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2.3. The Difficult Birth of an ‘Australian Spirit’
It was a ‘proud, European patriarchal, heroic spirit’ which came to extend the empire’s
greatness around the globe. David Tacey writes that, while it was materially and socially
successful, the European spirit did not prove to ‘travel as well as rum or mahogany’. The so-
called ‘progressive colonialists’ emphasised the universal mission of the Church and the
advancement of the colony, but ‘paid little attention to the sense of place or to the displacement
of the old spirit’ (Tacey, 197). It was rather the sense of dislocation and exile which was
voiced throughout the colonial period, and this, writes Bruce Bennett, persists even into the
modern period. It has proved very difficult for the inheritors of two hundred years of white
history to pick up on ‘Aboriginal notions of the sacredness of rocks or hills or rivers and the
accompanying sense of belonging to this land spiritually’. Australia has largely developed as
an ‘empty’ country, ‘deriving in part from the self-interested British doctrine of terra nullius—
a land without owners’ (Bennett, 1991, 12). While this may have been useful for the
colonisers’ purposes, it proved a huge handicap to the population, quickly dominated by
immigrants who were in need of a sense of community but found only cultural disorientation.
This led in the 19 th century to the new breed of pragmatic, white, masculinist, and
isolationist ‘real Australians’ (Tacey, 197). Tacey says that, ‘naturally egalitarian, instinctual,
secular, and godless’, they were ‘modernists and existentialists on horseback’ (Tacey, 198).
Sharrad more bluntly calls them anticlerical, sardonic freethinkers (Sharrad, 1990, 173). What
held together an image of such a diverse population was the stereotype of the Chinese which
served as an ethnocentric contrast to the Australian. That the Chinese were dirty, diseased,
conservative and backward, and their country corrupted and old, only made clearer just how
clean, healthy, democratic and progressive Australians were, and their land sunny and young
(Ouyang Yu, 1995, Bulletin, 138).
The Australian landscape often proved tougher than they, however, and the image of
loss, sacrifice, and ruin, exemplified by ‘the death of the hero, the father, and the patriarchal
spirit’, became an Australian motif (Tacey, 199). The continent itself draws much of the
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