This chapter discusses the way seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans used myths and fantasies to help conceptualize cultural contact with the frontier world of the antipodes. The focus in the following pages is on a unique genre of literary fiction, known as the ‘imaginary voyage’, that played a special role in helping to articulate Europe’s colonial role in the frontier region of the antipodes. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, just as the first European explorers were setting foot on antipodean land, writers of imaginary voyages began offering enticing visions of natural wealth and the potential for colonialism in the antipodes. The region of the antipodes was the most popular setting for imaginary voyages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Australia, as we know it today, did not accurately feature on European maps until the early nineteenth century. However, the antipodes had been the subject of a vast body of literature since it first featured in the classical imagination. The genre of the imaginary voyage, therefore, signifies the continuation of a long history of imagining the antipodes in myth and popular imagination. In this chapter I draw on the example of a representative imaginary voyage: Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750). This mid-eighteenth-century text presents a politicized vision of the potential benefits of European colonialism in the antipodes that is typical of many eighteenth-century imaginary voyages.
In Australia, and in Oceania more generally, the subject of imaginary voyage fiction is particularly topical now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when there is a renewed interest in the original European voyages of discovery. In Australia, this interest has manifested itself in impressive public displays that have included building true-to-life replicas of James Cook’s famous ship Endeavour, the first European vessel to navigate and chart substantial parts of Australia’s eastern coast in the late eighteenth century, and of the Duyfken, the Dutch ship that made the first recorded European contact with the Australian continent in the late sixteenth century. It has also offered an opportunity to reflect on the dire consequences of European intervention on the Indigenous populations that were so rapidly and irreversibly affected in the wake of first contact.
[extract]
Arthur, Paul Longley. “Capturing the Antipodes.” In Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism, edited by Graeme Harper, 205–18. London: Continuum, 2002.
