Always The Feeling of Australia In The Air: Martin Boyd’s Lucinda Brayford

Abstract

“My inner division, if I have one, is the age-long one of the European, between the Mediterranean and the north ”¹ With this uncompromising sentence the novelist Martin Boyd (1893 –1972) elided Australia from his own history. He repudiated the assumption that expatriation was significant to him because, quite simply, it was not his condition. We note Boyd ’s personal geographical orientation. He sees the “division ” entirely from the perspective of a European. Australians, it implies, may have issues of identity, but deciding whether their spiritual homeland is north or south of the Alps cannot be one of them.