'Antipodean eyes': ways of seeing in Shirley Hazzard's The transit of venus

Early in The Transit of Venus, Caro(line) Bell, a young Australian registers her response to an English summer. There is about it, she feels, 'an abundance that overwhelmed'. By contrast, '«Australian summer is a scorching, without a leaf to spare, Out there, the force is in the lack, in the scarcity and distance.»'1 They are opposites, each has its 'force' but it is not, in Caro's mind, a question of inferiority. In the same scene, because of Caro's influence, Ted Tice, a young Englishman in love with her, records a change in his way of looking at his place, '«