Constructing the metropolitan homeland: the literatures of the white settler societies of New Zealand and Australia

This article examines the responses articulated in white settler writing from New Zealand and Australia to the location and status of these nations as postcolonial diasporas. Beginning with the early colonial sense of estrangement from and idealisation of the metropolitan homeland of Great Britain it traces a pattern of literary engagement with the European source of ethnic origin through to the present day. The article notes changing attitudes towards home and homelands due to the greater fluidity and complexity of migratory and travel paths as the binaries of home and abroad, empire and colony, metropolitan centre and provincial periphery begin to break down towards the end of the twentieth century