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'Country' to Aboriginals is a whole that includes humans along with animal, vegetable and mineral constituents. To Anglo-Celtic colonial views the Australian 'country' was harsh and alien. Autochonous inhabitants were invisible or erasable, including their part in shaping the perceived 'park-like' areas. Marketing views of Australia disappointed actual migrants. Concerns about the efffect of white re-shaping of the landscape, and environmental destruction, only appeared in the late twentieth century, and an awareness of original inhabitants' rights in the landscape is central to postcolonial ways of seeing the 'country.'
A discussion of similarities in venue, time and pre-occupations (Australian cities' and industries' vulnerability to sea attack during WWII, 'cultural cringe' of the '1950s) in Eleanor Dark's The Little Company and Dymphna Cusack's Southern Steel, with reference to Cusack's defence of Australian literature and development of regional awareness in her Newcastle setting, and Dark's exploration of a new love for the Australian landscape, and the awareness of national history in both.
