Melbourne’s Outback
Melbourne’s Outback Journal Article
Dialogue: the Journal of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
- Author(s): Peter Sutton
- Published: 2009
- Volume: 28
Abstract: Anthropologists, naturalists, artists, writers and pioneer motorists established an intriguing set of links between deeply suburban Melbourne and the Red Centre before the end of the 1930s. The Centre thus took on the role of a hinterland counterpoint of Melbourne itself, a Wild Beyond from which the restrained civilisation of Marvellous Melbourne could be distinguished, but with which it might also be advantageously associated The story of this love affair is partly one of post-colonial progressivism and modernism in suburban Australia, when self-acceptance of Australia and the bush as part of Us, and of Indigenous Australians as fully human, gradually overwhelmed a former attitude of huddling against a threatening wilderness and its imagined savageries. With virtuous hindsight it is also possible to see a darker side to the relationship, one in which, as Tom Griffiths eloquently put it, ‘urban progressives pursued their fascination with the inscription and ritual of place, with the invention of names, monuments, cairns and pilgrimages. They were drawing the land into their grasp with a net of meaning and ceremony, filling its spaces and defending its silences’. Here I have space only to sketch some of the Melbourne/Centre liaison.