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

and international exchanges and movements. In the first of the two forms of cosmopolitanism defined by Dixon, colonialism determines a “spatial and temporal lag” in forms of colonial mimicry; cosmopolitanism is also seen in the second form: the “international traffic in culture, personnel, texts, images and ideas” grounded in a sense of “the circulation of cultural capital as conferring an experience of simultaneity, closing the gap between colony and metropolis” (Dixon, “Cosmopolitanism” 72). Dixon’s focus on “temporal logic” opens up the mobility that is so significant in Hazzard’s writing; however, I also suggest that in its striking presentation of Cold War locations and events, her work stages a decided, if subtle, move away from the specifically colonial frames that organise Dixon’s account of Australian cosmopolitanism. In this way, Hazzard’s work generates a distinctive form of cosmopolitan cultural mobility that speaks to her particular biography.

Although Hazzard’s fiction traverses the colonial world, notably in the minutely attentive account of the Bell sisters’ Sydney childhood and transportation to the colonial metropolis in The Transit of Venus and in the equally meticulous portrait of colonial Hong Kong in The Great Fire, the narrative trajectory of both works lurches into a different, albeit related, modality of cosmopolitan modernity: that of the Cold War, seen most directly in the progress of protagonist Aldred Leith from the battlefields of World War II Europe to those of Civil War China. The narrative significance of Caro’s journey to London in the early chapters of The Transit of Venus is, moreover, displaced not only by the proleptic passage of romance but also by her literal move to New York, and thence to an ever-shifting globe characterised by political dissidence and bureaucratic dislocation. This global world is figured in Caro’s sidelong observation of Adam Vail’s work representing dissidents from Tunisia. (Transit 118) and South America (207) and in her own work as translator of the dissident poet Ramón Tregeár (247–251). This world is defined, moreover, by insistent if passing references to contemporary concerns, such as events in Indochina (259–260), US involvement in South America (261), leftist