In her introduction Suzanne Falkiner addresses the paradox of overseas perception (and often our own projection) of Australia as a ‘nation of bushdwellers’ while in fact we mostly live in urban locations. She argues that now, by focusing more on city life, writers are shifting the balance and we are being seen (as well as seeing ourselves) more realistically.

The book is presented both topographically through perceptions of each State’s capital city, and sequentially in order of date of settlement. Chronology, while in one sense crucial to the concept of the book, is not rigidly adhered to. Governor Arthur Phillip appears (appropriately) to have the first word, but he is in fact upstaged by an epigraph from Holden’s Performance by Murray Bail which introduces the first chapter relating to nineteenth-century Sydney. The juxtaposition in terms of time provides and nice kind of tension.

There is nothing contrived or stylistic about the colour photographs that illustrate the text and it is only when seen in the context of an accompanying fragment of text that an irony emerges and these photographs become more than simply pretty pictures. In this sense they offer an exciting extension of the text itself and the reader’s response to it.

Sydney throbs with vigour and noise and shimmers in heat as people in Ruth Park’s Poor Man’s Orange wait for the southerly buster. Falkiner finds plenty of evidence that ‘Sydney is synonymous with a longing for the comforting presence of the sea’. A whole chapter is devoted to Patrick White’s Sydney.

The stereotypical idea of Tasmania as an ‘apple isle’ with useful ruins that attract tourists is challenged. Predictably, there is Marcus Clarke whose imagery is disturbing: ‘a wild and terrible coastline into whose bowels the terrible sea had bored strange caverns’. And Patrick White’s Austin Roxburgh finds Hobart ‘morally afflicted’, while Robert Drewe’s Stephen Crisp says he has ‘escaped to the arse-end of the earth’.

David Malouf and Thea Astley contribute much of the Brisbane material, and seven women who ‘have overtly identified themselves with Canberra in a regional sense’ bring another view of the city that is usually perceived in terms of politics and power.

Falkiner suggests that while Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip ‘is intensely evocative of inner city Melbourne life, there is little geographical placement’, but she doesn’t necessarily see this lack of the ‘external city landscapes’ as a limitation, asserting that certain writers are associated in the minds of Australian readers with particular cityscapes. Patrick White in The Eye of the Storm, says Falkiner, ‘relies on an evocation of an upper middle class life within a grand house … that is essentially Sydney’. Barbara Hanrahan, too, in her recollection of life in Adelaide in the 1950s captures a period as much as a place with little reference to specific landmarks except for the Torrens and Victoria Square.

The purpose of the book is ‘to link the concept of literary regionalism with the constructed or built environment – in this case Australian cities’. Falkiner chooses this urban concept of regionalism rather than that of geographical regions, explaining that terms such as ‘West Coast’ or ‘Top End’ are vague.

She refuses to categorise writers who tend to be associated with certain places (David Malouf and Brisbane, Barbara Hanrahan and Adelaide) as ‘regional’ writers. Instead she quite deliberately has chosen to use some of the work of authors usually thought of in terms of one particular place in relation to a different location in order ‘to provide a portrait of those cities and regions with which they have been at some time associated’ [italics mine]. At first I was rather affronted to find Randolph Stow, usually regarded as an archetypal West Australian regional writer, being also linked to Adelaide. And T.A.G. Hungerford, turning up in Canberra; and Charmian Clift in another unexpected location, Australia’s Top End. It seemed as if they (or indeed Falkiner) were being transformed into literary jackdaws for the sake of Falkiner’s particular vision. But it worked. They were simply writers gathering material, observing other landscapes, and not sealed hermetically within a single region.

There are some unexpected discoveries, sometimes from authors formerly unknown – the romantic view of Darwin through the eyes of a daughter of an early government resident, for instance, as she sailed in the harbour, ‘passing smooth white beaches, on to which waterfalls from overhanging cliffs shed glittering streams of crystal … It looked what it was, a land of perpetual summer’. In contrast, Xavier Herbert writes: ‘as the first settlers saw it the whole vast territory seemed never to be anything for long but either a swamp during the Wet Season or a hard baked desert during the Dry.’ And Charmian Clift’s impression of the Top End seen from the air is full of visual detail and sensory response, ‘the hills like fat squishy tumours, or dry scabby ones … pitted pores, dried out capillaries of water courses … wind ridges raised like old scars’.

There are some marvellous glimpses of Melbourne too. Hardy’s Collingwood circa 1890 (though written in 1950) and Alan Marshall’s version of the same area. These fragments make you yearn to read more. It’s a quite tantalising way to hook an uninitiated reader’s interest in our literature.

Occasionally Falkiner’s linking narrative is uneven; at times very convincing, at others sliding into easy imprecision. In the Perth section where she chose a rather atypical piece by Peter Cowan (atypical in terms of setting rather than style) she says of his academic who meets a former lover that ‘their inability to touch each other’s essential being is now set in aspic’. Does she really mean aspic? A kind of jelly that will melt? Will the ‘sensual pleasure’ they still enjoy actually do the trick and free ‘those essential beings’? I was inclined at first to think this was an oblique and rather clever use of language. But then, when she commented that Hal Porter had ‘preserved in aspic’ a Melbourne of the pre-war years I decided it was a case of convenient (and sloppy) metaphor. Perhaps she meant ‘amber’.

I was constantly reminded of books I had once read and now feel compelled to re-read. Also there was the material I had not yet discovered and which now beckoned. There were omissions I regretted, Dorothy Hewett’s post-war Redfern for instance (and pre-war Perth). But then selection is a writer’s prerogative and one can only respond to what is achieved rather than carp about what has been left out.

I got the impression that this book has been a long time in the making, which is fair enough, given the amount of research and selection involved. But most of the later source material seems to be no more recent than 1985 which is a pity. The Afterword, whose epigraph from Jan Morris’s Sydney is from a 1992 source, subverts any tendency the reader may have to become self-congratulatory about what has been achieved since 1788 in actual literary terms. Falkiner does what she set out to do very effectively, which is to chart the history of Australia’s capital cities through a novelist’s, a letter writer’s, or a poet’s eye and this makes a refreshing change from a more conventional historical approach. Lytton Strachey once said that ‘facts put together without art are compilations: and compilations no doubt may be useful; but they are no more History than butter, eggs, salt, and herbs are an omelette’. In Settlement Suzanne Falkiner has whipped up a very tasty omelette.

Excerpt from Wilderness: A writer’s landscape vol I by Suzanne Falkiner (Simon & Schuster).

Though remaining predominantly English-speaking and urban, like their parent-culture, the writers who have produced our literature of landscape were only rarely just undertaking an Intellectual and aesthetic survey of the countryside from a book-lined study window, perhaps between jotting notes for a sermon. Romanticism – which has been defined by some as a high development of poetic sensibility towards that which is remote or distant in time and place – gained a foothold only in the rather more modified and mundane form of the bush myth. The idealised and heroic figures of classical art and literature never had a chance to take firm root in Australia because, paradoxically, of a lack of distance, both chronological and real. Where there is little history, there is little myth. Where a society is newly established, it is necessary for most of its members to get their hands dirty. The ghosts of Aboriginal culture were invisible to the European eye. The Australian landscape and the challenges it presented were more immediate in time and space to its writers than the fields of antiquity were to English scholars, and even, in many cases, than the landscaped vistas and tasteful Grecian follies of his park were to that English guardian of culture, the aristocrat. What did become mythologised or romanticised, perhaps, were race memories of distant ‘Home’. The sense of truly belonging somewhere else, like a child’s ‘disconsolate fantasies of being adopted, lingered long after Australian-born generations had established themselves. All Australians, bar the country’s original inhabitants, have at close proximity the sense of inhabiting an alien context.

It has been argued both here and elsewhere that the ‘Australian’ character (and consequently its literature) has been formed to some extent by the process of a physical and intellectual grappling with a unique landscape, and one not experienced before by Europeans. While on one hand the development of Australian society could be said to fit predictably enough into the pattern of shifting populations and colonial expansion that has occurred in the last half of the millennium, this is not sufficient in itself to explain the formation of a collective cultural psyche. There have been discernible parallels with the American and Canadian experiences of settlement, and similarities with other emerging post-colonial cultures. But as these other emerging nations differed from each other, according to their various inhabitants and environments, so does Australia from them.

And yet, ultimately, however it is defined, we are forced to recognise that the Australian ‘landscape’ is something both less and more than geopolitical factors and deterministic forces, or even psychosexual ones. The Aboriginal idea of landscape has little to do with any of these concepts. It could be argued that a germ of conflict and mystery still inhabits the work of Australia’s writers today, springing from the influence of the continent on the interior landscape of our collective psyche. This impact must be considered when we ask, as a corollary to Stead’s questions, who are ‘we’? And who do we speak for when we attempt these answers? ‘Landscape’, as many poets and novelists would argue, has become a formative concept in the Australian metaphysical dialogue. If there is a soul to the Australian people, then, according to the work of many of the writers surveyed here, it is a soul shaped by landscape.