European maps depicting the imagined extent of the Australian continent in the seventeenth century often featured curious images of elephants roaming the vast interior region. The Dutch map ‘Hollandia Nova’ by Danckerts (1690) and the Italian map ‘Het Niew Hollandt’ by Coronelli (1696), for example, both include images of elephants along with other embellishments such as natural waterspouts and native people striking elegant poses under palm trees.[1] Clearly, it did not matter whether or not there had been any evidence of elephants actually living in those uncharted regions. In these examples, the elephants and the other far-fetched images surrounding them are included only as symbols of a world of potential rich trade and fruitful colonial contact for Europeans, drawn from familiar images of trade in Africa and India. As these maps show, Australia and the Pacific—the ‘Antipodes’ for Europeans in the late seventeenth-century—contained largely unknown spaces that had the potential to be imagined in an infinite variety of ways.
The existence of contemporary images that prefigured cross-cultural contact indicated a desire on the part of Europeans to give of Australia and the Pacific a manageable identity prior to their ‘discovery’. Colonial fantasy maps, like imperialism more generally, not only generated hopes of trade but also a sense of prior possession of far away land spaces, expressed through the mode of imaginative projection. The Antipodes had been given a European identity based on its imagined colonial potential long before Europeans actually arrived there. Explorers, therefore, did not need to search randomly. As Jonathan Lamb put it at ·a recent conference, actual journeys were undertaken in order to ‘put historical flesh on these fantastic bones’.[2]
The focus of this article is on the ‘imaginary voyage’, a genre of European fictional literature often set in the Antipodes, which used a similar mode of imaginative projection to speculative fantasy maps. Like the maps, imaginary voyages allow writers and readers to travel in their minds from known points to geographical spaces as yet out of reach; and, like the maps, imaginary voyages often validated colonial conquest because they depicted unknown worlds as already discovered and already claimed (implying that there would be no need for negotiations or treaties or wars). My geographical focus in this paper is on Australia’s interior region, a space which resisted European mapping and naming for a remarkable length of time.
[extract]
Arthur, Paul Longley. “Imaginary Conquests,” in “Imaginary Homelands: The Dubious Cartographies of Australian Identity,” ed. Richard Nile and Michael Williams, special issue, Journal of Australian Studies 23, no. 61 (1999): 136–42.
[1] R. V. Tooley (ed.), Map Collectors’ Series No 23: Early Maps of Australia, London, Map Collectors’ Circle, 1965, pp 50, 52.
[2] Jonathan Lamb, Conference paper given on 1 August 1996 at the ‘Re-imagining the Pacific’ conference, National Library of Australia, Canberra.
