Eccentric Visions

What this book represents is, quite literally, a “slice” of (white) Australian life. By noting the patterns and parallels that emerge in a random sampling of social phenomena of widely varying types, from soap operas to political behaviour, Gaile McGregor has constructed a model that, in its challenge to uniformitarianism, is a test case in ethnographic theory. Using methods ranging from the hermeneutic through the structuralist to the psychoanalytic, McGregor deploys the self-evidence of communal life and language to establish not only that all cultural phenomena are “patterned,” but that this patterning is unique to and consistent across the entire system. Further, it not only influences but constrains the way the Australian conceptualizes, codifies and expresses his/her existential position. Hence the Australian predilection for icons of intermediacy: the verandah in architecture, the bush in literature, the beach in folk culture, the middle ground in landscape painting, the pub in everyday life. This identification with buffer zones between inside and outside not only mimics the Australian’s real bracketing between desert and ocean, but embodies his/her sense of disablement vis-à-vis both culture and nature, art and techne, super-ego and id, all of which are coded as feminine.