The Visitable Past

Anglo-Australian literature has originally developed out of British literature, with which it has always been engaged in a continuous intertextual dialogue, so it is dependent on the British literary tradition. The result of this condition is a cultural tension between Australia and Britain. Subjective, socially-based literary images projected from the Australian context about Britain, about Australia's cultural roots, about its progenitors and its believed sources in Europe, have grown directly out of this tension and reveal the conscious and unconscious development of the Anglo-Australian mind within its given cultural condition.