David Malouf

I was struck by the way you quote an idea of Bruce Chapman's that you mentioned in his book Songlines, which was that thought that if the Russians had been the first Europeans to settle Australia as opposed to the British, we might have occupied much more of the interior.

But because it was the British...

the British were a sea-going people.

Yeah, an island people.

An island people.

We see ourselves as an island rather than a continent.

Yes.

Well, you know, I mean, Central Europeans, especially Poles and Russians, have a great sense of plains, huge, open, expansive space, and they're comfortable with that.

And they define their souls in terms of that expansive space.

You know, being...

A seagoing people looking always to the sea is a different kind of thing.

So we had come to an island, another island, but it just happened to be the biggest island in the world.

And, you know, if you look at Australian history, for the first 30 years of Australian history, all our industries were sea industries, sealing and whaling.

We did not think of having, for example, a pastoral industry until about 30 years into settlement.

And it was only then that we thought we better look and see what's on the other side of those mountains and see if there isn't pasture land, because now we want pasture land.

One of the things I realised from reading, I was ashamed I didn't know it before, was that one of the big impetus for the British government setting up a colony at Port Jackson in Sydney wasn't so much as a penal colony, but as a kind of an outpost for the East India Company.

Yeah.

A viable port.

Yes, they actually had a contract with the East India Company, which the Prime Minister was very suspicious of.

So they did some kind of deal where they got some control over the board there.