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3.2. The Outward Search For That Which Lies Within
White Australians have always been looking outward to find themselves. This is not
unusual for a colonial culture, especially one which has never burned its socio-cultural bridges
with the cataclysm of revolution, but Australians seem somehow more sensitive than other
nations about questions of identity. It could be that they are intimidated by the Aboriginal
ability to identify with the here and now, perhaps augmented by the fact that so many other
former colonies did undertake revolutionary movements while they meekly awaited their
master’s gift of emancipation, but, for whatever reason, white Australians have continually
looked over their shoulders, across the seas or back in time as if they might find themselves
somewhere else. It is a habit with serious psychic consequences. The literature is peppered
with the sense of self-belittlement which white Australians feel, as in Christopher J. Koch’s
Across the Sea Wall when the protagonist, Robert O’Brien, is introduced to the Indian
businessman:
Ram turned to him. ‘Mrs O’Brien is Latvian, I understand. You are
English?’
‘Australian,’ O’Brien answered.
‘Oh—yes,’ Ram said. His dark eyes rested on O’Brien with vague
regret, as though the young man had confessed to some embarrassing defect
which he was prepared to overlook, together with the tramp’s clothes with
which O’Brien was disgracing his club. (ASW, 111)
The problem is not that there is anything wrong with being Australian, but it is one of
knowing what being Australian means. Or, as Koch has another Indian character put it, that
‘you bloody Australians don’t know what you are. You don’t think much of colonialism, but
then suddenly you’re waving the Union Jack’ (ASW, 96). The criticism causes O’Brien to
reflect defensively, and he finds himself feeling ‘profound mistrust of India: India was chaos,
and sudden horrors’ (ASW, 95), and sorry for the British Empress whose statue ‘grilled in the
terrible heat, a figure of fun, her majesty a joke’. Hot, tired, and ‘sickened by the beggars’,
O’Brien, who has ‘a sudden thirst for anything familiar’ (ASW, 96) when suddenly nothing is,
is suffering an attack of identity crisis. Like many of the figures studied here, O’Brien has a
better sense of what he is not than of what he is.
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