Cirrus@Austlit

Among her reflections on Australian cultural identity, Janette Turner Hospital gives examples of two writers from non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds and the difficulties they have faced in being accepted as 'Australian writers'.

In his essay, Scott writes: 'The Australian continent was originally multicultural. Many peoples, many nations. Considering that helps you think differently about race and even about frontier conflict. If frontier conflict can also be seen as having something of the nature of international conflict, then it helps to understand ancestors, like my own, who not only were guides, but may have worked as trackers and troopers, and who at certain stages made alliances with the invader, siding with white people against black people' (20).

Robert Drewe discusses Australian identity in terms of 'the Myth of Landscape' and 'the Myth of Character', using examples from his fiction to illustrate.