David Tacey’s unusual and engaging book is directed at this audience. Partly autobiographical, partly a Jungian analysis of the collective Australian psyche, partly literary commentary, partly anthropological, Edge of the Sacred is a cri de coeur about our lack of an Australian spiritual identity and the fearful price we pay for that lack, and on the other hand a positive program for creating such an identity.

Our relations with the Australian landscape and ‘earth’ are crucial in this latter regard. Right from the beginnings of Captain Cook’s Australia we got it wrong, and we excluded and ignored our forerunners, the Australian Aboriginals, who had, in their own way, largely got it right. Tacey is, fortunately, not one of those who see Australia’s salvation in the romantic creation of a Euro-Aboriginal ‘dreaming’ since, even if we wanted to, we cannot now go back to a hunter-gatherer culture, with all its pluses and also all its minuses. But he clearly thinks that the Australian Aboriginal humans­and-land symbiosis shows how important it is that a new relationship between Australians and their land be established.

There is not much argument in Edge of the Sacred and for the most part Tacey ‘assembles reminders’ and offers quasi-meditative reflections. Heidegger once remarked about the realm of metaphysics, ‘I can’t prove anything but I think I can show you some things’, and that is very much Tacey’s method. Jungian psychology plays a large part in the book, together with literary analysis of the writings of D.H. Lawrence, Patrick White, Judith Wright, Les Murray, and others, and there are also philosophical and ecological reflections and autobiographical and confessional narratives. This rapid fire eclecticism leaves one a little bemused at times as one dodges between White’s Voss and Lawrence’s Kangaroo, and Jung’s theory of archetypes and the feminine principle, and various Australian Aboriginal and ‘Green’ ideas about our obligations to nature. One wishes that Tacey had concentrated a little more in depth on certain themes.

He could, for example, have paid more attention to recent critical thinking in the ecological camp which shows how many (sometimes conflicting) concepts of ‘nature’ there are. (I think here of the work of Charles T. Rubin, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Philip Shabecoff). One doesn’t have to accept a ‘social construction of reality’ theory to recognise that our view of nature and the landscape is, at any one time, powerfully shaped by cultural factors. To some extent, we see what our culture allows us to see. Again, Tacey neglects the vast amount of art-historical discussion on the Australian landscape and Australian artists. In his brilliant studies on English landscape painting in the eighteenth century the English art historian John Barrell has shown how much can be gleaned about the cultural psyche from how artist and landscape interact. Bernard Smith and others have done similar investigations with regard to early Australian landscape painters.

My main difficulty with Tacey’s admirable book, however, concerns its calm assumption that there is a prototypical Australian landscape with which we have to come to terms and to enter into a sympathetic relationship. This may be a simple-minded objection, but just off the top of my head I can think of twenty or more very different Australian landscapes about which I have profoundly different emotions. I was born in a small country town in the achingly flat wheatfields country in northern Victoria and I have very different (and ambivalent) feelings about that landscape from those I have about the coastal landscape of southern Victoria where I now live from time to time, or about the Victorian Western District which I often pass through. The tropical regions of this country offer, of course, even more diverse landscapes and evoke radically different spiritual emotions.

The Green slogan, ‘Think globally, act locally’, could be adapted to read ‘You can think about “Australia”, but you can only feel locally or regionally’. Most Europeans that I know do not concern themselves with the spirit of the Italian landscape or of the French landscape since for them their main spiritual allegiance is to Tuscany or Lombardy or Normandy or Provence. Their landscape is a local or regional one. In my view, we have become so obsessed with an ‘Australian’ identity that we have neglected the regional character of our lives in Australia. (I hope, perhaps vainly, that the coming of the Republic will be accompanied by a questioning of the place of the present states – all highly artificial creations incapable of exciting any emotions – and a positive recognition of the importance of the regions of this country.)

It is, however, unfair to criticise Tacey for not having written another kind of book. Perhaps, having written Edge of the Sacred and given us an enormously interesting and provocative ground-plan, he will go on to a more detailed study of what we need to do in order to create a ‘landscape based spirituality’. I shall certainly be waiting to read it.