Patterson VS Lawson, and the Australian identity.

After reading these two authors this week I have spent a lot of time considering the links between their writing and the idea of the Australian experience and identity. With Patterson’s romanticised, rugged bush tales and the mythology he created against the doomsday, socialist, urban tales of woe, Lawson weaved.  Due to my limited word restrictions and the time frame I have decided to reflect on this simply in reference to my own personal experience.

Growing up you could say I had a Banjo Patterson upbringing, with a family that had for the majority been private school educated and upper middle class, country, caucasian background. We spent Christmas’s in Bowral at my grandmother’s house and school holidays in Cootamundra on my cousin’s big sheep farm. Lots of camping trips filled the years, with my father regularly taking us bush walking, canyoning and camping, all with a very Patterson romanticised iconic setting and perspective. He’d impart on us History and tales of Australian mythology and we would listen, in awe and soak it all up. Funnily enough, reflecting back as an adult, my dad was no farmer or swagman, I don’t even know if he could ride a horse! The world that he held in such esteem was not one he actually lived in, but like what he passed on to me, there was something in his childhood and identity that was tied to Patterson’s world.  

As I grew older, I was also private school educated, in an all girls school, one focused on service and community, social justice and an awareness of equity. Not continuing to go to the bush as much with bushwalks and camping now much more sporadic, it continues to be something I hold close and identify strongly with but there is a lot more of me that as an adult connects deeply with Lawson’s experiences and style of writing. The challenging of this capitalist and commercial life that we lead really resonates with me. I live in urban Sydney and I work very hard in two jobs and I often find myself searching and yearning for that country/bush connection that has been somewhat left behind in childhood. The occasional camping trip to a powered site in a caravan park on the south coast are the closest I get to it these days. There are now major parts of me that fight that suppression and government control that is very much inline with Lawson’s ideology. The socialist rebel that was born out of a liberal education, and a long hard 16 years struggling to understand my part and purpose in the ‘urban dream’, is one which I feel Lawson would feel proud of.  

Then there is possibly a final layer, I find myself not connecting with either in some way. Being female and feeling quite unrepresented in their works it leads me to question maybe these two identities are part of me but that none of us are these simplified identities so easily summed up in a few lines of a poem. Maybe we are pieces of everything stitched together in a makeup built on varying experience and tailored by life, changing with age and time. I can have my romantic attachment to the bush but at the same time I can be very grateful for that because of the comparison I now have with the city and our urban life. Maybe that bush identity and connection and appreciation for the environment is what makes the city life bearable, have meaning and depth. If I then add another layer on top of that of the feminist writings of Barbara Baynton and Mary Gilmore and you start to realise that identity, both Australian and individual identity, cannot be defined in one simple way of thinking nor summed up in a small collection of poems but more so, could be seen as a sort of anthology of works from multiple perspectives, all contributing in their own way to the complex texture of identity.