SOURCE: Rowley, Susan. “Imagination, Madness, and Nation in Australian Bush Mythology.” In Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, edited by Kate Dorian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall, pp. 131-44. London: Routledge, 1996.

[In the following essay, Rowley affirms the “imaginative formation of Australian national culture” by the late nineteenth-century writers who employed the images and themes of bush mythology in their works.]

Recent theories of nationalism and national culture and identity have emphasised the active role of the imagination in the formation of nations. Benedict Anderson's most influential and persuasive argument for theorizing nations as ‘imagined communities’ exemplifies a recurrent theme in writing on nation formation.¹ Anderson cites Ernest Gellner's frequently quoted observation that nationalism ‘invents nations where they do not exist’.² The centrality of the imagination is echoed in the titles of recent publications on the formation of Australia as a nation: Inventing Australia, Creating a Nation, Illusions of Identity, and National Fictions are examples of well-known texts across a range of disciplines.³ Significantly, though the titles emphasize imagination or creativity in ‘inventing’ nations, these pivotal concepts are treated cursorily as though the act and capacity for imagination, invention, illusion and creativity were self-evident.

But the meaning of ‘imagination’ is not self-evident, and nor is there necessarily tacit agreement about how the concept is to be employed. Theories of nationalism and national culture appear unresolved on the issue of imagination, implicitly resting on a modernist construct of creativity to suggest that nations are invented, fabricated or manufactured. ‘There is no “real” Australia waiting to be uncovered,’ writes Richard White. ‘A national identity is an invention. There is no point asking whether one version of this essential Australia is truer than another because they are all intellectual constructs, neat, tidy, comprehensible—and necessarily false.’⁴ The wariness and ambivalence that frequently characterizes critical analyses of nationalism derives from the perceived likelihood that these inventions might be mistaken for reality, with very real consequences.

The critical focus of contemporary theories of nationalism is, therefore, on the cultural process of invention. At this point, writers are likely to circumvent the vexed issues of authorship, originality and imagination which have been subject to sustained postmodernist critique. Nations are understood, not as the original inventions of those who penned the stories and painted the pictures which articulate the cultural imagination, but as the products of culture. Graeme Turner, for example, writes of ‘the forms and meanings constructed through Australian storytellers’. ‘As the culture produces its texts,’ he states, ‘it prefers certain meanings, thematic structures and formal strategies.’⁵ In Anderson's writing, agency is vested in the print media: the ‘overwhelming and bewildering concatenation of events’, he writes in reference to the French Revolution, were ‘shaped by millions of printed words into a “concept” on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model’.⁶

Ironically, late nineteenth century writers and artists whose work articulated an emerging national consciousness in Australia also saw themselves as a conduit for cultural experience and were disturbed by the notion of imagination when it intruded in the process of nation formation. Rather than emphasising the act of invention, they sought to deny the fictionality of representations in order that the ‘imagined community’ they were engaged in constructing could be construed as real.

Theories of imagination, according to Paul Ricoeur, may be arranged along two intersecting axes: ‘on the side of the object, the axis of presence and absence; on the side of the subject, the axis of fascinated or critical consciousness’.⁷ At one pole of the first axis, Ricoeur places reproductive (or representational) imagination in which ‘the image relates to a perception of which it is merely a trace, in the sense of a weakened impression’. At the other extreme of the same axis he places productive (or creative) imagination in which ‘the image is essentially construed in function of absence, of what is other than present’. Contemporary post-modern cultural theorists are likely to perceive imagination as a representational process, but their insistence on the fabrication of nations permits a degree of slippage in the location of imagination along this axis, without going so far as to impute authorship to specific writers, intellectuals or artists to whom a more passive role is generally ascribed.

The ambivalence of writers and artists of the late nineteenth century to imagination arose from their perception of the creative capacity to generate imaginary worlds—imagination could intrude a disruptive, transgressive element into the representation of the emerging nation. Jochen Schulte-Sasse notes that radical social and material changes occasioned by modernization ‘profoundly changed the conception of the imagination and, presumably, the imagination itself’.⁸ From the eighteenth century, he observes, two reactions were common. The first was a fear of the disruptive potential of the imagination, leading to the demand that it be ‘tamed’ by reason. The second reaction was a concern that imagination, alternatively seen as a mode of critical resistance to modernity and a counterforce to rationality, might be unable to withstand the process of modernization. The resolution of this ambiguity lay in the separation of art from everyday life and the exclusion of the imagination from discourses that most directly legitimated the existing social order. Contained within the field of art, the ‘productive’ imagination could be given free reign. But ‘untamed fancy’ should be held in tight check. It goes without saying that nation formation was a central area of human activity into which this ‘productive’ imagination must not intrude, especially in the Australian literature and paintings of the 1890s which embraced the need to imaginatively project Australia's nationhood as an achievable goal for that decade. Consequently the act of imagination through which the nation was constituted was necessarily suppressed. Thus, imaginative literary and visual works of art were charged with forging an imagined national community in a process that implicitly denied the fictionality of either the representations or the nation.

In spite of differences in the ideological projects of creators and critics of nationalism, an unresolved distrust and tension between imagination and nation is a recurring theme in writing about national cultures. This tension derives from the perceived human capacity to confuse image with its real-world referent. This is Ricoeur's second axis, which intersects with the first ‘according to whether the subject of imagination is capable or not of assuming a critical consciousness of the difference between the real and the imaginary’. At one end of this axis, he places non-critical consciousness in which the image is confused with, or mistaken for, the real. At the other end, where ‘the critical distance is fully conscious of itself, imagination is the very instrument of the critique of reality’.⁹ From Ricoeur's analysis, these variations in the ways in which the concept of imagination has been theorized appear considerable and perhaps irreconcilable. ‘What after all,’ Ricoeur asks, ‘could be in common between the state of confusion which characterises that consciousness which unknown to itself takes for real that which for another consciousness is not real, and the act of distinction which, highly self-conscious, enables consciousness to posit something at a distance from the real and thus produce the alterity at the very heart of existence?’¹⁰

Many late nineteenth-century writers and artists understood their images of ‘Australia’ to be representations drawn from late colonial life rather than fabrications. In characterizing Australian nationhood on the basis of colonial experience, they contested and revised a legacy of European invention that pre-dated European occupancy of the continent by centuries. The European imaginative and intellectual investment in the idea of a southern continent is expressed in the notion of the ‘Antipodes’. Dating from colonization, the European antipodean fantasy, based on curiosity, desire, dread and anticipation, was counterbalanced by a colonial and emerging national Australian (albeit non-Aboriginal) representation of experience in a ‘new country’. As images of terra australis incognito were re-formed on the basis of experience, colonial perceptions, expectations and aspirations shifted, frequently (as Ross Gibson has argued¹¹) in order to accommodate disappointment and disillusionment.

These re-formed images of the new country grew out of the actual experience of journeys to and within Australia and inevitably the fact of journeying has played a pivotal part in the imaginative process of representation. ‘The Australian story’ is one of travellers, most of them men: of transportees, explorers, immigrants, pioneers, drovers, shearers, gold-seekers, bushrangers and swagmen. However, the centrality of the journey theme as a metaphoric and structural device in national imagery and narrative is not purely a function of historical mobility. Journeying infuses the representation of explorers, pioneers and bushmen with the potency of the quest, the pilgrimage and the passage of life itself. The journey is integrally bound to narratives of transformation of the masculine subject. The conventional gender-specificity of the journey theme has been invested in Australian myths of nation—not only in content but at the deeper level of narrative structure and organization of meaning. To use Hayden White's formulation, the journey functions as a poetic prefiguration of both the plot structure of the narrative and the explanation of its meaning and significance.¹²

It is significant, therefore, that the journey motif is also employed as a structural device and metaphor in critical studies of nationalism and national identity. For example, in his use of the notion of the pilgrimage, Anderson's study of nationalism is prefigured by this most deep-rooted poetic device. Along the ‘upward-spiralling road’, he says, the functionary ‘encounters as eager fellow-pilgrims his functionary colleagues, from places and families he has scarcely heard of’. In spite of the diversity of their backgrounds, their common destination, which is also the ceiling to their careers, creates ‘a consciousness of connectedness’. In his use of the journey motif, however, Anderson naturalizes elements which he might otherwise have questioned. Assuming women's national consciousness to have been formed in the same manner as men's, he accounts for its formation with reference to experiences which were specific to men, or arguably had different consequences for women's sense of identity. In choosing the pilgrimage as a structuring device, Anderson implicitly frames his study of national consciousness in terms that are both gender-specific and gender-blind.

SPATIAL PERCEPTION IN JOURNEYS OF NATION

Where the journey functions as the central imaginative device for nation formation, the representation of national space is likely to be determined by this device. Australian bush mythology is shaped by the journeying of bushmen: by their departures, adventures and homecomings. The space of the bush and home is represented from the perspective of the journeying bushman. Implicitly, other characters—themselves understood partially by ‘a visitor’ whose difference from them is a precondition of the narration—would perceive the space they inhabit differently.

Henry Lawson writes of the bush in terms of ‘its everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees’:

Bush all round—bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few sheoaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek.¹³

But his account of the Drover's Wife's Sunday afternoon walk with her children along the bush-track permits a complex discussion of perception as determined by experience of bush life. For the Drover's Wife, the pleasure in and commitment to this ritual walk are acknowledged. However, its meaning for her, and for her children, is undercut by the suggestion that strangers would not understand it because, for them, ‘[t]here is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet’.

In both ‘The Drover's Wife’ and the later story, ‘“Water Them Geraniums”’, the reader is persuaded to experience the bush as a stranger might, as one who ‘might travel for miles without seeming to have moved’:

You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman.¹⁴

The monotony ‘makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ships can sail—and further’. The Drover's Wife and the stranger, it is implied, would perceive and respond to both the bush and the activities of its inhabitants in different ways. In ‘“Water Them Geraniums”’, Lawson introduces a third point of view—that of a Bushman who ‘soon picks out differences among the trees, half unconsciously as it were, and so finds his way about’.¹⁵ Unlike the stranger who is unable to discern differences, the bushman traverses the bush by blazing a track or fixing a point in his mind. The Drover's Wife is neither bushman nor stranger. She belongs here in the bush, and ‘is used to the loneliness of it’ and ‘would feel strange away from it’. In fact, she represents a fixed point in the bush, as far as the bushman/narrator is concerned.

As readers, we see the bush almost invariably through the eyes of an outsider, at times a stranger, at times a bushman. Sometimes the bush is seen from the track to form a backdrop which appears static, shallow and undifferentiated. At other times, the bush may seem impenetrable or empty. Aspects of the bush world may be obscured from view, or patterns of meaning may be implied that would not be shared by the inhabitants of this space. Understood in this way, a lack of discernible differences and sense of depth of the bush may be a consequence of the point of observation and we may be unaware that the bush is seen from vantage points which permit only fragmented and incomplete vision.

Spatial descriptions reflect the perceptions, experience and forebodings of the male narrator. They articulate his dread of living in the bush. In this sense, it is the narrator who emerges as the protagonist and bush stories are episodes in his journey. For the narrator, the bush and its inhabitants are closely interconnected. As characters who are immobilized in relation to plot—whom Jurij Lotman describes as ‘functions of plot-space’¹⁶—bushwomen and sedentary bushmen appear mad, queer or eccentric. To the extent that the narrators identify with these characters, they realize that they too could become ‘bush-like’. The narrator may not recognize the effect of his prolonged stay in the bush until later. ‘It's only afterwards, and looking back, that you see how queer you got,’ says Joe Wilson.¹⁷ Thus, incessant, endless journeying is motivated not only by the imperatives of nation formation, but also by the need to avoid immersion in the life of the bush. The narrator recognizes that if he were to dwell there, he too would be assimilated into the bush, and therefore become deranged relative to the standards of normality and sanity which he represents as ‘natural’.

A similar distinction between those who travel and those who do not is structured into Benedict Anderson's theoretical framework for the formation of national consciousness, but the implications of this definitive difference are not considered. Amongst those who do not embark on career ‘pilgrimages’, Anderson argues, national consciousness is formed through reading print media. The distribution and the content of vernacular colonial print media elicits an identification with other readers and this identification forms the basis of an imagined community. The question arises: what is the relationship between those who have embarked on a pilgrimage and those who in effect ‘read themselves into national consciousness’? The formation of a national consciousness is based not only on identification amongst ‘fellow-pilgrims’ from diverse backgrounds, but also on differentiation from those who are not ‘travelling’.

The spatial metaphor of the journey in narratives of nation formation distinguishes between points of departure and return, and the locations of the ‘action’, through which Anderson's spiralling road passes. Similarly, Australian bush mythology represents national landscapes through a specific and limited experience of the land. Since it is inherent in the logic of the journey motif that the transformative experiences of the mobile protagonist determines the treatment of both the terrain of the journey and its inhabitants, it follows that the representation of national place and character is dependent on the perception of the traveller, which is predicted on mobility, transience and difference.

BUSH-INDUCED MADNESS

The representation of certain kinds of experience as formative of the emerging nation rested on the plausible identification of reader and author with a narrator whose journeying anchored the narrative to the real world inhabited by authors and readers. Significantly, these journeys permitted the imaginative negotiation not only of the distance between the city and the bush, but also metaphorically between the present and the past. The eccentricity or madness of bush characters is understood by the narrator in terms of his perception of the bush as a ‘maddening place’. The question of perception remains problematic as the narrator defines both the place and characters who inhabit it in terms of his own experience of mobility and nomadicism. Nevertheless, the theory of bush-induced madness advanced in Lawson's writing is significant for the light it throws on the notion of imagination that underpins the imaginative formation of nationhood.

In bush mythology, the breaking of the mind can serve to mute unendurable grief and pain forged in the bush. Lawson's bushmen and women attempt to reconstruct their world as a more manageable but more constricted mental space in which the experience of actual loss is balanced by imagined restitution. The bush, to which the initial loss is attributed, permits this contracting of mental space. Literally, isolation makes outside disruption unlikely and sheer physical labour exhausts body and mind. More significantly, the bush itself is depicted as a constricted space of stultifying sameness which dulls the mind to other possible worlds.

Some of Lawson's characters are able to form other worlds in the imagination and to convince themselves sufficiently of their reality to almost inhabit them.¹⁸ For others, such as Mrs Spicer in ‘“Water Them Geraniums”’, the more austere but arguably saner approach is the numbing of the mind against the intrusive events of the wider world, in order to anaesthetize the heart against its unendurable pain. Though Mrs Spicer does not seek to create and dwell within imaginary worlds, she has cut herself adrift of the world beyond the confines of the present time and her immediate surrounds. She rests precariously on the edge of sanity. Of the rest of the world we are told that she had ‘lost all her curiosity’:

But sometimes when she got outside her everyday life on this selection she spoke in a sort of—in a sort of lost groping-in-the-dark kind of voice.¹⁹

This loss of contact with events outside her selection is signified by the ‘groping voice’ she adopts when she tries to put into words her perceptions, memories and links with the world beyond. Her managing of grief and hardship has depended on her ability to contract the mental space within which she imagines and remembers her life, and to anaesthetize her mind against enduring pain.

Mrs Spicer's precarious mental stability is thrown off balance when she revives her connections with this world beyond her immediate struggle, through recollection of her past, or interaction with the bush community. Though she describes herself as ‘past carin'’, her present friendship with Mary and Joe Wilson are ill-afforded reminders of loss. The value she places on hospitality, the pleasure of the company of the Wilsons, the benefits the children derive from their acquaintance, the material help Joe provides, and her protective concern for Mary draw Mrs Spicer into the world they represent. But, she says, ‘the visits doesn't do me any good. I git the dismals afterwards.’ Ill and dying, Mrs Spicer's last instructions to Annie are to milk the cows, to feed the pigs and calves, not go to Mary Wilson for help, and to water the geraniums. Much has been said about the injunction to ‘water them geraniums’, but why should Annie not go for Mary Wilson? Mrs Spicer dies because she cannot grow ‘past carin'’ as long as she must still respond to the events of the world over which she has no control, a world that Mary Wilson represents.

The poignancy of Lawson's studies of madness lies in the inability of the characters in fact to sever links with the social world and inhabit the asylums they have created.²⁰ Lawson emphasizes the role of imagination in generating madness: ‘going ratty’ describes the queerness of thought and deed that is the consequence of loneliness ‘provided you have any imagination at all’. Mrs Spicer maintains an equilibrium by denying mental activities—by neither remembering nor imagining another life. Within the circumscribed world of the farm, she is alert, sensitive to absurdity, eloquent, and innovative in times of great hardship. It is because she is neither stupid nor lacking in imagination that the defences she has erected against the despair of her life are so vulnerable. Joe Wilson's first comment about Mrs Spicer is that

I supposed the reason why she hadn't gone mad through hardship and loneliness was that she hadn't either the brains or the memory to go farther than she could see through the trunks of the apple trees.²¹

‘Going ratty’ depends on the imaginative capacity of the mind. If the mind will not break, then the only possible way out of the unbearable pain of living is to grow ‘past carin'’.

As far as narratives of nation formation are concerned, it could be argued that these mad characters play only a marginal role in the national cast of characters and that their stories are located similarly on the margins of the national mythology. However the possibility that such immobilized characters, whether male or female, may become ‘adapted’ to the bush in such a manner that others perceive them to be mad, suggests an anxiety is attached to journeying that colours the apparently buoyant journeys of nation formation. Adaptation to the bush also is perceived as absorption by the bush. While the journey represents a quest to claim and domesticate the land as the national territory, inhabiting the untamed land threatens madness and death. The mobility of bushmen is a product not only of quest but of anxiety.

The possibility of the narrator succumbing to madness is implicitly dependent on two factors: the first is the prolonged dwelling in the bush, and the second is the mental faculty through which the response to this experience is formed. Implicitly the narrator does not lack either the brains or the memory that are preconditions for madness, since these are employed in the act of narration itself. Two observations follow from this recognition of the vulnerability of the narrator to bush madness. The first is that his implied mobility, and his incessant travelling, underwrites the reliability of his observation and narration. The narrator is necessarily familiar with, but not immersed in, bush life. The realist attitude of ‘objectivity’ and ‘reliability’ in the account of bush life is a function of the transience of the narrator's encounter with the bush.

The second implication of the susceptibility of the narrator to bush-induced madness relates to an attitude to imagination on the part of not only the narrator, but also, implicitly, the writer. This attitude is one of wariness. The imagination, without which no tale can be told, has the capacity to derange the narrative, and to undermine its veracity. The literary responses to this problem are not unlike the fictive responses of bush inhabitants to their experience of the bush. A primary response is to clearly delineate the products of ‘imagination’ from the representation of the ‘real’ world, to encircle the imagination within boundaries which indicate that this imaginary ‘space’ is not that of the real world. Richard Kearney alludes to this strategy when he comments that the nineteenth-century imagination ‘felt more and more compelled to recoil into a magical world of its own making’.²² Such a world appears as the product of the imagination, but it is not represented as holding up a mirror to the real world. Just as bush characters cannot inhabit delusive worlds without losing their footing in the real world, readers are warned against imaginatively ‘inhabiting’ these fantasies. The reader, like the narrator, should imaginatively travel through fictional worlds.

The literary and visual exploration of madness and fantasy emerges out of an exploration of the mind's construction of an image of that which does not exist. By contrast, the representations of the emerging nation are assumed to depict aspects of history and culture which impart a distinctive national character and provide a basis for national identity and coherence. The images are assumed to reproduce that which does exist, or has existed, in the ‘real’ world.

Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Steele Rudd and Frederick McCubbin—writers and a painter who consciously articulated a concept of ‘Australia’ and sought to contribute to its cultural formation—all display a direct interest in the ‘productive’ imagination, typically in its negative association with madness, hallucination and childishness, and generally on the margins of what might be called the nationalist centres of their work. In their treatment of fantasy, madness, enchantment and imagination, Lawson and McCubbin, in particular, appear to have understood the imagination as having a capacity to generate imaginary worlds which could be delightful or frightening. But they saw danger in the inability to distinguish these worlds from the ‘real’ world which they themselves inhabited. In the formal and stylistic sense, these artists appear resistant to the use of imagination as an instrument of their own practice, since such a use of imagination may appear to undermine the ‘truth claims’ made in the work. The association of madness and imagination suggests a degree of distrust of imagination which has implications for both their writing and the imagined national community.

NATION, MODERNITY AND IMAGINATION

The necessity of this imaginative restraint—the ‘veto’ of the imagination, in Luiz Costa Lima's terms—was urged in the aesthetic debates of the 1890s published in the Bulletin. As Douglas Jarvis has argued, the Bulletin's ‘rejection of aestheticism, classicism and romantic idealisation as literary or artistic creeds is based largely on moral and ideological grounds’.²³ The aesthetic vogue of the 1880s, which found expression in popular fashion and taste as well as literary and artistic forms, was denounced as reflecting aristocratic and imperialist values, to the neglect of contemporary social conditions. Literary realism, Jarvis argues, was favoured on moral utilitarian and nationalist grounds, and seen as reflecting radical, egalitarian and nationalistic ideas. Lawson's writing was valued for its apparent ‘artlessness’, his detailed, objective style was seen to report ‘truthfully’ that which he observed, and his capacity for observation was derived from the depth of his experience of the bush. Nevertheless, Lawson made use of an obtrusive authorial presence to give the impression of ‘a mature man remembering, retelling a past incident or a yarn heard in the past’.²⁴

The interplay of past, present and future was effected by the use of the narrator as a character who remembers the past. In this way, the bush story takes place in the ‘past’ of the narrator, who implicitly is speaking in the ‘present’ of the reader, thus establishing a national past which appears to be continuous with the present. The imagined formation of the nation is inscribed as a remembered past. The constricted space of imagination facilitates partial recall of a past in which painful and de-stabilizing experiences are repressed. Both memory and imagination are subject to wariness and constraint as they serve the imaginative formation of the nation. Just as bush mythology is able to provide a ‘usable’ past, based on the selection of some historical elements and the erasure of others, so the role of the narrator as a perceiving, remembering subject of his stories ensures that the perception of the imagined past is determined by the present constraints on imagination.

Notes

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1986.

2. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1964, p. 196, cited in Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 15 (Anderson's emphasis).

3. Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1981; Patricia Grimshaw et al. (eds), Creating a Nation 1788-1990, Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1994; Anne-Marie Willis, Illusions of Identity: The Art of Nation, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1993; Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1986.

4. White, Inventing Australia, p. viii.

5. Turner, National Fictions, p. 1.

6. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 77-8.

7. Paul Ricoeur, ‘L'Imagination dans le discours et dans l'action’, cited in Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture, London, Hutchinson, 1988, p. 400.

8. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘Afterword: Can the imagination be mimetic under conditions of modernity?’, in Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary—Reason and Imagination in Modern Times (trans. Ronald W. Sousa), Theory and History of Literature, vol. 50, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 203.

9. Ricoeur, ‘L'Imagination’, p. 400.

10. Ricoeur, ‘L'Imagination’, p. 400.

11. Ross Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia, Sydney, Sirius, 1984.

12. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse—Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 128.

13. Henry Lawson, ‘The Drover's Wife’, A Camp-Fire Yarn, Sydney, Lansdowne, 1988, p. 238.

14. Lawson, ‘Drover's Wife’, p. 238.

15. Henry Lawson, ‘“Water Them Geraniums”’, in Lawson, Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 720.

16. Jurij Lotman, ‘The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology’, Poetics Today, vol. 1, no. 1-2, 1979, p. 168.

17. Lawson, ‘“Water Them Geraniums”’, p. 724.

18. For instance, Ratty Howlett in Lawson's ‘No Place for a Woman’ and Maggie Head in Lawson's ‘The Babies in the Bush’.

19. Lawson, ‘“Water Them Geraniums”’, p. 727.

20. The exception—‘The Bush Undertaker’—is not a sad or pathetic story. Here the congruence of the bush and the imaginative world is most readily perceived. The old man has adapted his mental space to that of the bush, undisturbed by the intrusion of a discerning narrator, and nature's cyclical pattern of life and death subsumes the linear plot of civilized life.

21. Lawson, ‘“Water Them Geraniums”’, p. 722.

22. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, p. 186.

23. Douglas Jarvis ‘The Development of an Egalitarian Poetics in the Bulletin, 1880-1890’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, May 1981, p. 27.

24. Jarvis, ‘Egalitarian Poetics’, p. 60.

Bibliography

Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1986.

Costa Lima, L., Control of the Imaginary—Reason and Imagination in Modern Times (trans. R. W. Sousa), Theory and History of Literature, vol. 50, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Gibson, R., The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia, Sydney, Sirius, 1984.

Grimshaw, P., et al. (eds), Creating a Nation 1788-1990, Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1994.

Kearney, R., The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture, London, Hutchinson, 1988.

Lawson, H., A Camp-Fire Yarn, Sydney, Lansdowne, 1988.

Turner, G., National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1986.

White, H., Tropics of Discourse—Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1987.

White, R., Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1981.

Willis, A-M., Illusions of Identity: The Art of Nation, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1993.