Topographies of the Self: Coming to Terms with the Australian Landscape in Contemporary Australian Poetry

Abstract

Poetry taken as a highly personal, imaginative, emotionally experimental but epistemologically unprotected mode of utterance is able to indicate processes of intellectual orientation which precede the codification of generally accepted norms and truths. Thus, Australian contemporary poems in which man's relation to landscape is explored contribute to the continuing discussion on Australian identity. My claim that the historical process of man's environmental adaptation to a new country is reflected and partly relived in the present, demands a very brief recapitulation of the phases of colonial attitudes to the new land that were passed through in two centuries of Australian literature.