LOCATING THE ANTIPODES

What might it mean, then, to be antipodean? To be other, displaced, a reflex of metropolitan culture, and yet part of it, elsewhere. In Smith's way of thinking, to be antipodean is to be constructed into a relationship; the antipodes is not a place, though its image is often projected upon a place away from Europe, like that which we inhabit. Being antipodean, within the British frame of reference, was like a punishment of some kind or another, to do with the place felons were sent, or idiotic cousins or reprobates. Yet Australians were also exiles, in some way or another, as well as invaders. The antipodes are invented by imperialism. But they, or we, are not just ‘down there’, the dirty bits down below, the oddities of platypus and Aborigine, topsy-turvy. The antipodes are not nowhere, they are at the other pole, the other end, connected vitally to the centre because imagined and held by it. Our antipodes, our Australia is not just anywhere invisible ‘down there’, they are specifically Europe's antipodes, unspeakable European embarrassments or else laughable local oddities. In sympathy with Mikhail Bakhtin, and the idea of carnival which Smith had read of in Lindsay's work on culture, the antipodes could also be turned against the centres; we are the rude bits, the bits that talk back, behave as though they are autonomous even when instructed to the contrary.