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D. H. Lawrence visited Australia in 1922, and in his subsequent novel, Kangaroo, described the Australian character in terms of an image of a ‘withheld self, an inner blankness masked by a genial nonchalance and informality’. (p. 43, Penguin Books)
Ronald Conway's book elaborates Lawrence's intuitive perception. In doing so he draws extensively on Freudian and Jungian concepts and illustrates from his own experience in private practice and as senior psychologist at St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne. Another influence is the work of the British writer, Gordon Rattray Taylor. These orientations are drawn together on pp. 76-7 in ‘an attempt to create an interpretative “grid” which can be placed over Australian society relating various areas of social and personal behaviour to one of the four major variants of identification.’ (p. 69). These identifications, ‘Patrist-Authoritarian’, ‘Patrist-Conservative’, ‘Marxist-Indulgent’ and ‘Fraternalist-Anarchic’ indicates their main historical periods of influence. This sort of psychological typing scheme is of course very limited, as Conway is aware, but I found it useful to return to throughout subsequent chapters of his book.
Outcast from England, and after a somewhat terrible sea voyage, the inhabitants of the penal settlement spent their first decade in a state of crisis about survival. Henceforth, Australians have regarded their exhaustingly hot and very different land not as a challenge to be understood but as something to be nostalgically disguised by English flora or met with by ‘murderous impatience’ and ‘professional rape’ (pp. 244-5).
With about three men to every woman, and the latter finding little scope for the development of the more gentle feminine pursuits while struggling to survive in the pastoral interior of the country, the Australian revolt against the harsh image of a penal society came to be expressed not in a ‘romantic and permissive identification’ (p. 29) but in a ‘mateship’. There grew up a fraternity d