Still, I can’t help wondering about the extent to which this phenomenon – at least in its more negative manifestations – is kept alive (and certainly kicking) by a few embattled diehards, rather than being a widely shared vision of the country’s cultural shape. My own sense – and I could be quite wrong here – is that Sydney people don’t even think about it much, and that Melbourne people’s conversational and/or journalistic digs at the style of Sydney Slick and such are beginning to have an automaton quality about them, a knee-jerk effect like the ‘ums’ and ‘you knows’ that hang around like unwashed dishes on the tables of our conversation.

And goodness knows what the people from Perth and Adelaide and Darwin and Swan Hill and Mount Isa and Launceston think. ABR would therefore be very interested to know the views (the publishable views, i.e. neither indecent, defamatory, nor boring) of people in other places – Sydney and Melbourne persons and partisans need not apply – on this monolithic metaphor. If we get enough good replies from you marginal types (now look, that was supposed to be a joke), we’ll do a forum feature on it.

From reports I’ve heard from various Australian colleagues, overseas conferences on matters Australian are strange affairs, spotted with the comedy of cultural bewilderment. (By ‘cultural bewilderment’ I mean the kinds of misapprehensions under which the earnest Italian student Franco Casamaggiore is labouring in his conference paper ‘The Drover’s Wife’, inexplicably but generally regarded as actually being a short story by Frank Moorhouse.) Since – as Casamaggiore’s paper (or Moorhouse’s story) demonstrates – the meaning of so much Australian utterance resides in what is not said, or in the ironic gap between what is said and what is meant, overseas conferences with Australian themes present rich opportunities for misunderstanding; and the more Real Australians attendant at such affairs, the more chances there are for gentle and general enlightenment. Just this is reason enough to go to the Exeter Australian Landscapes Conferences, should you happen to be paying a visit Home early next year.

But there are lots of other good reasons. One is that the proliferation of Australian Studies courses and programs in Europe and America is something that should be encouraged at every opportunity. Another is that we have hardly begun to explore what it means to say ‘Australian Studies’ or ‘Australian literature’ (the other day I saw a student in one of my Aust. Lit. seminars stun her fellow-studes merely by observing that ‘The idea of a nation only has meaning in terms of either geography or politics. As soon as you say “Australian” you’re really talking about geography and politics’) – and we can only gain, enormously, from exposure to other cultures’ conceptions of nationhood, including, and especially, our own.

The main reason, however, is that it looks like a great double conference. The ‘Rationale’ accompanying the information brochure says, among other things,

Australia is an English-speaking country whose landscape reflects ideals derived from British traditions … These ideals and traditions have had to be reviewed, revised, and often given up in the subsequent task of coping with an environment spectacularly unlike that of Britain and social circumstances likewise remote from those in the European homeland … Our general aim is to embrace the totality of the landscape experience of a single country, including … rural, urban, industrial and genre scenes, through the perspective of all those professions, from engineering to art, that are actively involved with the use and appreciation of landscape.

No details are available (not to me, anyway) of the program for the second conference, a two-day affair (March 30–31) organised by the British Association for Australian Studies, a.k.a. BASA (which strictly speaking is not an acronym but affords a fine opportunity for referring to the Association as ‘Bazza’, which, I am told, people do – an opportunity for cultural bewilderment if ever there was one, further enriched by the fact that the Association’s initials are actually BAAS, which is more or less South African and opens up a whole new set of possibilities … ) For the earlier conference (March 26–28), convened by the Landscape Research Group (LRG) and the Centre for American & Commonwealth Arts and Studies (AmCAS) (yes, that’s right), the general headings under which each day’s papers and discussions are grouped are ‘Iconography and Symbolism’, ‘Memories and Amnesias’, and ‘Coming to Terms With the Australian Landscape’.

So if you can (or, for whatever reason, must) be in and cope with Thatcher’s Britain in the raw early spring, Exeter is the bit of it to head for over the last week of March. Enquiries about attending the conferences should be sent to Peter Quartermaine, Associate Director AmCAS, Queen’s Building, The Queen’s Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK.

May Issues, June Issues, Green Covers, Yellow Covers, Red Faces, Blue Fits, and the Mystery of Life Department: for the benefit of those subscribers who didn’t see the elegant paragraphs on the inside of the subscription insert in the June issue – a message penned in haste and in extremis by a member of the Editorial Board (who, revealing himself here as a scribe manqué, has clearly missed his calling) while the acting editor was off luxuriating in the subtropical fleshpots and warmth of the North, blissfully unaware of icy home-front disasters – you missed a masterpiece of clear exposition and finely tuned tone, not to mention an explanation of the strange mail you’ve been getting from us lately. Here, therefore, we reprint said explanation:

Dear subscriber,
You were probably surprised and a little confused to receive a second copy of the May issue, this time with a green cover. Whatever theories you had – some have suggested it was so good it deserved a reprint – the cause was simple. Our printers, who have served us well over scores of issues, nodded. They accidentally reprinted the May issue instead of June, for which they and we apologise.
Now that you have a spare copy of the May issue, please pass it on to a potential subscriber. The more subscribers we have the better we can make the magazine.
We hope you enjoy[ed] the ‘real’ June issue. [And this one, too.]

Regards,
Australian Book Review