the trope of desire is a more useful way to organize desert narratives. It not only offers new ways on conceptualizing narrative relations with the desert, but can ...
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Desire in the Desert: Exploring Contemporary Australian Desert Narratives Alison Bartlett
Australian deserts have traditionally been narrated as sites of discovery, exploration, penetration and mapping, and have featured also as physical landscapes for dtamas of the Austtalian psyche (particularly by Patrick White, whose work is most often cited in critical work on desert narratives). These dominant tropes are enabled partially by the legal and cultural fiction of terra nuUius (Thteadgold), and also by a particularly masculinized tradition of writing, both of which have been amply critiqued over the last two decades (see Schaffer, Ryan, McLean). After two decades of cultural and feminist theory and recent political and legal shifts in black-white telations, I would argue that these tropes are no longer sustainable, despite their still considerable currency. In looking for new ways of writing relations with the desert, I want to suggest that the trope of desire is a more useful way to organize desert narratives. It not only offers new ways on conceptualizing narrative relations with the desert, but can also accommodate the dominant explorer narrative which is apparently so compelling to the Australian psyche. Desire is in fact already embedded in such narratives. mapping desire One of the seductions of the desert for literary types is its propensity to cartographic metaphors. In his book The Carrographic Eye: how explorers saw Australia, Simon Ryan makes an explicit link between the 'cartographic representation of knowledge" which Constructs Australia's interior as a blank map and the desire to fill it: 'blankness represents ignorance, but when included on a map it does more than this: it constructs the continent as a screen on which European fantasies may be projected" (117). The desire to inscribe f!.ew~found knowledge onto this tabula rasa inadvertf7llfly involve~ erasing ~he pres~nce of any indigenous culture, Ryan argues, m a practice that lS also characterized as a masculini~~d sexual activity of 'penetrating the inert yet resistant female land' (196). In his investigation of white Australian art, however, Ia~ MacLean suggests that early colonial representations of indigenous people were enterprises that mobilixed a desire to claim white indigeneity in the construction of a national belonging to a colonized land. In fact, he traces this 'desire by the colonizing culture to be white Aborigines' (vii) as a . dominant and continuing obsession in the construction of an Australian subjectivity, citing the examples of two white writers - Elizabeth Durack and Leon Carmen - who have written under controversial'Aboriginal alter egos. This desire, he writes, 'is sanctioned by the doctrine of terra nullius' (vii) which, as Ryan points out, is a cartographic as well as a legal doctrine. The representations of white explorers and artists, ~hen, already link their semiotic relations to the land and its Indigenous people through the complex machinations of
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subjectivity and desire. In her watershed study, Women and the Bush: forces of desire in the Australian cultural tradition, Kay Schaffer defines desire as "motivading] the need to define, to classify, to identify, to know the T, the nation, the self '... Both men and women are locked into this force of masculine desire although they are positioned differently" (24). Desire here is defined as supplementing lack, which perfectly accommodates the lack of knowledge consttu,ted by a blank map, of a colonized land. This kind of desire has become so much part of the national subjectivity as constructed by its settler population that resistance is difficult. Roslyn Haynes' recent study, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, for example, still finds the "figure of the explorer has particular potency" and that "exploration provided an important organizing metaphor'" (227) for literature, while rehearsing those same tropes yet again in the organization of her narrative. This text may well be successful in documenting dominant white cultural assumptions of the way the desert is culturally represented, but it seriously neglects cultural texts by women, and especially texts that operate under different desires than those of the male explorers. If desire were the organizing trope of desert narratives, what difference would gender make in the production of personal and national subjectivities? How are writing the land and writing the body implicated? And in what ways are the effects of gender and race inscribed? What other desires would women write about? In my desire to seek other deserts I turn firstly to the ways other white Australian women have written their relations with the desert in fiction, and then to some critical debates which raise issues of competing national, institutional and individual desires at work in writing on the desert. desiring fiction Most Australian desert narratives by white women writers involve a journey to and through the desert by coastal city- . dwellers. As such, the desert is already positioned as "other\ and yet it is also a liminal landscape, a place of possibility, a potential filled with personal desires. In some texts, these desires also transform the landscape. Susan Hawthorne"s 1990 novel, The Falling Woman, is particularly interested in the desert being a place in which a women"s culture might be located, as it compares mythology and indigenous stories from around the world grounded in the desert landscape of central Australia. This is a journey undertaken the main character, Estella, and her recently arrived European lover, Olga. The desert trip represents their coming together from across the globe and from different cultures, as it also involves their exploration of each other"s stories, sexuality and subjectivity. It is each other the two women are exploring, as much as - or even tather than - the land. And yet, the land is also refigured through this journey. As I have atgued elsewhere, this narrative rewrites the desert landscape of central Australia through a female literary gaze and as an extension of its characters' lesbian sexuality (Bartlett 1998, 1997). Describing her partner Olga, for example, "sitting in the curve of a pink~ grey rock that seems to enfold her"(45), Estella writes the following in her notebook:
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There is a small hole with a pool of wetness at its base. At some time water must have flowed here. Where the water
has been it is rounded and soft, like a woman's body. The colours, too, are soft: pink and mauve and grey with a touch of
yellow. The rock immediately in front of me is like smooth buttocks. A few dried leaves have setrled into the base of the crack, like a star. Just beyond the grey-pink entrance is a
The road floated under the car. It w~S'3 road from nowhere going nowhere and she was merely crawling upon it for
something to do. She was walking in the desert in the wind scuffing up the sand ar her feet. The wind suddenly whipped up skeins and swirls of sand around her, enshrouding her in a pale red cloak and obscuring her vision ... A man was walking
towards her through the sandstorm ... He came up to her and
shallow cave. It's like no other place I've ever seen. Like some
the instant she saw his eyes, she recognized him. She froze in
sort of vulval entrance to a womb. Sharp red rocks falling like
something between joy and fear. The Blessed prophet Muhammad looked at her closely and said,
a curtain. Sitting inside it is a thoroughly different experience
from rhe pink folding rock. (45)
"Who are you?" "The mother of Zena"
The interleaving of geological and bodily places here renders the archaeology of these women's knowledge as
"Who are you?"She said uncertainly,
He looked more closely.
intimately associated with the language of corporeality. Their'
"1 am the wife of Mas'oud al-Sharif'
landscape is positively and powerfully female in ways which contrasr the notebooks of early explorers which Schaffer
He stared into her eyes, and said gently, 'Who are you?"
describes as noting 'pliant, virgin land' which they felt
"I am lost." (126-27).
impelled to 'penetrate" (Schaffer 60). Hawthorne"s rewriting of gendered relations between the land, desire and sexuality can be compared to what Luce lrigaray and Helene Cixous claim as ecriture feminine in which women's desires and their writing are inherently connected. Cixous' exhortation to
'Write your body" is mapped through another strand of Hawthome's novel, which attempts to chart the experiences of Estelle's epilepsy I in which time and space become
unrecognizable territories, and which connects her (and by extension the desert) to more cosmic mythologies beyond the personal.
A very different body and desire are animated in Eva Sallis' novel, Hiam (1998). Like most of the novels I survey here, Hiam lends itself to the conventional language of exploration, which the reviewers enthusiastically took up. The character of Hiam is a Muslim woman who migrated to Australia from
Yemen with her husband two decades ago. We join her driving north from Adelaide to escape some traumatic family
event, which is gradually unravelled to be the suicide of her husband after their daughter has told them that she is no longer a virgin. Continuing the organization of narrative around women's sexual desire then, the beginning point for this story is a woman's emergent sexuality in the face of
cultural taboo. The magnitude of this taboo to Hiam's Islamic subjectivity is evident in her claim that both her husband and her daughter are 'dead'. The novel convincingly traces the
values of both the parent and child generation in this family whose cultural migration has not easily translated onto Australian soil. But Hiam's journey into the desert is not a conventional one of discovery; she is wanting to escape, she seeks self, . annihilation. Her desire is the exact opposite to the traditional
explorer narrative. As in The FalUng Woman, personal desires transform the possibilities for representing the landscape. It is Hiam's subjectivity as a Middle Eastern Muslim woman that determines her social relations, and also her spacial relations
Following this episode, it would be a relatively easy step to consttuct Islam as the Law of the Father. According to the father's logic, Hiam is lost because both her daughter and her husband.are dead: her role as mother and wife are no longer available. But soon after admitting to being lost, Hiam has a revelation: mMasoud is dead and Zena is under this same
moon and sky as I, at this very moment" (131). Hiam discards the laws of her dead husband, in order to reconcile her relation with her still living daughter. Ironically, there is some suggestion that Hiam's cultural tenets are loosened through this experience, that she becomes "reconciled" to Australian culture in some ways. This is most suggestive in the shift in
the way the desert landscape is described: the surreal, nightmarish, hallucinatory but whimsical and surprizing images are replaced by a dusty realism or naturalism, coinciding with Hiam apparently "coming to her senses", according to the dominant Christianized culture anyway. The shift in desert description sustains my point, though, that landscape is predominantly represented as an articulation of personal desire. While seeing Muhammad in"me desert is a turning point in the noveL I want to argue that this story contributes to a movement of women's texts engaged in charting family
relations onto desert landscapes. If these can be characterized as exploratory in function, then they involve a very different concept of exploration than the patriarchal colonial projects.
The desire to realign family relations in the space of the desert is especially evident between particular fathers and daughters. Daughters are important in trying to force family dynamics out
into the open. Helen Garner's published filmscript, The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), for example, involves Beth initiating a driving trip to the desert with her father,
"drag[ging] this poor old bastard out into the desert'" as Beth's husband, JP, describes it (56). It is clear that Beth wants re resolve or at least acknowledge their "ancient, unconscious,
with the land, so that her description of "a pink lake. Monochromatically fairy-floss pink, with a small, iridescent
unresolved hostilities" (74) but the father is clearly unwilling,
centre" (2), strikes me as an entirely new perspective in desert description. This is also a strangely unrecognizable journey through its remaking of traditional )udaeo-Christian associations with the desert. In a reflectively surreal passage that turns almost to fable, the narrator describes the prophet Muhammad appearing to Hiam:
Standard Time on his watch. Father and daughter get re talk abour God fmd almost about death --and Beth takes an
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remaining stuck in his family ways as he sticks to Eastern
unprecedented action by linking her arm in his during their
walk. The father (who remains nameless, only as father) "almost jumps before accepting it, and can't look ar her"(83). This is a gesture toward reconciling fat~er~daughterrelations,
as they walk on in silence, and is perhaps the only hopeful relation in this story of family and sexual betrayal. It is evident, however, that the desert is an enabling space in which these small gestures are possible, away from the complex web of social relations in urban life. Nikki Gemmell's novel Cleave (1998) also seeks to reconcile paternal telations. In this novel the daughter, Snip, is the protagonist, who is left an inheritance to track down her absent father and find out the terrible thing that he did to her mother. This becomes secondary, however, to the remaking of a primary relation between father and daughter. Bud the father is a nomad, and Snip drives from a coastal city to find him on a remote desert Aboriginal community in which they both used to live. He is there to preach at the local church. By locating much of her novel in an Aboriginal community, Gemmell directly confronts the very strong cultural and physical presence of aboriginal people in the desert, unlike Gamer and Sallis, but not in any cosy, unproblematic, or reconciled manner. It is the cultural and physical presence of indigenous people that prompts the narrative action in which Bud and Snip get lost and then found in the desert. When Bud makes a serious cultural error, he and Snip urgently drive away from the community in the middle of the night. Predictably, they are stopped in their tracks by mechanical breakdown and spend weeks stationary, running out of food and dodging Snip's unspoken questions of Bud. In a comparable plot to Garner's, Gemmell makes this desert trip the time to confront and renegotiate father#daughter relations, again initiated by the daughter and again with a resistant father. But this goal is circumscribed by the desert, whose never-endingly shifting sands in this particular country come to dominate and perhaps represent the father#daughter relation more than the desire to come to terms with it. Yet another example of a daughter reinscribing the deserr is Kim Mahood's Craft far a Dry Lake (2000). Being a memoir, rather than a novel, Mahood can incorporate critical and cultural analysis about the myths of the outback, and gamely applies them to her own life - and her father's - in the Tanami Desert. As a child, we are told, Mahood returned to the family station during school holidays to go mustering with her father; as a woman and practising east..coast urban artist whose father has recently died, she returns to 'his' country to pay homage and to revisit her memories of place. These are inextricably caught up in a sort of hiatus between experJence and cultural mythology, as she critiques:
When I was a child at boarding school I became aware of the gulf between the city and the bush. Each side held all sorts of derogatory assumptions about the other. The city was a stinking, crowded, polluted hotbed of ill-informed left-wing intellectuals, politicians and conservationists ... The country, on the other hand, was an intellectual desert full of bigots, racists and rednecks who ... if they no longer organized hunting parties to shoot down Aborigines, they still thought it Was a good idea. The macho ideals of manhood ruled supreme, shored up by alcohol· and violence ... At a certain point it ceased to be the country and became the Outback, a mythical zone of spiritual possibilities and marvellous landscape. (36-
37)
As an adult, she makes no attempt to recondile those COntradictions. Her father was a white pioneer in the area, and Mahood's travels are compared to her father's as well as the
diary of another white explorer. Clearly, the daughter's desire to return to her "father's country" is predicated on the masculinist culture of exploration and transformation of the land (mothers and other women are rarely accounted for). Ironically, however, it is in this country that Mahood comes to terms with her own social position as white urban woman, particularly through attending an Aboriginal women's ceremony, where she concludes that: Now, here, every idea I have ever had seems irrelevant., The women's ceremony has shaken me out of the notion that I have any real knowledge of, or relationship with, Aborigines and their culture. The stories I have told to city friends, that have given my life a glamorous and exotic edge, seem like flimsy posturing. (210)
Mahood finds that she identifies more strongly with the daughters of Greek mythology who endure penance away from their fathers and in doing so become women, rather than daughters. This is inextricably a daughter's narrative, though, sanctifying the memory of a father who clearly exerted considerable influence and continues to "growO hugely beyond the dimensions of the man I remember" (232). While Mahood's narrative is full of a~bivalent and sometimes incoherent desires, relations between father and daughter are intimately associated with this particular desert landscape and become permanently mapped onto that land in this text. In thinking about these texts which use the desert as a place in which to remake social relations there must be some quite profound symbolic implications involving the remaking of literary relations. The desert as a scene of writing has been filled with men's narratives and desires. In using the desert as a place of potential, a place in which social relations might be remade, these writers exhibit a desire to engage with, and rewrite, the paternal narratives that have governed desert literature. As an author Gemmell is promoted on the basis of rewriting such national fictions when the back cover blurb of Cleave suggests that she takes up her previous book, Shiver's "theme of women in tough places". I'd suggest that this is fast becoming a 'tradition' in Australian women's writing, perhaps most famously remembered in Robyn Davidson's Tracks (1980) but also supported by Julia Blackbum's self-reflexive narrative of the anthropologist Daisy Bates, Daisy Bates in the Desert (1994), and by Muriel Lenore's poetic retracing of Eyre"s expedition across the Nullarbor Plain by eight retired women in Travelling alone/together (1998). The desett might still be represented as a 'tough place' by many of these writers, but no more 'tough' than the desire to rework relations between people, as well as the cultutallegacies of those relations which must include our patriarchal and colonial legacies with the land and its indigenous people. critical desires I want to return briefly to Ian McLean's work on the desire of the colonizing culture to be white Aborigines, and to remind us of the mapping work of terra nullius by T etry Threadgold's comment that 'both law and literature in Australia have been colonising institutions' (54). The 1990s obligation to address Aboriginal cultural and physical presence in desert narratives has meant that some critical work now actively employs an aboriginalising strategy in regard to the sacred. David Tacey's Jungian analysis, Edge of the Sacred::
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Transformation in Australia (1995), is probably exemplary in its contention that 'we" (white Australians) need to form a closer spiritual connection to the land, like the Aboriginals', before we can begin any sort of reconciliation process in our own psyches. Haynes' Seeking the Centre ultimately complies with this thesis in its celebration of 'the Dreaming'. and I think Stephen Muecke"s No Road (bitumen all the way) (1997) can also be implicated in this tendency. Such narratives inscribe theit desite fot the 'white Aboriginal' sacred, and they invariably depend on another colonising action in regard to accessing and rewriting Aboriginal knowledge. What interests me is the way in which personal experience can be recruited to authorize such a procedure. Tacey does this quite explicitly in his first chapter, claiming his authority through spending his formative childhood years in Alice Springs, during which he became "attuned to Aboriginality' (14). His knowledge of indigenous beliefs were 'taught' to him by Else Corbett, a white European migrant who lived in Alice Springs on Pitchi Richi sanctuary, a portion of bushland filled with William Ricketts' sculptures of Aboriginal people. Roslyn Haynes places her personal experience of the desen in the margins of her academic text, in her preface, but it is no less powerful in claiming her personal experience as authorising her knowledge on the topic. She says: Most of all, I enjoyed being in the desert and having my preconceptions shattered, preconceptions that had been shaped largely by writers and artists and, before them, those ever~present patriarchal figures, the explorers ... However much you have seen in pictures, nothing prepares you for the desert landscape. (xii) Here, personal experience is valued in, through, and I would argue in excess of, the academic work produced. There have been some other telling performances of this procedure. Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs met with criticism for not incorporating personal experience in the writing of their book, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Posu:olonial Nation (1998). Concerned with what it calls "discourses of the sacred": that is, the ways in which Aboriginal sacredness manifests itself in the public domain of a modem nation' (xi), Uncanny Australia reads diverse and often conflicting versions of 'the sacred' via Freud's concept of the uncanny - of being both familiar and made unfamiliar. This is read as a 'productively unstable dynamic' in a postcolonial nation (24), considering for example, the coexistence and flow between two possibilities like reconciliation; the impossibility of reconciliation (24). In an essay in Austmlian Book Review, however, Veronica Brady marks out this book and its authors for criticism because they have not and cannot account for the experience of the sacred, and particularly the Aboriginal sacred. Brady is distressed that no'''common ground" can be found between the dualities Gelder and ]acobs continually posit, and asks, 'But why then do they not try to move across the boundary and attempt to understand the Aboriginal side of things?' (24). She accuses them of standing Ufirmly within our culture and within the academic subculture to which they belong" (24). The implication of Brady's essay is that it is possible and desirable to 'cross the boundary' from being an academic to"'understanding the Aboriginal' in an indigenous way. Brady's essay follows on the heels of the ABR 'Letters" section, in which a correspondent similarly accused Gelder and Jacobs of'''overlook[ingJ the ,simple truth that the sacred is lived; it is
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real' (HillS). Their writing, he said, was too academic, not emotional, failed to include their own religious beliefs (or lack thereoO, and he suggested they find time to go camping with him (HillS). Hiam's author, Eva Sallis, has also been subject to a similar argument in the Letters pages of ABR. She also has been accused of being an academic, of basing her'''research fiction' on reading other writers rather than on "her own real life experiences' of the desert, and of being dispassionate (Hillman 5). In her reply, Sailis tackles her critic both ways, by claiming that research is an innate part of fiction and that she has in fact travelled the Stuart Highway. These identical debates over separate books were happening at the same time in ABR. They are symptomatic, I would tentatively argue, of the desire of individuals to "know' the desert; to have experienced it in a way that disembodied "academics", or "writing", can never satisfactorily account for. Are these the contemporary explorers and cartographers, insistent that their masculine pursuit of knowledge through experience fills in the blanks marked 'desert' still on Australia's maps? The cartographic metaphor of terra nullius instilled in the national archives for 200 years still seems to compel the national psyche. Writers like Gelder and ]acobs and, to a lesser extent, SaIlis, pose a threat to such values because their writing challenges the nation's preoccupation with knowing the inland through experiential hardship rathet than, for example, critical application. The epistemological framework of mapping knowledge through exploration retains currency. unsettling desires But this is not an easy conclusion for me to draw. As an academic who grew up in Alice Springs during my formative childhood years, I find myself in a complicated position. On the one hand I find the inclusion of personal narratives compelling as a reader because they connect at points with my own history of place. I confess that Tacey's first chapter prompted me to buy his book. But on the other hand as a critic I find such narratives untenable as a form of critique. On the other hand my reading in feminist methodology wants to value the personal as an inexorable part of public discourses, like academic texts. And then there"s the complicating factor MacLean mentions, that to evoke the 'white Aborigine", "does figure a desire for some form of reconciliation" (127). While Alice Springs is dominant in my imagination as the representative "Australian desert" I have not been there since 1985.1 began my undergraduate study in 1987. Could this paper be implicated in my nostalgia for that landscape, in my desire to revisit the central Australia of my imagination, but this time in the vestments and texts that I have adopted as an academic? Is it not arguable that my feminist self wants to see the rewriting of this space as retaining the possibility of female relations in the desert, of family relations, not just as the place of single white male heroes? And also as a place of white women as well as Aboriginal women? My rewriting of desert narratives may be implicated in these personal desires, but this would only reinforce the capacity of desire to be an organising trope of desert writing in Australia. And if the seductiun of cartography is difficult to resist as a writerly desire, then incorporating that body of desires rather than characterising them as an exploratory exercise for the benefit of the nation is a strategy that may
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avoid the traps of colonial and patriarchal enterprises.
Works Cited
Damn(ed) Yankees: The Pacific's Not Pacific Anymore
Bartlett, Alison. 'Land of Plenty: the narrative politics of the desert in Susan Hawthorne"s The Falling Woman."
by Donna Coates
Coppertales 3 (1996): 3-18. --. Jamming the Machinery: contemparary AustTalian women's writing. ASAL Literary Studies ser. Canberra: Association for the Study of Australian Literature. 1998. Blackburn, ]ulia. Daisy Bates in the Desert. Port Melbourne: Minerva. 1994. Brady, Veronica. 'Truths, Illusions and Collisions.' La Trobe University Essay. AustTalian Book Review 212 (1999): 23-27. Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa" trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1,4 (1976): 875-93. Gamer, Helen. The Last Days ofChez Nous & Two Friends. Ringwood: McPhee Gribble/Penguin. 1992. Gelder, Ken and lane ]acobs. Uncanny AustTalia: SaCTedness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: MUP. 1998. Gelder, Ken. 'Letters' AustTalian Book Review 206 (1998). accessed 21.6.99 Gemmell, Nikki. Cleave. Milsons Point: Verso/Random House. 1998. Hawthorne, Susan. The Falling Woman. North Melbourne: Spinifex. 1990 Haynes, Rosslyn. Seeking the CentTe: The AustTalian Desert in Literature, Art and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1998. Hill, Bany. 'Letters' AustTalian Book Review 205 (1998): 4-5. Hillman, Richard. 'Letters' AustTalian Book Review 205 (1998): 5. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. /thace: Cornell UP. 1985. Lenore, Miriel. Travelling Alone/Toget.he-r. North Melbourne: Spinifex. 1998. MacLean, Ian. White Aborigines. Cambridge: CUP. 1998. Mahood, Kim. Crafr far a Dry Lake Milsons Point: Random House. 2000. Muecke, Stephen. No Road (bitumen all the way). Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. 1997. Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: how explorers saw AustTaIia. Cambridge: CUP. 1996. Sailis, Eva. Hiam. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. 1998. --. 'Lettets' Australian Book Review 206 (1998). accessed 21.6.99 Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: farces of desire in the AustTalian cultural tTadition. Cambridge: CUP. 1988.. Tacey, David. The Edge of the SaCTed: tTansfarmation in AustTaIia. North Blackburn: HarperCollins. 1995. Threadgold, Teny. 'Legal Witchcraft and the Craft of Fiction: Wik and its Literary Precedents. AustTalian Literature and rhe Public Sphere. Ed. Alison Bartlett, Robert Dixon, Christopher Lee. Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1999. 51-65.
Alison Bartlett lectures at the University of Southern
Queensland.
Until recently, social historians and literary critics have paid little attention to the one million American servicemen who
spent time in ,Australia between 1941 and 1945, a surptising oversight given that, at the time of the "friendly invasion", the population of Australia was only seven million. Although
Dixon Wecter's "The Aussie and the Yank" (1946) and Henriena Drake-Brockman's "The Ameticans Came" (1949) were published shortly after the war, it was several decades
before John Hammond Moore"s Over-Sexed, Over-Paid, Over Here: Americans in AustTalia 1941-1945 (1981); E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts' Yanks Down Under 1941-1945: The American Impact on AustTalia (1985); Dennis Phillips' Ambivalent Allies: Myth and Reality in the AustTalian-American Relationship (1988); Rosemary Campbell's Heroes and Lovers: A Question ofNationa/1dentity (1989); and Anthony]. Barker and Lisa ]ackson's Fleeting AttTaction: A Social Histary of American Servicemen in Western AustTalia During the Second Warld War (1996), appeared. These historians provide detailed accounts of the tensions over fighting prowess,
money, and women which heated up shortly after the Americans arrived, but their efforts to determine the impact
the Americans had on Australian culture and way of life proved remarkably elusive, leading the Potts, for example, to conclude that the effect of the American presence on Australia is "much more difficult to establish than their contribution to victory in the Pacific" (404). The historians
also suggest that contact with Americans served to sharpen Australians' awareness of their own identity (Drake; Brockman
57; Moore 281; Ports 404), but to what extent most are unable to say, in part because they fail to take into account the existence of the powerful "Australian male heroic tradition"
which had been, according to Campbell, holding sway for decades ("Introduction" 1). She asserts that the overwhelmingly masculine monopoly of the Australian national identity was being called into question before the war, for many of the circumstances that had supported the national image were changing:
The economy was shifting from primary to secondary , industry, taking with it the very heart of the association of the national myth with rural life. The Depression had forced many men into the humiliating experience of powerlessness. An increasing number pf non- British migrants were entering
Australia. Above all, the overwhelming masculine monopoly of the culture was being challenged by a feminist dimension-the arrival of the "new woman", changing work patterns,
falling birthrates, and the growth of suburbia with its orientation to domesticity and family life. ("Introduction" 2-3) Campbell further observes that while it seemed likely that the Second World War would "restore the environment which
had allowed the male role of hero to flourish", she concludes that it did not, because the "presence of the Americans contributed to a questioning of sexual roles and expectations, race relationsl and delineations of the Australian way of life which had been spelled out in various depictions of an
Australian national identity" (5). According to Campbell, the war "marked a critical point in the male-female relationship in Australia and its disintegration of the hero myth"
("Introduction" 3). I have quoted Campbell's remarks at ANTIPODES
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