Paul Arthur » 18th Century

Exploration and Endeavour

Paul Arthur — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:32:40 +0000

Exploration & Endeavour: The Royal Society of London and the South Seas celebrates the society’s 350th anniversary by bringing together a selection of iconic objects and original documents that highlight the society’s key role in European maritime exploration and discovery in the Pacific. The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, was founded on the premise that knowledge should be subject to independent verification—‘freeing oneself from unexamined opinion, particularly through the study of empirical data’, as Andrew Sayers puts it in his introduction to the beautifully produced accompanying book publication. The society’s motto, Nullius in verba (‘Take no-one’s word for it’), attests to this commitment to independence of thought, underpinned by methodologically rigorous inquiry. Fellows of the society include larger-than-life figures who in many cases have revolutionised their field: Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Christopher Wren, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick, James Watson, Stephen Hawking and, with particular relevance in the Pacific context, James Cook and Joseph Banks.

Fictions of Encounter

Paul Arthur — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:52:06 +0000

The “imaginary voyage” was an early form of the modern realist novel popular in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, set predominantly in the region of Australasia and the Pacific. As a branch of travel literature, it was linked intimately to the expansion of empire. Through repeated stories of successful colonizing schemes and heroic accounts of cross-cultural encounters between European travelers and the people of the antipodes, these texts allowed European readers to enjoy farfetched fantasies of colonization well before, and during, the period of actual colonial expansion. As in the case of the many better-known examples of literary fiction produced in the later period of European imperial dominance, imaginary voyage fiction helped embed social acceptance of colonial expansion by modeling cultural domination as natural, beneficial, and welcome.

Teaching and Learning Guide: Antipodean Myths Transformed

Paul Arthur — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:51:51 +0000

Sample Syllabus:

Week 1: Introduction and Overview—Exploration and Colonisation of the Great South Land

- The myth of the antipodes—the allure of the great south land
- Gaps in maps—spaces for the imagination

Weeks 2–4: Fantasies of the Antipodes

- The role of imaginary voyage texts—blending reality with fantasy, pre-programming colonisation
- Myths of extreme difference
- Myths of Indigenous populations’ welcoming attitude to colonial intrusion
- Theories of otherness

Weeks 3–5: Entering the Antipodes

- Early explorers’ contradictory responses to Terra Australis Incognita
- Utopias and dystopias
- First contact with Indigenous people—the concept of ‘terra nullius’ framed by myths

Weeks 6–8: Images of Contemporary Australia: Enduring Myths

- The myth of terra nullius and the impact on Indigenous Australia
- The ‘dead heart’ of Australia as the last unfathomed antipodean space

Antipodean Myths Transformed

Paul Arthur — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 01:59:02 +0000

Australia and the South Pacific held a special status in the eighteenth century: this was the farthest region from Europe and the last part of the earth remaining for Europeans to explore and chart. In the context of European nations’ own histories of discovering and exploring the world beyond Europe’s borders, this region is unique in the sense that no other part of the earth had such a substantial and well-documented body of European thought devoted to it over such a long period of time prior to its physical discovery. The ‘antipodes’ existed in the European imagination for approximately two thousand years before Europeans set foot on antipodean lands. Myths inspired explorers to go searching for the genuine antipodes, and voyages were often undertaken with the specific aim of finding the uncharted places that punctuated otherwise formless maps.

Capturing the Antipodes

Paul Arthur — Thu, 25 Jul 2002 02:04:35 +0000

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.

Imaginary Voyages and the Romantic Imagination

Paul Arthur — Sat, 25 Aug 2001 02:06:26 +0000

This article examines the relationship between European romanticism and the geographical space of the Antipodes with the aim of showing that conventional readings of romanticism are limited by their restrictive focus on Europe as the sole arena for romantic expression, influence and imaginative inspiration.