1Questions of myth, landscape and self constituting a sense of place have played a significant role in much literature written in and about Australia and continue to do so; from the paintings, journals and letters of the first French and English explorers and settlers to the folkloric works of Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson in the 1890’s, from Katharine Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929) to White’s The Tree of Man (1956) and Voss (1957), from Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline (1963) and Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988) to David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1994), and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), for example. The writing of English biologist, amateur anthropologist and psychologist, metaphysician and colonialist E. L. Grant Watson (1885-1970) belongs to this tradition. While landscape representation in Watson’s writing is striking for many reasons, foremost among these must be the evidence it offers of his transition from an unorthodoxly educated child to Cambridge educated biologist to self-styled metaphysician, who continued to wrestle with ingrained colonialist beliefs. Accordingly, his early life and education may be said to ‘haunt’ his post-Australian thinking and writing to the point where he felt compelled to attempt to synthesise irreconcilable belief systems. Interestingly, the changing nature of his representation of the landscape and its Aboriginal peoples may be seen to trace the process by which Watson became ideologically ‘un-homed’. In a very real sense as well as a metaphorical sense he straddled new territory and old territory.

2As a young man Watson was familiar with the thought of Goethe and Nietzsche and after them of Hegel,1 as well as with the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley and Tennyson.2 He was also interested in the contemporary novel, especially in the work of Joseph Conrad.3 But his literary career proper began in 1913, after his travels through the Australian south-west and north-west in the company of the anthropologists Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Daisy Bates. The experience would challenge his recent university studies of neo-Darwinian biology and reaffirm his childhood love of Nature as the manifestation of a creative power. Seeking a further understanding, Watson would read widely on primitive mysticism, Eastern and Western mythology and philosophy, later adding to these influences the ideas of Steiner, the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures and Freudian and Jungian psychology. Ironically, however, this was not to make him a genuinely radical thinker. Instead, as a result of this attempted synthesis of disparate sources, he was to become what Edward Said calls ‘a learned Orientalist’, drawing not so much on original sources as on ‘a kind of second-order knowledge’ based on and also reinforced by contemporary attitudes and popular prejudices (52-53). Indeed, he was to become a self-proclaimed initiate of primitive and Eastern beliefs, intrigued by the meaning of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, sharing with Nietzsche a desire to challenge naive faith in language, seeing human beings as the artistic creators of our linguistic world (Houlgate 1986: 45-46). As the stuff and source of this world language, he argued, was neither ‘pure truth’ nor ‘pure fiction’. Instead it became a way for undermining the distinction between the two and uncovering subtle correspondences between various ways of knowing and writing about Nature. As such, it was also a means of representing an otherwise unrepresentable unseen realm, what Eliade calls ‘sacred space... the only real and real-ly existing space’ (Moore 1984: 129). This sort of space, which is a source of creativity and renewal, a centre for orientation and ‘a fixed point grounded in absolute reality’ (129) contrasts with the fragmented universe produced by a materialistic and mechanistic society. It was the sort of ‘space’ Watson sought and found in the bush and desert landscapes of Western Australia and in the rituals of its Aboriginal people. This essay examines how his early life and education combined with his Western Australian experiences, resulting in a body of fiction and non-fiction which provides insight into the ideological ferment of the early—mid twentieth century.

3On the 14th June 1885 at Staines, Middlesex, England, Elliot Lovegood (or Peter as he came to be known) was born to Reginald and Lucy Grant Watson. Although he belonged to ‘a long line of God-fearing, God-serving, soldier ancestors’ (Watson 1946: 1), Reginald was a man who had enthusiastically embraced Darwinism, seeing in it a means of attaining a wider consciousness and truer valuation of life. Following his premature death and the death of their other son, his widow also became an ardent admirer of Darwin, devoting herself to the (unorthodox) education of her only remaining child, Peter. It was through her that very early in his life he became aware of the fervent debates about ethics and the purpose of human life, which raged in the latter part of the nineteenth century and concerned artists, scientists and philosophers alike. During his ‘natural-history ramblings’ with his mother he was introduced to God-in-Nature, ‘not in churches, nor hidden by priests in a dark box’ (10). As a result, although he had been baptised into the Church of England, his sense of landscape as a meeting of visible and invisible realms and his idea of the self’s place in relation to these realms seems to have been more influenced by these childhood ramblings. With the brief exception of his university years, this mystical idea of nature was to remain with Watson throughout his life; arguably the foundation of his fiction and non-fiction alike.

4After school, which he later likened to Nazi Germany, in 1905 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, to study biology. But like the ‘truth’ espoused by orthodox Christianity, the dogmatism he met there disappointed him. He seems to have been more inspired by his own reading, in particular the Romantic poets and the works of Nietzsche, as well as contemporaries like Joseph Conrad. The centrality of human creativity in the tradition of the German Romantics and in Nietzsche’s philosophy appealed to him, as did Nietzsche’s concern with anxiety and despair at the condition of the contemporary Western world, which Watson saw as approaching a time of crisis. So, too, was Watson. In the first of many such periods of ideological experimentation at Cambridge, he read not only biology but philosophy, psychology and modern novels (81). This reading, combined with his disappointment with the growth of scientific orthodoxy, seems to have provoked his reaction against the cultural and social awareness instilled in him by his mother, leading him briefly to declare himself an atheist and a socialist.

5Nevertheless, he graduated with First-Class Honours in biology in 1909. Shortly afterwards he was invited by an admired fellow collegian, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, to join an anthropological expedition into the Australian north-west. He accepted and left Liverpool for Albany, Western Australia, on Friday 13th January 1910 on board the S.S. Suevic. As Dorothy Green has observed, he was ‘young and inexperienced... with the full equipment of the anthropological stereotypes that constituted racial theory throughout the nineteenth century...’ (Green 1990: 29). From the moment of his arrival in Western Australia, however, he was challenged by the striking strangeness of the landscape. In contrast with the sterility of his recent studies, however, this challenge seems to have prompted a reconsideration of his childhood notion of landscape as a marriage of spirit and sensuousness. Together with his growing appreciation of the imaginative possibilities of science, this meant, as he later reflected, that ‘the straight jacket which had been made of Darwinism was soon to be loosed’ for him (Watson 1946: 72).

6Watson’s experiences in the desert and bush landscapes of Western Australia led him into a borderland where such opposites as science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, apparently became indistinguishable from one another. In this way the expedition with Radcliffe-Brown and Daisy Bates became both literally and metaphorically a journey from the centre of Western rationalism (England) towards ‘emotional consciousness’ a realm where he believed that he ‘ [could] easily feel the initial impulses of life... and the ungauged forces of the cosmos work [ing] on the open souls of men’.4 It was in the desert and bush landscapes of north-western Australia, he claimed, that he first transcended the ‘rationalistic, scientific’ thinking of ‘civilised people like [him] self’ (208) and experienced the ‘primordial reality’ of Aboriginal ‘savages’5 who separated him from ‘the consciousness of [his] race’ by the ‘subtle yet penetrating psychic aura’ of their culture (Watson 1946: 107).

7Initially, however, he was concerned primarily with the geography of the area, assuming the mantle of naturalist and biologist. This changed when, after a brief stay in Perth, he travelled to Kalgoorlie and then to the new mine, the Bullfinch, near Southern Cross (98). Here, surrounded by a ‘community of gold-hungry men... from which one could easily escape by walking a few hundred yards in any direction’ (Watson 1968: 15), he spent his time collecting beetles and then prospecting for gold with an elderly Irishman, Gilbert, who had lived in the bush for twenty years and who, in retrospect, became for Watson ‘the bush, incarnate’ (Watson 1946: 103). In his company and on solitary walks he first experienced the ‘ambiguous, veiled influences of the bush’ (100).

8When after some weeks he returned to Perth to meet Radcliffe-Brown, the force of this experience stayed with Watson. From there they set out together for the small inland township of Sandstone, hoping to coincide with a gathering of Aboriginal peoples. Watson vividly recalled that journey across a ‘limitless plain’, in a train which ‘seemed hardly an invention of the nineteenth century, but more like a prehistoric desert creature, very old, sun-dried and dusty... waiting to crawl back again to its native bush’ (Watson 1968: 19).

9This image of the landscape and its creatures engulfing the unwitting explorers, in this case Watson and Radcliffe-Brown, recurs frequently in his early writing. Thus in their first journey from Sandstone to the interior, he wrote, he and Brown felt ‘completely swallowed up’ by it (19). He felt an eeriness about the survival in the ‘bare red dust’ of mulga, acacia and eucalypts. ‘Poised in the still hot air... to command attention’ (19), they seemed to be part of an ancient ceremony, becoming like the blessing hands of unseen high priests. In this respect the West Australian bush and desert landscapes seemed to him a ‘sacred space’, a means of access to the powers of creativity and renewal, forming what Eliade calls ‘a transhistorical centre’, a point of orientation in a time of social and cultural deterioration and impending chaos, suggesting a possible relationship between space and transformation (Moore 1984: 131). Thus his Western Australian experience became ‘the subjective pivot around which much of his subsequent experience was locked’ (Healy 1975: 28).

10Reaching Sandstone Radcliffe-Brown and Watson were forced by local racial tensions to abandon the idea of meeting with inland Aboriginal groups. Instead they travelled to the Lock-Hospitals on Dorré and Bernier Islands in the Shark Bay area. These Lock-Hospitals, operational from 1908 to 1918, had as their patients Aboriginal men and women from isolated areas of the north and northeast of Western Australia believed to be suffering from venereal disease (Jebb 1984: 68-87). The state-controlled scheme of which they were part involved segregation, compulsory medical treatment and reflected the Aborigines’ status as outcasts. Pursuing their anthropological research here for several months, they questioned the Aboriginal patients on their marriage customs. But Watson found it a harrowing experience and wrote about it and its possible meaning for civilised humankind in his first novel, Where Bonds are Loosed (1914).

11Watson was ethically and intellectually challenged, as the others were not, by his experiences on the islands. Writing later of the final few months there, he confessed that ‘ [despite] feeling a pull to return to England... there was growing stronger, and always stronger, the magic of life, as lived beyond the outer fringes of civilisation’ (Watson 1946: 124). His resolve to pursue his biological study was weakening. Travelling up the Gascoyne River with Radcliffe-Brown immediately after leaving the Lock-Hospitals, he felt even more strongly the intensity of ‘the powers within the wilderness’. Feeling that he was becoming ‘almost adrift’ he therefore decided to ‘renounce the bush and all of the unknown that it stood for’ and to return to Europe (125). But it would not be so easy to renounce.

12As Healy notes, Watson’s world became ‘an inverted pyramid’ after his Western Australian travels, inspiring a ‘life-long questioning of the foundations of society and the nature of man’ (28). But what Healy calls his ‘Aboriginal experience’ was, more accurately, Watson’s own experience which he attributed to the Aborigines, who like the landscape became its embodiment. Thus in later years it became for him a manifestation of ‘a vast archetypally patterned collective unconscious’, evidence of the primordial foundation of the psyche itself (Tarnas 1989: 258-80). In this way his experiences came to support his belief in Western superiority, even as they challenged his thinking on the nature of man and society. As such, early in his career he might well have considered his interests and orientation in postcolonial terms. With the passing of time, however, he became increasingly colonialist.

13Watson had begun his journey from the comparatively safe haven of a Cambridge educated middle-class consciousness. But once in Australia he was faced with uncertainties and revelations, the psychic and physical torments of what he described as a ‘primordial vision’, and his hasty return to England late in 1911 may represent a retreat from the threat posed by this vision. But within eight months he made another brief journey to India, Australia and New Zealand, this time returning with little inclination to pursue a career as a biologist (Watson 1946: 144). This disillusionment was an important ingredient in the stresses that brought him to the point of a nervous breakdown early in 1913 and again in 1917 (152). Previously unquestioned, English values seemed irrelevant in the context of the Australian north-west. Indeed, in later years he wondered if ‘perhaps it [the landscape] was eternity, and I, in its presence, for certain moments, dropped out of time, and was encompassed by the Eternal. It was strange, beautiful and frightening. I might be lost. Already I might be lost’ (43). So he fled back to England and Europe. But he returned to a centre which no longer seemed to hold, a place of chaos and ideological uncertainty, as civilisation balanced uneasily on the brink of war.

14In 1913 immediately upon his return to England from Australia in response to this state of dissonance he began to write and the representations of the Australian north-west and south-west in these works thus reflects the intellectual, spiritual and socio-cultural challenges of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as his own personal dilemma. For him the ‘mild, innocent and aloof quality of that virgin territory’ of Western Australia became a sort of no-man’s-land, or borderland, a symbol of the unconscious of a Western self. He saw it in retrospect as ‘a vast interrogation mark’ questioning ‘more than consciousness [could] know of itself, or indeed of life’ and demanding that humankind ‘listen to its silences’ and sustain its ‘vast and indifferent regard’, or else ‘shrivel into nothingness’ (Watson 1946: 100).

15One of the undoubted attractions of Western Australia for Watson and instrumental in developing his sense of landscape as a spiritual force, had been his sense of its remoteness from the ideological and social chaos of Europe on the eve of and during the First World War. Nevertheless, his growing interest in Aboriginal religion and culture could not erase his awareness of this threat to his own culture and spirituality. It became a disturbing presence, even a ‘troubling other’, in his early writing, in the form of his emerging preoccupation with what he called ‘the Shadow’, which, paraphrasing Jung, he later described as ‘that side of life which we all naturally wish to hide and cover up’ (203).

16This sense affected his early Western Australian writing, which told a ‘crude, brutal tale of life in the Australian bush’ (Watson 1946: 145). Looking back he saw this writing as ‘a kind of excretion, an attempt to get rid of pain and anger and frustration’ (145). But at that stage, torn between past and present, between the conflicting worlds of Western science, primitive mysticism and the landscapes of Western Australia, in 1913 Watson sought refuge in a village near the forest of Fontainebleau, at the time the centre of a group of theosophists (including artists like Katherine Mansfield) who gathered around Georges Gurdijeff. There his increasing concern with spiritualism developed. Surrounded by ‘great chestnut woods’ and ‘deep-blue ponds’, he wrote ‘Out There’, his first short story, which was to provoke public outrage and indignation (145). Supposedly fictional, it was in fact based upon his own experiences in Western Australia and the fears arising from them.6 Like all of his early works it was also a response to the ideological no-man’s-land in which he found himself at the time.

17If as Abdul JanMohamed suggests, colonialist literature explores, represents and delights in ‘a world... not (yet)... domesticated by European signification or codified in detail by its ideology’ (JanMohammed 1986: 83), transforming it for its own purposes, then Watson’s attitudes can be seen in this way as colonialist. But there is also a difference. Where colonialist writing initially sees the world as ‘uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately evil’ (83), threatening on account of the differences in race, language, social customs, cultural values, and economics which it represents, Watson found this new world fascinating. Like D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and the Australian Katharine Susannah Prichard, as well as such other writers in the Vitalist tradition as Havelock Ellis and Rudolf Steiner, Watson was drawn to the mystery and the power he saw in this new world, hoping to find the coherence he was looking for.

18In ‘Out There’ a civilised self is confronted by the Aborigines and by the ‘untamed expanses of the North-West’, which threaten to ‘change the blood and brain of... existence... and uncover doubts, lusts and unsatisfied emotions’ (Watson 1990: 212). Set on Karramatta, a cattle-station south of Wyndham in the remote Kimberley region, it tells of the struggles of an Englishman, Jefferies, to save himself from the influence of the Aborigines and the landscape and, perhaps most importantly, from his own primitive instincts.

19At night he retreats indoors, lights the lamp, and pores over back numbers of English magazines and newspapers. Yet as the years pass his resistance turns to fascination with ‘that baffling mystery of the land’, or more specifically, with the ‘enigmatic and bestial... but attractive’ indigenous women (214), who seem to be its embodiment. He must, he decides, ‘possess’ the women and ‘demand of [them] all [their] secrets’. Through them he will ‘penetrate’ the land, whose mystery is, he feels, ‘identical to his own’ (216). So he takes one of the Aboriginal girls, whom he calls Mary, as his ‘wife’. She is ‘frankly sensual, natural and childish’ with ‘primitive and rather ugly’ habits (216).

20Despite this, Jefferies’ acceptance of her shows his desire to comprehend and control the ‘untamed expanses of the North-West’ (211) and to escape from the restraints of Western culture and consciousness. So when she says she wants to sleep on the floor in front of the fire, he throws away his furniture and follows her. Later he pulls down his hut and goes less and less frequently to Turkey Creek, the nearest township, preferring the company of ‘the natives’. Yet—an example of Watson’s racism—in comparison with the Aborigines Jefferies is represented still as the boss, ‘a wondrously powerful being, the owner of guns and other magical instruments’ (216).

21Even when finally he renounces civilisation, adopting the ways and beliefs of his Aboriginal companions, the narrator suggests, paradoxically, that it is because he is Western and therefore superior that he is able to do so. Similarly, his consciousness remains in control as he sits among ‘slender spears’, listening to the ‘long-drawn nasal chants’ of a corroboree (217). He sees the dancers, ‘each with tufts of emu feathers on hips and shoulders, their red and white head-dresses swaying to and fro in the glare of the forked flame’, as ‘spirits of the earth, sprung from it and worked on wires...’ and thus places them in his own system of value (217).

22For all that, they are obviously figures of literary fantasy in the tradition of Blake, Coleridge and Yeats, representing a ‘mysterious resolution’ between the inner and outer worlds which is taking place in the observer’s mind. So, ‘a silent spectator’, Jefferies is seized by ‘a feeling... that all this [has] happened before... that he [has] lived many lives, and in each life at such supreme moments [has] lost all individual desires and fears and [has] reached towards some supreme God who [lives] in the bush and in the heart of these friendly savages’ (217). Like Watson himself in his later autobiographical writing, he thinks this is ‘the most real experience’ that he has ever had (Watson 1990: 217). Empathising with the ‘savages’, he believes he understands something of the sacred significance of the ‘supreme moment’ and of the dancers’ God. So for him the moment represents a sort of initiation, through which, like the dancers, he is able to ‘assume his mode of being in its entirety’ (Moore 1984: 132).

23Implicitly it seems that, now that he has been admitted as a full tribal member, he has achieved a sort of understanding of the Aborigines (or mastery over them). The mystery of the landscape is redefined; he understands and is empowered by it. The bush is no longer foreign; psychically as well as physically he is at its centre. If we accept Said’s view of Orientalism as a created body of theory and practice, which is ‘never far from... the idea of Europe... [and] of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non—European peoples and cultures’ (Said 1991: 6-7), this story can thus be seen as the work of an Orientalist, and Watson’s simplification and unintentional misrepresentation of Aboriginal culture can be seen as the product of an unrecognised attitude of racial superiority.

24In this way his representation of indigenous culture and spirituality vacillates between contempt for what is unfamiliar and its ‘shivers of delight in—or fear of—novelty’ (Said 1991: 59). Thus in the story when the ‘shocking’ fact that Jefferies has ‘gone native’ gets out, the company which owns Karramatta and employs him forces him to take an extended holiday in Perth, where the prodigal child is taken back into ‘civilisation’, in the form of Miss Muriel Thornton, whom he meets and shortly afterwards marries.

25Jefferies’ situation is not an easy one—reflecting perhaps the writer’s own sense of ambiguity. He is torn between responding to his own sensual and ‘primitive’ impulses; choosing to live among the Aborigines or returning to a society which in contrast seems to him obsessed with ‘superficiality’ and what it sees as ‘fine big things, overpoweringly big’, trade and commerce (221). In contrast with his Aboriginal wives and children and the bush landscape which figure so powerfully in the earlier corroboree scene, everything about Muriel, from her behaviour and opinions to her toiletries and wardrobe, seems mean-spirited, an indication of what Watson saw as the questionable ‘greatness’ (Watson 1990: 221) of contemporary Western civilisation. Instead of choosing between the two, however, he compromises, returning to Karramatta but taking Muriel with him.

26Not long after they arrive Jefferies comes across Muriel in a pool of blood, her head ‘beaten almost out of recognition’ and her breastbone ‘broken in by the blow of a heavy digging stick such as the native women use’ (225). Standing looking down at her, he is aware of the ‘intense stillness’ of the bush and the ‘hum of... bull—roarers’ in the distance. The tribesmen, he believes, are ‘speaking with their God: the God of the land’ (225-26). Instead of being appalled, he is overcome by a sense of harmony with ‘the outside, wild world, a feeling of comprehension for what [is] mysterious and silent’, as he passionately embraces one of his Aboriginal wives, Muriel’s murderer. The story concludes here on a positive note, implying that he has at last found his place in the mystery and silence of the wilderness: Jefferies has defied the rules of civilisation, accepting the primitive within himself. Whatever is to be said about his position ethically, what matters for my present discussion is the site of this reconciliation. Although geographically it is the ancient Kimberley region of Western Australia, what interests Watson is rather the psychic state it represents, the discovery of an aspect of the self which is in tune with the mystery of the ‘dim expanses of the wild land’ and its savagery (216). Yet, paradoxically, this identification with the landscape occurs only when the self unconsciously embraces it on its own culturally conditioned terms.

27Not surprisingly, this preoccupation dominates all of Watson’s subsequent works; foremost among these are The Mainland (1917), The Desert Horizon (1923) and Daimon (1925), as well as the unfortunately titled The Nun and the Bandit (1935). In each of these the harsh landscape has an aesthetic function, becoming an ‘all-embracing... symbol not easily to be escaped’ (Watson 1925: 45), which, we are told, repels ‘civilised man’, while also appealing to an ‘undefined element’ in him (45). The desert is a place of transformation and reflects a basic unity of the universe, enabling Watson to explore—in a limited way—what he saw as a ‘reciprocity... between the mystery of life and an emergent consciousness... under the inevitable cosmic influence’ (Watson 1990: 93). But what he viewed as the nature of this ‘cosmic influence’ and the ‘mystery’ illuminated by it was largely determined by his own social and cultural experiences. So, for example, the desert evokes a ‘Spiritual Gestalt’ behind the phenomena of life, suggesting his hope for the psychic regeneration of a Western civilisation languishing in the chaos following the First World War.

28While he argued that the spiritual qualities of landscape could be unlocked given the appropriate ritual keys (Duncan 1988: 122), Watson did not, however, realise that his understanding of ritual was itself limited by his own culture and personal history. So, for example, he presumed that his efforts to transcend the consciousness of what he termed his ‘race’, would succeed as a result of his superiority as a Westerner. He had no doubts that he and his culture were central, or that here an ‘objective and all-enfolding reality’7—incarnated in the physical world—was being revealed to him. Although his experiences in Western Australia had led him at least to question his ‘unshakeable abstract maxims’, these experiences nevertheless reinforced his sense of his own authority. His approach remained that of a learned Orientalist, confirmed in his ‘second-order knowledge’.

29This sort of ideologically conditioned knowledge, rather than the exact and clear knowledge of the scientist he was trained to be, pervades much of Watson’s work. Paradoxically, it is most noticeable in his representations of those primitive (particularly indigenous Australian) and Eastern beliefs and cultures, of which he either had some experience or had studied. Here the influence of his conditioning is most obvious. In these works the European is normative. There is no real sense of self as process, rather it is an established entity—as it is in imperial discourse. True, on occasion he is led astray by illusion, but after a period of solitary wandering and intense introspection—usually in the desert at the end of the story— the self is nevertheless finally re-established as the centre of landscape and of reality. So the protagonist or (in the case of Watson’s later scientific writing) the writer himself, remains the focal point.

30E. L. Grant Watson’s perception of the space, psychic as well as physical, in which humankind exists and which exists in it was influenced by the psychological and spiritual challenge of his early experiences among the Aborigines of Western Australia. In pursuit of a greater understanding of the primitive culture and spirituality he first encountered here he continued to travel and read extensively. But he also carried with him several basic assumptions derived from his reading as a young man of philosophers such as Plato, Goethe and Nietzsche. He was also familiar with the ideas and works of the Romantic poets. So, when at various stages in his career he reworked his Western Australian experiences in fictional terms, attempting to reconsider the meaning of his ‘primordial vision’ there, Watson invested them with a symbolic significance which he tried to fit into a classical European education. In this respect, seeking a place of reconciliation between the contemporary Western self and its primitive origins, he attempted to understand in terms familiar to him what was different and perhaps unknowable in these terms. He found this place in the unconscious, which he associated with the desert and bush landscapes of Western Australia. This meant, however, that he was unable to look at his actual experiences, bringing to them instead ‘a kind of second-order knowledge’ (Said 1991: 53), reflecting what Said has famously called a ‘free-floating mythology of the Orient’ derived from ‘contemporary attitudes... popular prejudices... [and] the conceit of nations and scholars’ (53). In this way Watson’s work, which represents a conscious attempt to find relatedness between personal experience and the psychic life of his time, also reveals the influence of the ideology of imperialism.

31Watson’s work is an educated Englishman’s attempt to distil from his experiences in the desert and bush landscapes of Western Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century a more complete understanding of his own and contemporary humankind’s place in history and of its future direction. He represents a region, a nexus of self, myth and landscape at the centre of his short stories, novels, scientific—philosophical and autobiographical works alike, which reflects the limits of his earlier formal, and perhaps more importantly, his informal, education. In this region a series of previously unimaginable border crossings are attempted, clearly inspired by the haunting power of Watson’s former life.