Judith Wright has identified the landscape as one of the major preoccupations in Australian poetry, and also clearly identified links between perceptions and descriptions of the landscape with political and social movements evident in the poetry produced since colonisation. Harking back to Harpur, she identifies:
… the two strains of feeling (for the conservative, the sense of exile, and for the radical, the sense of liberty, of a new chance) have until very recently, been recognisable in all that was written here. (1965: xii)
Paul Carter, and Hodge and Mishra, take this further, to trace the development of two distinctive syntaxes: the Nomad and the Expatriate. These are both defined in terms of distance. The Nomadic, which is concerned with the distance of seemingly pointless nomadic journeys, includes such examples as the bush balladeers, modernism and the New Poetry (such as that of Dransfield) of the 1970s. Its distinctive features are long, rambling sentences and short unstructured pieces (“because they have nowhere in particular to go”, Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 154). This tends to include the most popular writing forms.
The Expatriate or Imperialist syntax yearns for Mother England, and remains the dominant syntax in the Australian literary establishment and the determinant of literary quality. It includes historical examples such as Henry Handel Richardson's Fortunes of Richard Mahony , the criticism of Leonie Kramer and the editorial direction taken in the landmark Oxford History of Australian Literature edited by her (and published in 1981), and the poetry of A.D. Hope and Christopher Brennan. Features of the Expatriate style are a wealth of detail, lengthy and convoluted sentences, and certain realist conventions.
Richardson’s trilogy, for example, fits into this syntax not only as a massive and densely detailed realist work, but also in its depiction of Mahony’s displacement and travels from one homeland to another. Even Professor Kramer finds it difficult:
Richardson’s style lacks penetration. A point which can be made in one sentence is often allowed to occupy several; and what follows the original statement is a series of slight variations, or near synonyms, adding bulk, but not meaning. (1971: xxiv)
Yet Judith Wright argued that the trilogy was a “bridge between Europeanism and the unknown thing that is to be made of Europeans by Australia” (1965: xvi), and as an Expatriate text it offers a slightly different meaning to the term: it was written by an Australian living in England, but seeking, like Joseph Banks and many other English visitors, to explain Australia in great detail to the English reader.
To take these arguments further, I would suggest that these syntaxes are intrinsically related to how the land is described, and in particular the concept of the unreality of the Australian landscape. For the Nomad, the landscape is something to be travelled over, and innately understood. To the Expatriate, the landscape is something that is oppressive, and should be avoided, but conversely might have to be explained in detail, as something foreign, in the tradition of the draughtsmen who accompanied Banks and Darwin on their travels.
In the modern context, this can be seen in the correlation made between cultural emptiness and the desert regions of the continent. This metaphor is best, and most famously, illustrated by A.D. Hope’s poem ‘Australia’:
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
There's a hint of Eliot’s metaphoric waste land here, perhaps, although Hope described that poem as “mumbo jumbo”. (1965: 15)
Expatriate writing perpetuates the love of distance (from the Centre—of ‘civilisation’, of the continent). Writing in the Nomadic tradition, on the other hand, reinforces the love of the journey, and the belief in the relationship of the nomad to the outback.
The reconciliation process, then, has the ability to not only reconcile two (or more) peoples and the land they inhabit, but it also may lead to the reconciliation of these two modalities of expression, and the philosophies which underlie them.
The end result of these processes may well be that mature, inclusive and coherent identity of place for which Judith Wright called over thirty years ago:
We are becoming identified with this country; we are beginning to know ourselves no longer exiles, but at home here in a proper sense of the term. (1965: xxii)