"Our kind of country" : writing Australia from New Mexico

Some of the best things in Australian fiction emerge from New Mexico. D.H. Lawrence finished Kangaroo in Taos in 1922, and Christina Stead finished For Love Alone in Santa Fe twenty years later. The last part of The Aunt's Story takes place there, inspired by Patrick White's visit in 1939. Randolph Stow wrote The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea in Aztec NM in 1964. Is it anything more than a coincidence? Santa Fe, the state capital, and nearby Taos attracted artists and writers for the dry, healthy climate, spectacular scenery and rich Indian and Hispanic cultural presence-the same people whose cheap labour sustained the creative life styles of those escaping modern civilization in the Southwest. New Mexico was an older, different version of the New World. Did the visitors sense affinities between what they knew of Australia and what they found there? Did something about New Mexico encourage a grander, more imaginative expression of Australia and self? The novels-Kangaroo, For Love Alone and The Aunt's Story, and later The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea-are all autobiographical. All depict journeys, outward or returning, away from or to Australia, through relationships that are also rites of passage, intense and concentrated, with Australia lyrically, elementally, ambivalently present. All are transnational Australian works, as Hazel Rowley's biography of one key author in that sequence, Christina Stead, avowedly was, too, opening the way to the other lives she would write.