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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, Museum Studies
Exhibiting History: The Digital Future
This paper surveys the digital history field, highlighting trends across historical, cultural and literary studies, heritage, archaeology and geography, as well as library information, screen and media studies, multimedia production and interaction design. This broad field is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience.
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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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Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Experimental Histories
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.
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Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Hypermedia History: Changing Technologies of Representation
Technologies of representation are not just instruments of recording and reporting. Their basic attributes determine what it is actually possible to conceptualise, capture and articulate. Photography, to take a classic example, transformed people’s outlook on the world because it could provide an unrivalled visual framing of actuality. It had no equivalent in the prior traditions of visual communication. Technological invention spurs social change. By focussing on ‘technologies of representation’ I am not only concerned with the technological means that underpin specific forms of representation, although these fundamentally define the range of options available, but also with the ways of seeing and understanding that they open up. Tomas describes these beautifully as “a new type of amniotic environment for vision”.
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Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies, Literary Studies
Multimedia and the Narrative Frame
Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), a landmark text written nearly a decade ago, set out to investigate the potential for interactive story forms at a time when digital interactivity was, for the first time, in the hands of the mainstream. Her book, which analyses a range of non-linear narrative models, continues to inspire those who wish to imagine the future of digital narrative textuality. The study of interactive narrative is now a vast field in its own right. Today there is extensive, vibrant debate on the evolution of digital narrative story forms, with theoretical commentary coming from perspectives as diverse as new media theory, literary studies, cinema studies, media arts and humanities computing.
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Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Interactive Histories
In this paper I discuss broad concepts that are at the centre of debates in the digital history field. The discussion ranges over four key concepts: digital interactivity, narrative, content and form. Digital interactivity is a shifting concept, the changes in its meaning directed by technological change. Narrative, which continues to be the primary mode for the telling of history, is gaining new meanings as interactive modes prompt the question of what can be considered ‘narrative’ and what cannot. Particular kinds of historical content lend themselves more readily to interactive representation, but to discuss this is to acknowledge that what counts as ‘history’ has been expanded immeasurably over the past decades. Finally, the many hybrid forms being utilised in the digital history field requires that new critical frameworks be developed to help theorise and differentiate those forms.
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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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Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Imaginary Voyages and the Romantic Imagination
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.
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about
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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