But to open this specific text to the possibility of this type of analysis requires some elaboration and conflation of notions of 'Australian', landscape, language and the ways in which these are recuperated by dominant discourses. I am thinking specifically of the notion of landscape, and the relation between landscape and a literature whose moments seem essentially alien to each other. The literary history of Australia has in some sense always turned on a notion of an opposition between what gets defined within the imported Western discourses as culture and nature, as though there were a naturally given distinction rather than constructed categories. These types of questions have generally been implicated in the notion of 'national literatures', and, particularly in the Australian context, with a continuous quest for a national identity. One of the orienting principles in the debate around this question of national identity is that traditional western construction of the naturally given split, the demarcation of a clear border between categories of culture and nature.
European languages have a history within a landscape.
They have evolved within a reciprocal and relatively stable relationship with a landscape with which they have been intimately connected for many centuries. In this relationship the forms of language come to trace the lines of the landscape, words form themselves around the specific features of a landscape. Colours too enter this complex world of the relations between landscape, language and the intermediary function of the realm of the visual. Colours insinuate themselves around the tongue, European green is crisp and clear with a long legitimated grammer that defines and articulates borders in the construction and consequent perception of different shades of green. More than one writer in English has been troubled by the disjunction between the available and defined colours in the English language and the perception of the non-matching colours of the Australian landscape.