Foreclosure: Why Australian modernisms are implausible

Abstract

This article appraises debates about modernism in 1930s and 1940s Australia in relation to the cultural and political traditions of settler colonialism. We theorise settler modernist and anti-modernist engagements as conditioned by a succession of negations constituting ‘Australia’ as what we have previously termed ‘the negative Commonwealth’. Both rejections and affirmations of European modernist traditions considered the imminent arrival in Australia of the ‘dangers’ of modernity. One response was the attempt to keep modernity and its contradictions ‘out’, and to maintain the supposed advantages of being an island continent. When isolation could no longer be maintained, attempts were made to leap over the implications of imminent reconnection by asserting that Australia was always already modern. Here, we survey settler cultural expressions and their embrace or rejection of ‘Old World’ traditions. Beyond complex engagements with these traditions, Australian modernist and anti-modernist experiments similarly struggled to establish their own indigenising settler nationalist traditions.

Introduction

In our previous work, we have focused on the cultural and political traditions of settler colonialism, and their contradictions. Here we appraise 1930s and 1940s debates about modernism in Australia in relation to these traditions. We theorise settler modernist and anti-modernist engagements as responses to a succession of negations constituting ‘Australia’ as what we have recently termed ‘the negative Commonwealth’, a polity defined by a complex of concomitant, coordinated exclusions: from the recurring imagining of a future polity devoid of Indigenous presences, or what we term Indigenouslessness, and racelessness, both contributing to the new society's classlessness, to historylessness and, most relevantly here, culturelessness (Veracini and Tout, 2024). These negations, constituting the negative Commonwealth, in turn facilitated Australia's perception of itself – alongside its Anglophonic antipodean Aotearoan counterpart – as a socio-political ‘laboratory’ during the first half of the twentieth century, and beyond.

Australia was a crucial contributor to the political traditions one of the authors of this article has termed ‘the world turned inside out’. If Christopher Hill (1972) had referred to the ‘world turned upside down’ as a project of emplaced transformation, the political traditions of ‘the world turned inside out’ advocated displacement as a response to social upheaval (Veracini, 2021). They were an alternative to revolutionary transformation. The former envisaged new polities arising in the place of the old ones; the latter envisaged new polities established elsewhere. In the imagination, the neo-Europes were supposed to be ‘other’ places, not simply ‘new’ places; communities determined and able to steer away from the social and political contradictions that were generally seen as defining features of the ‘Old World’. But the ‘new’ polities struggled to assert autonomous cultural and political traditions as they negotiated complex and ongoing relations with both European and Indigenous antecedent authorities, alongside a range of always present exogenous alterities. Their responses were contradictory, often incoherent, and in their complexity reflected and revealed the contradictions inherent to the settler-colonial predicament.

In particular, Australian rejections and affirmations of European modernist traditions feared the imminent arrival of the ‘dangers’ of modernity and its manifold contradictions. In the first instance, the aim was to keep modernity and its social tensions ‘out’, and to maintain the supposed advantages Australia's isolation was purported to confer. In the second, when such isolation could no longer be maintained, attempts were made to leap over the implications of imminent reconnection by asserting that Australia was, in David Carter's (2013) rendition, ‘always and already modern, in its nature if not its culture’ (xii). Carter's qualification provides a departure point for our analysis. Australia's self-appointed role as socio-political ‘laboratory’ was facilitated by its constitutive negation of exogenous influence, allowing political experimentation to proceed in a supposedly controlled environment. But the foreclosure of Indigenous priority, and the imagined absence of all traditions, imported and Indigenous, made modernist cultural production implausible if not impossible.

All modernisms are about proclaiming, and then responding to, a new time. Modernisms and anti-modernisms agree on the newness of the new time, demanding its embrace and recommending full steam ahead, or its rejection, a return to what was before. But how can one declare a new time against the old, let alone embrace or reject it, when one is also proclaiming that there was nothing before, when one is foreclosing the prior? In a cultural environment in which the dialectical ‘labour of the negative’ was rendered impossible by an originary foreclosure, the very possibility of cultural modernism and its antithesis were similarly foreclosed. Settler attempts to embrace or reject European modernisms turned instead towards the supposed peculiarities of Australian antipodean existence in a series of attempts to leap over, or beyond, the cultural impasse produced by the pre-emptive foreclosure of tradition as such. Modernisms could be imported, but this would have undone isolation and contaminated the laboratory. It was an impasse.

In the following sections, we survey a range of settler engagements with modernism in 1930s and 1940s Australia. Taking D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and Apocalypse as our points of departure, we appraise a series of antipodean attempts to overcome, to work around, or to leap beyond the negations constitutive of the Australian polity, including those of publisher and polemicist P. R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, poet Rex Ingamells and his Jindyworobaks, and novelist Eleanor Dark. In different but related ways, each of these intellectuals turned towards the genius loci of the Australian place as the source of settler national culture, and sometimes found there a prior and persisting Indigenous sovereignty. We read their attempts to overcome the antipodean impasse resulting from pre-emptive foreclosure as attempted indigenisations; as contradictory, frequently incoherent attempts to locate the source of a modern and mature settler national culture on and in relation to stolen lands.

The attempted indigenisations surveyed here, modernist and anti-modernist alike, like those that preceded and have followed, were riddled with contradiction, and together signal the implausibility of Australian modernisms (and, therefore, of Australian anti-modernisms too). This article draws on our previous work, but here we push our arguments forward in an original and, we believe, timely way. After the ‘Voice’ debacle of October 2023 and the deafening silence that followed, exploring the ‘labour of negation’, as we pursue below, is especially needed. In this article we offer a statement of how this negation may be approached. Our reading of the cultural contradictions inherent to the settler-colonial predicament thus remains relevant today, as projects of settler national/ist indigenisation remain ongoing and incomplete. The ideal of an indigenised, modern and mature settler society is still projected into the future ad infinitum, kept at bay by Indigenous endurance (see Kauanui, 2021). Despite persistent insistence to the contrary, undoing an original foreclosure is still required.

Non-settler non-modernisms: Writing from the end

We begin with Lawrence's Kangaroo (1923), a novel written, in a sense, from the end of space. Kangaroo is then related to his Apocalypse, a text about the end of time. Together, they epitomise how Lawrence approached the dilemmas and contradictions of modernity. Lawrence seems like an arbitrary starting point for an analysis of Australian modernisms, but beside his persistent influence on the country's subsequent cultural scene, we should emphasise that our paper is about modernist engagements from Australia rather than Australian modernisms. Settlers, by definition, are from somewhere else, even when they are super busy denying they are, indeed especially when they are busy denying they are. Even though he was obviously not a settler and never seriously contemplated staying, when in Australia he was from a hallowed and privileged somewhere else. As such, he was like the settler modernists in Australia: from somewhere else and benefitting as a result (see Game, 2016).

Lawrence wrote famously about his experiences in the island continent. The point is not whether he liked the country and its peoples, and why or why not, which is what much of the scholarly discussion of Kangaroo has focused on. The point for us is where the novel was written from. Lawrence, we argue, felt he was writing from the end of space and from a timeless land. He had been concerned with endings for quite some time, and had embarked on his famous ‘savage pilgrimage’ immediately after WWI, leaving England in search of a much needed something else (Carswell, 1932). It was his world-indigenisation of sorts, and in Australia he followed a pattern of engagement with the ‘Spirit of the Place’ and its original inhabitants that would be replicated in the decades that followed by those provoked and inspired by Lawrence's observations (see, for example, Tout, 2017b; 2017c).

It is a well-documented story. Lawrence was seeking locales that were still uncontaminated by the industrial civilisation he saw emanating from his ‘Old’ country. He consistently and passionately professed an aristocratic ‘anti-capitalist’ drive, accompanied by an equally passionate rejection of revolution. Lawrence's search for ‘regeneration’ was based on his perception of widespread decay, which he understood as a kind of revolution, an unturning. He was at one point in Taos, New Mexico, which was, from England, across the water and then across a continent. It was a locale where American modernists clustered together; Taos was a place, he felt, fit for regenerative community (see Rudnick, 1996). Thirroul, north of Wollongong, South of Sydney, on the contrary, was at the end and very edge of a continent, and also at the end of a profoundly disorienting experience. It was a place somehow almost suspended, somewhere a world away, a place where even the novel almost lost the plot (as Kangaroo does). The ocean at the end of the yard was an alien expanse – orientation was impossible. This shore was a liminal space: the sand is shifty, nothing is fixed (Bricout, 2023). The antipodes are an other-directed location, a place defined in opposition to another, and a place from where one returns whichever direction one takes. He returned.

A few years later, in 1929, Lawrence wrote Apocalypse, a text about the end of time that he wrote just before the end of his time (he died shortly after). Kangaroo and Apocalypse may thus be considered together: they were written from different ‘ends’, and yet for similar ends. Lenin had proclaimed a new time (the Bolsheviks even inaugurated a new calendar); Lawrence had witnessed the end of space in Australia (a place he also interpreted as timeless) and was now considering the end of time. ‘New’ and ‘end’ are two sides of the same coin: one stresses rupture, the other rapture. He saw the Bible as a text that preceded and subverted Christ's message, a text epitomising all revolutionary traditions, and a text he saw as undermining Christ's emphasis on ‘escape’. In this sense, Apocalypse was contributing to world turned inside out traditions, advocating displacement and escape against revolution, against the prospect of emplaced transformation (Veracini, 2021: especially 217).

Apocalypse, he considered, underpinned all revolutions. Lawrence was repulsed, thinking that a revolutionary ‘spirit’ had triumphed in his ‘contemporary society’. Apocalypse led to an apocalypse. Section IV refers to Lenin as an epitome of contemporaneity, and at the end of para 9, section V, Lawrence refers to ‘miserable’ Bolsheviks, busy preventing anyone from shining ‘like the sun’. This revolutionary sensitivity is alien, he reckons, from the original Christian message. At the beginning of para 2, section III, Lawrence remarks on Jesus building his kingdom in ‘another world’. Apocalypse thus deals with the ways we have collectively lost contact with the cosmos and the stars. Revolution begat this loss – this is the revolution of modernity, even if he does not use this term. Recovering the message of an original text, beyond the fog of successive mystifications and interpolations, will allow us to understand, Lawrence argues, that we should reject the contemporary revolutionary spirit and return instead to an original connection with the cosmos and the stars. Lawrence's political testament thus exhorts a rejection of revolution and a return instead – an anti-modernist trope if there was ever one.

An anti-revolutionary statement from a time that feels like the end of time parallels the anti-revolutionary statement written from a place that felt like the end of space: Australia. Lawrence's perception of these ends sustained an anti-modernist vision, but in his observations of Australia's ‘aboriginal’ [sic] genius loci, he had perceived a potential for regeneration, as others had sought the same in ‘primitive’ and ‘exotic’ cultures and locations elsewhere. But the ‘soullessness’, the ‘indifference’, the ‘meaningless of meanings’ produced by the ‘reality of timelessness and nowhere’ in the antipodes reflected his perceptive and influential vision of settler-colonial Australia as constituted and constrained by a succession of negations. As David Game (2016: 2) has suggested, Lawrence perceived both ‘the possibility – and impossibility – of establishing his Rananim in Australia’.

Lawrence is just an example, a provocation – for us, but also for the many settlers who responded to him. In Australia he was only a privileged outsider, but this is our point: all settler colonists are, by definition, privileged outsiders. We see this as an entry point; when it comes to a consideration of Australian cultural modernisms, modernity is frequently seen as hailing from a non-time rather than a new time, and from a non-place – ‘empty space’ – rather than a locale that is to be subjected to emplaced transformation, to revolutionary upheaval. We are considering the implausibility of modernism in Australia.

Modernisms typically declare a new time in an old place – as in the Italian Futurists’ cult of speed, or in other revolutionary traditions. In the Old World it may work, but the settlers bring their own time with them to the New World: settler time (Rifkin, 2017). The settler-colonial calendar begins at Year Zero – as far as settlers are concerned there is no prior, and nothing to impede their own priority (see Rose, 2004: chapter three). Australian modernisms are about declaring a new place out of timelessness (no wonder the very possibility of Australian modernisms has been brought into question time and time again). Alternatively, the question of modernity in Australia is leaped over with a tautology: it is modern because it is so.

In the following sections, we reflect on what in dialectical terms may be referred to as the ‘labour of the negative’ in Australia: the process whereby we make sense of and transform reality. It is the task of all modernisms, but in Australia the labour of the negative had to contend with the pre-emption of foreclosure. ¹

This predicament was already intuited by Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos (2014), who emphasised the ‘being of the occupier’ in the context of a Hegelian reading of the Indigenous–settler relation. They concluded that the being of the occupier was inherently unstable. We agree, and ask: How can one declare a new time against the old, when one is also proclaiming that there was nothing before; that is, when one is foreclosing the prior?

The settler modernist predicament: Modernity without modernism

All modernisms are about proclaiming, and then responding to, a new time. Modernity has been authoritatively defined as the consciousness of a new time (Griffin, 2007). Embracing and rejecting the new time – we call these stances modernisms and anti-modernisms respectively – are together constitutive of the politics of modernity. They differ, obviously, but agree on the newness of the new time, demanding a return, and a movement away from it, or recommending full steam ahead. The settler-colonial world was established in line with Ezra Pound's injunction to ‘make it new’, but contrary to the revolutionary political traditions of both Left and Right, settler colonialism's ‘new world’ would be located elsewhere: in the New Worlds (Veracini, 2021). ² The world turned inside out traditions of settler colonialism ‘opt out of both revolution and reaction; they change the world by changing worlds’ (Veracini, 2012: 2). In doing so, they explicitly seek to leave the ‘Old’ world behind (Rose, 2004: 57). But by the time they leave, it is no longer the old ‘Old’ world but the new ‘Old’ world of modernity in the making, riddled with contradictions.

Settler-colonial Australia was thus born modern without becoming so, but the experience of a becoming is crucial to modernity. ‘Australia’ was modern because of the entanglements of modernity and empire, and because the state came fully formed with the establishment of colonial rule. Modernity has as one of its ‘distinctive features’ the emergence of the modern nation-state, and (metropolitan) modernism emerged at the same time as the Commonwealth itself (Moody and Ross, 2020: 17; Williams, 1989). But separation had preceded transformation, and thus, paradoxically, throughout the period of its formation and beyond, ‘Australia’ was defined by modernism's absence. If modernism seemed impossible, modernisation beckoned, and remained an ongoing project. Cultural modernity was always almost on the verge of being achieved (Carter, 2013). This was the new nation's promise, as well as its curse. A radiant smile could so easily turn into a cringe.

In Australia, as David Carter and Bridget Griffen-Foley (2013) contend, ‘[m]odernity and nationhood had arrived together, generating anxieties that the nation was both too modern, with no deep traditions of its own, and not modern enough, always lagging behind the great metropolitan centres’ (237). The nation has consequently operated as ‘an organising principle’ in Australian culture (Smith, 2012: 8), and whatever ‘incipient modernism’ can be identified ‘is strongly correlative with the creation and legitimization of a hegemonic national identity’ (Hall, 2015: 265). As Melinda J. Cooper (2021) has observed, these correlations and conjunctures complicate attempts to understand Australian (and other) settler-colonial modernisms within established interpretive frames.

For ‘writers and artists in interwar Australia’, engagements with ‘modernist styles and ideas’ ran concurrent to their ‘desire for a national, post-Federation settler culture’. As a result, ‘aesthetic modernism and Australian nationalism were not “opposite traditions” but rather “mutually enabled” each other, fusing together in complex and interesting ways’ (Cooper, 2022: 10). Cooper (2022) concludes that the approach of Eleanor Dark – like those of others who similarly ‘trouble[d] rigid distinctions between provincial nationalism and expatriate, cosmopolitan modernism’, including the Jindyworobaks and the Palmers – might thus best be described as a kind of ‘modernising nationalism’ (8). Or, better still, as a modernising mode of indigenising settler nationalism (see Tout, 2017b).

Settler colonialism is a project of double displacement: of settlers themselves, from the old to the new place; and, crucially, of Indigenous peoples, to make space for the new world to come. This is a temporal as well as a geographic projection. Prudence Black and Stephen Muecke (2010) remark on the ‘double dislocation’ instituted through the settler-colonial project of displacement, ‘the key to its modernist conceptual architecture’, which entails ‘a temporal disjunction for two sets of peoples: first the colonials who thought they had to “catch up” with European social and cultural trends, then “behind” them the indigenous peoples who were thought to be civilizationally backward and therefore nowhere near modernism’ (962).

Australia, and Australians, have always been, and remain, in Carter's (2013) terms, always almost modern:

Whether in the 1880s or the 1980s, commentators have repeatedly discovered that the nation's culture was on the verge of modernity; that the signs of modernity were gathering but had not yet, not quite, been consolidated […] that the nation had finally caught up, or grown up, for modernity was often linked to cultural maturity (that step beyond colonial status). This response, of course, is an effect of nationalism […] but it is also a symptom of Australia's colonial/postcolonial situation, that sense of living in a cultural province or ‘suburb’ in relation to the modernising cultural metropolises, so dramatically and schematically described by Pascale Casanova – or closer to home by A. A. Phillips's resonant notion of the ‘cultural cringe’ (viii).

Incipience has been a chronic condition. The search for modernity and cultural maturity were linked, and yet always withheld, in line with the double dislocation characterising the settler-colonial predicament (Carter, 2013: viii). Settler Australia has been condemned to cringing away, in this far-flung literary suburb, although we should note as well that suburbia is itself a settler-colonial phenomenon: an attempt to escape the contradictions of the urban metropoles (see Veracini, 2012). Assumptions about the imperial metropole as both prior and superior to the periphery have been comprehensively challenged, but for the settler intellectuals of the period we are focusing on, this was not always so. They had to contend with the burden of dislocation. Then again, as Carter effectively illustrates, and despite various predictions and proclamations to the contrary, this burden persists, abated but not eliminated, to the present day.

The ongoing Australian project of national cultural construction has entailed, in Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra's (1991) terms, ‘establishing a distinctively Australian tradition’ that ‘would at last prove the colonists’ right to belong, both to the metropolitan centre and in the territory that they had invaded and colonised, Australia itself’ (x). Writers, critics and intellectuals have argued over different dimensions of this search for belonging – some emphasising Australia's British inheritance, others stressing the production of new, ‘indigenous’ cultural forms. They may have disagreed over means, but their ends remained the same: a fully modern and mature settler national culture, written in and on stolen lands. Such ends, however, could never be convincingly attained: the new is impossible when there is nothing prior; there is no negation in the face of foreclosure. The Australian modernists had to negate foreclosure first.

A great leap over? Or, back to the future?

Not only the burden of numbing isolation; not only the impossibility of labouring the negative. The settler-colonial ‘situation’, organised around a ‘triangular system of relationships […] comprising metropolitan, settler, and indigenous agencies’, subjects the settler to ‘conflicting tendencies’: towards ‘indigenisation and national autonomy’ on the one hand; towards ‘neo-European replication and the establishment of a “civilised” pattern of life’ on the other (Veracini, 2010: 6, 21). One trajectory is pre-empted by Indigenous endurance (see Kauanui, 2021); the other remains unreachable in line with the Greenwich meridian of literature, and of culture at large (Kirkpatrick & Dixon, 2012). Settler Australia remains, in Alan Lawson's (1995) summation, ‘suspended between “mother” and “other”’ (n.p.); a double dislocation and an insuperable temporal predicament make it so. A leap over has seemed to settlers the best, or only, option.

The New World held promise precisely because of its break with the past, its crises, and contradictions. The negative Commonwealth rested on the presumption of vacant land – this was a useful environment for socio-political experimentation, less so for cultural production. On the one hand, the precondition of settler culture in the New World was precisely the absence of ‘History’. As Johnston and Lawson (2005) surmised, in settler-colonial societies ‘the land must be emptied so that it can be filled with both words and herds’ (364). Yet the process of transplantation and ‘adjustment’ (see Cooper, 2018; 2022) cultural nationalists were engaged in, modernist and anti-modernist alike, was in need of proper material – horror vacui. The ‘continuing settler quest’, as Jeanine Leane (2014) identifies, has been to ‘write a nation’ (2). Tom Ford and Justin Clemens (2023) have recently excavated Barron Field's early and influential efforts towards precisely the same end.

Marcus Clarke lamented: ‘our native or adopted land has no past, no story’ (quoted in Carter, 1994: 9). Lawrence, as we have seen, concurred, and Kangaroo dwells on History's absence in Australia. For Lawrence, ‘being in Australia was “rather like falling out of a picture and finding oneself on the floor, with all the gods and men left behind in the picture”’ (Holbrook, 2022: 71). History's absence produced a purported absence of inner life, of distinction, of cultural possibility. While settler nationalist historiography proceeded from a ‘discourse of “newness”’ (Moran, 2002: 1016), settler culture followed Lawrence in turning towards the environment as a source of originality and as the site of national emergence (see Carter, 1994; 2000; 2013; Carter and Griffen-Foley, 2013).

Humphrey McQueen (1979) influentially sought, and found in the work of Margaret Preston, an ‘emergent’ Australian modernism that did not arrive ‘in suitcases from Europe’ (xii). European imports and influences were dangerous, and anyway, their arrival from elsewhere only reaffirmed Australia's belatedness. Preston was an exception, and many considered that European imports should be excluded in case they brought the world's contradictions in with them. Janus-faced lament and celebration of Australia's much-mythologised ‘isolation’ were key (Blainey, 1983; Smith, 1988). The response to crisis – the response to all crises, including the First World War and subsequent revolutionary crises – was to keep Australia ‘free of the Old World's contagion’ (McQueen, 1979: 59). As Carter (2000) notes, ‘Australia could be seen as a refuge from the twin aspects of modernity: the decadence of Europe […] and the degraded modern culture of America’ (265), but this could only bring cold comfort.

McQueen (1979) identified a feeling of ‘gratitude for Australia's remoteness’ among a diverse selection of Australian artists and intellectuals, including R. D. Fitzgerald and the Lindsays, A. D. Hope and Hans Heysen, and located in Streeton's pastoralism the possibility of ‘a way out of, or rather a way around, war, revolution and depression, by a return to the soil’ (114). But the problem of provincialism remained. One, hardly plausible, response, has been one of returns: a back to the future project that attempts to ‘leap over’ settler Australia's belatedness via a turn towards Australia's purported primaevality as the source of what David Carter has usefully captured as an emergent sense of ‘radical originality’, and to thereby invert the antipodean relation (Carter, 2013; see also Carter, 1994; 2000; Carter and Griffen-Foley, 2013). McQueen's search for an emergent antipodean modernism was one attempt to overcome its absence. But the crises of modernity threatened but never finally exploded. Australian modernisms remained correspondingly incipient; never fully formed. Beyond Margaret Preston, Australian cultural modernisms remained, in McQueen's view, ‘mere echoes’ on the ‘surface’ of the more substantive metropolitan ideal (see Rowse, 2006: 29).

Australia had already been thought of as new, but by the 1930s and 1940s the country had a great future behind it. It was always already belated: timeless, primordial, and ‘lacking in tradition’ (even if Australia's timelessness foreshadowed the possibility of an originary emergence from the land itself). For those invested in culture and Australia's future, the emptiness had to be addressed, and overcome. And yet there were no ‘insides’: ‘everything’, as Lawrence had decried, was ‘outward’, and ‘civilisation struggles because of the reversals associated with the antipodes’ (Game, 2016: 137). The inversion of antipodean belatedness could only be possible by means of yet another negation: anticipation. Anticipation negates the present – it is about the future. As Barron Field had already observed in 1823, and in the course of his culturally and politically constitutive ‘terra nullius operation’, anticipation ‘is to a young country what antiquity is to an old’. ‘Australia’ was inaugurated in and as a ‘state of anticipation’ (Ford and Clemens, 2023: 125). So it remains.

Settler-colonial returns I: Towards the genius loci

Lawrence was searching for a site of regeneration beyond the contradictions of the Old World and located its potential in Australia's genius loci. For settlers, the problem was, rather, one of cultural generation, always in relation to but never reaching the metropolitan meridian. Modernism, as Rachel Adams (2016) observes, is ‘often defined as the antithesis or repudiation of tradition’ (233); ‘modernism negates tradition itself’ (Adorno, 1984: 31). But as Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross also note, despite calls to ‘make it new’, tradition provided the imperative, and basis, for doing so. The relationship is complex, but ‘[i]n nations formed out of the population displacements of modernity, as in settler colonial states’, the dilemma is that of establishing ‘a new tradition’ where no such thing is seen, or conceded, to exist (Moody and Ross, 2020: 13). P. R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, Eleanor Dark and Rex Ingamells were among those compelled to respond to Lawrence's insights – so too, later, did Manning Clark (it was Kangaroo that helped inspire his definition of settler Australia as the ‘Kingdom of Nothingness’) (Holbrook, 2022: 72).

The polemicist and publisher ‘Inky’ Stephensen (1936), for his part, sought to locate, or construct, the ‘foundations of culture in Australia’. He did so by means of a succession of negations, clearing the ground for settler national emergence. Prerequisite was his ongoing disavowal of actual Indigenous presences. ‘Culture in Australia’, he proclaimed, ‘if it ever begins indigenously, begins not from the Aborigines [sic], who have been suppressed and exterminated, but from British culture’ (12, our emphasis). Settler Australia's emergent ‘indigenous’ culture would be produced through the unmediated interaction between ‘Race and Place’; in the uniqueness Lawrence had perceived, but in the absence of the ‘terror’ experienced by ‘visitors’ like him: ‘A new nation, a new human type, is being formed in Australia’ (15, 11, 18). Tellingly, however, its arrival was postponed. Australia was not yet ready, and an indigenised settler national culture remained a ‘culture of the future’ (162). Australia was neither colony nor nation, but something ‘betwixt and between’ – and yet ‘Australia’, Stephensen was certain, was almost ready to emerge (18).

Four years after Stephensen's intervention, Professor J. I. M. Stewart infamously restated the cultural void, derisively proclaiming the absence of local material in introducing his Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture on Kangaroo (see Butterss, 2015). In the meantime, after reading the first section of Stephensen's Foundations in 1936, Rex Ingamells (1948) had returned to Lawrence's novel, from which he ‘gained a strong sense of the primaeval in Australian nature’, but ‘rejected Lawrence's view of strangeness in the Spirit of the Place’ (10–11). Eleanor Dark (1944) agreed, critiquing Kangaroo as ‘one long, tormented effort to see’, an impossibility because of Lawrence's ‘outsider’ status (13). As Cooper (2021) contends, Dark's criticisms were largely mounted in defence of her and other settler Australians’ belonging and legitimacy – of the authenticity of the ‘native’ perception – rather than against Lawrence's modernism as such. Whereas Lawrence, in Kangaroo, ‘wanders through the pages … peering like a man half-blind’, rendered so by the ‘veil’ of his inherited, imperial assumptions, Dark and other ‘native-born’ writers and artists were able to see with clear and ‘adjusted’ vision (Dark, 1944: 13).

The process of adjustment was gradual but could be accelerated. One option was to embrace the speed of modernity, to move beyond the belatedness of provincialism by means of technology. Both Dark and Stephensen saw history accelerating, and shared a perception of a shrinking world as both risk, and opportunity. Both were aware of and responded to the ‘radical shifts in understandings of time and space that occurred in the early twentieth century’ (Cooper, 2022: 42). Dark's perception was ambivalent, and the ‘combination of fascination with and resistance to the modern’ is evident throughout her interwar oeuvre (Cooper, 2022: 42). Technology, and especially aviation, was one method of reducing the geographical and temporal distance between Australia and ‘the Mother Country’, but this endangered the indigenising project. ‘We are not isolated any more. Time, which has by-passed this continent for centuries’, she wrote in 1944, ‘is now hammering on our door’ (Dark 1944: 19). Time was coming, from somewhere else.

Dark's engagement with motor travel in particular, exemplified in Return to Coolami (1936), was a back to the future project in which the car features as an ambivalent symbol of the contradictions of modernity: freedom and materialism, progress and deracination, bound up always in the settler-colonial project of ‘naturalising the nation’ (see Clarsen and Veracini, 2012). As the novel's characters rehearse the foundational journey of Australian settler colonialism from Sydney to the interior, the motorcar mediates their experience of the ‘primeval’ landscape, distancing them from it even as it accelerates their progress towards a ‘new beginning’ in which they have learned to belong (Dark, 1936: 306). Traversing what Dark (1941) perceived as a ‘timeless land’, the car functions as a kind of ‘magic time machine … capable of transporting characters into a more authentic’ – that is, timeless and indigenous – past (Cooper, 2022: 133). The time machine, moving along the ‘black magic’ of lines on a map, transports its passengers simultaneously forwards in time, towards ‘a future coming endlessly upon them’, but also backwards into a ‘primeval past’, as Aboriginal placenames seem to evoke ‘something you had forgotten a thousand years ago and to which you were returning now, not only in miles along a road but in spirit through a dissolving barrier of time’ (Dark, 1936: 289–290).

Contrary to Dark's ambivalence, Stephensen (1936) was optimistic. In phrasing that operates at the levels of both the individual and the nation, he declared: ‘It is the old who now must learn. The young can teach […]. All is in flux, our Australian nation is emerging, finding itself, in a welter of accelerated human change which is occurring all over the globe’ (83). At a time when ‘the systems of the Old World’ appeared to be ‘on the edge of collapse’, the speeding up of history, and its cultural effects, facilitated Stephensen's perception that Australia's ‘isolation and distance’ offered the prospect of its emergence as ‘the sole repository of what were once European culture, ideals of decency, and civilisation’ (87–89). Stephensen saw in Australia's future the potential identified by Wentworth more than a century earlier: ‘A New Britannia in Another World!’ (189). The great future was back in front. Still, it was postponed.

Settler-colonial returns II: Towards the Indigene

Along with McQueen's exemplar of antipodean modernism (Jindyworobak associate and supporter Margaret Preston), Stephensen, Dark and Ingamells also shared an investment in the displaced and (re)appropriated figure of the Indigene as the source of radical national emergence and settler indigenisation (see, for example, Cooper, 2022; Griffiths, 2018; Smith, 2014; Tout, 2017a). As Nicholas Thomas (2001) has remarked, Preston's work suggests an intention towards ‘a simple synthesis of the “modern” and the “primitive”’, which ‘would have exemplified the indigenized white Australian culture that she so frequently advocated’. On the contrary, however, and in keeping with the settler predicament, ‘the effect of her works […] is to make the fact of difference explicit […] . Preston presented combination rather than fusion, a possibility rather than an accomplishment, a problem rather than a solution’ (149).

Ingamells’ indigenism was the most explicit in attempting to appropriate a deracinated ‘essence’ of Indigeneity, which he perceived as closely associated with the ‘Spirit of the Place’ he sought to claim as his own. It was in the same year that he had read and been inspired by Stephensen's Foundations that Ingamells encountered James Devaney's appropriately – albeit inaccurately – entitled collection of short stories, The Vanished Tribes (1929), from the glossary of which he ‘adapted’ the originally hyphenated term ‘Jindy-worobak’ (a term translated as meaning ‘to annex, to join’, and deployed to denote the ‘synthesis of our European cultural heritage with our Australian heritage’) (Ingamells, 1979: 221).

Ingamells’ project of radical indigenist appropriation separated and usurped a symbolic Indigeneity from its bearers in an attempt to accelerate the ‘adjustment’ necessitated by the settler predicament. Indigenous peoples and their living cultures were thoroughly instrumentalised in the Jindyworobak equation; it was their ‘primaeval’ connection to the land that mattered, while Indigenous culture was of interest only as a catalyst of settler indigenisation. Ingamells was thus part of a familiar tradition: his pronouncement of Indigenous people as ‘a forgotten […] degenerate, puppet people, mere parodies of what their race once was’ (Ingamells and Tilbrook, 1938: 16) remained, as Carter and Griffen-Foley (2013) have observed, ‘consistent with the belief that Indigenous people were doomed to extinction’. It also ‘expressed the possibility of a radical originality in Australian culture with Aboriginality at its centre – a possibility with which Australian culture is still engaged’ (246).

Although less explicit in their indigenist appropriations, Dark's novels operated to similar effect through their reliance on what Johannes Fabian (2014) influentially termed the ‘denial of coevalness’, and reiterations of ‘the “dying race” trope at a time when it was becoming increasingly untenable’ (Cooper, 2022: 20). Her novels, and in particular The Timeless Land, ‘resigned Indigenous peoples to the past’, and contain ‘no contemporary Indigenous characters’ (Cooper, 2022: 21). Her writing thus ‘participated in the ongoing displacement of Aboriginal peoples, even as it tried to engage with historical injustices against them’, conditioned and constrained as it was by ‘“available discourses” that associated Aboriginal people with primitivism and timelessness’ (Cooper, 2022: 20). In keeping with comparable examples of settler-colonial modernish primitivism, among which Cooper (2022) tellingly includes Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent (1925) alongside Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo (1928), ‘Dark frequently approached Indigenous cultures as sources of renewal’ to express anticipatory hope ‘for white Australian culture through a fascination with and appropriation of’ Indigeneity (32).

Even one of Ingamells’ most scathing critics (there were many), A. D. Hope, expressed his own version of a ‘radical Australian originality’ in his oft-cited and widely anthologised poem Australia (1943), which ‘links him unexpectedly to the Jindyworobaks and forward to a poet such as Les Murray’, the self-proclaimed ‘Last of the Jindyworobaks’ (Carter and Griffen-Foley, 2013: 251). Hope's ‘desert’ reinscribed his perception of Australia as terra nullius, however. Indigeneity was not at its centre; it was nowhere to be found. ‘Settlement’ begets a cultural desert, but Hope hoped for its inversion. His ‘Australia’ exemplifies the tradition to which Ian Henderson (2014) assigns the ‘purposefully ugly label “antipòdernism”’ (89), characterised by the kind of ‘jump-back-to-move-forward movement’ in which Hope looks ‘back to see forward, rendering Australian prophecy a New Old Testament’ (99). It was a negation of an original foreclosure, but only an engagement with actual Indigeneity would do. Hope considered it but did not follow through.

Anti-modernist indigenisations

Carter (2012) has characterised the Jindyworobaks’ ‘attempt to leap backwards over the colonial inheritance, into an Aboriginal connection to the environment, [as] also a step forwards into modernity’ (97). It was also a turn inwards, towards the Australian environment. For Ingamells, as much as for his critics, modernism was a European phenomenon that had to be engaged with from afar. Seeking an alternative to either attempting to ‘catch up’ to European modernity, or rejecting it outright, Ingamells turned away from Europe and towards the spirit of this place. In doing so, he found himself confronting the figure of the Indigene.

Despite J. J. Healy's (1989) insistence to the contrary, such a confrontation was not inevitable, and settler cultural traditions, modernist and anti-modernist alike, more frequently spectralised Indigenous presence as both in and of the land (and, relatedly, as both in and of the past). Spectralisation was foreshadowed in Kangaroo, as Will Holbrook (2022) discerned, where Lawrence's ‘frequent recurrence of the adjective “aboriginal” in the strangest of contexts […] functions as a kind of ghostly remembrance for the reader of the land's original ownership’ (72). As Evelyn Araluen (2019) insightfully concludes, such representations of Indigenous presence are frequently ‘charged with psychic significance in the symbolic evocation of a ghostly spectre haunting land lost to Aboriginal people, but which ultimately clears space for the discovery and cultivation of that land by the appropriate settler’ (n.p.).

The underlying imperatives of these and other settler engagements with Indigenous presences complicate attempts to classify them as either anti-modernist provincial isolationists or, conversely, modernist primitivists, a distant branch of the European avant-garde (see Kirkpatrick, 2012; Smith, 2012). The traditions remain distinct, as Nicholas Thomas (1999) has argued:

Primitivism in settler culture is […] something both more and less than primitivism in modernist art […]. Settler primitivism is not […] necessarily the project of radical formal innovation stimulated by tribal art that we are familiar with from twentieth-century modernism. It was, rather, often an effort to affirm a local relationship, not with a generic primitive culture, but a particular one (12–13).

The project of appropriation for the purpose of settler indigenisation – of displacing, and then appropriating, an emplaced Indigeneity to substantiate its replacement – is distinct from the project of appropriating a romanticised ideal from afar. Over and above the concerns common to other primitivist movements, ‘[s]ettler cultures were generally interested […] in their own localization’ (Thomas, 1999: 106); in their self-indigenisation. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the settler project has often evinced an interest in salvaging a remnant Indigenous essence (salvage ethnography was, after all, a settler innovation), since it relies upon an authentic antecedent Indigeneity to confer indigeneity upon itself (and to thereby claim an ‘indigenous’ settler future independent from its metropolitan m/other). Cooper (2018; 2022) makes a similar observation of the ‘middlebrow modernism’ of Eleanor Dark, invested as it also was in settler indigenisation.

Aided by the perception of temporal and geographical distance, and despite a generalised ‘denial of coevalness’ (see Fabian, 2014), colonialism and its modernist-primitivist cultural products could countenance, and even desire, the continued existence of the ‘primitive’ societies they sought to exploit for firstly political and economic and subsequently cultural and aesthetic purposes. On the contrary, the proximity and competing claims of settlers and Indigenous peoples mean that settler indigenism requires instead an imagined ‘passing of the mantle’ in line with the encounter Deborah Bird Rose (2004) describes: ‘the Aboriginal dies and the settler flourishes […] the Aboriginal passes the mantle of belonging to the land (autochthony) to the settler […] the settler takes his place as the new (and superior) indigene’ (117).

As Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra (1991) observed, for all of Dark's professed sympathy for Aboriginal people and perspectives, her ‘timeless land’ removed Aboriginal people from History, even time itself (30). If Ingamells’ looked to the ‘Alcheringa’, conveniently and ‘misleadingly translated as the Dreamtime’, as the source of a ‘pristine outlook’ that would provide ‘a form of cultural authenticity or indigeneity’ for the settler nation that ‘would distinguish it from imperial culture’ (McLaren, 1996: 16), Dark's primitivism, as well as her commitment to textual strategies of empathy, identification and education, are similarly ‘implicated in such settler-colonial desires’ (Cooper, 2022: 234–235).

Dark's approach, though somewhat less abstracted and detached from Aboriginal realities than Ingamells’, similarly displaces Indigeneity into ‘a kind of “dreamtime” which exists outside the material world and physical space and time’ (Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 30), in accordance with the operations of what Patrick Wolfe (1991) termed the ‘Dreaming complex’ . Her temporal consignment of Indigeneity to the ‘timeless land’, alongside her persistent belief in the doomed race ideal, enabled its contradictory reincorporation as lower-case indigeneity; as Cooper (2022) concludes, in ‘all of Dark's writing, it is white settler culture that receives the inheritance of Aboriginal culture, rather than living members of Aboriginal communities’ (235).

In line with the ‘premature elegiac’ modality it shares with Ingamells’ Jindyworobak indigenism (Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 244; Kirkpatrick, 2013), and despite ‘mourning the destruction of Aboriginal culture at the hands of white invaders, The Timeless Land points towards a settler future that, Dark hopes, will be informed by Aboriginal culture even as it usurps its position’ (Cooper, 2022: 244). Yet Dark's indigenised settler nation remains, symptomatically, ‘a future community’ beyond the ‘temporal scope’ of the narrative itself, the attempted indigenisation of the settler ‘always partial and incomplete […] always out of reach’ (Cooper, 2022: 235).

Conclusion

These and other attempts to ‘leap over’ Australia's belatedness have been pervasive, and remain persistent. As Carter (1994) surmised, in this lineage by ‘being the last we become the first’ (9). Yet as he also observed, while one option for completing the ‘great leap over’ inhered in the possibility of reversing the terms of the antipodean relation – in the ‘claim that Australia was always already or almost always modern’ – this vision ‘neatly transforms dull provinciality into a radical form of originality’ but ‘scarcely escapes the colonial bind’ (Carter, 2013: viii). We close with Carter's (1994) caution against searching for anything exceptional about the attempted Australian indigenisations we have described. He encouraged us instead to observe the commonalities across Australian and other settler-colonial settings in their cultural engagements and entanglements with modernity and modernism alike.

In keeping with these traditions of returns, we close by returning to where we began: to our non-settler, non-modernist protagonist, Lawrence, who, in terms that could equally be applied to Australia, had previously perceived an American consciousness that was ‘essentially “unfinished” and incomplete’, with ‘the Indian’ at ‘the very heart of American ambivalence’ (cited in Deloria, 1998: 3). Writing Kangaroo, he had been by the shore. Walt Whitman wrote about the shore making the settlers angry (in 1923, Lawrence had called Whitman ‘the first white aboriginal [sic]’) (2003: 397). At the shore, in Australia, Lawrence considered the settler predicament: the question of how to become indigenous, without becoming, or being able to become, Indigenous (Tout, 2017c: 76). For him it was also the modernist predicament: how to be in the new time without losing a connection with the stars.

As Dakota scholar Philip J. Deloria (1998) observed:

The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation's inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants … half-articulated Indianness continually lurk[s] behind various efforts at American self-imagination (5).

Settlers see themselves as ‘agents of disjunction’, their arrival in the ‘new’ place signalling and enacting a ‘shift from before to after’ (Rose, 2004: 57, 60). As Deborah Bird Rose (2004) has shown, however, settler-colonial invasion establishes an interregnum – the ‘left hand’ of violent conquest and displacement to be followed by the ‘right hand’ of civilisational replacement, once the left hand has done its work; once the Indigenous ‘presence has been erased’ (61–62, 65). In this extended temporal disjunction, the ‘left hand creates the tabula rasa upon which the right hand will inscribe its civilisation’ (Rose, 2004: 62). The interregnum that is the settler-colonial present is persistent, however, because the Indigenous presence persists. The ‘disjunctive frontier’ is stretched across time and space, a ‘long transitive moment’ in which ‘history is about to begin’, ‘a more or less suspended moment awaiting transfiguration’ (Rose, 2004: 64–65). The violent colonist is in the past, the settled settler in the future; settler society remains ‘trapped’ within its own ‘tragic and permanent incompletion’ (Strakosch, 2016: 16).

Modernism declares a new temporality, so it is about negating a previous era. But how, we ask, can one negate when they are busy foreclosing instead? Australian modernisms are implausible, if not impossible. And when they are imported, they import contradictions. So, they are often unwelcome. And when they are asserted by way of a leap over, they do not work seamlessly either, because they refer not to a prior time, but to a non-time – a timelessness – instead. Projects of settler indigenisation are never complete, and the imagined ideal of a fully indigenised, modern, and mature settler society remains a future projection, forever postponed. If undoing an original foreclosure is still needed, if foreclosure remains a persistent feature of the current modalities of settler-colonial relations in Australia, a structure that remains durable over time as Indigenous sovereignty persists, Carter's call for escaping ‘the colonial bind’ retains currency in the settler colony today. The labour of negation is much easier, notionally at least, in the polities that emerged from decolonisation processes. Postcolonial modernisms are instantly recognisable, even if neocolonial subjection continues to undermine postcolonial polities, and their cultures (for a complementary exploration of the labour of the negative in the postcolonies, see, for example, Táíwò, 2022). But in the settler colony Indigenous endurance holds settler indigenisation in check; the double dislocation characteristic of antipodean engagements with modernity, modernist and anti-modernist alike, persists.