Such behaviour will not strike American intellectuals of a certain vintage as particularly unusual. There was a lot of it about in the 1950s in all parts of the West, and indeed to an extent Australian academics and intellectuals were only mimicking admired overseas models. But there was a difference. In a much smaller and more isolated cultural community—one characterised simultaneously by an aggressive commitment to an egalitarian ethos and by desperate concern to distinguish itself from the surrounding philistinism—there was much less diversity and pluralism, less in the way of countervailing challenges to this orthodoxy, than in either America or Europe. To the untutored eye, at least, the Australian cultural landscape seemed as flat and unvaried as an Australian sheep station.