Of course, Australian literature had not been altogether absent from America before The Thorn Birds. Viking, for example, had published Patrick White’s A Happy Valley in 1940 and each of his subsequent books, which have been read through the years by a discerning audience attuned to their greatness long before many Australians. Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, also published in 1940, gained at last a substantial American audience twenty-five years later when Randell Jarrell gave it a deserved push. The novel continues to be much read and admired, especially by the feminists, who often neither realize that Stead came from Australia, nor, fortunately, that she denied the feminist label. A 194l Readers Club edition of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, with a foreword by Sinclair Lewis, indicates that Henry Handel Richardson had at one time caught the American imagination on a large scale.

Once World War II got underway in earnest, though, literary interest flagged in the wake of events larger than fiction. Yet Americans did not lose sight of Australia, for their boys went down there to help out. Then, the war over, the boys returned home with stories of fantastic flora and fauna and landscape, cherished memories of Brisbane’s and Sydney’s sleazier side, and often with Australian wives, the latter soon absorbed into America’s metaphorical melting pot. But in the rush thereafter Americans generally forgot all about Australia for thirty-five years or so.

I suppose, then, this recent appreciation of literature and other things Australian might properly be called a renaissance, even if the word does sound a bit pretentious. Still, the evidence of the boom is abundant, whatever name it is given. The all-powerful New York Times Book Review has run in the last year a couple of major articles on the impact Australian literature has made in the US. Publishers Weekly, the unimpeachable source for libraries and the book trade, devoted the better part of an issue in April 1985 to Australian writing and publishing. An editor of a small New York publisher, carrying Australian work on its list, complained that the competition for Australian novels was now turning keen. Today all over the US the books of Australians have found their way onto bookstore shelves, the authors’ names impersonally alphabetized along with their American counterparts. Like the brides of forty years ago, the Australian writers have stepped into the melting pot, this one of a cultural nature.

What I am about to say may sound arrogant and boastful. Considering that Americans are so often accused of displaying these qualities, even expected to do so, I will go ahead without shame or further apology. In spite of reports otherwise, we Americans are not provincial, not parochial, not isolationist at heart, even though we may often give that impression. We are international in outlook, whether we be educated, travelled, urban, or not. Granted, for the most part we have gained this outlook by accident, for the rest of the world comes to us, and we absorb what they bring, be it themselves, their products, their art, their food, their ideas. Such has been the cornerstone of America’s uniqueness from its founding.

So Australia has brought its literature, and we are in the process of absorbing it, a process that raises two significant questions. How do Australians in the literary and publishing world view this assimilation? And why does Australian literature have to say to Americans?

In regard to the first question posed, I sense a pride and a pleasure, perhaps even an element of amazement. But, with some bewilderment, I sense as well doubt and suspicion and fear to let go.

One Australian academic, David Tacey, wrote in a Meridian review on recent White criticism that Americans are largely ignorant of the great writer’s work, a state Professor Tacey perceives brought on by ‘the problem’ of ‘American parochialism’, for Americans, he claims, ‘find it hard to become interested in anything that does not have immediate bearing on themselves…’ Harsh words those.

But even harsher is Dorothy Green’s theory, in her otherwise perceptive essay ‘Porn Birds’, that McCullough’s novel is in truth a form of psychological conditioning. She fails to identify the perpetrator of so heinous an act, only suggests ominously that ‘Someone, somewhere, has decided that the time has come to provide more information of a clearly defined kind about an important base in the South Pacific,’ thereby removing awkward qualms in American hearts about their country’s attitude to Australians.

The theory, while intriguing, falls short. First, the reader of The Thorn Birds actually obtains scant knowledge of Australia; the book could easily be transplanted to the American South-west. Second, not even the simplest-minded fan ever considered the novel anything more than a good read – which it is. Third, the average American does not know enough about his government’s relations with Australia to harbour any ‘awkward qualms’.

The resentment I detect comes often from Australian critics who appear to question their American colleagues’ ability to write intelligently on Australian literature. Witness Geoffrey Dutton’s opening thrust in his review (ABR, April 1985) of a distinguished American scholar’s study of White. Peter Wolfe’s book, Professor Dutton notes, ‘reveals that he knows a great deal about the subject although very little about Australia.’ Later Dutton employs the phrase, ‘Being a foreigner…’, which in the US at least carries the most negative of connotations. At another point, Dutton writes scornfully: ‘Wolfe has read a lot about Australia but lacks experience of it’.

In spite of the Australian tendency to perpetuate the myth of their country’s Difference, it is not, after all, that different, that mysterious, that impenetrable. And whether a knowledge of geography, Dutton’s main complaint about Wolfe, should be considered a prerequisite to insightful criticism seems a specious demand.

An Australian professor once informed me that, being an American and therefore ignorant of Australia, I could never understand or appreciate Joseph Furphy’s writing. Then, in length and with authority, he compared Furphy to Mark Twain, apparently failing to grasp the irony.

Australian writers, as well, seem to share some like misgivings about their place in the overseas market. According to Sandra Hall in an article from Publishers Weekly, they especially fear that ‘internationalism’ might lead to blandness. As far as I can tell, no one has asked Australians to write ‘international novels’, whatever they might be. Works conceived with an eye for this supposed market will probably not get far from home or make much of an impression if they do.

Sandra Hall also mentions that Peter Carey said he had set aside the possibility of American sales when he started Illywhacker, because ‘it’s so filled with Australian colloquialisms I didn’t think Americans would be interested’. Carey not only insulted the intelligence of Americans but also the importance of his work, thinking that it would stand or fall on its slang. William Faulkner’s and Eudora Welty’s southernisms do not exclude Australian readers, nor does the Eastern prep-school talk that gives J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye its edge.

Another annoyance Australians often express over American readers stems from the proneness to stop and start Australian literature with the work of Patrick White. Although so limited a venture into such a rich body of literature can hardly be justified, I think the reason apparent. White has joined that select group of writers who transcend national borders, whatever their origin, whatever their language. He is, in my unguarded opinion, one of the· great voices of the twentieth century whose work surpasses that of his fiction-writing countrymen and most of his fellow writers in the English-speaking world. Still, not all is black, for American readers who have exhausted the White canon, if not exhausted themselves, usually go on to read other Australian novels, even to appreciate them.

A while ago I posed two questions, so perhaps now the time has come to take up the second one and to flee into safer territory.

Before looking at what Australian literature has to say to Americans, I will digress for a moment to consider how this literature says it. Just as the Australian films enraptured audiences having never seen anything like them, so has the fiction – and well might the poetry and drama once it is better known.

The style must derive its peculiar quality in part from that which makes Australia different –but not incomprehensible: its language, its landscape, its isolation, its European-like cities perched on the coast of an almost empty continent, its myth of the bush. And what causes Australians to be Australian – but not impenetrable – must enter into the picture: their independence, their acute sense of the ridiculous, their love of the land, their delight in a good story, their search for identity.

For something altogether Australian produced the exquisite prose of David Malouf and of Thea Astley; the bombast and the narrative power of Xavier Herbert; the inventiveness of David Ireland who has redefined the form of the novel; the delicacy of Barbara Hanrahan; the incisive wit of Peter Carey, of Robert Drewe, of Frank Moorhouse, of Elizabeth Jolley; the elegance of C.J. Koch.

And all this variegated language that has found its way over here expresses what Faulkner describes so eloquently and truthfully when he tells the writer to leave ‘no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice’.

It took Americans a long while to discover that their own authors, not just the British, had fulfilled “the poet’s, the writer’s duty” of which Faulkner speaks. Now they are finding others have done so as well.