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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Fictions of Encounter
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.
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Teaching and Learning Guide: Antipodean Myths Transformed
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
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Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Participating in the Past
The profile of oral history research has grown dramatically over the past two decades. One of the reasons for this is that there has been a diversification of modes of public access and delivery. The increasing use of digital media means that oral histories are now reaching far greater audiences, and these histories are being presented in more direct, more stimulating and richer ways than have before been possible. In fact, the digital revolution is rapidly transforming history as a genre and set of practices, and oral history is a key player in this process. Because oral histories lend themselves to digital forms of delivery much more readily than conventional, text-only, representations of history, oral history has come to be a central focus for digital history researchers.
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Antipodean Myths Transformed
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.
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies
Colonising the Future
The future has always been a favourite setting for fantasy, but significant temporal milestones such as the end of a millennium attract special attention and become the focal points for fascinated speculation. Almost every day in Australia newspapers herald new fears and fantasies of the year 2000. Further, the word “millennial” has begun to be used as an adjective for describing the cyber culture of the late twentieth century, and as the end of the century looms closer and closer, we are being deluged with speculations on the new millennium as the bearer of destructive computer bugs, aberrant climate trends, natural disasters, nuclear war and the long-awaited second coming of Christ. The millennium is also associated with apocalyptic visions of the ending of the world. In the lead-up to the last millennium, such prophecies led fearful European believers to climb mountaintops in order to be as close as possible to God.
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Capturing the Antipodes
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.
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Imaginary Conquests
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. 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.
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Historical Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Fantasies of the Antipodes
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.
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Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Romantic Imperialism
Coleridge, the Romantic poet, is a central figure in traditional literary histories and the anthologies that support them. However, Coleridge’s role as a political essayist and commentator on Britain’s colonial activities at the time that he was writing his poetry is less well-known in spite of the fact that his productivity in this area was vastly greater. Almost ignored by traditional literary histories are his many volumes of writings in which he celebrates the benefits of British imperialism and supports the view that it was his country’s duty to spread the concept of civilisation to as many “less fortunate” people as possible. The traditional emphasis upon Coleridge as poet of fantasy, supernaturalism and of the primary imagination, has all but blocked out his other major public role —that of enthusiastic supporter of political issues of the day including the politics of empire.
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Paul Arthur studied at the University of Western Australia and has held fellowships in Europe, North America and Australia. He worked in research positions at Murdoch University (1999-2006) and as a Research Fellow at Curtin University (from 2007) before taking up the position of Deputy Director of the National Centre of Biography and Deputy General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography at the Australian National University in 2010. He serves as inaugural President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, and is a member of the NeCTAR project board, the steering committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, the international executive council of centerNet, the executive committee of the International Auto/Biography Association, and the advisory board of the Australian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres. His forthcoming book, History and New Media, examines how technology is transforming knowledge of the past. Recent publications include Virtual Voyages: Travel Writing and the Antipodes 1605-1837 (2010), a cultural history of European travel literature and cartography, and the edited volumes Recovering Lives (2011, Life Writing special issue) and Voices from the West End (2012, with Geoffrey Bolton). He is founding editor of the Anthem book series Scholarship in the Digital Age (Anthem Press, London and New York). Click here for Paul's CV.featured
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