An earlier stab at defining Australian Romanticism, which I had previously explored here and here on junk for code. The assumption in our artistic culture is that Romanticism has been superseded by modernism and that Australian modernity has transcended Romanticism.

What then of place? The environment, the natural world, the landscape or even the flora and fauna peculiar to this continent feature prominently among the subjects of Australian romanticism in our visual culture. The argument here is that the emphasis on themes of 'landscape', 'environment' and ‘place’, is part of the inheritance of Australian artists that has been handed down from their romantic forebears in Europe; an emphasis that rejects nature as framed by utility and the technological domination of nature.

This mode of thinking has been deemed to be inadequate for several reasons: romanticism does not simply involve a veneration of nature; nor does it necessarily privilege the natural world as a subject for artistic inquiry; and, finally, the influence of romanticism on Australian visual culture is far from clear-cut. It could be argued that ‘romanticism’ failed to take root in Australia because of the perceived hostility of the natural environment in the antipodes.

So argues Andrew Johnson here. He adds:

Romanticism is not a singular phenomenon. The word ‘nature’ can also be understood in many different ways: is ‘nature’ the animals, trees and plants (including human beings) or, more widely, the totality of animate and inanimate things, or is it just that which is opposite to ‘culture’ and all that humankind has made?

Johnson says that Paul Kane in Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996) argues that the problematic experience of nature in Australia could as easily have increased the need for a romantic ‘transvaluation’ of nature: an act of imagination powerful enough to overcome the alienation from the natural world felt by the colonists and first poets, hence a native romanticism. The fact that no such transvaluation occurred, in turn, should not be blamed on the supposed ‘failure of nature’ but on a ‘failure of imagination’. Johnson says that is is necessary to clarify this point.

It is not to say that the relationship between humans and nature in Australia has not been a troubled one — one in which nature has come off second best due to human failures to respect or even recognise what is distinctive about the environment of the continent. Salinity and the continuing destruction of native habitat and species are potent reminders of that fact. Neither is it to say that the country’s poets have struggled to respond adequately to the Australian environment because they do not have any examples of a response to nature or, specifically, the manifestation of ‘nature’ peculiar to the Australian continent to follow, and therefore have no ‘language’ in which to respond to it themselves. What it does suggest is that both past and contemporary poets have had, first and foremost, to deal with the fact that they do not have a native, original tradition of poetry against which to set themselves or test their strength. In this way, the original absence of romanticism, or the failure of imaginative strength in Australian poetry, has nevertheless determined the way poets in Australia have written about nature. While the perceived otherness of nature, the sense of alienation from nature experienced by the first Europeans in Australia, did not of itself necessarily hinder the development of a romantic tradition of poetry in Australia, the absence of such a tradition has certainly influenced the way nature appears, and has been figured in Australian poetry.

What then of the emphasis on the development of Australian culture in the Australian radical nationalist tradition, with its sense of Australia’s unique history and culture, and the 1960's concern to conserve the environment from economic development? Doesn't a romantic current run through here? What of romanticism as a critical philosophy: a critique of a damaging instrumental rationality and a narrow conception of ‘reason’ based upon the natural sciences was an urgent task? This is an alternative conception to Romanticism as a historical period in which the longing that "haunted” the Romantic “critique of the world” was “for the lost unity of man [sic] and nature,a yearning for the middle ages, primitive man (or, what could amount to the same thing the ‘folk’), and the French Revolution.This conception of romanticism is a rejection of an enlightened capitalist modernity, rather than an anti-capitalist protest within liberal capitalist modernity.

Johnson accepts Kane's argument and goes on to say that the argument reveals at least one major reason for the perpetual habit that Australian poets and critics have of orienting their work in relation to the environment. In Australia the romantic tendency to confuse nature and imagination has manifested itself as conflation of issues of national and cultural identity and issues of environment.

When a poet writes about the unique qualities of the natural world in Australia, it may be that they have in mind quite a different project than discovering an authentic response to the Australian environment or of finding a more natural and sustainable way to live in this part of the world.Instead, their project is to establish an original Australian poetics, or to distinguish their own work from the rest of the poetry written in English in the past and in the rest of the world. Australian flora, fauna and landscape have thus frequently been employed as figures in the search for imaginative originality

Maybe. But the alternative interpretation as a critique of instrumental rationality and its linear conception of progress would recover the surrealist emphasis on the dream as the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ and not as a ‘one-way street’ back to the archaic mists of time that had been radically displaced. As Michael Calderbank argues our reality is suffused by a dream----eg., the Paris arcades as a dream-world of banal and outmoded forms of capitalist consumption--in which we are fully immersed. The ‘dream’ is both a historically specific modality of experience on the one hand, and on the other, the ‘dream’ can conceived of on the hermeneutic level as textual object, a critical resource waiting to be interpreted as a guide to future experience.

The dream for Walter Benjamin discloses powerful utopian desires and wish images of mass culture. The dream was only interpretable, only capable of sundering its meaning, if its façade of unity was broken down into discrete fragments. The interpreter of the dream can make a meaningful reconstruction of the fragments at that moment when the consciousness is shocked into the recognition of possible forms of cognitive experience from which it is excluded in reality. The assumption here is that progress is not a gradual, seamless, linear continuum, but instead proceeds unevenly in jolts, leaps and unexpected reversals.