The Australian land mass was an alluring enigma in the European imagination centuries before its discovery and colonisation. So when British settlers finally arrived in 1788, they brought with them a vast store of prior expectations and images, based both on actual reports of explorers and on historical myths, which persuasively moulded their way of seeing the unfamiliar land and its people. Australia’s nebulous reality began to be formed and measured against these powerful historical images, and they continue to have a clear bearing on perceptions of Australia even now.
This essay focuses on European images of Australia and the Pacific—the region known as the Antipodes—as they were presented in fictional and documentary literature up until 1788. In particular, I explore the concept and history of the term “Antipodes” and show ways in which that hypothetical space was utilised as a setting for European utopian fiction long before there was any concrete empirical knowledge of the region in Europe. Visions of the Antipodes in literature formed a pre-text that greatly influenced (and effectively limited) the reality that Europeans found when they finally arrived in Australia. To Europeans landing in the uncharted Antipodes, it was as though they were playing out a colonial drama that had already been rehearsed on the stage of the European imagination. It is often argued that early explorers and colonists saw the Australian land mass as a “blank space,” a terra nullius which was theirs for the taking, without regard for the Aboriginal occupants.
[extract]
Arthur, Paul Longley. “Fantasies of the Antipodes.” In Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry, ed. Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan, 37–46. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1999.
