'Writing hands us back the reins...'
             Paul Kelly
             Post colonial literature and imperial history pass like ships in the night. Indeed, the emblematic preoccupation of Australian literature: canonical and contemporary, with the post colonial status of Australia and the hybrid nature of her culture is testimony to the notion that Australia is entrenched in a crisis of identity, seemingly yearning for a defined concept of 'Australian-ness.' Literature is most often a forum for exploring the unsaid and the unaddressed within society and thus it makes sense that this journey for a 'place and a space: and an effective identifying relationship between the two' has remained a major concern for the Australian author; the search for a new language and imagery a long and agonizing one.
             There are complexities and perplexities surrounding the difficulty of conceiving how a colonized country can 'use language as a tool for revenge' in order to reclaim its identity 'in a language that is now but was not its own language, and genres which are now but were not genres of the colonized.' Certainly the images and constructions of 'Australian-ness' are hazy and although her national identity has transformed over time, in essence the dominant national identity remains the same today as it was upon English settlement; 'masculine, White Anglo-Irish and heterosexual.' This is only confirmed by the absence of academic focus on Indigenous; ironical as it is the only really authentic Australian work, and yet unintelligible to all but a handful of white Australians.
             Despite this cultural hegemony Australia is still perceived as 'the Arabian desert of the human mind.' Writers, from Lawson whose work seemed to epitomise the 'new national democratic spirit' of Australia to Winton who covets ...