Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial Note
- Introduction
- Virtual Voyages
- Chapter 1 Real and Imaginary Voyages
- Chapter 2 Blank Spaces for the Imagination
- Chapter 3 Exoticism and Romanticism
- Chapter 4 Finding Paradise and Utopia in the Pacific
- Chapter 5 Australia's Mythic Inland
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 5 - Australia's Mythic Inland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial Note
- Introduction
- Virtual Voyages
- Chapter 1 Real and Imaginary Voyages
- Chapter 2 Blank Spaces for the Imagination
- Chapter 3 Exoticism and Romanticism
- Chapter 4 Finding Paradise and Utopia in the Pacific
- Chapter 5 Australia's Mythic Inland
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Whether Botany Bay was made in a merry mood of Nature, or whether it was her first essay in making continents, we shall never know; but we may be quite sure, that every thing found there will be diametrically opposite to the ordinary productions and inventions of the Old World.
– Monthly Review (1794)There is something so strangely different in the physical constitution of Australia, from that of every other part of the world; – we meet with so many whimsical deviations, on the two islands of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, from the ordinary rules and operations of nature in the animal and vegetable parts of the creation…
– Quarterly Review (1835)Known colloquially the world over as the land ‘down under’, Australia has a reputation as a place ‘so strangely different’, where the rules of nature are turned upside down. The stretching horizons, the flatness and the particular quality of light mean that, even now, many claim Australian spaces are somehow different. Apparent contradictions show themselves in contrasting stereotypes of Australia as the land of the lucky, of opportunity, of the endless summer, at the same time as being an underdog culture with roots in a penal colony past. In the nineteenth century, the term ‘antipodes’ came to be associated specifically with the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virtual VoyagesTravel Writing and the Antipodes 1605–1837, pp. 107 - 132Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010