The Archives

Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Literary and Cartographic Projections
06.01.12 | Permalink | Comment?

The early novel was based upon and drew upon the textual traditions of descriptive travel writing, with the narrative structure of the novel mimicking the activity of travelling. The connection is so strong that travelling can be aligned with characteristics of narrative itself. As Paul Carter puts it, “voyaging and storytelling go together” (1998, p. 19). According to another critic, novels share a “spatial metaphor” with the accounts of voyages. The early novel, “more than any other genre,” is “spatial” (Freedman, 1968, p. 72). The spatial impulse is also illustrated when the protagonist takes on the role of the intrepid explorer, a position that removes the character from the familiarity of home and its known geographies and places them in unknown geographies as a discoverer.
Historical Studies
Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia
07.11.11 | Permalink | Comment?

Almost a decade in the making, the Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, edited by Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard, is now the most up to date and authoritative composite portrait of the state’s history. This work is a remarkable achievement. It is the result of a sustained collaborative effort that is a credit to the skill and energy of the editorial team and to the more than three hundred contributors, along with hundreds of expert readers. In 1912 J. S. Battye, the well-known State Librarian of Western Australia, produced the Cyclopedia of Western Australia: An Historical and Commercial Review, Descriptive and Biographical Facts, Figures and Illustrations, which remained a central reference resource for WA history throughout the twentieth century. The highly regarded volumes of the sesquicentenary series appeared in 1979, followed in 1981 by the influential A New History of Western Australia, edited by Tom Stannage.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Virtual Voyages
25.04.10 | Permalink | Comment?

Born out of an ancient geographical theory of balance, the term ‘antipodes’ was first used to refer to the vast uncharted underworld of the southern hemisphere from a northern perspective. The principle behind this belief, as described in the Quarterly Review in the nineteenth century, was ‘that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe’. The idea of the antipodes as a counterbalance, though now remembered only as a peculiar, discredited theory, has been surprisingly influential as an imaginative concept. An antipodean expectancy filled minds, maps, novels and utopian plans, laying the foundations for perceptions of Oceania and Australasia that continue to impact on how this part of the world is seen from a distance as well as from within. The region of the antipodes has been occupied by European settlers and their descendants for a relatively short time. And yet, this brief period is set against a backdrop of one of the longest recorded histories of imagining prior to geographical discovery.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Fictions of Encounter
25.09.08 | Permalink | Comment?

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.
Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Experimental Histories
25.01.07 | Permalink | Comment?

Interactive digital technologies are transforming the processes of research and production across all major academic disciplines. The changes are most significant in traditional disciplines. In that of history, online public access to digitised historical resources has meant that the materials of history are now available to anyone who has access to the internet. Previously, the study of archives was only open to the dedicated specialist with access to the world’s major library collections. Digital technologies have not only enhanced access to resources, but they are also enabling the development and growth of new kinds of content delivery and new modes of historical narration. Although the book is not likely to be superseded any time soon, the book now competes with experimental digital works that are relating history in new and highly interactive ways.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies
Colonising the Future
25.12.02 | Permalink | Comment?

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.
Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Imaginary Voyages and the Romantic Imagination
25.08.01 | Permalink | Comment?

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.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Imaginary Conquests
25.11.99 | Permalink | Comment?

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.