A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness

What has made us into Australians? What blend of circumstance and influence has been at play to form a character, a place that we recognise as our own? In his 1998 ABC Boyer Lectures, esteemed novelist, poet and librettist David Malouf contemplates the series of forces that has been at work since settlement.Not only are we a society created by the tectonic friction of living in one hemisphere while the antecedents of our culture and our institutions were in another, but we are a society forged from an experiment - and so we have continued to be.Our character - the nature of Australians - has been formed through a series of oppositions and translations. The translation from one hemisphere to another; the translation from one long-established society into an experimental other. We have lived with the complex heritage of our English beginnings and the influence of earlier English successes and failures in America. We live on an island with no aggressors immediately at our borders; yet the moat of surrounding oceans has allowed us to isolate ourselves from ideas and influences we are not prepared to acknowledge.Our entire history since settlement has been an interplay of extraordinary inventiveness and openness - a spirit of play - against the fears of our isolation and dark beginnings. We have had periods of great change and a willingness to embrace the new, but also periods of deliberate isolation or of the frictions that can occur when a chrysalis is shed.In A Spirit of Play, David Malouf examines these oppositions, and, as well, how through a process of recreation and imagination we have managed to encompass and reconcile newness with continuity.