How Picnic at Hanging Rock not only touched American sentimentality but revealed as well the surprising news that Australians made movies is all history now. As is the short-lived, yet astounding success of The Thorn Birds, that renowned caterer to the American appetite for sex, violence and instant morality. Yet those who comment on the inroads Australian literature, the novel in particular, has made in the United States point always to that nostalgic film and encyclopaedic novel as the start of what one New York editor recently called “an explosion of American interest in Australian literature”.

The analysis is probably correct, for those two works triggered in millions of Americans a fascination with the continent so far removed from their immediate experience. The works also opened the way for more films, good ones and bad, and, without argument, for better novels. Before long the mere fascination had turned to a genuine interest and awareness.