AustLit

'It was once said by W.B. Yeats that artists arc the antennae of society, and Australian writers have been alert to a dimension of the sacred that seems to lie beyond the edge of the nation's secular consciousness. Conventional religious observance has never occupied a prominent place in Australia's national culture. But the striking feature of Australian art and writing is the extent to which it has produced a sense of the sacred that seemed denied in cultural life. A radical transformation of the sacred began to occur in that art and writing in the nineteenth century, a transformation originating squarely in the colonial encounter with a new and threatening land, best described by the terms, exile, displacement, unheindichkeit — an encounter steeped in awe and uncertainty, question and discovery. Australian artists and writers found a language with which to consider the incomprehensible vastness of Australian space. This was the language of the sublime. It was not the vertical sublime of mountains and gorges, storms and tempests, of the European Romantics, but a 'Horizonal Sublime' focused on the vastness, the openness, the distance of Australia, the psychic line of its endless horizon.' Although most noticeable in painting, it also characterized the attempt by nineteenth-century writers to produce an aesthetic that could fully apprehend the way in which Space had overwhelmed History in the Australian imagination.' (Introduction)