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.FleurAdcock, for example, whose return to England in 1963 was marked byan initial unsettledness and (in two of her poems) overt rejection ofNew Zealand (Adcock 2000: 43 4) began in the 1970s to balance herdual allegiances: to friends and family in New Zealand, and to vocationand life in England.Landscape and place become vital markers of a newsense of belonging in her poetry, and in Letter to Alistair (1978), forexample, she says of the Lake District: You d love this place; it s your 138 Constructing the Metropolitan Homelandcentral Otago, /in English dress the bony land s the same (2000:122).After returning to New Zealand in 1976 after thirteen yearsaway belonging, exile and estrangement emerge in her reconfiguringof home.In Instead of an Interview (from The Inner Harbour (1979))she asserts that home is London; and England, Ireland, Europe (2000:115); both worlds remain inhabited, however, because the shells andsouvenirs she has brought back in her suitcase symbolize her continuedattachment to New Zealand.She reflects on the way in which her jour-ney complicates and problematizes the categories of home and away :But another loaded wordcreeps up now to interrogate me.By going back to look, after thirteen yearshave I made myself for the first time an exile?(2000: 115)Moving back and forth between nations and classes as a diasporicsubject enables Adcock to form multi-locational attachments, andto occupy more than one point of view: an outsider s insider knowl-edge of England appears in her satire of the British in poems such as England s Glory and The Genius of Surrey (163 4), while poems inthe Thatcherland section of The Incident Book (1986) set in her localdistrict of East Finchley constitute locally-informed interventions intonational politics.Poems in Time-Zones (1991) explore a more interstitialhabitation of in-between spaces, celebrating her to and fro movementsbetween hemispheres in which, as the hyphenated title implies, tempo-ral distinctions of zones as periods of time are coordinated with timezones as spaces experienced in travelling (Wilson 2007: 86, 93).Moving a step further from Adcock s poetry of dual locatedness, workby other antipodean writers published in the late 1970s and 1980soffers newly revised perceptions of the colonial home and of Britain sinsignificance, rather than the processes of adjustment and the sense of in-betweenness that come from living diasporically.Elizabeth Jolley snovel Miss Peabody s Inheritance (1983), for example, playfully subvertsearlier narratives of escape to Europe, as well as reversing the polari-ties of English centre and Australian colony : its heroine DorothyPeabody (living in Weybridge, England) reads instalments of a novelabout Australian schoolmistresses seeking culture and sexual adventurein Europe, sent to her by an Australian novelist.Only when she escapesEngland and arrives in Australia does she come into her inheritance: to Janet Wilson 139complete the novel left unfinished at the novelist s death in what sheperceives will be her new home.As Gay Raines points out, the drawof imaginative vitality and creative power comes, for once, from theAntipodes, pulling the provincial and marginalized spirit of Englandtowards and into itself (1995: 189).Similarly, in a reversal of earlier nar-ratives in which Britain is posited as the object of settler self-fulfilment,in Murray Bail s novel Homesickness (1980), Australian tourists whocome to Europe and visit the mummified versions of Europe s past inmuseums experience new insights into their Australian identity.White settler postcolonial diasporasOver the last thirty years, demographic changes such as an increase inthe number of non-white immigrants, and resulting reassessments ofantipodean race-relations, have led Australia and New Zealand to rede-fine themselves as multicultural societies.Increasing globalization andtransnational connections between settler societies and other parts ofthe world continue to displace the imperial centre and colonial periph-ery model associated with the so-called monocultural settler societiesof the early twentieth century.As the British Empire has waned, andas global forces generate multidirectional movements of people andcapital, writers have found alternative centres of pilgrimage, and arejust as likely to travel to cities like Tokyo, Berlin, Prague, New Yorkor Bombay (with which they have no prior attachment or affiliation)as they are to the former cultural capital of London.In these overseasdestinations the society of origin is now represented as the place ofbelonging.Relocation in these new societies which cannot be claimedas imaginary homelands in the way that Britain originally was for thewhite settler continues to overturn and complicate the earlier divisionsof home and abroad.Likewise the pursuit of indigeneity which (according to the writersof the Empire Writes Back) was the white settler s principal undertaking has been politicized and redefined (Ashcroft et al.2002: 134; see alsoGoldie 1989: 13).Debates over ethnicity, sovereignty and national-ism have led to an acknowledgement of cultural hybridity rather thanuniformity.In New Zealand in the 1990s, for example, a more complexpost-settler Pakeha nationalism emerged as groups of sympathetic Pakeha(descendants of European settlers in New Zealand) developed affiliationswith Maori, hoping to overcome the legacy of colonial guilt by embracingbiculturalism (Williams 1997: 27); while in Australia, texts such as PeterRead s Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (2000) point 140 Constructing the Metropolitan Homelandtowards a similar reassessment of the relationship between settlers andaborigines.The emerging field of Settlement Studies spearheaded byantipodean researchers draws on ethno-historical work undertaken inthe Pacific with the aim of exploring the mutual transformation of colo-nizer and colonized in the complexities of encounter and exchange(Calder and Turner 2002: 8)
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