AustLit

'The title of this chapter is of course a not-so-subtle take on Germaine Greer's phrase "the pain of unbelonging," which gives its title to the collection of essays edited by Sheila Collingwood-Whittick,' to which our co-editor Sue Ryan contributed. It refers to the sense of alienation, dislocation and bewilderment experienced by the European colonists of Australia - what Sheila Collingwood-Whittick called "the colonizer's absolute unfamiliarity with the alien space of the colony [...] their overwhelming sense of estrangement." It is an experience that has often been highlighted by writers and critics - two examples that come to mind are John Carroll's collection of essays Intruders in the Bush (a title that epitomizes the book's argument) and Les Murray's assertion, in his poem "Noonday Axeman," that "It will be centuries / Before many men are truly at home in this country." The non-Indigenous population of Australia is as it were doomed to grope its way, sometimes in a most painful manner, towards a sense of belonging, achieving what is rightly regarded as "a consummation devoutly to be wished," though it may be permanently out of reach if Greer is correct in saying that "for a gubba [white] in Australia there can be no belonging."' (Introduction)