Get lost and die

Also in Paris Review, Peter Carey (who reminds me of Dan Shepheard) talks about our national heroes - Ned Kelly, Burke and Wills, Phar Lap, Gallipoli. He says:

These are all about loss. Landscape forms character, of course, and ours is a killer. In America the narrative is, Go west. You might eat a few people on the way, but basically it will be wealth and success. We just get lost and we die.

INTERVIEWER

You go into the bush and then-

CAREY

You're fucked. It's a hostile place, with droughts and fires. There's no frontier that trumphs over space in Australia. Also we have a big Irish component, a folkloric culture, about being robbed, tortured, and oppressed. And then we have the convict narrative, which is certainly about loss. And under all of this lies the knowledge that the land we love is also stolen. The horror of the destruction of aboriginal society is there every day. In Australian stories we trust loss and we are very suspicious of success. We have an affection for outcasts and oddballs.