| Chapter : | Introduction |
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The sense of history here shifts from a linear temporality of progression, a sequence of events leading to the present which is conceived as a vantage point, to a more complex and vulnerable sense of engagement and shared location. The maturity Hazzard promotes in these lectures as absent from the Australian culture of her childhood is constructed according to this more complex temporality; it is not a perspective on time so much as an immersion in it, seen in the account she provides of Australian colonial history as rendered continuous with its past through the work of metaphor and imagination:
It was the age of discovery—the three centuries of European navigation inaugurated by the Italian Renaissance—that led to the settlement of Australia. I think that Australians are at present discoverers of their own land. They are coming to know it as if they had not truly lived in it before. (Coming of Age 32)
The time of the nation here is not locked into the present. History, like poetry, is a process of engagement across time, “the mainstream of civilised awareness,” rather than a logic of progression and development within it: thus the metaphors of discovery and rebirth are revived through acts of scholarship and imagination, providing points of reiteration and reconfiguration across time and across space, “an infinite distance—even, at last, to ourselves” (Coming of Age 33).
It is the work of technology, rather, to measure the linear passage of time:
Technology, by definition, cannot be expressive, as are the arts at their best, of all our innate humanity—of what used to be called our soul. The superiority with which we may look back at the technical deprivations of our ancestors is without ethical or spiritual content. It is comparable, rather, to the advantage enjoyed by a man with weapons over a man unarmed. (Coming of Age 36)
The human image here explicitly refuses a teleological account of human change. It is replaced with an ethical appeal, compressing historical