Sir John Kirwan, conservative politician, friend of Empire and admirer of Benito Mussolini, described Australia in 1934 as a ‘great empty land – one of the last of the world's fertile spaces that remain to be filled’. His metaphor of emptiness belied his enormous fascination with every aspect of the life and geography of outback Australia, including its Aboriginal inhabitants. However, he regarded Aborigines as ‘a Stone Age people. We and they, as people, are far apart. The mystery of the dead past ages is about them’. This goes some way towards explaining why so many books about Australia that were published in the mid-twentieth century included phrases in their titles such as an Empty Land, a Dead Heart, a Timeless Land. Because they enclose both Aborigines and the land in the same metaphors of entropy, the place is acknowledged as being both Aboriginal land and a terra nullius. This contradiction is due to speaking about an other who is in ‘our’ midst, and about an other place that is also ‘our’ place – a metaphysical difference which structures Australian cultural identity.

Metaphysical difference is not a political relation between centre and periphery, but an internal relation – what Theodor Adorno called the ‘non-identical’ that ‘my thought is driven to it by its own inevitable insufficiency’, its own exclusions, limits and contradictions. No culture or individual is single or complete in itself; each is broken and run through with internal differences and repressed histories.