A Canadian-Australian-American Hybrid Writes...in response to this question. I grew up in Ontario and moved to Australia at the age of 27 and still live Downunder at the age of 67. You will find some observations below-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania
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Margaret Atwood, Canada's major writer as the millennium turned, sees the Canadian character as one with a gloomy-through-catastrophic strain. This interpretation of the character is reflected in Canada's literature and especially in the writing of Margaret Atwood.
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Pioneers in Canada for several hundred years before the word "pioneers" was first used in the electronic media in the 1920s and 1930s, were swallowed up by the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the great Canadian wilderness, the frozen Arctic tracts and the USA. In Australia there was a similar swallowing up process by means of: the hot desert centre, the vast interior spaces, the surrounding oceans and seas. The most ‘significant other’ in both these countries where my life has been swallowed up, in a different sense, is the landscape. Visual representations not language seems to be the most common window of understanding in the consciousness of these two national groups.
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All of this is, of course, pure speculation. There are so many parallels between Canada and Australia that I can make in relation to both countries. The white populations in both countries tend to congregate in a very few, relatively sizeable centres. Boundaries and frontiers in the USA serve as limitations to be transcended or denied. In Canada and Australia they are seen as dangerous places to be negotiated. The relationship between these general psycho-geographical characteristics and my pioneering life will be elaborated on, unfolded, in the nearly 2500 pages which is my autobiography. What will also unfold, at least it is my hope, is what American novelist Normal Mailer said is the purpose of art, an intensification, an exacerbation, of "the moral consciousness of people."
Some writers go so far as to say they are their country. The Irish writer Seán O'Faoláin made this declaration in commenting on his autobiography. Ireland was the central metaphor of his self. This may be even more true for those living on islands; the concept 'island' implies a particular and intense relationship of land and water. Allegorical and structural associations of island characters become used for the reconstruction of people’s personal history and identity. The Irish professor in Aidan Higgins's novel Lions of the Grunewald suggests, “the smaller the island the bigger the neurosis.” If this has some truth, I may be protected from such a fate since I have lived on only two islands, Baffin Island and Tasmania. Others emphasize the highly ambivalent relationships between people and their island homes. My island homes are large ones and my stay, thusfar, has been for short periods of my life, ten years in total, unless of course one counts Australia itself as an island. Structurally and thematically speaking, the motifs of 'leaving the island' and/or 'returning to the island' seem to make for key scenes in a wide range of autobiographies by islanders. There are the emotionally charged events. This was not true for me given the short periods of residence thusfar on the island of Tasmania.
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I'll close this post with some thoughts from Gore Vidal. I have placed these thoughts in the form of a prose-poem.-Ron
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LAUGHING GAS
While I was teaching at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education in 1974 and at Box Hill Tafe College in Melbourne in 1975, the film Monte Python and the Holy Grail was produced and then released in London. I won't summarize the film's story here because readers can find the story in many places. But this classic satire of King Arthur and his knights has been part of the core of comedy's world in western society now for more than a quarter of a century. This send-up of a legend, of courtly love, fidelity and bravery, among other things, symbolized, for me, my getting of humour. I had grown up in a serious household of classical music and religion in Canada; I had studied serious subjects in university for four years; I had struggled through the first six years as a teacher, experienced several episodes of bi-polar disorder and lived through a divorce by 1975. These were all pretty heavy-duty items on life's agenda.
By 1975, though, I had had four years living in Australia where humour was a way of life with its slices of skepticism and cynicism, sarcasm and irony, self-mockery and pleasure seeking. During my decades in Australia humour became, as Thomas Mann experienced the process, insensibly and by immeasureable degrees, by subtle and incremental additions and alterations, part of my soul's salvation. Humour was, as Thomas Carlyle put it at the beginning of the Bahá’í Era in the 19th century, "a token of virtue." Self-mockery and humour's light touch became for me, what it was for millions of others, survival tools in a spiritually parched land.(1) -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Four On An Island, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, p.87.
They've been pumping laughing-gas
into lounge rooms now for over half
a century.(1) I remember I Love Lucy
back in the fifties: that was where it
began for me. It's not all bad, Gore.
It's got an important role in our great,
vast brontosaurissmus society, with its
slough of despond and the phantoms
of a wrongly informed imagination.
The laughs have lightened the load,
Gore. I was, like you, once critical
of the whole thing, but I've softened
with the years in this downunder land,
this world that is just not as serious as
Canada which once housed my impulse
to believe, nurtured my imperfections
and let them grow as insidious as a seed.
Laughter came out like a baby, pushed
out, giving birth, born of the pain of life
in a grand and periodic shake-up injecting
a high seriousness with laughing-gas.
Gore, it's not all that bad.
(1) A remark made by Gore Vidal in an interview in 2006.
Ron Price
21 November 2006
Updated for City-Data Forum
On: 19/12/'10
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think its just a right of passage etc. 
A Canadian-Australian-American Hybrid Writes
