The deserted village? Thea Astley's Drylands

Abstract

[Extract] Australians have long had a complex and contradictory relationship with the hinterland of their continent. The most urbanised people on earth, voting emphatically with their feet to live in coastal cities, they continue to derive much of their most compelling iconography from a mythologised 'bush'. 1 One conspicuous recent expression of this contradictory relationship was the use of a troop of Snowy River horsemen to lead off the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games - held in Sydney not the bush - wearing the nearest thing to a national folk costume: Dryza-bone coats, R.M. Williams boots and Akubra hats. What could be more - or less - typically Australian? It would have been more truly typical if they had been replaced by city mothers driving their children to school in 'Toorak tractors' , si nce the ubiquity of these fourwheel drives in the suburbs classically expresses Australian city dwellers' hankering after rural symbols in their otherwise determinedly urban lives.