We are an island just off the south-east coast of Asia, and are part of the Oriental world. There our fate is set…. The decision we must make as Australians is this: are we going to look after our coloured future or our cultural future? … I could imagine a much finer race existing in Australia in a hundred years if their colour was the colour that so many Australians seek to attain on the beaches. THE RIGHT REVEREND E. H. BURGMANN, ANGLICAN BISHOP OF GOULBURN, JANUARY 1946 In the summer of 1966, when I had just left university in London, my father took me and my younger brother, Richard, to Australia. It was, in some sense, to take us home. Born in Melbourne soon before the First World War, the eldest son of a writer and journalist, my father had left Australia for Europe in 1937, to catch and report on the last days of the Spanish Civil War. What he wanted to do was join the other young writers and painters drawn so powerfully abroad by a longing for a culture and history that they felt Australia lacked.
