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
Teaching and Learning Guide: Antipodean Myths Transformed
08.08.08 | Permalink | Comment?
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
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Antipodean Myths Transformed
25.08.07 | Permalink | Comment?

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.
Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Capturing the Antipodes
25.07.02 | Permalink | Comment?

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.
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.
Historical Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Fantasies of the Antipodes
25.06.99 | Permalink | Comment?

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.