AustLit

'Few things have puzzled us more, in recent times, than out relationships with our environments: not just rural and "natural» environments but built ones as well. Increasingly, it all seems like the one bewilderment: perplexity about how to see the green world is inseparable from anxiety over how to imagine the constructed one, As recently as 1978, Les Murray was able to write, "our culture is still in its Boetian phase, and any distinctiveness we possess is still firmly anchored in the bush" (179). The fact that poets like Peter Porter, engaged in a dialogue with Murray about this that stressed alternative - "Attic" — sources of authority: "the permanently upright city where speech is nature" (23), felt that they had to pursue such things overseas, only confirmed the weight of Murray's argument. The key thing, however, was that we inhabited a polarity, and that what one saw when one looked at either country or city depended on which viewpoint one looked from.' (Introduction)