In this paper, I intend to consider authorial freedom in Australia and to question some aspects of Australian literary criticism from the longer perspective of an academic working in the Mediterranean island of Malta. I will suggest it may be too simple to equate high art and literature with the sacralising of nation without enquiring into the equally nationalist projects of writers who cater for middlebrow and mass readerships as these can be just as involved in justifying the claims of settlers on the Australian land. Through my reading of Malouf and Keneally, I hope to raise the question of how a different audience may read nation in another place and to destabilize neat distinctions between elite and mass readerships.