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3.1. Introduction
The Literary Tradition
Driven by pressing needs for new socio-cultural points of view, Australia has in the
post-Vietnam period been experiencing a growing movement for renewal. David Tacey writes
that the ‘old stoical, laconic “masculinist” national persona is now widely viewed as
anachronistic and burdensome’ (Tacey, 118), but just what awaits Australia in their new,
deconstructed world is yet unknown. The old Australian ego is being eroded, and there is
always the possibility ‘that a new stability or point of integration will not be achieved’. There
will be casualties in the process of psychological reorientation, but, while the Australian
national spirit ‘may be young or frail, the time has come to allow it to mature and to expose it
to the deep unconscious’ (Tacey, 122-23).
The process of psychological reorientation which is fascinating writers and critics today
is bringing all that which is known into question, stripping away the psychological and
spiritual armour of Western culture, and seeing reality invaded by a mythopoetic ‘Otherworld’.
Tacey says that the challenge for Australians is to integrate the two competing worlds of
today—one represented by the old Euro-centric, patriarchal order; the other by the re-emergent
ancient sciences and mysteries of Asia and the Middle East.
This implies, Tacey argues, neither clinging to the new or throwing out the old, but
balancing the two at ‘a new point of cultural and personal equilibrium’. Blanche d’Alpuget
and C. J. Koch put this approach into practice, exploring that which Tacey describes as ‘the
excesses and tyranny of the patriarchal institutions on the one side, and the excesses and
indulgences of the matriarchal counter-culture on the other side’. Their characters experience
the alienation, loneliness, and psychological conflict between warring parts of the psychic
totality which he warns about (Tacey, 193), and in the end they can not be properly seen except
in the context of the dual world in which they live.
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