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.