Bumping into everything

Thanks for all the fish.

By "literary landscape" I meant the way writers in Australia have described the country, the landscape. That in Lawson and Paterson I think it was little more than a great set, a stage on which human dramas played. It was "the vision splendid" for the Banjo and for Lawson it was an "agony of scrub and wire fences". There wasn't a great sense of regionalism, just outback. And whatever that meant to the writer.

So, I want to talk about the way the words we use to describe 'Country" have changed over the last hundred years and more. I want to see how we have claimed country, imaginatively, so to speak.

I remember reading about an old fella in the Territory who watched the pioneers:

Whitefellas just came up blind
bumping into everything
and put the flag, put the flag

Midday Horizon

I'm trying to do a feature for Radio National about the Australian literary landscape and how it has changed since the writing of the 1890s.

It's an interesting task: Who are the most significant writers of an Australian landscape consciousness? If we start with Lawson and Paterson in the 1890s .. who's next?

Miles Franklin in the early 1900s. The new nationalists like Xavier Herbert in the 30s. Poets like Judith Wright, Robert Gray and Les Murray. Populist writers like Ion Idriess. Any ideas people?

I like this poem of Philip Hodgins - Midday Horizon

... A big mob of sheep is moving to the left
breaking up and catching up
in slow eddies like a lava flow.
Seen through the hot distorting air
clear flames seem to be tearing off the mob.
A man is walking sheep-slow behind them.
From where you are
his shape is continually being modified
as if he were walking through different dimensions...

The man stops
and a low piece of him draws right away this time.
It must be a dog.