Village in the Jungle The Eighth Annual Doireann MacDermott Lecture

This paper is a slightly edited version of a keynote lecture, delivered atthe Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona as The Eighth Annual DoireannMacDermott Lecture, organized by the university’s Australian Studies Centre inDecember 2007. Offord’s essay takes us from Leonard Woolf’s creative and ethicalintervention in Britain’s colonial project, forged through a transformative vision ofthe ‘spirit of place’ in his novel The Village in the Jungle (1931), to the Australianspecifics of colonialism and its aftermath. Highly critical of the dominant powerstructures in Australian society that keep sustaining the Enlightenment discourse of anunfinished colonial project, Offord delineates alternative strategies so as to deal withidentity and belonging, arguing for a notion/nation of ‘cultural citizenship’, no longerbased on exclusions.