What insights has your study of Australian Literature and Art given you into the importance of creativity as part of human experience?
Australian literature has given me insights into a world which is often hard to describe and a world which is not often noticed by the rest of it. It was a rare opportunity to look at some literature and art which we don’t often view as classic so we push it to the side as we look on the more famous pieces forgetting the literature that made us and only focusing on the literature that has made the world. Whilst I am readily a creative person at heart I have always drawn my inspirations from other classical and famous works coming from the British Isles, and always perhaps undertaking this snobbish attitude to any works beneath them, saying “I was reading Chaucer or Wordworth or Yeats” instead of looking at literature that is much easier to understand and takes as much insight as those classical people.
The importance for creativity for me has turned from the fine olde English writing that I have so often viewed to be the proper way to write, and the proper way someone takes on the mountain of literature that is known to us. But Australian literature has given me a new perspective of a much more real situation, for example I have so often without even knowing it always sided with an English mind, being biased myself from my mothers heritage I have always hindered this almost elitist attitude without noticing. And so this new way of literature is truly insightful for me because it somehow seems much more real and far more free than the constraints of English ideologies, from the structured paddocks on the English hills to the messy and beautiful scenery of Australia. I have found that a creativity can be found in the messiness that is the icon of Australia with our otters with beaks and our giant rabbits cross rats.
And so finally answering the question, I have often felt that creativity is not as much important to human existence but crucial to it. Without our ability to think creatively or illogically I believe we may have lost ourselves to the world a long time ago, to the point that our language would all be one, without Australia’s colourful way of naming things or even making a plural of the word ‘you’ (youse). And so creativity is not only to me something that is important to life but crucial to my own survival.
BonhamandLiterature 