In a sense, the very notion of world standards is an abomination here: the beauty and stringency of the lyric relativise and suborn such critical sloganeering. But if one is to concede a difference between provincial and world poetry – a concession that must note that it is a moving line – one would put Nielson on the ‘world’ side because of the total lack of emotional partisanship in this poem: the homing of the bees is as deeply felt and yet as clinically objective as a Keatsian autumn, and the delicacy is solicited not out of gentility but because anything more annunciatory would paper over the intricate vulnerability of life as surrounded, islanded, by death.

But poems, even poems as soberly enchanting as ‘Song Be Delicate’, do not stand on their own. They need readers. Australian literature may not have been lucky for most of its literary history, but it was blessed with four extraordinary American readers. A variety of factors made championship of Australian writers an act of swimming against powerful prevailing currents. If one looks at the four pioneer academic American Australianists – C. Hartley Grattan (1902–80), Joseph Jones (1908–99), Robert Ross (1934–2005), and the still-living Herbert C. Jaffa (born in 1920) – one notices the necessary intellectual courage to swim against these currents, as well as certain other common traits. All were people who did not have conventional academic careers and who worked outside the university, as well as in it. None of them was an adherent of a prevalent ideological system of their day. Furthermore, all were ‘maverick leftists’.

This was particularly true of Grattan, who, of the four, was by far the most interested in history and the social sciences. As Laurie Hergenhan has shown in his authoritative biography (1995), for Grattan being interested in the South Pacific was a way of resisting what we would today call Eurocentrism, and from the Arnoldian, Anglophilic assumptions that permeated the United States academy. Even as, in Grattan’s time, the history and political science departments of American universities largely conformed to the leftist stereotype so many have historically had of them, the English department was the traditionalist’s refuge, operating as a stay-behind army in the wake of modernity, an atmosphere so Anglophile that American, much less Australian literature, was considered a somewhat radical pursuit. Grattan’s independence even came at some ideological cost, as his isolationist attitude about World War I and in the run-up to World War II was, in the judgement of many, inadvisable. But Grattan’s accomplishment was remarkable, particularly since he was an outsider who was never comfortable in his own country’s power structures, despite publishing fairly widely in books and periodicals. His New York Times obituarist seemed slightly befuddled by Grattan’s Australian interests, and labelled him as a scholar of the James family, when in fact he had produced only one early (good) book on the subject.

Joseph Jones was the first American Australianist to train other Australianists; people who worked on PhDs under him are still teaching or have only recently retired. Jones also was the first to establish a niche for Australia in American academic publishing, editing, with his wife Johanna, a series of monographs for the Twayne series. Jones’s most famous book, Radical Cousins: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Writers (1976), restored the link between American transcendentalist optimism and Australian egalitarianism. Jones set the precedent for the American Australianist to stand in democratic solidarity with the country of mateship and the fair go. Jones also coined the phrase ‘Terranglia’ to describe world literature in English. This phrase is the ancestor of all terms used to denote an Anglophone literary landscape not intrinsically dominated by the metropolitan centres.

Without Robert Ross’s pivotal role in the founding of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies (AAALS) and the journal Antipodes (which I currently edit), today’s scholarship within the United States on Australian literature would not have been possible. All the founding members of AAALS were literary scholars who did their dissertations on Patrick White or the Australian novel. Furthermore, Ross, and most of his colleagues, were comparative postcolonialists. Ross admired the writing of J.M. Coetzee long before Coetzee moved to Adelaide, and he was a particular champion of South Asian literature before it became chic. Ross’s lucid, painstaking mode of reading stands as an example for today’s Australianists.

Grattan, Jones, and Ross were, in different ways and eras, linked to the University of Texas, which is the one academic institution in the United States that has consistently persevered in the study of Australia. Other institutions had a strong presence which has since declined (Penn State), a strong financial commitment with room to grow in academic content (Georgetown), a prestigious visiting chair with little permanent undergirding (Harvard), or strong library collections with little supporting pedagogy (Iowa, New York University). The strength of the latter is Jaffa, who served as a wireless operator in World War II, during which he was stationed in Queensland before moving on to New Guinea. When he first came to Townsville in 1942, it marked the beginning of a dialogue with Australia that has lasted over six decades and across two centuries.

Jaffa, currently in retirement in Connecticut, is still vitally involved with Australia. Jaffa’s dominant interest has been in Australian poetry, and in an ambit where, as in other postcolonial literatures, the novel has occupied a hegemonic role and an often hypostatised status as the receptacle of the national imaginary, Jaffa’s focus on poetry, from Brennan and Neilson to his beloved Kenneth Slessor onward, has kept the field open for students of all Australian non-novelistic genres to explore these fields. Jaffa not only admired the poets of his own generation, but spoke highly of poets of later eras and quite different sensibilities, such as Michael Dransfield. He has been the model of an external critic of national literature who must find ways to justify the merit of even works not personally sympathetic to the critic.

These four men – as well as early feminist readers of Australian literature, such as Joan Lidoff and Marian Arkin – struggled against a canon that, after modernism, may have valued aesthetic innovation in countries people already knew as sources of literature, but did not want to explore literature from countries newer to the world literary scene. They also struggled against the perceived minor and ‘irrelevant status of Australian literature’. Australian literature had to fight the taint of being colonial. It also had to fight the parallel yet quite distinct stain of being ‘irrelevant’, which was a legacy of the assumption that literary quality decreased the further one got from power.

Pascale Casanova’s widely influential The World Republic of Letters (1999) has asserted that literature from non-metropolitan spaces is only valued highly by those spaces once a gesture of, as it were, formal recognition has been made.

Leo Tolstoy was a fervent critic not only of the government but of the entire social structure of tsarist Russia, yet his fame would not have been so possible had he not been born in what was perceived as a great power. Had Fernando García Lorca not written in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, his name would not have become so well known. Australia was away from the action, from World War I to the Cold War. It is important to note the long tenure of the Menzies government, effectively for the first half of the Cold War era. This established Australia as a conservative refuge well behind the American cordon sanitaire, and even though this changed to some degree after Whitlam, as long as the Cold War persisted Cold War cultural politics endured, with positions basically assigned in the early 1950s.

The only way that Australia could have been perceived as more relevant is if it had been in the tradition of what Christina Klein has termed ‘Cold War Orientalism’, the middlebrow books and cultural artefacts that proliferated after 1945 to show Asia as a place where anti-communist values could prevail. This requires some explanation. The residual impact of the Menzies government meant that Australia could never be championed by the left in Cold War terms. Surprisingly, it was the White Australia policy which meant it could not be championed by the right. During the Cold War, the American right was not Eurocentric. It was the Democratic Party that wanted foreign policy more oriented to Europe, and it was leftist intellectuals such as Susan Sontag who urged a greater attention to European writers. Her attention to Australians such as Les Murray and Paul Carter (both of whom were ‘blurbed’ by Sontag) came very late, and was no doubt facilitated by their being with her publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Sontag was the daughter of a man who had been a Christian missionary in China. Although reading her disclamation for Asia-Pacific texts biographically is reductive, it was this kind of religious and expansionist interest in Asia which, not implausibly, made the left disaffected about a great role for Asia in world literary affairs.

Rightists, on the other hand, were fervently attached to the Kuomintang government of China, later Taiwan; the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and that of Syngman Rhee in South Korea. These were repressive, dictatorial regimes, not in themselves worth honouring. But the embrace that the United States offered them did mean that the American right was, at least in international terms, not racialist, and that an Australia which admitted Asian refugees from communist governments would have been celebrated.

Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), widely visible in the United States in both book and movie form, is Cold War Orientalist in tenor. It is set amid the turmoil in Indonesia in 1965 precipitated by an alleged communist threat. Had Koch been born in 1912, not 1932, Australian literature might have been perceived as more relevant. If the White Australia policy had ended in the early 1950s and not the early 1970s, T.A.G. Hungerford, whose interest in Asia has been both knowledgeable and insightful, might well have been a world literary figure. But the task of establishing that inelegance would have fallen to the right, as long as Australia’s champions on the left were such as Grattan, who did not have mainstream visibility, and not such as Sontag, who did. To write one’s way into the mainstream during the Cold War was to write about an area of crisis.

Blanche d’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach (1983) is another interesting case. The New York Times said this about it:

Political novels about the third world tend to be rather extreme. There is always the clash of cultures. West bludgeons East with civilization: East seduces West with inscrutable sensuality. It is a measure of the Australian journalist Blanche d’Alpuget’s sly intelligence that she manages in this, her first novel to appear in America, to acknowledge the hoary tropical clichés of Western literature while transcending them. She is too wise to deny the brutality and seduction, but ‘Turtle Beach’ is not so much about the clash of cultures as about their murky comminglings, the curious symbiosis of West and East that is the legacy of colonial rule in Southeast Asia today.

Joe Klein, who wrote this review, was to become famous as the author of Primary Colors (1996), the roman-à-clef concerning Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. The politically savvy Klein is far more excited by d’Alpuget’s Asian focus than by her Australian origin. It was through Asia that Australia, in American eyes, began to shed the stigma of the ‘indifference’ which D.H. Lawrence had noted with respect to European social stakes. And both Koch’s and d’Alpuget’s books were read against the knowledge that Australia had taken in many refugees from post-1975 Vietnam and Cambodia, people who, in the first instance, were fleeing communism. This diaspora eventually produced current writers such as Hoa Pham, Uyen Loewald, and Nam Le.

What else made Australian literature of the 1980s visible in the world market? Even if the metropole took up Australian literature in this era for Casanovan, opportunistic reasons, the literature had to be good first, just as Tolstoy and García Lorca were each, in their own way and manner, good. And the 1980s saw all sorts of Australian writers, from the old to the young, the macho to the feminist, the arcane to the popular, succeed in the United States. By the time Oscar and Lucinda (1988) came around, capping and crowning this trend, the Cold War was effectively over. The success of Carey’s novel set the tone for the way Australian literature was read across the Pacific for the next twenty years – as Anglophone literature, as literature that is relevant to the American public because of the author’s participation in a larger English-speaking world. Without the idea of post­Cold War United States unipolarity, this idea would not have been viable. Australia in the 1990s was still seen as a subordinate position, still an aspiring entrant, an ‘oblate’ in Bourdieu’s term, to the metropolitan consensus. Joseph Furphy, in his elegy for Abraham Lincoln (perhaps the second greatest, after Whitman), hoped for a time

When dove-eyed peace shall have eternal birth,

And spread Millennial bliss along our shore

And all the nations of the smiling earth

Shall learn the horrid art of war no more

This time was judged by many to have come in the late 1990s, and Australia played a part, if still a peripheral one. Ironically, the shock of 9/11, with a cooperation between the two governments generally not to the liking of most on either country’s literary scene, did give Australia a greater sense of centrality; in the wake of the Tampa and the Bali bombings. no one could say Australia was marginal. A book such as Andrew McGahan’s Underground (2006), with its vision of a malevolent, post-’war on terror’ world government exercising power from Canberra, is proof of this.

Australian literature is still too elusive, too spectral a presence in the United States. But the infrastructure for the improvement of the situation is there, and those who seek to follow in the footsteps of Grattan, Jones, Ross, and Jaffa do not have to swim so arduously against the tide. The path has been partially cleared by Australia’s recent stocktaking of its own political and juridical history. Although the Mabo judgment was handed down six years after the American Association of Australian Literary Studies was formed, it is plausibly a ‘pre-Mabo’ organisation in that it could not have been conceived had Australia not been on the brink of full recognition of Aboriginal custodianship. It is not just the post-Mabo acknowledgement of rights but the post­Mabo acknowledgement of historicity which is so enabling. Just as Americans who studied Europe were able to see the literature against the background of the growth of European legal institutions over the fold from the medieval to the modern era, so can we now see an Australia that is on the way to legally accommodating the realities of its own history.

Our nations have stared across the Pacific (and for that matter across the Equator, a not unimportant point) for more than two centuries, so close and yet so far. An Australia no longer reserved about its own history, able to talk openly about its tragedies and contradictions, will inevitably meet a less reserved reception in the United States. A more open and grounded conception of the material field may well generate what Les Murray, in ‘Quintets for Robert Morley,’ winningly called ‘an ampler physics’.