Cirrus@Austlit

'The notion of an inner life - just like the idea of an inland - has long been equated with emptiness in Australia. Terms such as 'dead heart' to denote the red centre and 'outback' to describe regions outside coastal cities suggest that, in Australia, the inner is on the outer. Even in the metropolis there is, as D.H. Lawrence noted when he visited Sydney, a terrifying vacancy. Australians, he wrote in his novel Kangaroo, were 'awfully nice but they have got nothing inside them'. For Patrick White, this was the Great Australian Emptiness, an environment in which 'the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is ...' (Author's abstract)