The Artistic and the Literary Imagination in Australia and Beyond

Abstract

This essay reflects upon the reasons for the early dominance of the painting tradition in Australia and the later blossoming of both visual and literary art forms. Artists tapped into cross-currents of feeling and opinion—at times with praise, on other occasions with a sense of an alien, forbidding nature. A literature of place, often referred to as nature writing, could only thrive when people’s hearts were with Australian places. Artists facilitated this attunement. Nature writing has now begun to take hold in Australia so offering an opportunity to look back and deeper our understanding of times marked by its absence. Today, the nowhereness of cyberspace stirs a yearning for the sense of embodiment that goes with place and home, thus providing an opportunity to understand the shaping of an Australian literary imagination and a poetic sensibility that goes beyond poetry in seeking to defend places of the heart.

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