep reflective attitude, David Russell describes the dominant sensibility of Australia, the cultural complex, as being one of silence; a silence, not of words—for talking was everywhere—but of reflective language.
The early patterning of coping with loss of identity and the resulting experiences of psychic pain are the underpinning of the particular psychological story that was and still is dominant in the culture of Australia. This chapter argues that it has taken two hundred years to gradually transform from the desire to not linger on the rawness of emotional experience, the dominant attitude of cultural silence, to the desire to reflect on and express our cultural experience; and in this expression to find a relationship characterised by qualities such as love and beauty.
