Looking West

From the moment James Cook dropped anchor at Botany Bay, taking shelter from the many squalls and great seas and hard rains that had attended his passage up the east coast of the continent, the modern Australian mind has turned to the Pacific when seeking to understand its place in the world. On the shores of that ocean lies our foundation city. It is to the east coast that most of our population clings. Beyond the vast blue horizon lies America, across another ocean the mother country, and beyond that Europa, all of them potent cultural touchstones, at first for a small, isolated colony, then for a frontier country, and eventually a nation.