Why are European influences to be seen in major Australian writers?

and that by re-creating them, writers could simultaneously delineate and define their country and create a new imagery. By singing of the lives of the pioneers, the explorers, the first settlers, even the misery of the convicts, they could create a depth of time, a substitute for ancient castles, churches and ruins – the memorials of past generations – the absence of which they believed, would retard the flowering of the new literature.

The strangeness of the new country – its inward flowing rivers, its monotony, its great deserts which were inhospitable to human habitation (even at the end of the twentieth century, the country supports a population of only 18 million people), the mixture of opposites – it is the smallest continent but one of the largest countries – demanded a setting aside of previous associations and a forging of new bonds. Through four decades, fiom the foundation of the Commonwealth at the beginning of the century to the outbreak of World War 11, the way of these writers was not an easy one. They needed their own land yet its intellectual and cultural atmosphere was too thin for sustenance. The cultivated minority with ‘elevated tastes, a lofty conception of writing, a severe standard of criticism, thinking and conversation, was disproportionately small.’ Australia had ‘no culture’, it was ‘crude, materialistic’. Many Australian writers sought inspiration from Europe and stayed there permanently but most came back.