Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist B ...

in books, and imagination, where one discovers affinities” (O’Grady 8). Rather than remain at school as a boarder in 1947 when her parents departed for Hong Kong, where her father had been posted to a trade position, Hazzard chose to take up what she saw as the “fortunate, formative” experience of overseas travel (O’Grady 8). In Hong Kong at age 16, she began working for British Combined Services Intelligence. En route to Hong Kong, she visited Hiroshima, an experience accorded as formative to Ted Tice in The Transit of Venus and central to the sense of time and place as well as to the narrative of The Great Fire. Hazzard remained in Hong Kong for two years and then was taken, very unwillingly, back to Australia because her sister had contracted tuberculosis; the family moved soon after that to Wellington, New Zealand. Compounding the disappointment of having to leave the cosmopolitan vitality of Hong Kong was Hazzard’s devastation at leaving behind a great love, an older man whom she has not publicly named; but she has referred repeatedly in interviews to this experience as one of the sources for The Great Fire, with her life described at one point as “a carbon copy of Helen Driscoll’s” (Lawson).

Hazzard’s time in New Zealand clearly mirrored her earlier experiences in Australia: “I was eighteen; I’d arrived from a dramatic, exotic, eventful place and now found myself in an extremely subdued, ingrown, and conventional society—everyone in bed by 7pm” (Gordan and Pasca 46). This experience was tempered by a nascent sense of the existence of broader contexts for life through literature. In Wellington Hazzard discovered the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi, which inspired her to take up the study of Italian. She then travelled with her family by way of London to New York, where her father was posted in 1950. In 1953 when her parents separated and subsequently departed from New York, Hazzard elected to stay on there, taking up a position with the United Nations, where she remained for ten years:

I was 20 and I was part of that feeling of hope that came into the world with the end of the war. I went, like many other people then, to apply to the United Nations in a spirit of idealism, little