This paper focuses on certain challenges for environmental memory that seem to follow from historic quasi-affinities of Australia and the United States as Anglocentric settler cultures with longstanding frontier/outback traditions driven by boom-and-bust capitalism that in modern times have become much more self-consciously multi-cultural, much more urbanized, and much more ecologically self-conscious.
Specific issues discussed will include the quest for fuller recuperation of the ecocultural past (imagining ethno-racial and biodiversity across much longer horizons of time and space than colonial/national) and the proclivity for representing inland space as remote, opaque, gothic. Writers engaged during the course of the lecture may include Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez, William Least Heat Moon; Barbara Baynton, Patrick White (Author's abstract)