The Transit of Venus

For the British society that receives the Bell sisters, Australian identity has an aura of the accidental about it. This in part stems from the circumstances of Australia’s “discovery”: British Captain Cook found Australia in June 1769 when he attempted to go to Tahiti to see the planet Venus make its transit across the face of the sun. While the British soon colonized Australia and left their mark on the country’s language and education system, they are somewhat astounded by the presence of Australians amongst them in their home country. They do not know what to make of this reverse migration of former imperial subjects, and they view Australians as provincial and inferior. Christian describes his reluctant infatuation with Australian Grace in cosmological terms, as “something out of the ordinary [that] had been set in motion” (20). Just like Captain Cook discovered Australia on a diversion from his mission, Christian thinks of Grace as “a departure” from his expectations of a wife.

Ironically, the Bell sisters, who have undergone an Australian education that centers on British texts and wildlife, also regard Australia as a diversion; it is Britain that is the heart of culture and therefore life. Hazzard based this on her own experiences of growing up in Australia. In her Paris Review interview she says that she found Sydney “Provincialissimo, especially to a reading child who had the evidence, on the page, of other worlds, other affinities” (McClatchy, J.D. “Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction No. 185.” The Paris Review, Spring 2005, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5505/the-art-of-fiction-no-185-shirley-hazzard. Accessed 8 Aug. 2021). Thus, the sisters consider arriving in England, the place where everything aligns with their education, their first achievement.

Charlotte Wood writes,

[B]eing Australian is shameful, to be sure. And yet, once the sisters are free of the country itself, it bestows upon them a strange sort of authority. It is as if, free of the dun-coloured history of their own land, Caro and Grace are free of all history, and this statelessness bestows a confronting new power (Wood, Charlotte. “Across the face of the sun.” Sydney Review of Books, 21 Apr. 2015, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/transit-of-venus-shirley-hazzard/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2021).

Wood is correct, given the sisters’ unapologetic status as Australian interlopers into the rigid British class system. Their composure and self-possession startles both Christian and Tertia, who expect them to be deferential in the style of class-conscious Britons. However, by becoming Christian’s wife and conforming to his wishes, Grace becomes subsumed in the expectations of English society. Caro, on the other hand, delays marriage until she meets the American Adam Vail, retaining her outsider status and using it to experiment with novel modes of living; she takes a job, lives in an apartment of her own, and engages a lover who has no intention of marrying her.

Towards the end of the novel, the sisters contemplate visiting Australia together. Caro declares that she remembers it more these days and that she would “like to see what [she] was incapable of seeing then” (324). Her recent realization of Ted’s merits causes her to reconsider all her pre-existing assumptions, including those about her homeland. Caro might come to realize that her sweeping judgement of Australia as inferior was not truly her own, but that of the British power that needed an excuse to colonize it. Grace too, who has found herself stifled and erased by British custom, looks to Australia optimistically, imagining “an entire city turned, expectant, towards the sea” (324). This indicates that she is beginning to view Australia as a manifestation of untapped potential—one that aligns with the transformations she wants to make in her own life.

At the same time, it’s unclear whether Australia as Grace here imagines it truly exists, or if it’s simply a colonial construct. There is no mention of Australia’s indigenous peoples in her fantasies, and the idea of the country as a blank slate on which she can recreate her own life closely echoes imperialist ideology. Furthermore, Caro’s memories of Australia are at least in part a romanticization of a less pleasant reality; when she reminisces about their mother sitting on the lawn and watching them play, Grace corrects her, saying that that was Dora—a figure who lends herself less to nostalgia. After so many years in England, the sisters have perhaps finally absorbed its view of its colonies.