| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Australian government in the munitions industry, and at the end of the war, he moved into the Australian Foreign Service. Hazzard’s account of her early life stresses the cultural aridity of this period in Australia as formative, in negative terms, of the broad cultural and imaginative values espoused and defended in her work. Another dramatic feature of this period was the 1930s Great Depression, of which she recalls primarily the broadly experienced humiliation:
I was lucky that my family did not actively suffer during the Depression, which was terrible in Australia. It’s not something a child lives through and ever forgets. It becomes a yardstick really for human experience when you’ve seen an entire populace humiliated, compounded by the penury of veterans of the First World War. (Gordan and Pasca 46)
Hazzard attended Queenwood School for Girls in Sydney. During World War II, with fears of a Japanese invasion of Sydney running high, her school was evacuated to the countryside—as dramatised in the Australian sections of The Transit of Venus—and she has spoken of encountering Italian prisoners of war there as a significant moment of difference in a largely monocultural society: “In Australia, in wartime, Italy and Italians were a theme of derision to us—yet, here were these prisoners, recognizable in simple human terms” (Gordan and Pasca 46). Against this humanity is set her experience of rural Australia:
Anywhere in the country then was desolate. There was a feeling you might be forgotten there, and at night the silence was the silence of a convent. There was a farm on the property, and I was sent down to get the milking can one evening. The sun was dying, there was the smell of cows, and I thought, Oh, to be more sad than this would hardly be possible. It was like a scene out of Thomas Hardy. It felt hopeless. (Wyndham 29)
Hazzard also writes and speaks of the effects of reading poetry and describes herself as somewhat isolated as a consequence of these interests. In an interview in 2000 she observed, “In childhood, I lived much