pure Edwardian nationalistic, Antarctic race, lay the murder which was the initiating
murder of World War I. I t was a murder and a lie and it was a prelude to all the
murders and lies of World War I. One understands why these tensions weren’t
expressed in the way they would be these days because you were not supposed to
admit eternal hatred could grow in the hot house atmosphere of an Antarctic hut
organized along a class system ... But there must have been dreadful tensions when
you think of them lasting out an entire winter in such an unnatural environment.
One thinks of the viciousness that sometimes characterized the seminary with men
with too much thought on their hands, men with too much reflecting time and not
enough recreation on their hands.
W H: I have another concern that links into this and that is place. The idea of
place behind all of these things; I ’m developing the idea that there is a continuum
of place. There’s place where first of all it is just background to the things that we
do, then there’s place that we imbue with almost an animate presence of itself, that
it effects us ... There’s the aboriginal idea of course, you know, they bury their
placenta in the place where they’re born because that anchors them and it becomes
a very special place. And I see this coming through in a lot of your work too, that
floating behind everything is this power of place.
TK: Yes, definitely. I am absolutely convinced and writing The Great Shame only
convinced me more that place is ... that a sense of the spirits of landscape, is the
most fundamental religion of humanity. That it’s pervasive and indeed the children
of European settlers have built it up in this time. I find that in the time that we’ve
been here with this extremely non-European landscape, landscape is one of the
reasons why, despite the opportunity to become an expatriate, you know I held, I
only lost U.S. residency for neglecting to go back to the U.S. within a year time
frame during the writing of The Great Shame so I sort of sacrificed American
residency, consciously, unconsciously; unconsciously but perhaps by intent, during
the writing of The Great Shame.
I feel that Australia is particularly interesting for this reason, that inevitably,
the view of God that people have is linked to landscape. Now I know that
pantheism is a Christian heresy but pantheism exists because it is a more than
theological opinion. It is an opinion that I ’m sure is genetically encoded. That’s
why I say that animism, the idea that the landscape occupied by God is almost, is
the most fundamental because it is the easiest to believe in. I wonder about
Australia because we know that it’s a fairly godless place because we settled it in
ron
(Ron)
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