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Nonie Sharp on a sense of place.

Article Excerpt
Do most Australian landscapes remain today largely unportrayed and unsung? George Seddon's thought in Landprints, A Reflection on Nature and Place was hard to dispute even a decade ago. At least for non-indigenous Australia. The story is quite different for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Through the years when the newcomers behaved as though the land was unoccupied, they continued to dance, sing and depict their landscapes and seascapes. Much of their performance was about their own lives, about the spirits with whom they shared a place, about the mountains and rivers and plains, the winds, the planets, birds and other creatures. Their world lay invisible to settler people.

Now in a new century people are asking the question: why has a literature of place and landscape with which north America is so well endowed developed so little in Australia? Did the 'otherness' of the landscape make it out of bounds for most Australians? Or does the silence stem from the relative shortness of white settlement here compared with, say, north America? Do we need four centuries too to thaw out and warm to our new clime? And are we now coming of age? Willing ourselves into the realm of nature writing.

Are our sensibilities changing? The answer is certainly yes. A couple of years ago, a Melbourne writer brought up among the gums confided with honesty that, seen from London, his home in exile and even on his return, he had found Australian trees--the landscape--unappealing. 'Now', he said, 'I feel differently; I see its beauty'. He was not alone. Even twenty years ago it was rare to find an Australian like the late H.C. (Nugget) Coombs who spoke in a public broadcast of his felt joy at sighting the eucalypts on return from abroad. 'I wanted to put my arms around them'; his voice is firm; no sense of self-consciousness. There were others of course: the works of Eric Rolls, of George Seddon himself are part of a fine thread of writing in praise and defence of nature and place that goes back to the nineteenth century. Yet it has taken a long time for something like an ode to the wonder and glory of our eucalypts to appear. Ashley Hay's 2002 book, Gum, is a nice sign of a more active awakening to the aesthetic appeal of the Australian landscape....