the Enlightenment whereas America was settled in the Age of Calvinist dissent. But
it’s also a threat to the European God because the Australian landscape has no
purchase points for the European sensibility. I t is a landscape, which as I ’ve often
said, gives the middle finger to European sensibility. We try to ... we’ve made a
number of attempts to make it into, and these appear in literature, to make it into
well, if you like, a little England. Which is an attempt to which it gives the middle
finger, we’ve tried to make it into the anti-Europe, the other place, the place that
contradicts Europe but it won’t even stand still for that concept. The place that
reverses and mocks European prettiness, it won’t even stand still for that.
Basically, it is what it is and there was a famous tribal God called Yahweh,
he said, ‘ I am that I am’ and the Australian landscape makes a similarly divine
assertion, I am what I am. As a result you have to come to terms, if you’re going to
come to terms with a version of God, you have to come to terms with this new
landscape which is presenting a challenge to the European concept of God. And so
that’s one of the aspects of Australia which fascinates me, you get Baron Field
doubting that this was a part, a place for which Christ died. You get the same
surmise in Patrick White’s Voss; ‘ ... did Christ die for this place, is this a redeemed
place?’ And the answer by Australia is that it doesn’t give a fuck whether it’s
redeemed or not. I t’s just this confused loutish continent, just stands there saying,
‘You want a bloody Georgian garden, go to buggery. Good luck, I ’m not going to
help you’
Of course, it’s huge ... I ’m very much aware and of course I ’m conditioned
by everything that I ’ve ever read, I ’m very much aware of the, of hero ancestors in
this landscape, I ’m very much aware of the spirit of place in the Australian
landscape. When I was young and reading European verse and European novels
and so on, I was very, I felt very deprived that I couldn’t find any reference points
in these novels in this landscape.
I mean I do write about this a little bit in that book Our Republic, about how
place presented a problem for the European soul and coming to terms with how to
fit into this place and be civilized in a particular way is the great challenge for
Australians. I remember talking a bit for an ABC documentary called Australian
Spirituality, and I put forward these ideas that Australian spirituality was not like
European spirituality for this reason. Actually, I write about this question of God
and landscape and God and churches, I write about it in A River Town where Tim
Shea goes to a Methodist church in Euroka, across the river from Kempsey and it’s a
ron
(Ron)
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