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he has to face the probability that he will never be able to return. His younger, more affable
character is spoiled by this dilemma, and he turns more intolerant, puritanical and humourless,
even as he becomes more successful with the support of his wife Polly. Sent over to Australia
to escape a hopeless situation back in Ireland, Polly shows the resourcefulness and strength of
character to come to grips with the exigencies of the hard colonial life, making the tough
decisions which her silly husband cannot. Richardson is in effect only reversing
masculine/feminine roles, not transforming them, and so keeping this female writer with a
male pen-name in Australia’s paternalistic tradition.
Later came others whose homes had been destroyed by war, or whose very families had
been sacrificed to the evil of European ideologues, and whose lives have become an important
theme in Australian literature. Many of these immigrants came penniless, but none came
naked—clothed at least with rich histories and cultures and armed with a hardened will to
survive. Louis Nowra brought the theme of suspect identity to the stage in his Summer of the
Aliens, the story of a pubescent boy growing up in an environment where everything and
everyone can be construed as alien, from his parents, to his friends, to his uncle’s silent
Japanese wife, to the pretty, crippled refugee girl, and even to the featureless, volcanic
Australian landscape.
This feeling of foreignness shared by many Australians is the root of the leitmotif of the
search for identity by a population where nearly everyone feels like an exile, alien, or an
‘Other’. Generations of Australians made pilgrimages back to Europe to find themselves.
Then, with the end of the Second World War, came the dismantling of the European colonial
empires. Britain, in particular, turned its own attention inward, and, step by step, left its former
colonies to rely on themselves. In Australia this manifested itself in a perceived weakening of
the old Mother Country, a fact which the Australians had surely noticed when the Japanese
routed the British in the Pacific and the Aussis found they could fare better fighting the Asian
enemy themselves. Nevertheless, the vacuum of power left by the retreat of the British
colonial forces and the increased instability in the region led Australia to turn to the United
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