| Chapter : | Introduction |
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culture. Hazzard’s 1984 ABC Boyer Lectures, entitled “Coming of Age in Australia,” received some vigorous and at times hostile responses from some of her Australian listeners. They present, nonetheless, a rich account of the complex location of the colonial nation in the modern world, informed by her understanding of and commitment to humanism. Hazzard takes up the question of Australia not through the rubric of the nation but, rather, by tracing Australia’s relations to an inherited and displaced European culture as part of a shifting and expanding globe. The lectures stage this through the move away from a defining rhetoric of development: the tropes of coming of age, adolescence, and maturity signalled in the title of the lecture series are complicated as the argument moves into a closely configured and mobile engagement with the geography as well as the history of a wider world. The time of national culture, understood as the time of the present nation, is refuted in favour of a temporality of engagement and learning, activities that are, Hazzard argues, profoundly at odds with nationalist accounts of culture:
To propose something worthwhile of our own requires both objectivity and passion. I think it needs an inner silence into which judgment can enter. It needs persistence and humility, and a long view in both directions—a sense of what has gone before us, and a fellow-feeling for those who are to come. (Coming of Age 37–38)
She proposes further that a nationalist understanding of culture rests on a bounded sense of time, a point she unpacks through a reconfiguring of the concept of history:
Perhaps Australia even yet has not seen herself as a full participant in the human story; does not quite believe herself a part of history. Our word “history” comes from a Greek word meaning “enquiry.” It embodies the assumption that men and women are curious about life on earth; that they wish to question the dead as well as the living, and to ponder the present and the future as widely as possible from knowledge about the past. (Coming of Age 19)