Gary,

Your stuff on Australian romanticism is very interesting. Say more about the line from Brennan, Randolph Hughes and Alan Chisholm to MacAuley.

I still think there is a difference between us on romanticism, for which I have much greater sympathy. Romanticism has always been a whipping boy, in my experience, a running dog. I’m in agreement with Charles Bukowski – you run with the hunted. When you run with the hunted the standard criticism is that you are old-fashioned. This is what happened to me at the recent conference. ‘Why must you insist on talking about materialism when I should use the word “realism”’? I was asked. I couldn’t tell them the answer but it is, ‘Because you don’t want me to use that word’.

The bourgeoisie have used romanticism when it suited them, in Australia and overseas, but it’s not a bourgeois philosophy. The bourgeoisie also use Rome and Athens with gusto if that’s what’s needed for the moment, but we don’t usually write all that stuff off on the strength of it. My thinking is that all this stuff is bourgeois, in the sense of the dialectic of enlightenment at least. Capitalism and Auschwitz are its ultimate expression but nonetheless I can’t throw it away. Once again, you’ve got to run with the hunted.

I am sure you are right that political romanticism in Australia from the 1930s to the 1950s was associated with the right, and that Australian romanticism is a romanticism of alienation. My feeling is that all romanticism has this element of alienation, even when there is a mythic past available, such as Blixen found in Africa, in the landscape itself. This is not very different from the romantic fantasy of the Australian right, who were only ever the dregs of British bourgeois existence in the first place. They’re the reason why Australia is such a heap of shit culturally.

This right romanticism, drawing on such figures as Hans Heysen, was used against the modernist movement in Australia between the wars. But soon the romanticism has seeped into Australian modernism itself, and with it the alienation effect. All Australians are obsessed with a wide empty landscape in which we are but a speck of dust. Until recently Europe was light-years away. Emptiness, isolation and alienation conjoined. There’s a dialectic of the city and the bush – but now I’m speculating idly. I think romanticism appears everywhere, from left to right (If these categories are still meaningful), because it is about alienation, and also about redemption and transcendence.

I also agree with you about the dialectic of reason and romance. We’ve talked about how it manifested itself in our dear old professor.

Your main objection to this way of thinking seems to be that it doesn’t focus enough on the environment, or that it doesn’t do it in a practical enough way. Is this what you are saying? You seem to think that Heidegger spent more time thinking useful thoughts about the environment. Is this the basis of your criticism of both romanticism and Marxism?