AustLit

'From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, the bush has been among the most powerful ways of signifying Australia. The term has been used with reference to diverse landscapes and ways of life and has been given radically different political meanings - conservative, imperialist, republican, utopian, and socialist. The bush landscape has been populated by noble pioneers and rough-hewn bush workers and projected equally as the site of regeneration and degeneration. Beneath these divergent meanings lies the shared belief that it is in the bush that the authentic, distinctive, typical, or essential Australia will be found. In 1893 the journalist Francis Adams wrote that, despite the many harsh aspects of life in the bush, ‘not only all that is genuinely characteristic in Australia and the Australians spring[s] from this heart of the land, but also all that is noblest, kindliest, and best’ (154). The bushman was the ‘one powerful and unique national type yet produced in Australia’ (163). (Introduction)