For Love Alone appeared in 1945; the year augured the post-war era. Yet mythic Australia – true always in its ghostly, affective way– continues to haunt writers, even those who try to exorcise it with postmodern ironies. Classics like Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife still seem unappeased, echoing in Russell Drysdale’s painting and Murray Bail’s story, both by that name (more of them later.) And Lawson’s flawed, little masterpiece, The Bush Undertaker, can’t leave myth alone. Its closing sentence, compulsively superfluous, reads: ‘And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird’. Did it need to be said after what we had read?

Perhaps it did. Inga Clendinnen takes up this story again in her Boyer Lectures for 1999, True Stories. Its grisliness and parsimony, she feels, make Sam Beckett seem ‘anodyne’. Really, anodyne? (Even in refined minds, it seems, cultural identity can assume superiority, not simply difference.) No matter. Myth lives on like an amputated limb, an imaginary wound. Nibbling baklava or sipping latte, nowadays, we suddenly experience the ache, or think we should experience it, till something else makes sense of our lives.

In America, driving SUVs to the supermarket, we pretend that four things shaped our history: Puritanism, Slavery, ‘Indians’ (genocide, that is), and the West. (Hiroshima, Vietnam, and Bill Gates came too late.) And in Australia? The Bush, Indigenous Australians, Transportation, Gallipoli? How many New Australians would agree? No accidental tourist, an amateur visitor rather, I whisper to myself: the Bush and its Indigenous Australians, yes, and Australian English too. But I would not dare say this out loud, only in print.

The bush first, the bush again, because I find it easier to access, though I claim no kinship to Leichhardt, Burke, or Wills. The bush oppresses, or simply presses on, much nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian writing, and lowers in foreign works like Lawrence’s Kangaroo. Surprisingly, I have said, it persists in more recent fiction, re-imagined through earlier imaginings, through Voss, A Fringe of Leaves and The Twyborn Affair, down to Media Kitsch, down to Crocodile Dundee.

A few instances. In Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes, Australia is still that ‘obdurate land’, that ‘grotesque land’, ‘evil’ to its afflicted settlers ‘because it was weird’. In that desolation, people unite ‘to ward off oblivion’. (American Puritans spoke in the same accents two centuries earlier.) Thus the bush, no less than colonialism or the carceral system, disfigures both victim and victimiser – all the way back ‘home’ to England or Ireland. It is as if the wildness of it all could creep westward across the Indian Ocean to taint Europe, as it crept eastward across the North Atlantic even after 1776.

In David Malouf’s The Conversations at Currow Creek, however, the land appears as ‘an infinity of cold and light’; it raises ‘the ceiling of the world by pushing up the very roof of your skull’; it demands legend – Adair becomes O’Dare – and delivers marvels to bored or brutalised minds. Ever on the prowl for the imaginary, Malouf also sees the bush as a kind of excess, abandon, vertigo, like opera, reaching for that impossibly high angelic or demonic note, an excess that civilisation must repress, that colonialism must choke. This much Captain Adair understands about himself, and about his operatic parents still alive within him. But opera gives joyous form to the irrational – back to Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy – as colonialism never can. And so the bush remains formless, the true secret and irrepressible domain of our condition, just like that wild patch of land, somewhere in Brisbane, which bulldozers threaten to turn into a shopping mall in Malouf’s recent story, Jacko’s Reach.

My point is that the bush is Australian, indeed, but that it alters with the times. It mutates in the artistic twilight zone. It can become an aspect of myth, opera, sexuality, colonialism, the uncanny, or the human condition. How Australian is that?

And Indigenous Australians? That is a topic I can neither evade nor satisfy, a knot of violence no foreigner can hope to cut, let alone untangle. (Piety here will not serve: like all moralising, it is but the shadow of virtue, unearned rectitude.) Still, I took heart from Patrick White’s deep tact in portraying First Peoples. And I learned from Bernard Smith’s The Spectre of Truganini, his 1980 Boyer Lectures, that veracity demands nuance. Smith’s premise is that a culture needs to ‘put down firm ethical roots in the place from which it grows’. A culture cannot live off the universals of another, though it may challenge or modify them. Hence Smith’s ‘Antipodean Manifesto’, which avoids essentials – how Australian is this or that – in favour of dialogical, historical arguments, subject to the ambiguities, more, the outright paradoxes, of history.

In that paradoxical sense, may not Bennelong, or any ‘Jacky Jacky’ for that matter, remind us, painfully, paradoxically, that hybridity is our destiny? Does not a native ‘clown’ mime the desperation of living in multiple, divided worlds? The question is prickly, not because it hints political incorrectness but because suffering in Aboriginal mimicry overwhelms laughter. Yet mimicry, in the conflict and evolution of cultures, may point a way beyond assimilation, through and beyond pain. Mimicry assumes a certain empathy; empathy both acknowledges and effaces difference.

Can Aboriginal suffering offer itself to any restitution or better, any future widening of life? Clendinnen remarks:

‘But there remains a scar on the face of the country, a birth stain of injustice and exdusion directed at the people who could so easily provide the core of our sense of ourselves as a nation, but who remain on the fringe of the land they once possessed.’

 An ennobling, perhaps enabling, idea. But how many Australians, again, believe it, outside academe? And what can the statement practically mean? That collective guilt and right recall can create a decent society? That the revived debates about Reconciliation, the Stolen Generation, and a Prime Ministerial Apology can serve as foundational moral acts, guiding future policies toward all minorities, not only Indigenous Australians?

Possibly. Memory, however, has seldom stanched ethnic or racial violence. Walter Benjamin, much quoted if seldom understood, thought that no document of civilisation is free of barbarism – or, as someone forthrightly put it, civilisation rests on the shambles. This is less cynicism than un-illusioned historical clarity: we should learn what history never seems to teach us.

As a boy in Egypt, I read James Fenimore Cooper’s Deer Slayer and The Last of the Mahicans, and moved freely, fancifully, in their wooded worlds. But to say this is not to say I believe that the genocide of Native Americans can provide the core experience of my citizenship in the United States.

Many decades later, I read with dread and admiration – admiration also in its older sense, wonder – Sam Watson’s The Kadaitfha Sung. I felt the power and passion of the book, its brutal truth, its craft in an alien tongue. I marvelled, too, at the sheer supernatural energy in the novel. But drawn as I am to spiritual things – again, more of this later – I found it allegorical magic alien: I could never make sense of my world with what the Kadaitcha sing.

The indigenous claim to social justice and shared humanity is unassailable. But we need also to recognise that if intellectuals have an iron obligation to speak the truth to power, as Edward Said says, they must also speak it, in whispers or in thunder, to themselves. That may be harder in our impacted, hybrid moment, rife with ideological mendacity, internet terrorism, media hype, nationalist frenzy, fatwa justice.

So how Australian can anything remain in this geopolitical climate? I have ventured: the bush and its First Peoples, setting aside Australian English, a daunting topic, crying for sustained treatment by a native Australian – if you doubt me, browse Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune or The Penguin Book of Australian Slang. Yet even Bush and Aborigine may be more distinctive on a literal than on a subliminal level, there where symbols hum and meanings buzz, and change brushes by like a bat in flight. Put otherwise, all life is translation, as the poet James Merrill said, and we are all lost in it. Lost and metamorphosed, I think. But that still leaves the titular question unanswered, precisely because in subliminal Australia values shift, languages slide – the pundits of theory call it ‘semiosis unending’.

The matter is neither theoretical nor abstract. Consider America, for an instant; an instant may be all we have in techno-culture. According to a US census, persons speaking Spanish at home increased, between 1980 and 1990, by 50.1%; Arabic, by 57.4%; Chinese, by 97.9%; Vietnamese, by 149.5%; Hindi and Urdu, by 155%; Mon–Khmer, by 676.3%. (Many of these new immigrants are smart, talkative, educated; some of them will return home.) Though statistics can lie, the ‘ethics of impermanence’, which Bharati Mukherjee applies to the new Americans, seems to have become a demographic law. Who thinks, who dares now to ask, ‘how American is it?’

Is change any less flagrant in Australia? No doubt, Australians themselves live their own changes while others merely pretend to perceive it. Still, cultures are famously invisible to themselves. And the brute numbers are there: so many tourists, students, immigrants, trading partners from East Asia alone, so many military and economic concerns touching the Pacific-Rim. So much public and private anxiety about Australia’s identity, role, destiny in the world. The Anglo-Celtic heritage, of course, remains vital – it’s claptrap to say otherwise. But like all strong cultures, that heritage knows how to adapt, adopt, absorb, and sometimes refuse what comes its way. It knows how to translate or refigure whatever migrates.

Translation in cultures or languages, however, is never a cinch. It brings confusion, error. It brings worse: baneful conflicts imported from other times and other places. (Watch what you say to a cabbie, in Melbourne or Sydney, about Lebanon, Bosnia, or Kashmir.) And yet translation works, seems to work better in Australia than in America, though neither will be loved universally for whatever it does. And if translation works, does it not make sense, after all, to ask ‘how Australian is it?’

Though I find cultural nationalism self-indulgent, and the cultural strut as tedious as the cultural cringe, I do feel, when I visit Australia, a zest and vibrancy that suggests an Athenian moment. Is it the ‘lucky country’ all over again? Has it finally overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’? What is this rich efflorescence in all the arts? And yes, how Australian is it?

I know: I keep asking the question only to duck it. Is there any other way? Perhaps it’s what the query itself demands. At least, that is what contemporary Australian writers – the best of them, the most inward with their culture and craft – seem to do. Of course, it would be tempting to isolate tropes and strains in classic Australian writing, recalling Manning Clark’s Tradition in Australian Literature (1949). But I prefer to let contemporary artists speak. They rework their own tradition and in so doing answer, as much as it needs answer, the pesky question. But they will not speak with one voice.

I return to that emblematic story, Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife (1894). It will not escape our stereotypes about grit, self-reliance in the bush, its mean pleasures and prodigal solitudes. That’s what survival takes. But the story also limns a mother’s love, facing down evil, all those black, slithering snakes in a stringy-bark shack. What is it all about? Try answering that and you come nearer to answering the question about ‘Australianness’ before it dissolves into the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Now Russell Drysdale’s painting, The Drover’s Wife (1945), which many Australians will have seen, seen in reproduction, at least. No children, no snakes here; bare, spindly trees; a wagon, a horse, an ant-like man in the far distance; hard, blue sky above the red earth. The rest is the woman, hulking in the foreground, with her suitcase and shadow. As in Lawson’s story, the sense of bleak, of clumsy, endurance comes through; the big feet press firmly on the ground. One wonders how a woman could stand so full in such a spare, un-giving space – where did the fat on her body, her legs, come from? But the real difference between story and painting is loss: the eyes in the small face, half-hidden by the sadly tilted hat, the eyes have a thousand-yard stare. Right over the viewer’s head. Do they express bewilderment, resignation, old hope, terminal loss? Where is the woman going with her suitcase, her back to the puny man? Right out of the frame? And what else, of Australia, is going out with her? Myself, I think this lumbering woman, with small head and shaggy dress, stands up front, at once curvaceous and columnar, saying: I am here, I may be Australia, take it or leave it. But is that what the picture really says?

Questions again. It’s what Murray Bail proffers us in his story, The Drover’s Wife (1975). Bail: sly, knowing, ironic, secretive, acutely intelligent, gruffly urbane, always sure. That’s a distance from Lawson. Watch him go at Lawson, and how Australian it is, through Drysdale. (No need here to invoke post-modern reflexivity or intertextuality.) In Bail’s story, a dentist speaks: that’s Hazel there, my former wife – why do they say she’s a drover’s wife? Bail, ever the trickster, is at it from the start: ‘There has perhaps been a mistake – but of no great importance – made in the denomination of this picture’ (reproduced on the cover of Bail’s book). A ‘mistake made’? By whom? ‘Perhaps’? ‘Of no importance’? And where did Drysdale find Hazel to pose? Come off it now, Bail.

This is not the place for a fussy explication de texte. The point is that Bail’s smart narrative takes up an icon of Australian culture, wraps it in ambiguities, casts upon it a hundred lights and shadows – and ends by reaffirming it somehow. The trick is in Bail’s flickering realism, a style of enigmatic banality, which undermines the world of common appearances without quite erasing it. That person, there in the picture is Hazel, a real person, the dentist avers. (Real just in what sense?) And she does – or does she? – elope with a drover. But why does she elope at all? Because she feels ‘in her element ill the bush’ and the silence of the drover ‘woos’ her? Because, unlike her husband, she likes snow on Ghost Gums; she enjoys chopping wood; she kills snakes. She is ‘Australian’, all right, ‘the silly girl’. In brief, the stereotypes somersault back on their feet; reality wavers, but only for a moment; and even those bushfires, absent in Drysdale’s picture, make their way back into the story. This is ‘a serious omission’, the dentist grumbles, deadpan. ‘It is altering the truth for the sake of a pretty picture or “composition.”’ Is Bail kidding us, or what? Not entirely. The tacit pain in the tale, the husband’s loss and wife’s loneliness, put reality back into place. Beyond all ironies, the Drover’s Wife lives.

Is that Australian? Australian enough so that, though the mystique may mutate in history or flicker in language, it won’t dissolve. Thus in Bail’s recent, magic romance, Eucalyptus, the author feels obliged to say on the first page:

But desertorum (to begin with) is only one of several hundred eucalypts; there is no precise number. And anyway the very word, desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origins in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let’s not forget the isolation, the exhausted shapeless women, the crude language, the always wide horizon, and the flies.

It is these circumstances which have been responsible for all those extremely dry (dun-coloured – can we say that?) hard-luck stories which have been told around fires and on the page. All that was once upon a time, interesting for a while, but largely irrelevant here. Again, really, ‘largely irrelevant here’? So what is this passage doing at the commencement of this Calvino like, yet very Australian, fairy tale called after the Eucalypt? Repudiating the stereotypes by perpetuating the archetypes, no doubt, unsettling the scene. And, of course, making space for himself.

This can be hazardous. In Bail’s earlier novel, Homesickness, for instance, the attempt to ‘flicker’ Australian reality largely fails. Bail, however, is crucially right: scratch any so called distinctive culture, and what do you see? Our common condition, the museum of personal obsessions and human conceits. Thus, thirteen Aussies on a world tour begin – gradually, zanily – to see themselves in an entirely empty museum, let’s say in Russia:

.. they followed remaining squashed together before disintegrating: shoulder–blades, ear, pelvis, heart, movement, elbow, nose, eyes, air, rib cage, bladder, cigarette, trees, thorax, shoes, penis, shadow, post.

So, how Australian are these body parts? (The passage I quote is no more cryptic or elliptic than any other in the novel.) Still, Bail manages to insinuate whimsical little essays, micro parodies, and allegories of Oz throughout the novel: bits on gum trees, Racial Laws, Australian Speech, Drysdale’s The Drover’s Wife (again!), corrugated iron structures (Australia’s answer to the Ionic column), explorers of the outback, Ayer’s Rock Hike, the nose of a man in Derbyshire – ‘it rose out of the red skin and stubble with monolithic force’), boomerangs and kangaroos, the great Australian emptiness (‘a country ... of nothing really’, a character mumbles).

These riffs are sometimes comically brilliant, sometimes merely bizarre. But Bail has a larger ambition than to inflict arcane jokes on bemused readers. He seems to say: look at Australians abroad, look for the odd detail, and you might perceive Australia anew. A right good novelistic notion. Only, Homesickness failed to renew my perceptions of the Antipodes. What it does renew, despite assorted infelicities – taxonomic fugues, tremolos of erudition – is our insight into post-modern tourism; and by guiding us through some fantastic museums of the world – the museum of the leg, of marriage, of gravity, and, yes, of corrugated iron – the novel glimpses the interior museum of us all. But all this is not to say that in an age of both global tourism and cyber-travel, none of us have or need a home. Surely, that’s one abstraction we have already seen horrifically blooded.

So, finally, how Australian is it? The question may be all wrong. For one thing, what is the ‘it’ in the question? Beer, barbie, beach, language, literature? Hardly the latter: where is Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley? For another, who am I to pronounce … but I have already entered that disclaimer.

What I have attempted here is to chase the question into some awareness of itself. In this, my covert example may have been Walter Abish’s novel, How German Is It, which appeared in 1980 before its author had ever visited Germany. An American of Jewish extraction, a consummate artist, Abish recreated ‘Germany’ by questioning our sense of it. So does the visionary company of Australian writers – note their surging presence in the New York Times Book Review – recreate ‘Australia’ in ingenious ways.

Consider a signal example: Gerald Murnane’s The Plains. This lean, hypnotic allegory enjoys a crepuscular existence, perpetually out of print. Yet the novel lives on, still original in its apprehension of Australian life, or rather, of hermetic reality. Of course, we may choose to catch in it hints of Kafka, Borges, or Coover. Allusive as it may be, though, the work remains seamless, perfectly singular.

In allegory, interpretation is a formal, if necessary, clumsiness. Set, apparently, in the immense plains at the heart of the Antipodes, a country contrasted with ‘outer Australia...the sterile margins of the continent’, The Plains probes the enigmas of identity, homeland, natural environment, ultimately, of mind and all its representations. The narrator – no one here has a proper name – offers himself to the latifundian masters of the plains, philosopher kings one and all, as a film-maker. His avowed purpose: to capture the gnostic mystery of their land. But, of course, this lucid madman, no madder than any of us, dissolves into his languages, into his arts. Can we wonder that, at the very end, he admits in a typical moment of metaphysical melancholy:

I would always ask my patron at last to record the moment when I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.

This eerie, terminal image of human endeavour, however, should not obscure the relevance of The Plains to our topic. Though the work moves in ‘shadowy areas that no one properly occupies’, though it dwells in a virtual, heraldic, imaginary space where time is a ‘pathless plain’, though it seeks the occult at the heart of ordinary things, it also challenges our worldly ideas of belongingness, of self and place. Thus one great landowner states: ‘I’ve spent my life trying to see my own place as the end of a journey I never made.’ A writer of the plains argues ‘that each man in his heart is a traveller in a boundless landscape.’ And an extremist denies outright the existence of Australia, maintaining that it is a ‘legal fiction’, superfluous to the ‘real, that is spiritual, geography’ of the world.

The Plains does not make our query, ‘How Australian is it?’ nugatory; it radically alters the terms of discourse about it. Who, after letting this noetic quest seep through consciousness, can rise to wave a flag? But then, flag-wavers under every flag have seldom been readers of avant-garde fiction. And other readers? How many will bother to ponder the intricacy of inconsistencies – say, about the patron’s daughter – of Murnane’s veiled narrative? How many will simply note its (mock) masculinist ethos, its insouciance of plot, its abstract and elusive style, before putting the book away?

Gerald Murnane and Murray Bail may adhere to the Uncanny School of Australian Fiction. They also stand high among original writers of our era. This is not to deny that other writers, like Kate Grenville, can render Australian characters dazzlingly, without turning the continent into a gnostic dream. But what did Patrick White mean – it was just a jacket blurb – calling Lilian’s Story ‘an Australian myth’ transformed into a ‘fiction of universal appeal’? What myth, particularly Australian? Certainly not that of the Terrible Father or the Fat Lady, both universal as they come. Perhaps the myth of freedom, unfettered existence, marked by historic rebelliousness, distaste for authority and genteel pretensions, an egalitarianism sparked less by resentment than, in Lilian’s case, by an immense appetite for life. As she puts it with typical zest and insight:

I fill myself now, and look with pity on those hollow men in their suits, those hollow women in their classic navy and white. They have not made themselves up from their presents and their pasts, but have let others do it for them – while I, large and plain, frightening to them and sometimes to myself, have taken the past and the present into myself

But the wonder and untamed energy of Lilian surely revert to fictions from Rabelais to Marquez, Grass, Bellow – or else they are entirely her own.

I suspect the question, ‘How Australian is it?’ lives precariously in the imaginary space between the concreteness of culture and the universality of the human condition. Without conclusion, then, let me close with a key text that inhabits that space: David Malouf’s A Spirit of Play. (Australian epics like The Great World, even fables like Remembering Babylon, are unmanageable here.) Speaking as the Boyer Lecturer for 1998, the pre-eminent novelist perceives, questions, and reinvents Australia, all at the same time, in terms open to our common understanding.

For Malouf, Australia at the start of the third millennium is a ‘raft’ on which people have scrambled, ‘a new float of lives in busy interaction’. It is also an ancient continent to which Europeans brought, as a kind of gift to the land, a way of seeing it, not simply in itself but also as ‘it fitted into the rest of the world’. (Call it colonialism if you wish, but it has been more than that.) And so, if Indigenous Australians are a land-dreaming people, latecomers share a sea-dreaming. This makes for a ‘complex fate’ – the phrase is Henry James’s about Americans – multiple allegiances to different worlds, multiple tensions between cultures and environments, which Australians need not scramble to unify. Or, as Malouf puts it: ‘Our answer on every occasion when we are offered the false choice between this and that should be, “Thank you, I’ll take both.”‘ Thus ‘identity’ becomes a confident way of being in the world, rather than some anxious definition, provided mostly by others. No cringe or scratchiness necessary, a level gaze at the world.

A Spirit of Play ends with a plea for Falstaff, for the festive, motley, carnival aspect of existence, say Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, a civic occasion of tolerance and laughter, mockery and release, death too (AIDS), which must stalk every feast. ‘Finding a place for Falstaff,’ Malouf concludes,’ acting imaginatively in the spirit of lightness he represents, is the way to wholeness; and wholeness, haleness, as the roots of our language tell us, is health.’

Health, yes, but also death, I insist, death and rebirth, both warp and woof, the loom of being. And this means spirit. Can any carnival sing out, beyond camp, folly, misrule, without the music of spirit? Can any culture, really? Identities created by an assured way of being in the world flow toward ultimate mysteries, sometimes called sacred, beyond the horizons of their assurance. And they can do so without benefit of dogma – church, mosque, temple, and shrine – because spirit finally empties itself out of its own forms.

It may be wise to recall, from time to time if not in every sublunary hour, recall even in robustly secular societies, that identities dissolve where human beings attain their fullest destiny. Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light.