Regional, National and Post-Colonial (II)

In the opening chapter of A History of Australian Literature Ken Goodwin suggests that there are ‘two major rival determinants’ in the literature of Australia: the British written cultural tradition, which settlers brought with them to Australia, and the totally different environment of the new land, including the unwritten culture of its Aboriginal inhabitants. In addition, there is the fact that these settlers were, to begin with, mostly convicts — outcasts from the mother country, and often from backgrounds, Irish and Scottish, for example, which made them unsympathetic to established British values. Consequently, although there are many modern Australians who still ‘emphasize commonality with and derivativeness from Britain’, they ‘exist alongside vociferous nationalists … and those who reject both colonialism and nationalism in favour either of internationalism … or of personal withdrawal and self-identification’.