I looked about me for the sunburned land. In vain.' L and. Identity. Land and identity. The two words encourage one to think that they bear upon each other; that identity, for instance, is somehow determined by land. The conference title reminded me of a passage in Barbara Hanrahan's first book, The Scent of Eucalyptus, where the narrator realises that the stereotyped version of Australia which she had been fed as a child was not the Australia of her own experience. A sec ond passage from The

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... ent of Eucalyptus also presented itself to me, a passage in which the narrator describes what, for her, was the 'real' world when she was growing up. These passages illustrate Hanrahan's sense of alienation from popular or official con structions of Australian land and culture, and her identification with a more personal, intimate Australia. In the first passage the narrator describes the Adelaide Hills. She compares this gentle, monotonous grey landscape with the Australia she learnt about at school and asks: But where were the hills of the history book, stitched with the pathways of Burke and Sturt and Leichhardt?-the hills of the sun-burned earth and budgerigar grass, the azure skies and fiery mountains we sang about at school before the flag spangled with all the stars of the Southern Cross I was never sure of seeing? Where were the old dark people I did not link with the lost couples on suitcases at the railway station? Where were the crocodiles and brolgas, the billabongs and snakes? Where were the flowers that wilted in blistered clay, the rusty leaves of spinifex ... ? . . . I looked about me for the sunburned land. In vain. (90-1) The second passage describes life at home as a child with her mother, grandmother and great aunt: Once they entered the house, and the front door closed behind them, the outer world was lost-drowned in the greenness of crinkled glass. The real world sprang into being as my grandmother, my mother, Reece, and I came close. It was a deli cate world that waxed and waned; constantly threatened by my grandmother's depressions and possessiveness, my mother's materialism and secret longings, Reece's stomach that rattled, my fits. It was nurtured and protected by the roses and the grape-vines, the ivy and the lavatory-creeper ... The real world came into being round the dining-room fire, as we toasted bread on the crooked fork; it lurked in the porcelain basin as my mother washed my hair with rainwater from the well, bloomed in the fusty bedroom as Reece soothed my head with little pats when I was sick, rose from the earth when my grandmother stooped in the gar den and coaxed withered seedlings to life ... (182) Note the gendered nature of these two versions of Australia. The first version, the sunburned land, is the masculine land of explorers, deserts and bush. The second version, Hanrahan's 'real' world, is the domestic world of women and relationships. The Australia that was recorded in the history books when Hanrahan was growing up,