AustLit

'The relationship of Australian literature to rural hinterlands is generally captured, both within criticism and popular parlance, by reference to the concept of the bush. This slightly amorphous concept is essentially understood in negative terms to encompass everything that is not a city. Wilderness and country towns, deserts and mountains, farms and stations, remote Aboriginal communities and peri-urban peripheries are all at times imagined as being (in) the bush. As Don Watson put it: ‘The bush is everything from a gum tree to any of the creatures that live in it or shelter beneath it, and it is the womb and inspiration of the national character’ (66). The bush is a denominator of sociological, ecological and economic difference, and invoked in debates as diverse as water policy and telecommunications, wind-farms and youth suicide. It occupies the space set aside for ‘regions’ in other nations and traditions and shares some of the class dimensions that Raymond Williams identified as being central to a ‘regional’ identity. And in Australia, too, the bush is often a synonym and a metonym of ‘the regions’ or ‘regional Australia’. The fact that a concept can have such a protean and omnivorous application, stretching over much of the continental mass of Australia and transecting debates in national policy, reminds us that the bush has a central and ongoing ideological function within Australia as a settler nation. It operates, in short, as a continuously available and infinitely malleable support to public moral assertions. Somewhat paradoxically, as well as being ubiquitous, the bush is also unique, in the sense that the bush is imagined as being uniquely Australian, and even that which makes Australia unique, ‘the source of the nation’s idea of itself’ (Watson 66). An essence, in other words. The particular status of the bush is not upheld in abstract terms but manifests at every level of national discourse, and is sustained by cultural products from both elite and popular dimensions of social life in Australia. From reality television (The Crocodile Hunter, Farmer Wants a Wife) to popular rural romance novels written for women (‘ru-ro’, ‘chook-lit’; see Martin), on the one hand, to the most revered movements in painting, literature and cinema, on the other, the bush runs like a grey-green thread through the Australian cultural imaginary.' (Introduction)