You can make initial contact with someone who does not speak your language with signs or smiles, but to communicate you need words. So it is with a nation; to understand it you have to read its books
Australians are not given to applauding tragedy unless it is at a distance like Gallipoli or Cooper's Creek, and they prefer pure heroism to be spiced with disaster, except of course in sport. It was all very well for Adam Lindsay Gordon to have shot himself, but it would never have done for Don Bradman.
The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially when those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends.
