Australia As The Antipodal Utopia

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. Australia as the Antipodal Utopia evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period. It argues that because of its antipodal relationship with Europe, Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, Australia as the Antipodal Utopia provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination.

The European maritime explorers who first visited the bays and beaches of Australia brought with them diverse assumptions about the inhabitants of the country, most of them based on sketchy or non-existent knowledge, contemporary theories like the idea of the noble savage, and an automatic belief in the superiority of European civilisation. Mutual misunderstanding was almost universal, whether it resulted in violence or apparently friendly transactions. Written for a general audience, The First Wave brings together a variety of contributions from thought-provoking writers, including both original research and creative work. Our contributors explore the dynamics of these early encounters, from Indigenous cosmological perspectives and European history of ideas, from representations in art and literature to the role of animals, food and fire in mediating first contact encounters, and Indigenous agency in exploration and shipwrecks. The First Wave includes poetry by Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, fiction by Miles Franklin award-winning Noongar author Kim Scott and Danielle Clode, and an account of the arrival of Christian missionaries in the Torres Strait Islands by Torres Strait political leader George Mye.

He's constantly demonstrating that the natural world is as splendiferous as any fable.' - Jim Shepard, New York Times New Zealand and Australia were imagined thousands of years before they became real. From Plato's Atlantis to Dante's Mount Purgatory, Sinbad the Sailor to Abel Tasman, travellers, writers, map-makers, charlatans and rogues dreamed of other worlds at the back of the sun. In Zone of the Marvellous Martin Edmond recounts the fantastic history of the antipodes in the Western imagination. Edmond tells the stories of Gilgamesh, seeking immortality on the other side of the Waters of Death, and Ptolemy, inventing a Great South Land to balance the weight of northern-hemisphere continents. He traces the invention underlying truth in the tales of Marco Polo and the equivocal John Mandeville; and the fact underlying fiction in Thomas More's Utopia. Along the way he wonders if Tasman's dour puritanical character is somehow mirrored in aspects of the New Zealand psyche - and if the Australian character might resemble that of the old pyrating dog and three-times circumnavigator William Dampier, insouciant larrikin and freedom-monger. Shining with intellectual breadth and imaginative reach, Zone of the Marvellous is one person's trawl through the detritus of the past five millennia. Edmond unfolds his inquiry with a weather eye for the always fertile intertwining of fact and fiction that makes up what we call history; for the moments of wonder and wild surmise that invented our Land of Gold, our Great South Land, our Antipodes; and for the sense and the resonant non-sense that keep alive our feeling for the marvellous.

"This abridgement of Godfrey Charles Mundy's popular three-volume work of 1852, Our Antipodes, provides the contemporary reader with an absorbing picture of colonial Australia. Dealing with Sydney and the bush, Mundy's chatty and vivid anecdotal style conveys the obstacles and issues that beset a colony growing rapidly in extent and population."--BOOK JACKET.

Pref signed: E L On spine: a visit to the Antipodes.

'Virtual Voyages' is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history. In the post-colonial studies field, books about travel writing and empire have tended to focus on the high period of nineteenth-century imperialism and on the colonial settings of Africa and India. This book offers a fresh perspective by focussing on the eighteenth century, and referring to the geographical region of Australia and the Pacific, which has had far less attention. The book also breaks new ground by being the first to approach the genre of the imaginary voyage from a post-colonial perspective. In addition to the new insights into European colonialism that it offers, the book illustrates many broader themes in eighteenth-century history and thought. These include connections between the rise of science and modern imperialism, the development of narrative history and fiction and the influence of romanticism, the evolution of the early novel in Britain and France, and the role of mythology in the development of national identity.

Bernard Smith is widely recognized as one of Australia's leading intellectuals in the fields of anthropology and art history. Peter Beilharz argues that Smith's work also contains a social theory or a way of thinking about Australian culture and identity. Smith enables Australians to think about matters of place and cultural imperialism through the image of being not Australian so much as antipodean. This is the first book-length analysis of Bernard Smith's work. It is both an introduction to Smith's thinking and an important interpretive argument about imperialism and the antipodes.

"Tells how Australians, inspired by their new democracy, attempted to use their freedom to build a society without social and economic conflict. As the second book in a landmark five volume Australian Liberalism series, A Free Country shows the successes and missteps in the attempt to establish the legal and moral foundations for a liberal society in Australia, examing the ideological battles of the period."--