Every new culture must come to terms with its historical and geographical circumstances. In Australian literature, these circumstances are portrayed as particularly extreme and violent; Australian experience characteristically challenges both an individual's self-images and a society's structures of response, forcing continual interpretation and redefinition. The recurrence of specific topics in Australian writing suggests that certain kinds of experience reflect fundamental determinants, or conditions, upon which the culture is based. Further, such recurrence implies that the problems and the possibilities of encountering Australian reality have never been resolved or exhausted. The landscape influences everything. Most often, Australian writing conveys a sense of geographical extremity, either through comparison with other countries--usually with England--or through more direct depiction of a landscape which engulfs whatever imposition human society attempts to make.
The techniques of landscape description, then, emphasize distance and isolation; recurring motifs of description not only help structure individual works but point to the presence of national considerations in response to archetypal experiences. Distance, extremity, and isolation are the keynotes, too, of Australian history. White settlement began literally under a curse, and penal transportation has continued to affect the way Australian writers see their culture: convictism seems to be a good metaphor to use in discussing individual problems and social limitations, even beyond the historical period of transportation. Likewise, the threats of the Aborigines--threats more psychological than physical--have continued to force the white culture to admit its limitations; the Aborigines' survival in a landscape inimical to white imposition challenges the ability of white cultural values to make sense of new experience.
Even in social novels, concerned with the established settlements of a triumphant culture, the senses of extremity and dislocation derived from considerations of the open landscape, the convicts, and the Aborigines continue to require discussion as basic conditions of Australian life.
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