In the thirty years that followed, Conrad ‘fell to earth’ in other places: Oxford, Lisbon, London, New York – but not Australia. As he has done with a dazzling array of other subjects – opera, literary criticism, autobiography, even the panoramic sweep of the twentieth century itself – Conrad has written beguilingly of the various enchanting worlds he came to claim as his own. Even if he sometimes flushed at the public slights that metropolitan London cast on his native land, he was perhaps silently complicit with those Oxford colleagues who expressed sympathy with him about his origins. They thought little Tasmania must be just like the Isle of Wight, only 12,000 miles from London. God knows what they said about Australia.

But in Conrad’s middle life something strange happened. He began to wonder about what he had lost. There were various prompts, including prodding and encouragement from friends such as Carmen Callil and the historian Marilyn Lake, who had remained creatively grounded ‘down home’. Australia began to assert itself in unexpected ways. Sheltering from rain under trees near San Francisco’s Golden Gate, Conrad was tugged back to his past. It was the oily, pungent aroma of eucalypts, their scent released into the wet air. Like a dog, he was smelling his way home. When he came across Peter Sculthorpe’s phrase about ‘the wind singing in the sky, just as it did in Tasmania’, Conrad felt his throat tighten. He remembered his own childhood when the trees in Castle Forbes Bay beside the Huon River near his grandfather’s orchard sighed or moaned as the wind lashed them. With W.H. Auden, whose rejection of little England had once seemed so final, Conrad too could begin to discover anew ‘my own tongue / And what I did when I was young’.

Peter Conrad’s 2004 Boyer lectures, delivered recently in the quiet lagoon of a late Sunday afternoon time slot on ABC Radio National, were conceived, we might guess, as a kind of atonement for his youthful rejection of the country that had reared him. They were not his first attempt to make amends, and they were, perhaps, not his best effort: a bit stilted, precious, displaying recondite facts and knowledge but failing to consolidate these into something more powerful and persuasive than mere description. Much in these lectures is distilled from previous excursions into his Australian past: Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania (1988); the poignant ‘New New World’ essay in Granta 70 (2000); and the lugubrious At Home in Australia, commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia in 2003, and in which Conrad treads heavily through a sea of photographs to discover for himself some truths about country and belonging.

It was once a national embarrassment that distinguished visitors to the country would be asked ‘What do you think of Australia?’ in the brief five minutes after they had arrived. That question was prompted by a desperate insecurity. It was a plea for understanding and for reassurance that Australia – distant, benighted and despised – really was all right; that it was, as some still like to believe, ‘the best country in the world’. Now, as Australians more readily look out and claim their own place in the global village, is it not an anachronism to seek the expatriate’s blessing on the country’s progress? Do we still need reminding that Australia has no need to apologise for itself, that the country has finally come of age? This is not Conrad’s fault but rather a reminder that uncertainty resides still deep within the Australian psyche and that it occupies a niche at the ABC.

The distant view can lend enchantment. It can also bring insight and wisdom. This is something, perhaps, that the expatriate is well placed to offer. In 1984 another exile and another Boyer lecturer turned her gaze home. Shirley Hazzard reviewed the ‘desolation, incomprehension and intolerance’ she had known in her Australian childhood in the 1930s. But she did so with a keen historical sense of how and why this was so, and with a generosity and compassion for the Australians and the country she had known. Conrad’s affection is present, but it is cool, detached and watchful. He is not altogether convinced.

For all his sense of atonement, Conrad remains a prickly and sometimes uncomfortable observer. He is not a particularly historical one. As befits a scholar of English, his sources are chiefly literary ones; his propositions about country – about belonging to it or about his reasons for leaving it – are drawn from novels and from the characters who inhabit them. While these sources have their place with others, Conrad’s absence seems to have isolated him from recent shifts in historical writing and from reappraisals of early Australian painting. It is easy to repeat the clichés about the sense of alienation that newcomers felt in the strange landscape of Australia, but the scholarship of Alan Atkinson, Tim Bonyhady, Tom Griffiths and others suggests that the European accommodation with local conditions came early and put down strong colonial roots.

Best of all in this packaging of the most recent Boyers are Conrad’s two appendices, which are based on separate lectures that he presented in Tasmania in 2004 to help celebrate the state’s bicentenary. These are heartfelt and moving. At his best, Conrad is a superb memoirist. But as he tells his Tasmanian audience how he and others have learned to ‘like this place’, and as he evokes the looming presence of Mount Wellington in the landscape of Hobart, he reveals both the strength and the essential weakness of his Boyer Lectures. His view of the larger Australia, collected in Tales of Two Hemispheres, is narrowed by two things. One of them is expatriatism; the other is Conrad’s inescapable identity as a Tasmanian.