From its inception Australian literature has been largely dominated by the idea of place. The contemporary writer Murray Bail is no exception to this rule: from Homesickness (1980) through Holden’s Performance (1988) down to Eucalyptus (1998), his novelistic body of work shows a definite, if often parodic, concern with the unsettling experience of establishing a link between self and place in the postcolonial context.
Yet, it is worth noting that Bail’s autobiographical diaries (started in London in 1970 and first published in 1989) break free from this traditionally central theme: if the author still deals with the relationship to his native country in his Notebooks (recently reissued in an augmented version), he does so even more obliquely than before, partly because of the narrative transposition to a European setting, but also because the issue of place now emerges as only one among many features of a text that self-reflexively touches on the nature of art and storytelling.
In my paper, I will argue that the thematic, as well as structural, liberties Bail takes in his deceptively transparent autobiography may well point to a political agenda: as he constructs a textual collage that conflates quotations and press cuttings as well as first- and third-person entries, Bail invents a hybrid genre that probably matches a complex conception of identity, in terms of which a sense of self and a sense of place need not be equated.