Australia as the Antipodal Utopia: European Imaginations From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century 9781785271397, 1785271393

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Australia as the Antipodal Utopia

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Australia as the Antipodal Utopia European Imaginations from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

Daniel Hempel With a Foreword by Bill Ashcroft

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Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition frst published in UK and USA 2020 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–​76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © Daniel Hempel 2020 The author asserts the moral right to be identifed as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949661 ISBN-​13: 978-​1-​78527-​139-​7  (Hbk) ISBN-​10: 1-​78527-​139-​3  (Hbk) This title is also available as an e-​book.

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Bill Ashcroft

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction 1 1.

Arcadia Australis

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2. The Civilising Mission

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Antipodal Inversion

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4. The Antipodal Uncanny

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Antipodal Monstrosity

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Conclusion 127 Bibliography Index

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FOREWORD Bill Ashcroft The interest in utopianism grew rapidly throughout the twentieth century and accelerated after the establishment of the Utopian Studies Society in 1989. Recognition of the importance of utopianism to the insurgent spirit of independence movements in the European colonies has only recently begun to develop. Throughout the British Empire the form of utopian thinking that emerged in colonial and postcolonial writing in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean was driven by the prospect of independence. This utopian spirit continued after such national liberation was achieved. But of the various forms of invasion that characterised British imperialism the one that proceeded in the Antipodes was a distinct example of the belief that a eutopia could be established on the far side of the world. The myth of Australia as a land of promise and the subsequent food of settlers to the colony gave Antipodal colonialism a distinctive character. This was a paradoxical consequence of the utopian spirit that drove imperialism itself. In his magisterial The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch observes that all ideology has a utopian element. In imperial thinking, as in all ideology, the belief in a ‘better’ world, however fanciful, can only be maintained by being at some level authentic. Clearly all empires display their utopian element when they manage to convince themselves that their overthrow of nations, their control of international policy and their securing of markets are conducted for the beneft of humanity. Imperialism is a classic demonstration of the realisation of a utopian dream, the legislation of which ensures its degeneration into dystopian reality. The paradox of utopia then is not limited to the contradictions of the clash between regulation and freedom that frst emerges in Thomas More’s Utopia; it also stands as a feature of what is in Bloch’s mind a fundamental contradiction of the relationship between ideology and utopia. Thus the impetus to expand throughout the world, an impetus that had a formative impact on Australia, is characterised by the apparently contradictory impulses of exploitation and a civilising mission. Within a century after the publication of More’s Utopia the utopian genre had taken permanent root. Utopia emerged at a transitional period in

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European history, a period in which Utopia was coexistent with Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in 1513, and Luther’s ‘Ninety-​Five Theses’, proclaimed in 1517. This was a pivotal period for European imperialism, which we might see as the expansionist arm of Modernity itself. The classical utopias that emerged in the century after More’s book were largely motivated by a sense of Christian morality, although all pursued the ideal of an equally shared material world:  Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), Johann Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) were all examples of this early-​modern idealism that drew directly on More’s example. However the more subtle and long-​lasting efect of utopian thought was its gradual impact on what might be called the ‘pre-​literature’ of empire. Long before Britain even thought about an empire the dynamics of the civilising mission, what today might be called ‘developmentalism’, were in evidence. More’s Utopia, in fact, presents the colonial process in microcosm:  King Utopus conquers the land; its name is changed; the indigenous inhabitants are ‘civilised’; what was previously ‘wasteland’ becomes cultivated; and the land is physically reconstructed. In this respect we could say that Utopia anticipated quite directly the imperial ideology that drove England’s expansion. The search for utopia was extended in the eighteenth century by the literary imagination of various kinds of colonial utopias in isolated regions of Africa, the Caribbean, South America or the Pacifc, with a blithe disregard for the possible feelings of the inhabitants. In time, imperial expansion itself was driven by the utopian drive to populate the world with the British race and to civilise the invaded inhabitants. From classical times the region of the world that generated an intense, almost mystical attraction to the utopian spirit was the Antipodes. One of the major ways in which utopian vision was generated in British thought was through the idea of the Europeanisation of the Southern Hemisphere. For example, Rev. Sydney Smith writes:  ‘To introduce a European population, and consequently the arts and civilisation of Europe, into such an untrodden country as New Holland, is to confer a lasting and important beneft upon the world.’1 Geographically the Antipodal point (from the Greek ‘anti’ –​opposed; and ‘pous’ –​foot) of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth’s surface that is diametrically opposite to it. But to the European imagination such absolute geographical otherness meant that this was a region of both ominous threat and boundless possibility. It was a region of monsters, where you sailed of the edge of the earth, a region of the unknown. Indeed for St Augustine the idea 1

 Qtd in John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 7.

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FOREWORD

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of human habitation and even land itself on the other side of the globe was highly dubious. The Antipodes share with Africa an existence that frst took shape in the imagination of Europe. Where Africa was the primitive ‘Heart of Darkness’ in contrast to the light of European civilisation, the Antipodes, the geographical Other of Europe, too absent even for primitivism, also signifed the Antipodean Other of civilisation itself. In Mercator’s projection map, Australasia was named Terra Australis Incognita  –​it was unknown and possibly unknowable. So the Antipodes represented nothing less than an absence in the European imagination. The dystopian aspect of this otherness was exacerbated by the development of convict transportation to the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. This was augmented in nineteenth-​century novels of Trollope and Dickens, which saw Australia as the farthest place of escape for social failures. But gradually the regard people had of Australia as a prison transformed itself into the idea of the new colony as a place of boundless possibilities, above all, through the availability of free or at least cheap land. The utopian vision of early European explorers came to be endorsed in the hopeful journeys of British migrants. In settler colonies such as Australia settlers saw themselves escaping the rigid class structures and economic inequality of Britain and the colony ofering a new start to free settlers. If this start was not always as completely utopian as some texts hoped, it was an improvement for most settlers. But the settler colonies, or ‘dominions’, were as diferent from each other as they were from colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Australia, in particular, carried the burden of convict transportation, and as the great southern continent was depicted as both utopia and dystopia well before European arrival. Nevertheless, settler colonies demonstrated more purely utopian writing than any other colonised country. The reasons for this are fairly clear: settlers who moved by choice were always propelled by the promise of a new start, and often the ownership of land; European settlers drew inspiration from the Western tradition of utopian thought; the white population quickly overwhelmed the indigenous owners, who, if they had no agriculture, were considered to be on a level with the fauna. Needless to say, settler utopianism generated dystopian ruin in the displaced indigenous populations, and the consequences of attempting to relocate England in the colonies soon revealed to settlers themselves that utopia, if it were at all possible, would have to be constructed in a diferent way. This groundbreaking volume goes further into the origins, prehistory and realisation of Australian utopianism than any before it. Indeed it stands alone in its examination of the utopian spirit –​both eutopian and dystopian –​that underpinned white settlement in Australia. Meticulously researched, and fnely argued, it examines the presence of the Antipodes in the European mind from

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Arcadian to the monstrous, examining the drive of the civilising mission and the lingering perception of the Antipodes, and Australia in particular as an upside-​down world. It demonstrates how the utopian vision resulted in deeply contradictory consequences:  the combination of a new and comparatively egalitarian society and the genocidal consequences of indigenous dispossession. This book goes a very long way towards establishing the utopian spirit as a central factor, not only in its settlement but also in its deep political and cultural ambivalence.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Bill Ashcroft. You have been a wonderful supervisor and supported this work critically and generously from the very beginning. Thank you also to the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), whose Ailsa McPherson Fellowship allowed me to mature my dissertation into the present work. And a big thank you to my colleagues at the PVC(E) at UNSW. Finally, heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Amy. You have been a most supportive, critical and, at times, painstakingly precise reader of my work.

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INTRODUCTION  In her famous essay ‘Australia’s Double Aspect’, Judith Wright wrote: Australia has from the beginning of its short history meant something more to its new inhabitants than mere environment and mere land to be occupied, ploughed and brought into subjection. It has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality; frst, and persistently, the reality of exile; second, though perhaps we now tend to forget this, the reality of newness and freedom.1 What Wright seems to argue is that in the idea of Australia, two competing and ostensibly antagonistic visions of the continent come together to form a precarious unity. Wright’s double aspect is readily translated into a dystopian vision of exile on one hand, and a utopian one of ‘newness and freedom’ on the other. However, a frst inconsistency in this double aspect becomes apparent when Wright explains that Australia, as a land of exile, ‘could scarcely have been more alien to all European ideas either of natural beauty or of physical amenity with its unknown plants and animals, its odd reversals of all that British invaders knew and understood of their own country’.2 One might wonder here how dystopian this vision of exile really is, because after all isn’t this newness and freedom from European ideas liberating, and therefore in a sense utopian too? In other words, just how dystopian the ‘reality of exile’ is depends to a large extent on what one is exiled from. The two experiences of Australia, it seems, aren’t as distinct from each other as a neat dichotomy of utopia and dystopia suggests. Australia’s ‘odd reversals’ certainly challenged the imagination of Europeans in a very special way. The continent at the other end of the world was and continues to be a symbol for absolute distance and otherness, and as such provides a uniquely fertile setting for imagining places and societies 1 2

 Judith Wright, ‘Australia’s Double Aspect’, Literary Criterion 6, no. 3 (1964): 1.  Ibid.,  2.

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radically diferent from, but sometimes also uncannily similar to, Europe. This is the story that this book attempts to tell: about the unique place which Australia holds in the European imagination. It is a story which stretches back to European antiquity, and which is marked by visions of Arcadian lands of pleasure but also of terrifying monsters. It is a story in which dreams and nightmares cut across, complement and contradict one another in visions of an Antipodal utopia.

Scope and Structure It needs to be stated from the outset that the ambitious goal of this book has inevitably meant that its research focus has had to be narrowed to a manageable body of texts, with painful omissions made. It makes no pretence to encyclopaedic coverage as the topic was approached with an eye to broader discursive similarities, which have necessarily been delineated at the expense of individual diferences. The guiding principle in selection of material was identifying the larger thematic patterns which circumscribe Australia’s role as an Antipodal utopia within the discursive network of the European imagination. While this approach has yielded a reasonably coherent set of heuristic arguments about, for example, the civilising mission or the Antipodal uncanny, it also has produced a necessarily incomplete picture of the numerous visions of Australia. As a second caveat it needs to be remarked that the book attempts to incorporate as many diferent perspectives as possible, but its exploration of Australia’s place in the European imagination is unavoidably Eurocentric. The issue of Aboriginal displacement certainly forms a recurrent and important part of the book’s investigation of utopia’s relationship with imperial ideology, but questions about indigenous utopianism and the intriguing interconnections between Aboriginality and Antipodality remain largely unanswered. I sincerely hope though that someone with the necessary expertise will expand my line of inquiry in this direction. The historical scope of this book may be surprising, especially when approached with a conventional understanding of Australia’s ‘short history’, that is, its history of European occupation. But as Wright points out, Australia ‘has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality’, and the history of this inner reality reaches far beyond the two hundred and something years of Anglo-​ Australian history. It goes without saying that Australia has a rich indigenous history that stretches back millennia. But what is often overlooked is the curious fact that the continent already loomed large in the European imagination long before any European set foot on its shore. Europeans did not reach Australia before the seventeenth century, but over the span of almost two millennia the continent had an ‘inner reality’ in the European imagination,

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where it was prefgured by imaginary and often mythical avatars such as Terra Australis, Magellanica or the Great Southland. All these pre-​discovery avatars were ultimately rooted in geographic speculation about the Antipodes, the hypothetical continent which Ancient Europeans posited as the cosmological counterpart to Europe. This is not to suggest that the European history of Australia reaches as deep as its Aboriginal counterpart; rather, and this is a central argument, the book aims to demonstrate how far back the imperial desire to explore and conquer this Antipodal utopia reaches. Another important point to emphasise is that in this book, the Antipodal relationship between Australia and Europe is not primarily understood as a geographical one, at least not in the precise sense of the term. After all, Europe’s exact antipode lies somewhere south-​east of New Zealand in the Pacifc Ocean. As will be discussed at some length, the Antipodes arose out of mathematical and geographical discourses, but they also, more consequentially, played an important role in European cosmography. Cosmography is understood here not in a mystical or esoteric sense (even though this does factor in at times), but more concretely as a symbolic mapping of the world which allows for the articulation of certain value judgements based on perceived geographical relations. In other words, it is a way of understanding the universe and one’s place in it, which in the case of the Antipodes was motivated by a pronouncedly Eurocentric desire for an Antipodal counterpart. To emphasise this conception of Antipodality as a symbolic rather than a precise geographic relationship, the term and its derivatives are capitalised in this book. It is also with a broader cosmographic understanding of Antipodality in mind that diferent utopian visions of the same space (e.g. the Antipodes, Terra Australis Incognita, New Holland, etc.) can be linked together as sequential historical avatars that represent essentially the same discursive complex. A  critical omission needs to be highlighted here: Antipodality, of course, also afects the modern geographical entities of New Zealand and Antarctica. While Australia’s Antipodal sisters would certainly provide additional insight into the phenomenon of Antipodality, they have been neglected here, primarily for practical reasons since their inclusion would require work that is beyond the scope of this book, but also for theoretical ones because as far as I can see, Australia stands undisputed as the Antipodal heir in the European imagination. However, critical interventions are welcome here. In terms of structure, the book is divided into fve chapters, each of which takes the question of an Antipodal utopia in a diferent thematic direction. The frst chapter introduces a particular instance of a group of ostensibly eutopian visions of Antipodal space, that is, visions that imagine Australia as a decidedly paradisal utopia. It demonstrates how these visions of Antipodal

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space as a form of pleasure ground rely extensively on the trope of bounty, a particular ideologeme or rhetorical stratagem of imperialism which unhinges the connection between natural wealth and indigenous production. With the beginning of colonisation, these visions are remodelled into a form of Arcadianism. While this shift provides an important utopian corrective to Modernity, its critical functioning is substantially compromised by its backward-​looking nostalgia. The second chapter provides a diferent perspective on eutopias via the counterpoint of euchronic visions, that is, imaginations of future utopias which focus frmly on time and progress. The chapter shows how intimately euchronic visions are entwined with imperial ideologies, and in particular with the narrative of the Civilising Mission, and how they deploy ideologically overdetermined notions such as the idea of ‘improvement’ to incorporate Arcadianism within their imperial framework. While the frst two chapters focus on conventionally utopian visions and their active engagement with the ideology of imperialism, the following chapters set forth the features distinctive to Antipodality and the utopian spatiality that follows from them. They reveal the inherent antagonism between imperial ideology and any form of Antipodal utopia. Chapter 3 introduces a fundamental aspect of Antipodality, the principle of Antipodal inversion, and details how this principle produces Antipodal utopias, that is, topsy-​ turvy places which, in their reversal of European hierarchies, are unsettling to the European subject, and often subvert imperial ideology. Chapter  4 focuses on a particular by-​product of the unsettling efect of Antipodal inversion: the Antipodal uncanny. It demonstrates how the Antipodal utopia produces a sense of the uncanny in which tensions between feelings of belonging and ‘not-​at-​homeness’ are dramatised. The fnal chapter deals with an aspect of Antipodality which on the surface appears to be the least utopian of all: Antipodal monstrosity. The chapter reveals how even some dystopian visions of Australia exhibit an inherently utopian quality in their critical, productive and subversive resistance to the ideological reductions of imperialism. The chapters are tied together by the central idea that Australia, due to its cosmographic signifcance as Europe’s Antipodes, is intrinsically caught in a tension between utopian spatiality and imperial ideology. Individual chapters present largely stand-​alone arguments by focusing on particularly frequent and infuential manifestations of this tension, which appear to act as literary themes within the discursive network of the European imagination. This means that instead of providing a complete history of Antipodality (which would be a task far beyond the scope of a single work), the book aims to draw out its major themes in the hope that each of the chapters ofers the reader diferent conceptual tools and ideas for further research.

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The Concept of  Utopia A few words need to be said about the conceptual framework of this book. Its use of the word ‘utopia’ may appear idiosyncratic, especially when approached with a conventional understanding of utopia as an imaginary place of absolute political and social perfection. Within the feld of utopian studies, this understanding of utopia is often described as ‘eutopian’, from the Greek ‘eutopia’, meaning ‘the good place’. The word ‘utopia’, however, literally means ‘no place’, combining the Greek words ου (‘no, not’) and τοπος (‘place’). A  whole vocabulary has emerged to describe diferent facets and manifestations of utopian thinking, for example, the well-​known dystopia (popularly understood as the opposite of utopia), but also more technically specifc terms such as euchronia, critical utopia or utopian satire. Although at times when greater accuracy is desired this book makes use of some of these terms, it largely aims to keep the terminology simple by using the word ‘utopia’ in an inclusive and comprehensive sense. This has obvious practical advantages but is also meant to underline a broader theoretical point: that the diferentiation of utopian thinking into subcategories can be deceptive and may divert attention from the fact that these categories are far from clear-​cut. Hence one key argument that this book puts forward is that in the Antipodal utopia, eutopia, euchronia, utopian satire and dystopia form a complex but coherent whole. To illustrate how the diferentiation of subcategories of utopia may be misleading, it is instructive to consider how the terms ‘dystopia’ and ‘utopian satire’ apply to the foundational text of the utopian genre, Thomas More’s Utopia. It does not take long to realise that More’s perfect society is overshadowed by grave imperfections. For example, More’s utopia is underpinned by an unforgiving body of punitive laws, which in totalitarian fashion circumscribe personal freedom with rules regulating what clothes to wear, where to live and when to work or sleep. Further, not only is the island’s wealth based on penal labour, but even more worryingly, on imperial expansion:  Utopia was founded and keeps expanding by dispossessing and displacing indigenous people, a clear manifestation of the cliché that one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. On closer inspection, More’s utopia depends on an uncanny proclivity to dystopia. As Gregory Claeys observes: ‘Like the snake in the Garden of Eden, dystopian elements seem to lurk within Utopia.’3 This propensity of the utopian to engender the dystopian carries forward, I argue, through most forms of utopia, so that a clear distinction between the two terms only makes sense in specifc cases (e.g. when speaking of the modern genre of dystopia). 3

 Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), 6.

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Just as the boundary between utopia and dystopia is hard to draw clearly and defnitely, so is the line between utopia and satire. Occasionally, there is little doubt about the straightforward earnestness of a utopian proposal. It is hard to argue, for example, against the overall sincerity of works such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward or B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, even if both novels appear at times unintentionally self-​satirising and humorous. However, more often than not a utopia features central elements that complicate a straightforward interpretation of the intention that informs it. More’s Utopia is a case in point: while its exposition of a community without private property can be taken at face value, several aspects of the text –​for example, the main character’s name ‘Hythloday’ (which translates as ‘nonsense peddler’) or the Utopians’ contempt for gold (which they use to make potties and toys) –​provide reasonable grounds to read the text as a form of parody or satire. This has led C. S. Lewis to conclude that ‘diferent parts of [Utopia] are on very diferent levels of seriousness’, and that More ‘says many things for the fun of them’.4 One reason for this is that More’s text, and, it could be argued, utopia in general, stands frmly in the literary tradition of the ‘iocoserium’, a serio-​ comic writing style deriving from Classical satire.5 As these examples suggest, utopia’s satirical aspects complicate and frequently even undermine its constructive anticipation of a better society. This delicate dialectic of anticipatory expression and satirical devaluation is another common trait of utopian thought which renders the term ‘utopian satire’ only marginally useful.

Utopia and Ideology A further conceptual issue that is integral to this book’s theoretical perspective concerns the relationship between utopia and ideology. This issue has a long-​ standing history in utopian studies but also extends into the feld of Marxian ideology-​critique (Ideologiekritik). For the most part, the relationship between utopia and ideology has been examined by three central thinkers:  Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricœur; but Fredric Jameson also needs to be mentioned here for his stimulating, albeit less systematic, contributions to the discussion. In many ways, Mannheim provided the larger conceptual basis for the utopia-​ideology interrelation in his 1929 work Ideologie und Utopie by linking the concepts in service of the book’s central issue, the ‘sociology of knowledge’. In a frst step, Mannheim groups utopia and ideology together as  C. S.  Lewis, English Literature in Sixteenth Century Literature (Oxford:  Clarendon P, 1954), 169–​70. 5  Werner von Kopenfels, ‘Mundas Alter Et Idem:  Utopiefktion and Menippeische Satire’, Poetica 13, no. 1–​2 (1981): 35. 4

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‘reality-​transcending ideas’,6 which means that both, in their representations of reality, transcend the actual order of things. In other words, both are forms of false consciousness. In a second step, Mannheim then diferentiates between the two by arguing that although utopias and ideologies are both incongruent with the social order from which they originate, utopias difer from ideologies in that they succeed in transforming the status quo, while ideologies attempt to maintain and legitimise it: ‘Utopias’, Mannheim spells out, ‘are not ideologies in the measure and in so far as they succeed through counteractivity in transforming the existing historical reality into one more in accord with their own conceptions.’7 Before moving on to Ricœur’s elaboration of Mannheim’s theory, it is worth noting that Mannheim also draws up four ‘ideal types’ of ‘utopian mentalities’ to describe particular historical formations of the interplay between utopia and ideology. Each of these mentalities is characterised by a specifc ‘time-​sense’, that is, ‘the connections which exist between each utopia and the corresponding historical time-​perspective’.8 Where relevant, this book draws on Mannheim’s distinctions between utopian mentalities and his description of their diferent time-​senses to provide deeper insight into a particular utopian perspective. Ricœur developed Mannheim’s conception of the interrelations between utopia and ideology further in a series of lectures he gave at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1975. First, Ricœur extended Mannheim’s defnition of utopia and ideology as reality-​transcending ideas by arguing (pace Cliford Geertz and his theory of ideology as a cultural system) that any possible representation of reality is unavoidably distorted since ‘action in its most elementary forms is already mediated and articulated by symbolic systems’.9 Ricœur then shifted Mannheim’s defnition of utopia away from a transformation of existing reality to a critique of it, an idea which he anchors in utopia’s etymological meaning of being located ‘nowhere’: What must be emphasized is the beneft of this kind of extra-​territoriality for the social function of utopia. From this ‘noplace’, an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The feld of the possible is now opened beyond that of the actual, a feld for alternative ways of living […] Utopia is the way in which we radically rethink what is family, consumption, government,  Bryan Turner, ‘Mannheim’s Utopia Today’, Political Studies 43 (1995): 33.  Karl Mannheim, ‘Ideology and Utopia’, Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 2 (2006): 176. 8  Ibid.,  189. 9  Paul Ricœur, ‘Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination’, Philosophic Exchange 2, no. 2 (1976): 27. 6 7

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religion, etc. The fantasy of an alternative society and its topographical fguration ‘nowhere’ works as the most formidable contestation of what is.10 Ricœur thus redefnes the key function of utopia as its critical stance towards the social order of reality: ‘The critical mark of utopia is then not realizability but the preservation of distance between itself and reality.’11 In the end, Ricœur essentially redefnes ideology as a legitimising force and utopia as a force of critique and protest. From this he infers that both forces have distinctive positive as well as negative aspects:  Ricœur describes the oppressively deceptive representation of reality as the dysfunctional aspect of ideology, while utopia’s pathology takes the form of escapism in ‘the eclipse of practice, the denial of the logic of action’.12 In turn, ideology’s non-​pejorative, constructive aspect is its integrative function of establishing and preserving the social identity of a group or of an individual.13 Utopia’s positive function consists in criticising ideology ‘without having to step outside its infuence’,14 and thus subverting and disrupting an order of society that is established and maintained by a certain ideology. Bloch is indubitably the twentieth century’s most important thinker of utopia. His major contribution to the debate about utopia and ideology is that he provides a dialectical conception of their relationships, which in many aspects is more intricate than that of Mannheim or Ricœur. A good starting point for introducing Bloch’s idea of the interplay of utopia and ideology is via what he calls the ‘problem of cultural inheritance’, that is, the Marxist question of why past ideologies should be maintained. This issue relates back to the Marxist notion of ‘Erbe’ (usually translated as ‘inheritance’ or ‘legacy’), which Friedrich Engels at one point described as that which ‘is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture’.15 This cultural inheritance should ‘not only be preserved but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class  Ibid.,  25.  Paul Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 180. 12  Ricœur, ‘Ideology and Utopia’, 23. 13  Ricœur, Lectures, 311. 14  Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Ideology and Utopia:  Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricœur’, Journal of Political Ideologies 13, no. 3 (2008): 269. 15  Frederick Engels, ‘The Housing Question’, in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, vol. 23, October 1871–​July 1874 (New  York:  International Publishers, 1988), 325; cf. Wayne Hudson, ‘Ernst Bloch: “Ideology” and Postmodern Social Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/​Revue canadienne de théorie politique et social 7, no. 1–​2 (Winter 1983): 135–​36. 10 11

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into the common property of the whole of society’.16 The fact, however, that society’s cultural inheritance is drenched in the ideologies of the past poses a fundamental problem for a Marxist defense of it. In heavy Marxist terminology, Bloch therefore asks the question why ‘works of the superstructure progressively reproduce themselves in cultural consciousness even after the disappearance of their social bases’.17 In other words, should we, for instance, continue to draw inspiration from the works of ancient Greek philosophers and artists, in spite of the fact that they originate in a society based on slavery? Bloch’s response is this: What has cultural value expresses more than the goal of one age or one class:  It speaks for the future. Any signifcant philosophical or artistic work contributes to future maturity. Therefore great achievements in the superstructure no longer belong completely to their age. The Parthenon cannot be written of just because it was built by a slaveholding society. Its social mission at the time is no longer the important thing. What interests us now is its meaning for later generations living under a changed general situation.18 Bloch’s proposition, then, is that the continuing signifcance of cultural works arises from a particular kind of surplus in them that transcends their original ideological contexts: ‘Even the class ideologies, within which the great works of the past lie’, Bloch explains, ‘lead precisely to that surplus over and above the false consciousness bound to its position, the surplus which is called continuing culture, and is therefore a substratum of the claimable cultural inheritance.’ Inevitably, this surplus is of a utopian nature because ‘this very surplus is produced by nothing other than the efect of the utopian function in the ideological creations of the cultural side’.19 Bloch further argues that ideology depends on utopia to achieve its deceptive and compliance-​enforcing efect: ‘Indeed, false consciousness alone would not even be sufcient to gild the ideological wrapping, which is what in fact happened. Alone it would be incapable of creating one of the most important characteristics of ideology, namely premature harmonization of social

 Engels,  325.  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et  al. (Cambridge:  MIT P, 1986), 1:154. 18  Qtd in Jack Zipes, ‘Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination’, in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, by Ernst Bloch, trans. Jack Zipes et al. (Cambridge: MIT P, 1988), xii. 19  Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:156; emphasis in the original. 16 17

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contradictions.’20 Transcending ideological afliations, all great art contains such utopian surplus: Thus all great cultural works also have implicitly, though not always (as in Goethe’s ‘Faust’) explicitly, a utopian background understood in this way […] There is a spirit of utopia in the fnal predicate of every great statement, in Strasbourg cathedral and in the Divine Comedy, in the expectant music of Beethoven and in the latencies of the Mass in B minor.21 Bloch’s answer to the ‘problem of cultural inheritance’ is, therefore, that the inheritance that can be claimed from the great works of the past consists of the as-​yet-​unfulflled or unsatisfed hope-​content of their utopian surplus. In addition to Bloch’s dialectical conception of the interplay of utopia and ideology, this book also makes extensive use of his distinction between abstract and concrete utopia. Bloch describes mere fantasies that are completely disconnected from the ‘undischarged tendency-​latency’ of reality (i.e. actual possibilities for social change in a given historical situation) as abstract-​ utopian, the better to distinguish them from what is concrete-​utopian. Instead of abstract wishful thinking, a concrete-​utopian vision is in sync with reality and anticipates concrete possibilities.22 Finally, the book also draws substantially on some of Jameson’s ideas concerning the interplay of utopia and ideology. In an innovative attempt to extend the Freudian concept of repression to the social mechanisms that underpin mass culture, Jameson construes the dialectic of utopia and ideology as a ‘management of desire’.23 He interprets utopia as a desire seeking fulflment, and ideology as the force that represses utopian desire through false gratifcation: To rewrite the concept of a management of desire in social terms now allows us to think repression and wish-​fulfllment together within the unity of a single mechanism […] which strategically arouses fantasy content within careful symbolic containment structures which defuse it, gratifying intolerable, unrealizable, properly imperishable desires only to the degree to which they can again be laid to rest.24  Ibid.  Ibid., 1:157–​58. 22  See ibid., 1:157; cf. Sargent, 443; Ruth Levitas, Concept of Utopia (New York: Syracuse UP, 1990), 88. 23  Fredric Jameson, ‘Reifcation and Utopia in Mass Culture’, Social Text 1 (1979): 141. 24  Ibid. 20 21

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Jameson shows how cultural texts may contain compensatory structures through which social anxieties and tensions are put to rest by ‘the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony’.25 The specifc dynamic Jameson is referring to derives from a particular confguration of a text, in which a utopian desire is invoked but neutralised by an ideological structure that enacts its symbolic consummation. The symbolic compensation provided by an ideological structure thus undermines the subversive potential of utopia. Jameson’s theory of the compensatory structure, in which the subversive potential of utopia is undermined by the symbolic compensation provided by an ideological structure, delivers a key analytical tool throughout this book. Further to this, in his seminal text The Political Unconscious:  Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Jameson introduces the concept of the ideologeme in order to widen the horizon of his analysis of narrative beyond the formalistic plane of close readings, to include the social plane on which ideology operates.26 The individual text is understood as a ‘socially symbolic act’, meaning that the text is thought to betoken actual social tensions and conficts, which in the text are sublimated or transformed into aesthetic form. Jameson goes on to explain that ‘real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, fnd a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm’, which means that ‘the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions’.27 This is where Jameson’s concept of the ideologeme enters into the picture. Analogous to the Saussurean diferentiation of parole from langue, Jameson defnes the ideologeme as the concrete manifestation of an ideology. An ideologeme accordingly represents ‘the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourse of the social classes’.28 This concludes the discussion of the conceptual framework of this book. Where necessary, individual concepts are explained in more detail. As a fnal remark, it is worth pointing out that the theoretical approaches of Bloch, Mannheim, Ricœur and Jameson, although all essentially based on Marxist theory, are not always entirely compatible. For this reason, the application of this conceptual framework aims at times at heuristic value rather than theoretical rigour.  Ibid.  Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious:  Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981), 76. 27  Ibid.,  79. 28  Ibid.,  76. 25 26

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Chapter 1 ARCADIA AUSTRALIS  The European imagination abounds with eutopian visions for the region that is now Australia. Various epochs of European history have located their dreamlands in the Antipodes. The Elysian Fields, for example, that evergreen land of peace to which the heroes of antiquity retired, was placed by Homer at the ‘end of the Earth’.1 Legend also has it that a Satyr called Silenus told King Midas that beyond Europe, Asia and Africa, far south of the great ocean, there lies a land where the people sufer no hardship or want because it provides them with more than they need.2 This, presumably, was the myth that caused Alexander the Great, after he surpassed the previous limits of the world known to antiquity during his India campaign, to long to journey even farther to reach the other end of the world.3 Other mythological eutopias such as the Blessed Isles, Hesiod’s Golden Age, the biblical Ophir and Marco Polo’s fabled kingdoms have also been repeatedly associated with geographical regions that now roughly correspond to Australia. Even the Garden of Eden, the very archetype of eutopia in the Western imagination, has been located in Antipodal space:  it forms the crest of Mount Purgatory in Dante’s La Divina Commedia, which he posited on the opposite side of the world to Jerusalem. With this Antipodal geography Dante followed Christian cosmology faithfully, but more often than not the association of eutopias with the Antipodes was rather accidental. Amerigo Vespucci, for instance, the Italian name-​giver of America, confusingly located Brazil, which he describes as a veritable tropical paradise, in Europe’s Antipodes:

 Hom. Od. 4.563–​9.  Credited to the Greek historian Theopompus, this is related in Ael. VH 3.18. 3  Cf. Luc. 10.1. 1 2

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In conclusione fui alla parte degli Antipodi, che per mia navigazione fu una quarta parte del mondo; […] Questa terra è molto amena; e piena d’infnite alberi verdi, e molti grandi, e mai non perdono foglia, e tutti anno odori soavissimi, e aromatici, e producono infnite frutte, e molti di esse buone al gusto e salutifere al Corpo e campi producono molta erba, e fori, e radici molto soavi, e buone, che qualche volta mi maravigliavano de’soavi odore dell’erbe, e dei fori, e del sapore d’esse frutte, e radici, tanto che infra me pensavo, esser presso al Paradiso terrestre.4

In conclusion, I  was in the region of the Antipodes, which according to my navigation belonged to the fourth part of the world; […] This land is very delightful; and so full of numberless green trees of great size, which never shed their leaves, and have the sweetest and most aromatic fragrances, and bear numberless fruits, many of which taste excellent and are benefcial to well-​being, and the felds produce so many herbs and fowers and roots, all delicious and excellent, that at times I wondered at the delicious fragrances of these herbs and fowers, the tastes of these fruits and roots, thinking to myself, I must be close to the earthly Paradise.

Vespucci cannot be faulted too much for placing Brazil in the Antipodes considering that cartography in the sixteenth century was still in its infancy and that the Antipodes were still believed to stretch across most of the Southern Hemisphere. Numerous early-​modern maps document how toponyms from the already discovered New World of the Americas were, accidentally or intentionally, transposed to Terra Australis, the early-​modern avatar of the Antipodes. So it was that Marco Polo’s legendary kingdoms of Beach, Lucach and Maleatur, for example, were placed on the northern tip of what would now correspond to Western Australia. This inscription of mythical lands of natural wealth and paradisal gardens into Antipodal space produced what William Eisler fttingly called a ‘mosaic image of Terra Australis’.5 It was against this mosaic backdrop of mythological dreamlands that the European exploration of Australia took place in the seventeenth century. This chapter attempts to canvass parts of the discursive history of imagining Australia as a eutopia (‘good place’). It focuses specifcally on imaginations which, beginning with Quirós’s vision of Austrialia (sic), are built around the notion of a pleasure garden and in doing so rely fundamentally on the trope of bounty.

The Quirósque Vision In December 1605 the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós, commanding three Spanish ships, set sail from the Peruvian port of Callao  Vespucci to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Lisbon, 1502, in Ricerche istorico-​critiche circa alle scoperte d’Amerigo Vespucci, ed. Francesco Bartolozzi (Florence: Granducale, 1789), 170–​71. My translation. 5  William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 37. 4

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and headed for the South Pacifc.6 His mission was to discover Terra Australis and to claim the unknown Antipodal continent for the Spanish crown. After encountering only smaller islets for several months, Quirós’s expedition eventually reached what is now known as the Vanuatu archipelago in May 1606. Anchoring in the bay of its largest island, Quirós mistook the archipelago’s overlapping islands for a continental coastline and convinced himself that he had found his fnal destination:  Terra Australis. In a ceremonial procession of remarkable theatrical intensity, Quirós took possession of the island on 14 May 1606, claiming it for the pope and King Philip III of Spain. In honour of the House of Habsburg (of which the Spanish king was a member), Quirós baptised the new country ‘La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo’. He founded a city on the site, which he named New Jerusalem (la Nueba Hierusalem). He prophesied that New Jerusalem would become a most splendid metropolis, featuring a marble dome that would rival St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. With exuberant visionary zeal Quirós appointed numerous magistrates for the municipal administration of his future city, a Justice of the Peace and a Registrar of Mines among others. The climax of the ceremony was Quirós’s initiation of the ‘Order of the Holy Ghost’, of which he made every single member of his expedition, including native hostages, a knight.7 Only a few weeks later, Quirós’s expedition suddenly left the archipelago for as yet unknown reasons. One can only speculate, but indications about the crew’s discontent with their captain suggest that they may have opposed his command. At the same time relations with the island’s indigenous people became increasingly hostile, and this may have forced the Spaniards to retreat. Quirós fnally returned to Spain in 1607 and spent the rest of his life writing petitions to the Spanish crown, pleading unsuccessfully for funds for another expedition to his Austrialia del Espíritu Santo. Historical scholarship has often referred to Quirós’s frenzied religious enthusiasm to explain his actions and behaviour on Vanuatu. Oskar Spate, for example, described Quirós as a ‘man in the grip of religious mania’, and G. A. Woods called the Portuguese captain the ‘Don Quixote of the South Sea’, commenting that he ‘died with the divine madness still ablaze’.8 In   For a more detailed discussion of the Quirósque vision and its infuence over European visions of the South Pacifc and Australia, see my essay ‘Bounteous Botany Bay: Quirósque Utopianism and the Early European Exploration of Australia’, in The First Wave: Exploring Early Coastal Contact History in Australia, ed. Gillian Dooley and Danielle Clode (Adelaide: Wakefeld P, 2019). 7  Miriam Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita: The Spanish Quest for the Mysterious Great South Land (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006), 66. 8  Qtd in Miguel Luque and Carlos Mondragón, ‘Faith, Fidelity and Fantasy: Don Pedro Fernández de Quirós and the “Foundation, Government and Sustenance” of La Nueba 6

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an attempt to re-​evaluate these assessments, recent scholarship has taken a more sympathetic approach by drawing on baroque and early-​modern frameworks to interpret the ‘deranged theatrics’ Quirós had staged on Vanuatu.9 The most promising context that aids in understanding Quirós’s actions is provided by the utopianism of the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore. A  strong connection can be drawn between Joachim and Quirós, since the latter’s Portuguese hometown of Évora was a centre of Joachimite thought. Joachim prophesied that the fnal stage of history, the Age of the Holy Spirit, would see a new religious order transforming the world and ushering in paradise on Earth. His Christian utopianism, with its leitmotif of the Holy Spirit, runs through all the events on Vanuatu: it is particularly manifest in Quirós’s naming practices, most obviously in the name Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, which associates Terra Australis with the Holy Spirit; but also in Quirós’s Order of the Holy Ghost, which imitates Joachim’s visionary ordo novus. The fact that Quirós purposefully staged the annexation of Vanuatu on the day of Pentecost, which in the Christian calendar celebrates the heavenly descent of the Holy Spirit, further reinforces this connection. When the events on Vanuatu are reviewed in the light of Joachimite utopianism, Quirós’s overenthusiasm no longer appears unsystematic. Instead, the evidence points more towards a deliberate attempt on his part to establish a Christian eutopia on what he genuinely believed to be Terra Australis. For what it’s worth, one may want to acknowledge the utopian vision behind the quixotism in his unsuccessful efort to establish an Antipodal utopia. Specifcally the egalitarianism that shines through in his all-​inclusive nominations to the Order of the Holy Ghost hints at a socially progressive, concrete-​utopian impulse behind his vision. After his unfortunate return to Spain, Quirós began to make strategic alterations to his vision of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo that were to prove more infuential than his original plans. Although he was reduced to poverty and denounced publicly by his former crew members, Quirós petitioned determinedly for another expedition to the South Seas. The fact that he sold his clothes and bedding to raise money for printing his petition pamphlets illustrates his desperate determination to return to Vanuatu. Given his pressing fnancial situation, it is perhaps unsurprising that Quirós’s descriptions of Hierusalem in 1606’, The Journal of Pacifc History 40, no. 2 (2005): 133–​34; and G. A. Woods, The Discovery of Australia (London: Macmillian, 1922), 203. 9  See esp. Luque and Mondragón; and Margaret Jolly, “The Sediment of Voyages: Re-​ membering Quirós, Bougainville and Cook in Vanuatu,” in Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, ed. Margaret Jolly et al. (Canberra: ANU, 2009).

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Austrialia del Espíritu Santo became increasingly fantastical and exaggerated, fxating on the image of a land of plenty. This hyperbolic and euphemistic tone was part of a rhetorical strategy that, brushing over adverse reports from his critics, aimed to ensure fnancial support from the Spanish crown. His travel narrative, for which he commissioned the young poet Luis Belmonte Bermúdez, concludes: I am able to say, with good reason, that a land more delightful, healthy or fertile; a site better supplied with quarries, timber, clay for tiles, bricks for founding a great city on the sea, with a port and a good river on a plain, with level lands near the hills, ridges, and ravines; nor better adapted to raise plants and all that Europe and the Indies produce, could not be found.10 Quirós’s vision of a healthy and fertile utopia in the Antipodes unfolds most prominently in his Eighth Memorial. In this pamphlet Quirós reduces the complexities of his original Joachimite utopia to the simpler vision of a land of plenty. What this means from a conceptual perspective is that he moves away from his ‘city utopia’ of New Jerusalem to focus more on the aspect of a ‘body utopia’, a ‘utopia of sensual gratifcation’.11 Quirós thus reduces his Joachimite vision to a simpler form of social dreaming. The Eighth Memorial, which was intended as another petition to the Spanish crown but became extensively translated and circulated all over Europe, proclaims that Austrialia del Espíritu Santo is ‘the ffth part of the Terrestriall Globe, and extendeth it selfe to such length, that in probabilitie it is twice greater in Kingdoms and Seignories, than all that which at this Day doth acknowledge subiection and obedience unto your Maiestie’.12 It is, supposedly, ‘as great as all Europe & Asia the lesse’.13 Reminiscent of Vespucci’s panegyric on Brazil in style and  Clements Markham, The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, 1595–​1606, vol. 1 (London: Hakluyt, 1904), 271. 11   The terminology is borrowed here from Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies 4, no. 1 (1994): 10. 12  Ferdinand de Quir, Terra Australis Incognita, or A new Southerne Discouerie, Containing a ffth part of the World, trans. W. B. (London: Norton & Bill, 1617), 4 [EEBO: STC (2nd ed.)/​ 10822]; the original reads: ‘a quella parte oculta es quarta de todo el Glouo, y tan capaz que puede auer en ella doblados Reynos y prouincias de todas aquellas de q˜ V. M. al presente es señor’; see Pedro Fernández de Quirós, Señor:  el capitan Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, con este son ocho los memoriales que a V.M. … Madrid 1609 Dixson Library (NSW SL: SAFE/​Q60/​2), par.  1. 13  Quir, 4; the original reads: ‘La grandeza de las tierras nueuamente descubiertas […] es tanta como la de toda Europa, Asia menor’; see Quirós, par. 1. 10

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language, Quirós claims he has discovered a true ‘terrestriall Paradise’.14 In what reads like a catalogue of colonial desiderata, he then acquisitively lists spices such as nutmeg, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, cloves and anise seed; ‘garden-​fruits’ such as melons, pears, oranges, wine, honey and sugar cane; and other natural riches such as pearl, ebony, silver and, fnally, the prospect of gold –​all only waiting to be harvested.15 Raving about the ‘Wholesomeness and Pureness’ of the country, its melodious birds and sweet-​smelling fowers, Quirós paints with bold strokes an idyllic picture of an Antipodal utopia in which benevolent nature supplies man with all he needs. As Quirós summarises it:  ‘There are found in this Countrey as many commodities, both for the support & delectation of the life of man, as may be expected from a soile that is manureable, pleasant and very temperate. It is a fat and fertile land.’16 What Quirós describes here falls only slightly short of a veritable Land of Cockaigne. Binding together previous preconceptions of Antipodal utopias, Quirós brings these visions together in the body utopia of a tropical paradise. It is this Quirósque vision of a commercially highly appealing Antipodal utopia that would come to exert a major infuence over European (and especially British) visions of both the South Pacifc and the Australian continent. The key feature of the Quirósque vision is the conception of the Antipodes as a form of paradise, a Garden of Eden in which leisure dominates over work and natural riches are conveniently at hand. Etymology provides valuable insights into the mythological nexus Eden/​Paradise: both the Hebrew word for ‘pleasure’ and ‘delight’ and the Sumerian word for ‘wilderness’ and ‘plain’ converge in the word ‘Eden’. Similarly, the word ‘paradise’ (from Greek παράδεισος) refers to a park, orchard or pleasure ground. It is the notion of a pleasure garden that underpins the interrelated dreams of Eden and Paradise. This mythological nexus has, of course, profound symbolic signifcance in European culture. According to Christian belief, Eden represents the ‘lost abode of man’, the birthplace and original homeland from which humankind was banished, and to which it may eventually return. Precisely this underlying narrative of Paradise-​Lost-​and-​Regained makes the Quirósque utopia intricately complex, for even though Quirós’s Austrialia is situated in the immediate here and now, the mythos of an  Quir, 4; the Spanish original reads: ‘vn Paryso terrenal’; see Quirós, par. 1.  Quir, 7–​11; cf. Ross Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise:  Changing Literary Perspectives of Australia (Sydney: Angus, 1984), 22. 16  Quir, 14–​15; the original reads: ‘La comodidad y gustosa vida sera tanta quanta se vee en vna tan cultiuada, alegre, y fresca tierra’; see Quirós, par. 5. Notice that the English version seems to further increase the displacement of indigenous land management with the notion of spontaneous, natural growth by translating Quirós’s original ‘cultivada’ with ‘manureable’. 14 15

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Edenic place of abundance and leisure that underpins it is retrospective in its temporal orientation. The construction of an Antipodal utopia through the nexus Eden/​ Paradise produces, to borrow vocabulary from James Cliford, ‘structures of retrospection’: the paradisal garden of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo represents an ‘island out of time’, which due to its ‘prelapsarian appeal’ signifes a lost place of innocent bliss.17 At the core of this vision lies a specifc ideologeme: the trope of bounty. In essence, this ideologeme unhinges the connection between agricultural wealth and its creation and management by native people.18 It does so by replacing any form of native agriculture with the notion of natural abundance: the idea that a place’s agricultural wealth is spontaneous and ‘natural’, and subsequently free of any human efort or intervention, efects the erasure of indigenous peoples’ agronomic practices and their usually highly sophisticated management of the local environment. In its evocation of a benevolent, all-​supplying nature, the trope of bounty relegates indigenous producers to the position of passive bystanders and consumers  –​or put more bluntly, to naïve children living of mother nature’s gifts. In this, the trope has an ideological function according to the dogmatic Marxian sense of obfuscating actual relations of production (Produktionsverhältnisse) and, as such, efectively distorts reality. It is evident (at least to the attentive reader) that this ideologeme governs Quirós’s description of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, because when he conducted his colonial stocktaking of Vanuatu’s ‘natural’ riches, his landing party was in fact raiding villages and gardens.19 Quirós’s ideological repression of indigenous labour in his fantasy of an Antipodal utopia foreshadows in important ways later conceptions of Australia on the ground of terra nullius. What began as a positive, concrete-​utopian vision of Joachimite Millenarianism ultimately acquired a signifcant ideological underbelly. The Quirósque utopia’s backward-​looking orientation causes a spatio-​ temporal friction that fnds another refguration in the paradoxical ambivalences of soft primitivism. In his dream of Austrialia, Quirós lived out fantasies of European superiority, yet he simultaneously entertained contradictory notions of the noble savage. At times this verges on positive conceptions of indigeneity, yet the trope of bounty contains such fights into  James Cliford, ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’, in Writing Culture, ed. James Cliford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California P, 1986), 110–​12. 18  I am borrowing this term from cultural critic Beth Tobin; cf. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–​1820 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2005), 36. 19  Jolly, 67; I should point out, however, that Quirós seemed to be at least partially aware of gardening on Vanuatu. Nonetheless, this did not afect his vision of a naturally bountiful paradise. 17

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pre-​Rousseauian primitivism by persistently undermining native agency.20 As a concluding remark, it should be noted that this interplay between utopian vision and ideological revision establishes a paradoxical oscillation along two axes:  frst, the fuctuation between the poles of naturalness and artifciality, between body and city utopia; and second, between the garden as a sign of native ownership and as an emblem of colonial occupation. In many ways, this oscillation still characterises representations of Australia today.

The Cook Voyages The voyages of Captain Cook represent a pivotal point in the history of the European imagination of Australia. The Cook voyages, with their exploration of the South Pacifc’s uncharted regions, gave the last blow to the theory that a single monolithic continent covered most of the Southern Hemisphere. They lifted the veil of mystery of Terra Australis, causing the legendary continent to disintegrate into the geographic entities we know today. One would expect that Cook’s foray into Antipodal space would do away with previous utopian fantasies about the region, especially since the Cook voyages were fnancially supported by the Royal Society, whose scientifc interests clearly informed Cook’s ofcial instructions. However, the famous British explorer did not appear entirely immune to the kind of utopianism ofered by Quirós and his vision of Austrialia. For example, a trace of Quirósque enthusiasm can be sensed in Cook’s naming of Botany Bay, an inlet south of present-​day Sydney. Cook reported of the site: ‘I found in many places a deep black soil which we thought was capable of producing any kind of grain[;]‌at present it produceth besides timber, as fne meadow as was ever seen.’21 Cook’s description here bears some intriguing similarities to Quirós’s Eighth Memorial, which mentioned a ‘soile that is manureable, pleasant and very temperate’ and ‘aboundeth in wood’.22 However, when the First Fleet, following Cook’s and Joseph Banks’s  Instances, however, of native opposition are encapsulated in what Bronwen Douglas construes as ‘countersigns’ in which soft primitivism and the noble savage are transformed into their hard and ignoble counterparts. Bronwen Douglas, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–​1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014), 21. 21  James Cook, Journal of H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768–​1771 [3 May 1770]. MS 1, s230r, Digital Collection Manuscripts, National Library of Australia, Canberra; John Hawkesworth, the rather controversial editor of Cook’s journal, who took considerable editorial liberalities, changed this to: ‘We found also interspersed some of the fnest meadows in the world.’ 22  Quir, 15. Cook’s description seems even closer to the Spanish original, where Quirós writes of a ‘tierra negra y grassa’ (Quirós, par. 5). 20

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recommendation of Botany Bay, arrived at the site, the commanding Governor Arthur Phillip found Cook’s description, as Paul Carter writes, ‘so inaccurate he had to transfer the settlement to Sydney Cove’.23 Criticising Banks and Cook for relating ‘so faithlessly […] what they saw’, the First Fleet ofcer Watkin Tench wrote in response: We were unanimously of opinion, that had not the nautical part of Mr. Cook’s description, in which we include the latitude and longitude of the bay, been so accurately laid down, there would exist the utmost reason to believe, that those who have described the contiguous country, had never seen it. On the sides of the harbour, a line of sea coast more than thirty miles long, we did not fnd 200 acres which could be cultivated.24 Tench’s criticism of what he called Cook’s ‘fabled plains’ invites the suspicion that at times, the Cook voyages may have been carried away by an almost Quirósque overenthusiasm for Terra Australis, causing them to ofset the vision of a bountiful garden against the existing landscape.25 But the utopian expectations of the Cook voyages manifested themselves more concretely in a form which would come to dominate descriptions and representations of early-​colonial Australia –​probably because with the onset of British settlement, it became increasingly apparent that Quirós’s vision of a tropical Eden was not generally commensurate with the actual conditions of the Australian environment. Yet the underlying idea of a pleasure garden could, with some adjustment, still fnd reasonable application: two days before Cook would enthuse about the ‘deep black soil’ of Botany Bay, he recorded, ‘We made an excursion into the country which we found diversifed with woods, lawns and marshes, the woods are free from under wood of every kind and the trees are at such a distance from one another that the whole country or at least great part of it might be cultivated without being oblig’d to cut down a single tree.’26 Cook’s description here may seem rather innocuous and objective; in order to fully understand the associations evoked by this country  Paul Carter, Road to Botany Bay:  An Exploration of Landscape and History (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2010), 1. 24  Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales (London: Nicol & Sewell, 1793), 101; 29–​30; cf. Carter, 37–​41. 25  Tench, 101; cf. Carter, 37–​38; also Isabelle Merle, ‘Watkin Tench’s Fieldwork:  The Journal of an “Ethnographer” in Port Jackson, 1788–​1791’, in Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, ed. Margaret Jolly et al. (Canberra: ANU, 2009), 204. 26  James Cook, Journal of H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768–​1771 [1 May 1770]. MS 1, s229r, Digital Collection Manuscripts, National Library of Australia, Canberra; cf. Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011), 5. 23

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‘free from under wood’, it is necessary to look at the description given by Sydney Parkinson, the botanical draughtsman from Scotland who formed part of Banks’s scientifc entourage: ‘The country looked very pleasant and fertile; and the trees, quite free from underwood, appeared like plantations in a gentleman’s park.’27 It was this idea of a ‘gentleman’s park’ that allowed successful transplantation of the Quirósque vision of a pleasure garden into the Australian environment. Parkinson’s vision of a ‘gentleman’s park’ clearly found broad appeal among Governor Phillip and his ofcers. It is hard to say whether it was a case of objective observation or learned recognition, but the First Fleet’s second captain John Hunter, for instance, clearly reinforces Cook’s and Parkinson’s view: Near and at the Head of the Harbour, there is a very Considerable extent of tollerable land, and which may be Cultivated without waiting for its being cleard of the Wood, for the Trees stand very wide from each other, & have no underwood, in Short the Woods here in the place I am speaking of, resemble Deer Parks, as much as if they had been intended for such a purpose.28 Similarly, an observer wrote about the country near Port Stephens: ‘The hills are every where Clothed with wood, with constant verdure beneath it, unaccompanied by any Bush or Underwood, so that one is often forcibly reminded of Gentlemen’s pleasure grounds in the distance, on the Banks of a River, in England.’29 The homely association with an English gentleman’s ‘pleasure ground’ in this description is particularly noteworthy. As Bill Gammage points out, the common attribution of the word ‘park’ to Australia is somewhat surprising. Words like ‘bush’ found frequent application in other colonial settings (especially South Africa), but the word ‘park’ carried strong upper-​class connotations and was generally not associated with nature in a pristine and undisturbed state, but usually referred to the carefully husbanded country estates of the British gentry.30 Elizabeth Macarthur appears to have noted this when she wrote:  ‘The greater part  Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in His Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour (London, 1773), 134; cf. Gammage, 5–​6. 28  John Hunter, ‘Journal kept on Board the Sirius during a Voyage to New South Wales, May 1787–​March 1791’, SAFE/​DLMS 164, Col. 05, State Library of NSW, Sydney, 108–​9; cf. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacifc, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harper, 1985), 179. 29   Henry Thomas Ebsworth, Letters from New South Wales, 1826, 24. Henry Thomas Ebsworth papers. State Library of NSW, Sydney; cf. Gammage, 15. 30  Gammage,  15. 27

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of the country is like an English park, and the trees give it the appearance of a wilderness or shrubbery, commonly attached to the habitations of the people of fortune.’31 The sad irony is that the ‘English parks’ mentioned by the British invaders were, in fact, a product of Aboriginal land management. In his extensive study on the subject, Gammage has shown that the park-​like stretches of Australian landscape, in which the Britons recognised and recalled their homeland, were part of the traditional hunting ground patterns which Aboriginal peoples had created and maintained through fre-​ stick farming. In particular the frequently mentioned lack of underwood was the immediate result of the controlled and contained fres with which Aboriginal people shaped the landscape to their needs. This suggests that not only did Quirós’s utopia fnd a new avatar in the vision of a gentleman’s pleasure ground, but this vision also remained predicated on the trope of bounty: just as Quirós’s description of Vanuatu efaces indigenous agency in the production of the island’s wealth, so does the British colonisers’ description of ‘English parks’ in Australia ignore actual relations of production. The invocation of a gentleman’s park, in other words, attempts to write out Aboriginal producers and owners, and leaves in their place blanks ready to be inscribed with British claims to ownership. Mary Ann Parker, the frst woman to write a travel report on Australia, provides a forceful example of how the utopian notion of a pleasure garden, which we already saw ideologically overdetermined in Vespucci and Quirós, combines with the idea of an English park. She directly evokes the sense of ‘homeliness’ and ‘belonging’ that is associated with an English fower garden –​which is, of course, particularly poignant in the early-​colonial context, where questions of usurpation and legitimacy posed an ideological challenge to the colonisers. This is the description she gives of her landing in New South Wales in 1791: When we went on shore, we were all admiration at the natural beauties raised by the hand of Providence without expence or toil: I mean the various fower shrubs, natives of this country, that grow apparently from rock itself. The gentle ascents, the winding valleys, and the abundance of fowering shrubs, render the face of the country very delightful. The shrub which most attracted my attention was one which bears a white fower, very much resembling our English Hawthorn; the smell of it is both sweet and fragrant, and perfumes the air around to a considerable distance.32  Qtd in Smith, European Vision, 179.  Mary Ann Parker, A Voyage Round the World, in the Gorgon Man of War (1796; repr.; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 87.

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Parker’s continuous use of the word ‘shrub’ is noteworthy since shrubs commonly refer to small trees or woody plants like brushwood that have been cut or artifcially reduced in size; in much the same way as the visions of ‘gentleman’s parks’ mentioned before, this underhanded reference to Aboriginal land management suggests that her description, too, is steeped in the trope of bounty: Parker’s picture of the ‘beauties’ of New South Wales relies on the notion of a spontaneous and ‘natural’ wealth that, rather than being viewed as a result of indigenous agriculture, is understood as a present from God (‘Providence’). Like Vespucci and Quirós, Parker also calls forth the utopian image of a divinely created garden.

The Pastoral Paradigm The Quirósque vision of a pleasure garden was given a substantial update when the colonisation of Australia gathered new momentum after 1820. The colonial frontier was now rapidly expanding into much lusher regions beyond the Sydney basin, many of which were particularly suitable to pastoral use. This resulted in a rapid increase in the production of wool, which was quickly replacing whale oil as the colony’s main export so that by the 1850s, Australia had established itself as the largest supplier of wool to the British market.33 Within this historical context, the vision of Australia as a pleasure garden fell on fertile ground, but the colony’s new socio-​economic outlook required a few tweaks to the relevance and scalability of this vision. The Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell played an early and infuential role in this. His journals provide valuable insights into the reinterpretation or reorientation of the Quirósque vision into the more complex one of an Australian Arcadia. Mitchell, continuously praising and glorifying the ‘open and extensive pastoral regions’ he encountered during his surveying missions, came to call Australia a ‘land of picturesque beauty and pastoral abundance’.34 At the base of Mitchell’s vision was the aesthetic framework of the picturesque, which orders a landscape into waste-​and improved land according to the principles of contrast and irregularity. The following short passage, for instance, compresses picturesque organisation of space and imperial indexing of futurity into one small word picture:  Jane Lennon and Michael Pearson, Pastoral Australia:  Fortunes, Failures & Hard Yakka. A Historical Overview 1788–​1967 (Melbourne: CSIRO, 2010), 31; Bernard Attard, ‘The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction’, in EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples (Economic History Association, 2008). 34  Thomas Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia: In search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (London, 1848), 221. 33

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The land is, in short, open and available in its present state, for all the purposes of civilized man. We traversed it in two directions with heavy carts, meeting no other obstruction than the softness of the rich soil; and, in returning, over fowery plains and green hills, fanned by the breezes of early spring, I named this region Australia Felix.35 This is still very much equivalent to Quirós’s colonial stocktaking based on the trope of bounty; but Mitchell’s addition was that he grafted onto this framework the emotionally more evocative and compelling imagery of pastoral literature. A good example of this can be found in Mitchell’s drawing of Martin’s Range, which has been reproduced as an engraving in one of his journals.36 Again based on the aesthetic of the picturesque, this picture of a landscape in Queensland uses light, tonality and natural objects to clearly defne fore-​, middle-​and background into spaces of agricultural usability. But Mitchell imbues the drawing with a distinctively pastoral sentiment by focusing on a few cows grazing peacefully in the middleground and a male fgure reclining leisurely against a rock in the manner typical of a shepherd in pastoral paintings. Not only are these the basic fgurative personnel, so to speak, of the pastoral, but the ideas and mood conveyed by their positioning and posture corresponds exactly to the Epicurean ideal of otium, that is, the peaceful state of leisure that is central to the pastoral. It should be mentioned that Mitchell actually took cattle to this expedition, so the cows depicted were not imaginary additions to the scene. But just as much as Mitchell’s drawing captures an actual moment of rest during his exploration of Queensland, it simultaneously gestures beyond this immediate reality and beckons towards an anticipated Arcadian future. In this way, Mitchell’s journals mark the beginnings of a process in which the Antipodal utopia was remodelled from Quirósque pleasure ground to Austral Arcadia based on the conventions of the pastoral tradition. His mastering of this blend of picturesque aesthetic and pastoral imagery culminated in his description of Australia Felix, the Arcadian paradise that waits at the end of his journals. It was this utopian vision of rural simplicity and bliss that took over as the dominant representational strategy of Australia around the 1820s, as settlers, beguiled by Mitchell’s panegyric of Australia Felix, spread from the coastal settlements over the inland plains. A key function of the pastoral vision of Australia was to symbolically contain the British Empire’s political situation in the early nineteenth century.  Mitchell, Three Expeditions, vol. 2, 333; see also Robert Dixon, The Course of Empire: Neo-​ Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788–​1860 (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986), 117. 36  Mitchell, Tropical Australia, 225 (pl. 5). 35

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Arcadia could serve as a symbolic linchpin in the complex socio-​economic nexus that characterised Great Britain at the time, linking the Australian colony’s pastoral boom and need for free settlers with the increasing urbanisation, industrialisation, rural unemployment and Malthusian fears of resource depletion and overpopulation in Britain. Arcadia, representing the utopian location of the pastoral, was particularly suited to accommodate this nexus of discourses since it symbolically stood for a lost Golden Age of rural innocence, unspoiled by precisely the forms of alienation that defned mid-​ nineteenth-​century Britain (viz. displacement, industrialisation and urbanisation). However, the yearning for a lost past that underpins much of Arcadia also makes it susceptible to what Paul Ricœur calls utopia’s ‘pathological’ side.37 The reason for this is that the pastoral’s practice of seeking refuge in the romanticised (if not entirely imaginary) locus amœnus of Arcadia readily degenerates into unproductive escapism. Bloch describes this as ‘contemplative quietism’ that ‘disguises the future as past’. Paradoxically, it is precisely this practice of seeking refuge that also enables the pastoral to serve as a powerful vehicle for social critique: through its retreat to Arcadia the pastoral text criticises (at least implicitly, but more often explicitly) the society from which it retreats, and therefore features utopia’s positive, constructive tendency towards criticising social reality. Arcadia, with its potential for social critique as well as its inherent pathology of escapism, thus clearly displays the double-​edged nature intrinsic to utopia. Regarding the question as to what factors predispose a pastoral utopia to function pathologically rather than critically, Ernst Bloch identifes the representation of Arcadia as a readily accessible or attainable dreamland as crucial (by contrast to a temporally deferred or spatially detached utopia).38 A full impression of the rich emotional valence of pastoral imagery and its escapist associations may be gained from a short piece entitled ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’, which was published in the popular Victorian weekly Household Words. The story has a female narrator visit a settler family in the Australian interior. Her description of the family’s homestead abounds in images of idyllic prosperity, and conjures up a veritable cornucopia that testifes to the productivity of the colony: It was truly delightful to view this sylvan cottage in the calm and balmy coolness of a dewy morning, and to behold this structure, as it were, of rose-​trees and creepers, as the warmth of the morning sun opened  Ricœur, ‘Ideology and Utopia’.  Ernst Bloch, ‘Arkadien und Utopien’, in Europäische Bukolik und Georgik, ed. Klaus Garber (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 4–​5.

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those closed fowers that seem thus to take their rest for the night, and the fresh-​blown rose-​buds that were hardly to be seen the evening before; most of those could now be observed to be tenanted by that busy little creature, the bee, sent ‘as a colonist’, from England to Australia, humming, in all the active vivacity of its nature, a joyful morning carol to the God of Nature. Indeed, were it not that there were appearances of some more substantial domestic comforts to be seen in the background –​such as rows of beans, sweet peas, bed of cabbages, &c., set in the garden, and some young fruit-​trees; while near a shady corner might be noticed young ducks feeding under a coop, and ‘little roasters’ gambolling outside the pig-​stye, which by the way was deeply shaded by large bushy rose-​trees, this cottage at a distance might have been mistaken for a green-​house […] Truly, it was a little fairy home, with no rent, no taxes, no rates, to disturb the peace of the occupier; and no one, who has not lived in Australia, can conceive with what ease and little expense such rural beauties, such little paradises, and domestic comforts can be formed and kept up in that country.39 The vision that is articulated here fnds an excellent pictorial illustration in John Glover’s famous painting ‘A View of the Artist’s House and Garden’ (1835). The imagery of the settler garden and the ‘sylvan cottage’ deployed in both text and painting encapsulate the dream of Arcadia, of an idyllic life of rural simplicity and pastoral abundance. This vision echoes the Quirósque dream of a pleasure garden to a great extent, particularly in its emphasis on the ‘ease and little expense’ with which this utopia can be sustained. But it is also distinctly diferent:  where Quirós’s vision relies on the topoi of the tropical exotic, the Arcadian vision builds on the pastoral imagery of the country cottage and garden with their strong associations of homeliness and tradition. The Australian stories in Dickens’s Household Words were pivotal in the development and dissemination of the Arcadian vision of Australia, so much so that one could speak of a Dickensian Pastoral here. It is hard to overestimate the profound efect Dickens’s work had on the way in which Victorians saw themselves and the world. Beginning with Dickens’s earliest publications, his work played an active role in shaping British national identity in the nineteenth century, especially since his writing so often touched on the concept of Englishness. Coral Lansbury does not exaggerate when she argues that Dickens replaced for many Englishmen the recent historical past with his

 Caroline Chisholm and R. H. Horne, ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’, Household Words, 22 June 1850, 309–​10.

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idealised construct of a ‘Pickwickian England’ and thus changed the mythical self-​conception of the nation.40 A very similar argument can be made about Dickens’s infuence over the Arcadian vision of Australia. Household Words played an important role in this as it functioned as the mouthpiece of a specifcally Dickensian worldview. In its depiction of Great Britain, the Empire and the rest of the world, the journal refracted everything through a decidedly Dickensian lens of Englishness –​regardless of how internally inconsistent this lens actually was.41 Although the journal’s individual articles were written by an illustrious list of authors (including writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade and Edward Bulwer-​Lytton), Dickens was the journal’s ‘conductor’ and meticulously edited the contributions to ensure stylistic unity.42 Household Words and its successor journal All the Year Round featured numerous stories and sketches set in Australia.43 Dickens’s micromanagement of each of the contributions, and the fact that they ultimately appeared anonymously with only his name on the magazine’s front page, fnally meant that the vision of an Arcadian Australia was broadcast to the general public in the unanimous voice of Charles Dickens.44 The following excerpt from one of these Australian stories provides another insight into how the aesthetic of the picturesque, the notion of a ‘gentleman’s park’ and remnants of the trope of bounty combine with pastoral imagery to form a vision of Arcadia that replaces but also in many ways extends the Quirósque vision: Our way lay over a hard sand-​track; on one side, a river, or rather chain of pools; on the other, steep hills (Colonially, ridges), covered with Australian Pine  –​a beautiful tree, with excellent qualities for working freely, with a colour and smell like sandal-​wood, but useless for house use, as it breeds vermin. After an hour, we turned up stony ridges, thinly sprinkled with iron-​bark trees for three miles, until the range broke of short, in sight of a broad creek, which we forded, and, leaving the river, rode over undulating ground, timbered with box and iron-​bark; then  Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-​Century English Literature (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1970), 69, 158. 41  For a comprehensive discussion of Dickens’s construction of nationhood and Englishness in Household Words, see Sabine Clemm, Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood:  Mapping the World in Household Words (New York: Routledge, 2009). 42  Margaret Mendelawitz, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Dickens’ Australia:  Selected Essays from Household Words 1850–​1859, ed. Margaret Mendelawitz (Sydney: Sydney UP, 2011), xiv. 43  Margaret Mendelawitz (ed.), Charles Dickens’ Australia: Selected Essays from Household Words 1850–​1859 (Sydney: Sydney UP, 2011). 44  Lansbury,  70. 40

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over a thickly-​wooded, sandy, scrubby ridge, at the end of which our course lay for a mile through an open box forest, beautifully grassed, like an English meadow, which opened upon a splendid plain, as thinly dotted with trees as a nobleman’s park, which extended almost as far as the eye could reach, until, just on the horizon before us, appeared a dark boundary line, formed by a dense forest. But after riding several miles, during which we were constantly, but almost imperceptibly, descending, we came to a river never known to fail. It was in a valley, intersected by this river, which Father Gabriel’s settlement lay. Soon we could hear the lowing of the heifers, answered by their calves in the home-​station pens; the swash-​swashing of an oxen-​driven threshing-​machine, a recent investment of the patriarch’s; and presently, amid other farmyard sounds, the still moaning of a fddle. I don’t know which was most pleasant and homelike.45 Note how this passage moves through a landscape that is structured by the picturesque into diferent zones of cultivation. First reaching an ‘English Meadow’ and then a ‘nobleman’s park’, the journey fnally fnishes with the strongly sensory motif of the pastoral homestead and thus increasingly builds up the feeling of homeliness and belonging that were also apparent in Parker’s description of an English fower garden and the sylvan cottage in the story ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’ from Household Words. Before the evocative description of the homestead in ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’, the narrator joins the settler family for dinner. Describing a hearty meal of a ‘burly piece of beef with a plentiful supply of potatoes, peas, and greens’,46 she feshes out the text’s Arcadian vision by underscoring its domestic wealth as well as the rustic authenticity of the place and its people: Now, though some of my readers may not much admire this bush-​ culinary art, and this mode of dishing-​up a dinner, still there was in the whole scene so much of honest hospitality, so much of cheerful and good humoured hilarity, exhibiting in the most pleasing form the simple manners of a primitive people, –​the gems, in fact, of the class of English yeomanry, too often unable to fourish in their own native land, ingrafted and revived in a foreign distant shore, that even the most fastidious and refned could not but feel at such a moment a peculiar zest in joining a

 Samuel Sidney, ‘Father Gabriel; Or, the Fortunes of a Farmer’, Household Words, 12 October 1850, 68; emphasis in the original. 46  Chisholm and Horne, 309–​10. 45

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family so innocently happy and guileless as this, surrounded as they were by abundance of all the essential necessaries of life.47 The description here of a ‘primitive people’ with ‘simple manners’, who are ‘cheerful’ and ‘guileless’, vividly illustrates the Arcadian ideal of rural simplicity and bliss, and thus spells out the social vision that underpins the dream of Arcadia. Notably, the narrator associates this ideal with English yeomanry, and thus gives a national, even racial, spin to her vision of Arcadia. Again, the Arcadian vision modifes and extends the Quirósque pleasure garden in interesting ways: for one thing, it entrenches the signifcance of the garden as an emblem of colonial occupation (rather than native ownership); for another, it transfers the ethos of simplicity and bliss, which in the Quirósque vision characterised the indigenous population, onto working-​class settlers, and thus replaces one ‘primitive’ people with another. By emphasising the fact that the settler family has been ‘engrafted and revived in a foreign shore’, the narrator also foregrounds the issue of emigration. This proves elemental to the entire story. Although published anonymously, it must have been quite clear to the contemporary reader that the narrator, who is addressed only as ‘Mrs C–​–​–​’, referred to nobody else but the popular Victorian philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, who co-​authored the piece with R. H. Horne. A social reformer and activist, Chisholm had lived in Australia for some years and used this experience to advocate for emigration of poor British families and, in particular, single women to Australia. She wrote, for instance, The ABC of Colonization, and devised schemes such as the Family Colonisation Loan Society and the Female Immigrants’ Home to assist working-​class people to emigrate to the Australian colonies. It is unsurprising, therefore, that her story ends by conceding that the ‘little fairy home’ was marred only by a ‘certain vacuum’, since John Whitney, the settler family’s son, wanted nothing but ‘a wife to make his home a ft habitation for man’.48 It becomes apparent here that Chisholm’s Arcadianism aimed directly at potential migrants from the lower classes. It is the people ‘unable to fourish in their own native land’ who can prosper in this new country  –​the best example being the father of the family in Chisholm’s story, who can boast that he is now master of ‘one hundred and four acres’, owning ‘eight hundred sheep, and six hundred head of cattle, forty pigs, and a bit of money in the bank, too’.49 As Chisholm’s story shows, the pastoral representation of Australia,

 Ibid.,  308.  Ibid.,  310. 49  Ibid.,  309. 47 48

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pivoting around the Arcadian dream of idyllic innocence and rustic sufciency, is intricately linked to working-​class emigration. Chisholm’s short piece in Household Words demonstrates how the vision of an Arcadian Australia responds to and manages the complex socio-​economic nexus that defned Britain around the middle of the nineteenth century. The settler family in ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’ is presented as comprising refugees who successfully escaped the forms of social alienation that rendered their life in Europe miserable (viz. unemployment, industrialisation and urbanisation); and who found bliss and purpose in the Australian colonies as self-​sufcient farmers. Another story from Household Words, ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’ by Samuel Sidney, contrasts even more explicitly the evils of Modernity with this Arcadian vision of Australia when it tells the heart-​ rending story of Jem Carden, an honest farmhand who was transported for rebelling against the new ‘threshing-​machines that were […] throwing a good many poor people out of work’.50 The nineteenth-​century preconception about technology’s wholesale displacement of rural populations in Europe becomes personifed in the character of Jem Carden. Like Chisholm’s settler family, Carden fnds a refuge from the industrial dystopia of Britain in the Arcadia of Australia, where he soon builds a new home as a successful smallholder. However, there are some aspects that cast a shadow of doubt on these happy endings. For one thing, these stories have a strong overtone of nostalgia for a lost and heavily romanticised rural past, which strongly suggests a slip into pathological escapism. Often such stories operate as what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘compensatory structure’, that is, a symbolic mechanism which ‘strategically arouses fantasy content within careful symbolic containment structures which defuse it, gratifying intolerable, unrealizable, properly imperishable desires only to the degree to which they can again be laid to rest’.51 Jem Carden, for example, who begins as a victim of industrialisation rebelling against injustices prevalent in his home country, is ultimately transformed into a subservient labourer in the colony, where he furthers the imperial cause. The imagination of an Arcadian Australia provides here a convenient refuge from the pressing problems of Modernity. But in this, both Chisholm and Sidney ignore the harsh realities of settler life, and also reduce the complex and dynamic nature of Modernity to a simple binary of good-​versus-​bad. Chisholm’s story in particular appears to deploy a modifed version of the trope of bounty in its selective omission of labour and its depiction of natural riches as readily available. This, much like Quirós’s vision of Vanuatu,

 Samuel Sidney, ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’, Household Words, 6 April 1850, 41.  Jameson, ‘Reifcation and Utopia’, 141.

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is an ideological distortion in the dogmatic Marxian sense of obfuscating relations of production. In fact, colonial Australia was particularly unfavourable to the economic structure envisioned by Dickensian Arcadianism: before the advent of larger irrigation schemes, the soil quality, rainfall and seasonal patterns of Australia made the Arcadian vision of a self-​sufcient yeomanry living in pastoral gardens largely infeasible.52 The result, then, is that although this Australian Arcadia encapsulated a vision that articulates a strong societal critique in its pastoral retreat from a Britain tainted by the social ills of Modernity, it nevertheless eventually succumbed to ideology.

Streeton’s Arcadian Australia Throughout the nineteenth century the dream of Arcadia continued to defne Australia’s place in the European, and the newly emerging Anglo-​Australian, imagination. This is particularly intriguing given the fact that actual experience in the Australian colonies largely contradicted the quasi-​ Quirósque notion of a readily fertile and easily cultivated land and thus continuously proved the Arcadian ideal of independent small-​scale farming to be unattainable. However, the pastoral vision of Australia proved at least partially true in that large-​scale pastoralism was booming for much of the century. This meant that instead of realising the Arcadian dream by turning into a self-​employed smallholder, the poor working-​class migrant from Great Britain was much more likely to become a seasonal wage-​labourer for one of the ‘squatter kings’ of Australia.53 Even though Australian reality was therefore largely at variance with the Arcadian vision, its nostalgically evocative imagery nevertheless exerted great infuence on self-​consciously national visions of Australia that began to form towards the end of the nineteenth century. The work of Arthur Streeton provides an illuminating example of how the national vision retained the dream of Arcadia but also translated it into a form more compatible with the Australian landscape and the sentiments of Australian nationalism. Most of Streeton’s paintings could serve as  Qtd in Lansbury, 159.  Admittedly, I  am simplifying the course of Australia’s socio-​economic development here, particularly because I am bracketing out the complex diversifcation of Australia’s society and economy during the gold rush years. However, the fact remains that small-​ acre farming was mainly unsustainable, while pastoralism was making the largest contribution to Australia’s GDP by a single industry for most of the second half of the nineteenth century; cf. Georgina Murray and Jenny Chesters, ‘Economic Wealth and Political Power in Australia, 1788–​2010’, Labour History 103 (2012):  5; for the term ‘squatter kings’, see Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (Freemantle, WA: Freemantle P, 2007), 11.

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paradigmatic examples, but we shall focus here on Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889). Remnants of a picturesque aesthetic are still noticeable in the painting’s structuring of the landscape, but instead of roughness and contrast Streeton has blurred the contours into smooth patterns of light to produce the impressionist dreaminess so characteristic of the Heidelberg School. In the gold and blue palette for which Streeton is famous, an undulating landscape unfolds over the canvas, whose drought-​stricken foreground is populated by inconspicuous specks of sheep and a shepherd fgure gazing forlornly into the more saturated colours of the background. In the bottom left corner, right next to Streeton’s signature, one can faintly make out the word ‘Pastoral’. Streeton’s Golden Summer could readily be understood as showing that the pastoral utopia has become reality. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century Australia’s pastoral industry, which had experienced its most prosperous period around the middle of the century, started to show signs of steady decline.54 Hence scholars such as Ursula Hof have argued that Streeton’s ‘dramatisation of pastoral life’ was ‘concerned not with the actual and the present, but with a not very distant past’.55 This adds to the criticism that most of the artists and writers, who like Streeton were actively involved in articulating and shaping the national vision of Australia, belonged, in fact, to the middle-​class intelligentsia of Australia’s metropolises rather than the pastoral proletariat who populate their paintings and stories. As Paul Carter argues, the ‘nationalist myth of the bush’ represents a fantasy of the urban class, an expression of their own ‘anti-​urban nostalgia’.56 Critics such as Ian Burns have therefore suggested that Streeton and other painters of the Heidelberg School were not so much depicting the current socio-​economic reality of bush life as mythologising a rural past that had already disappeared, or never existed in the frst place.57 What this means is that the landscape of Golden Summer with its celebration of an Arcadian Australia was not so much capturing the present as nostalgically remembering the recent but already surpassed Golden Age of pastoralism in Australia. Moreover, the rural landscape that the painting evokes as spreading seemingly boundlessly in all directions also comes into question once it is understood that the painting was inspired and produced in the suburban

 Murray and Chesters, 5; Hoorn, 180–​81.  Ursula Hof, ‘Refections on the Heidelberg School, 1885–​1900’, Meanjin 10, no.  2 (Winter 1951): 132; cf. Hoorn, 168. 56  Carter, 282–​83. 57  Ian Burns, ‘Beating about the Bush:  The Landscapes of the Heidelberg School’, in Australian Art and Architecture:  Essays Presented to Bernard Smith, ed. Anthony Bradley and Terry Smith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), 85; cf. Carter, 282–​83. 54 55

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outskirts of Melbourne –​a city, it is worth noting, which for a brief period at that time was the second largest metropolis in the British Empire.58 The point to be made here is that the landscape depicted in Golden Summer is not an authentic snapshot in any strong sense of the word. Instead, the Arcadian vision of Golden Summer is larger than life and should therefore be understood as utopic rather than realistic. As Streeton’s contemporary J. S. MacDonald said about his paintings, rather than depicting Australian reality, they point the way to which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of focks and the minimum of factories. But we have to be like the rest of the world, feeling out of it if we cannot blow as many get-​ to-​work whistles, punch as many bundy-​clocks, and show as much smoke and squalor as places that cannot escape such curses […] if we choose we can yet be the elect of the world, the last of the pastoralists, the thoroughbred Aryans in all their nobility. Let others if they are bent upon it mass produce themselves into robotry; thinking and looking like mechanical monkeys chained to organs whose tunes are furnished by riveting machines. We do not need these things. We have the pastoral land, and if we do not realise it sufciently well, we have Streeton’s pictures to stress the miraculousness of  it.59 According to MacDonald, the utopian potential of an Arcadian Australia reaches its full expression in Streeton’s idyllic landscapes. In racial language that is even more pronounced than Chisholm’s, he emphasises the value of the ‘pastoral land’ as an immediately available but ever rarer refuge from the dystopia of Modernity with its ‘bundy-​clocks’ and ‘riveting machines’ that turn humans into ‘mechanical monkeys’. MacDonald thus emphasises how paintings like Golden Summer stage a retreat to a Golden Age of unalienated rural bliss, and thereby throw into stark relief the sprawling urbanisation, increasing technological commodifcation and emotional impoverishment that already troubled British migrants in the 1850s, but which by the 1890s were even further exacerbated. However, the duality of Arcadia manifests itself here again, because while such depictions of Australia as an Arcadian haven from the plights of industrialised and urbanised life articulate a trenchant critique of Modernity, they also rely heavily on escapist nostalgia which,  Shane Huntington and Stephen K. Smith, ‘Univer-​City of Melbourne: Case of Medical Regionality’, in Univer-​ Cities:  Strategic View of the Future:  From Berkeley and Cambridge to Singapore and Rising Asia, ed. Anthony SC Teo, vol. 2 (Singapore:  World Scientifc, 2014), 262. 59  Qtd in Hoorn, 241–​42. 58

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rather than critically appealing to the future, looks backward to an idealised and irreversibly lost past, and thus paralyses Arcadia’s subversive force. The critical potential of Arcadia again succumbs here to the ideological weight of nostalgia. Although Streeton’s work was not immediately successful, it was only a matter of decades before he was idolised as a national icon. For instance, Frederick McCubbin, his fellow member of the Heidelberg School, praised him for capturing nothing less than the national essence of Australia. Although McCubbin commented specifcally on the painting The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might (1896), his remarks could just as easily be applied to Streeton’s work in general: One cannot imagine anything more typically Australian than this poem of light and heat. It brings home to us forcibly such a sense of boundless regions of pastures fecked with sheep and cattle, of the long rolling planes of the Never-​Never, the bush-​crowned hills, the purple seas of our continent. You could almost take this picture as a National Symbol.60 Fellow artist and critic Lionel Lindsay went so far as to call Golden Summer ‘historically the most important landscape in Australia’.61 Perhaps unlike any other artist, Streeton succeeded in translating the pastoral vision of an Arcadian Australia into a coherent national utopia. This is manifest most clearly in what Bernard Smith calls the ‘visual integrity’ of Streeton’s landscapes.62 Streeton’s Arcadian utopia is a site that is spatially as well as temporally removed from the corrupted sphere of Modernity with its rational fragmentation, urban displacement and social alienation, and ofers instead the wholesomeness and bliss of Arcadian simplicity. As Hoorn puts it:  ‘In front of Streeton’s pastoral paintings, the viewer would fnd the spirit of Australia, a psychic wholeness and sense of being at home.’63 But the ‘psychic wholeness’ of Streeton’s work comes at a price. As McLean argues, Streeton ‘sought a transcendence which completely forgot the slaughter, destruction and melancholy of colonial history’.64 Streeton’s creation of a

 Qtd in Ian McLean, White Aborigines:  Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge UP, 1998), 52. 61  Lionel Lindsay, ‘Golden Summer’, Evening News, 28 November 1923, 1. 62  Bernard Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition:  A Study of Australian Art since 1788, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 146. 63  Hoorn,  243. 64  McLean,  55. 60

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sense of belonging in (and to) the landscape of Arcadia is predicated on the foreclosure of any issues antagonistic to colonial landownership and dominance, and thus on Arcadia’s transcendence of historical reality. No fences or enclosures are required in Streeton’s ‘land of the golden feece’,65 because unlike the early-​colonial period, proprietorship was presupposed and the question of ownership therefore precipitately settled. We thus fnd Arcadia again entangled in the ideology of settler colonialism.

Arcadian Communitarianism The entanglement of Arcadia and settler colonialism found a fnal and in some ways more sophisticated expression in the rich utopianism that sprang up in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Leading up to Australia’s federation, the 1890s were a complex period of social and economic upheaval: the decade experienced a global fnancial crisis and one of Australia’s severest droughts; it saw the culmination of a subprime mortgage crisis, the closure of the Federal Bank and several private banks, but also numerous major strikes for better working conditions and the formation of the Australian Labor Party. It was in this socio-​economic context that a powerful Panglossian utopianism developed:  the 1890s were remarkably rich in communitarian experiments anticipating the imminent turn of the century (e.g. William Lane’s New Australia Movement), and boasted a rich array of literary utopias, many of which recast the dream of Arcadia in a form more relevant and meaningful to the contemporary situation.66 Two such texts are David Andrade’s The Melbourne Riots and How Harry Holdfast and His Friends Emancipated the Workers (1892) and Horace Tucker’s The New Arcadia: An Australian Story (1894).67 Like all the pastoral visions discussed so far, both utopias draw heavily on the juxtaposition of Arcadia against the  Ibid.,  79–​80.  For discussions of utopianism in the 1890s, see Nan Bowman Albinski, ‘Visions of the Nineties’, Journal of Australian Studies 20 (1987): 12–​22; Melissa Bellanta, ‘Clearing Ground for the New Arcadia:  Utopia, Labour and Environment in 1890s Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 26, no. 72 (2002): 13–​20; Verity Burgmann and David Milner, ‘Future without Financial Crises: Utopian Literature in the 1890s and 1930s’, Continuum 23, no.  6 (2009):  839–​40; Van Ikin, ‘Dreams, Visions, Utopias’, in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (Maryborough:  Penguin, 1988), 253–​66; Bill Metcalf, ‘The Encyclopedia of Australian Utopian Communalism’, Arena 31 (2008): 47–​61. 67  David Andrade, The Melbourne Riots. And How Harry Holdfast and His Friends Emancipated the Workers (Melbourne: Andrade & Co., 1892) (via Wikisource): https://​en.wikisource. org/​wiki/​The_​Melbourne_​Riots; Horace Tucker, The New Arcadia:  An Australian Story (London: Robertson, 1894) (via Wikiscource): https://​en.wikisource.org/​wiki/​The_​New_​Arcadia. 65 66

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pathology of Modernity, which lends particular weight to their visions given urban unemployment, poverty and other acute socio-​economic pressures of the 1890s. But Andrade and Tucker were innovative insofar as both reworked the Dickensian Pastoral and its vision of self-​sufcient small-​scale farmers by introducing the idea of co-​operation: ‘Small holdings’, says Dr Courtenay, the protagonist of Tucker’s utopia, ‘are unproftable without co-​operation.’68 Both novels outline communal schemes, in which skilled and unskilled labourers pool their fnancial and human resources to buy and settle land in the countryside. Naturally these co-​ops immediately succeed in turning parched patches of desert into Arcadian oases. The following description from Tucker’s novel, in which an unlucky smallholder hit by severe drought and in search of help stumbles upon one of the co-​ops, clearly relies on pastoral imagery to showcase the success of the commune: Along the valley for miles rolled the fowing sea of green –​sorghum and maize, broom-​corn and wheat. In the meadow, the well-​watered lucern half hides the cattle that have strayed into it, while orangery, orchard, and vineyard streak with diagonals of green the red soil of the sloping hill-​sides. ‘I could not believe it was the same world’, exclaimed a bronzed, unbarbered selector, as he leaned over the boundary-​wire beside the topmost channel […] All, for hundreds and thousands of miles, fertile and smiling all the year round, if only water be conserved. ‘Just you go and stand in that maize’, suggests a settler, cutting watercress beneath the willows. ‘Creep in that there row and hold up your whip, and you ben’t able to top the corn, I’ll lay you.’ No more he could. Burly Starveling with bushy beard disappears into the ocean of green, and only the rustling and laughing of the yellow beards far above his head indicate the position of the dusty man of the plains.69 Tucker also substantially exploits the classic Arcadian tension between city and country and the symbolic opposition of rural simplicity and urban corruption, for example, when he decries the ‘senseless parading about overgrown cities’, or when he tells the workers who have ‘swarmed to manufacture for a population that does not exist’ to ‘go on to the lands and become producers, masters of your own destiny!’70 To Tucker’s credit, his vision of Arcadia seems more  New Arcadia, p. 6 (via wikisource).  Ibid.,  174. 70  Ibid.,  5. 68 69

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grounded in the environmental and social reality of late-​colonial Australia, especially because of his focus on bundling working-​class capital and labour power and applying sustainable irrigation techniques. Andrade’s The Melbourne Riots follows a very similar pattern. But unlike the Anglican clergymen Tucker, whose novel is set into motion by the Christian philanthropy of the bourgeois fgure of Dr Courtenay, the anarchist Andrade focuses on the revolutionary potential of the working class itself. In his novel the success of the co-​operative, socialist community ultimately sets of a global revolution: ‘The movement soon spread to England, Europe, America, Africa, and even Asia; and the workers of all countries soon began to forget they had ever been divided into nations, for they were all becoming Social Pioneers, and realized they were all common brothers in humanity.’71 In many ways, Tucker’s and Andrade’s utopias free Arcadianism of some aspects that previously curbed its concrete-​utopian potential. Most importantly, both overcome the Quirósque legacy of the trope of bounty as they replace the stereotype of an all-​supplying nature with the notion of the power of the many. However, in their insistence on a pastoral transformation of the landscape they move closer to another utopian discourse and its ideological underbelly:  the Civilising Mission and its notion of improvement.

 Qtd in Ian Turner (ed.), The Australian Dream: A Collection of Anticipations about Australia from Captain Cook to the Present Day (Melbourne: Sun Book, 1968), 188; on Andrade’s novel, see also Nan Bowman Albinski, ‘A Survey of Australian Utopian and Dystopian Fiction’, Australian Literary Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 15–​17; and Burgmann and Milner, 843–​44.

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Chapter 2 THE CIVILISING MISSION  The fact that the frst Australian settlements were founded as penal colonies casts a peculiar light on the kind of vision that underpinned colonialism in Australia. It is, however, unquestionable that the Botany Bay project was to a considerable extent driven and informed by a utopianism with deep roots in the European imagination. A  clear glimpse of this can be gained from artworks and poetry inspired by the colony’s dubious beginnings. In 1789 Governor Phillip sent a sample of clay from Sydney Cove to Joseph Banks, who had his fellow member of the Royal Society, the famous English potter and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, fashion it into a medallion called ‘Hope encouraging Art and Labour, under the infuence of Peace, to pursue the employments necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement’. This medallion gives an early insight into the utopian vision behind the British colony in its depiction of Hope personifed as a female in classical dress commanding the similarly personifed fgures of Peace, Art and Labour. The medallion became the frontispiece to Phillip’s journal, accompanied by a poem by Erasmus Darwin which spells out this vision in more detail: VISIT OF HOPE TO SYDNEY-​COVE, Near BOTANY-​BAY Where Sydney Cove her lucid bosom swells, Courts her young navies, and the storm repels; High on a rock amid the troubled air HOPE stood sublime, and wav’d her golden hair; Calm’d with her rosy smile the tossing deep, And with sweet accents charm’d the winds to sleep; To each wild plain she strech’d her snowy hand, High-​waving wood, and sea-​encircled strand. ‘Hear me’, she cried, ‘ye rising Realms! record ‘Time’s opening scenes, and Truth’s unerring word. –​ ‘There shall broad streets their stately walls extend, ‘The circus widen, and the crescent bend; ‘There, ray’d from cities o’er the cultur’d land,

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‘Shall bright canals, and solid roads expand. –​ ‘There the proud arch, Colossus-​like, bestride ‘Yon glittering streams, and bound the chafng tide; ‘Embellish’d villas crown the landscape-​scene, ‘Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between. –​ ‘There shall tall spires, and dome-​capt towers ascend, ‘And piers and quays their massy structures blend; ‘While with each breeze approaching vessels glide, ‘And northern treasures dance on every tide!’ –​ Then ceas’d the nymph –​tumultuous echoes roar, And Joy’s loud voice was heard from shore to shore –​ Her graceful steps descending press’d the plain, And Peace, and Art, and Labour, join’d her train.1 Compared to the Quirósque vision of a pleasure garden, it is striking that the vision which both poem and medallion articulate puts more emphasis on time as the crucial variable. The vision expressed here is clearly projected into the future, whereas Quirós’s vision of a pleasure garden was situated in the present time and place. Thus instead of an instantly available body utopia, the focus here lies much more on the anticipation of a city utopia in the future. The clay Phillip sent from the colony has to be viewed as highly symbolic, representing the continent itself and the expectation that it would be moulded to the colonisers’ wishes. Darwin’s poem mirrors this theme, especially when it has Hope’s ‘graceful steps’ leave deep imprints ‘press’d’ into the unresisting, amenable plains. Although Hope is invoked as a female fgure with ‘rosy smile’ and charmingly ‘sweet accents’, her tone is remarkably belligerent as she dictates (rather than prophesies) how the colony’s future will unfold. Her speech, in fact, maps out the Civilising Mission –​that is, the ideological narrative that rationalises the aggressive colonial expansion of the British Empire as a benign act, bestowing their supposedly superior civilisation on the ‘wild plains’ of Australia. Hope’s vision of a civilised future focuses mainly on economic and municipal aspects, such as the colony’s infrastructure of streets, canals and bridges, and its agricultural productions and overseas exports.2 Notably, this vision of a city utopia is brought into sharp relief by the wild and tempestuous appearance of the land, a disparity which underscores the drastic transformation of the landscape and which also contrasts markedly with the Quirósque notion of a benign, all-​supplying nature. Hope’s vision of the  Erasmus Darwin, ‘Visit of Hope to Sydney-​Cove, near Botany-​Bay’, in Arthur Phillip, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, 3rd ed. (London: Stockdale, 1790), xii–​xiii. 2  Smith, European Vision, 179. 1

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Civilising Mission is perhaps best embodied by Labour –​the only male fgure on the medallion, who, with intriguingly coy poise, hides a sledgehammer behind his back –​rather than Peace –​the female fgure with an olive branch in hand who forms the centre of the medallion but averts her face disinterestedly. While Hope orders Australia’s ‘rising Realms’ to listen to and acknowledge her plans for the future, she announces this very proclamation as ‘Time’s opening scenes’. Fashioning herself as a divine creator whose words speak the country into existence, she thus identifes her vision as the starting point of Australia’s history. Her vision of the Civilising Mission comes, therefore, at the expense of the continent’s past, of any previous form of history the land may have held. This overwriting of indigenous histories clearly outlines the ideological mechanisms at work here so that the larger narrative becomes apparent now: as Robert Dixon describes it, Hope and her train of Peace, Art and Labour are supposed to represent the ‘arrival of civilisation’, yet behind their benign-​sounding Civilising Mission lurks nothing but the ‘consummation of empire’.3 In the end, we fnd in both poem and medallion the paradox that the imperial vision of the Civilising Mission is articulated through the utopian voice of  Hope.

Early Imperial Imaginations The Antipodes had inspired fantasies of civilising missions and colonial expansion long before there were any concrete plans for colonising them. In the European imagination, the Antipodes for the longest time represented the Non-​Plus Ultra, the fnal frontier of geographical exploration. The desire to explore and conquer is most famously encapsulated in what Gabriella Moretti calls the ‘imperial myth of universal conquest’, that is, the legendary episode in which Alexander the Great, having already surpassed the previous limits of the World known to Antiquity during his India campaign, longed to journey even further to reach the other end of the World.4 As early-​modern maps amply demonstrate, descriptions from semi-​factual and mythologically enhanced works such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo’s travel narratives and, of course, Quirós’s Eighth Memorial fused into a vision of Terra

3 4

 Dixon, The Course of Empire, 16.  Gabriella Moretti, ‘The Other World and the “Antipodes”: The Myth of the Unknown Countries between Antiquity and the Renaissance’, in European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition, ed. Wolfgang Haase et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 257; apparently the reference is to Luc. 10.1; cf. also Alfred Hiatt, ‘Petrarch’s Antipodes’, Parergon 22, no. 2 (2005): 5.

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Australis as an exotic, alluring and fabulously rich dreamscape –​the ultimate object of desire in Europe’s imperial imagination. Suspended between mythological fantasy and empirical evidence, Terra Australis provided fertile ground for the imperial imagination. As Hiatt describes it: ‘Terra Australis was the shadow to New World cartography, or the supplement to the supplement –​a kind of colonial overspill that had to be explored by the European imagination before it was explored by its navigators.’5 First signs of this can be seen in Luigi Pulci’s ffteenth-​century poem Morgante. It is in a short but poignant episode towards the end of Pulci’s chivalric epic that the Antipodes emerge as a big question mark in the European imagination. In Canto XXV, the demon Astarotte declares that it is very possible to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules (an important symbol denoting the geographical and intellectual limits of classical Antiquity), and thus beyond the known limits of the World. Astarotte goes on to explain that the Antipodes are populated (‘there are cities, castles and empires down there’), but that the Antipodeans worship pagan gods.6 This is highly controversial since church doctrine had so far largely rejected the possibility of Antipodal populations. It leads Rinaldo, one of the epic’s protagonists, to raise the question of salvation: Disse Rinaldo: –​Poi che a questo siamo, dimmi, Astaròt, un’altra cosa ancora: se questi son della stirpe d’Adamo; e, perchè vane cose vi s’adora, se si posson salvar qual noi possiamo. –​7

Said Rinaldo: –​Now that we’re at it, tell me, Astarotte, yet another thing: whether these people are of Adam’s lineage; and also, since they worship empty things, whether they can gain salvation like we do. –​

Rinaldo highlights here the major challenge which the Antipodes pose to the European, and specifcally Christian, imagination: if Antipodeans belong to Adam’s progeny and can, consequently, gain salvation, then it becomes imperative that they must not remain ignorant of the Gospel.8 The devil’s reply to Rindaldo amounts to an almost formal theological discourse: in line with Matt. 24.14, Astarotte reminds Rindaldo of the Great Commission, inciting the Paladin to a crusade to the Antipodes. The last canto of Pulci’s epic fnally suggests that Rinaldo took up the demon’s call and sailed of to civilise the Antipodes:  Alfred Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (London: British Library, 2008), 187. 6  ‘laggiù son città, castella e imperio’; Morgante XXV, 230.6; ‘Adora il sole e Juppiterre e Marte’; Morgante XXV, 231.6. Translation: ‘Down there are cities, castles and empires’; Morgante XXV, 230.6; cf. Moretti, 272. 7  Morgante XXV, 232.1–​6. My translation. 8  Moretti, 272–​73. 5

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Ma l’aüttor disopra ov’io mi specchio parmi che creda, e forse crede il vero, che, benché e’ fusse Rinaldo già vecchio, avea l’animo ancor robusto e fero e quel suon d’Astarotte nello orecchio come disotto in quell’altro emispero erano e guerre e monarchie e regni, e che e’ passassi alfn d’Ercule i segni.9

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But the author of this work upon which I refect, it seems to me believed, and he may be right about this, that although Rinaldo was already very old, he still had a sturdy and wild spirit and with Astarotte’s vision in his ear that down there in that other hemisphere are wars and kingdoms and realms, he fnally travelled beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Pulci’s Morgante testifes to the missionary impetus that was building up in response to the mysterious blank that Terra Australis formed in the European imagination. Notably, at about the same time as Pulci’s epic sent Rinaldo on a civilising mission to the Antipodes, the Columbus voyages were taking of to the Americas. Pulci’s epic, therefore, marks the beginnings of a larger process during which the Antipodes became embedded in expansionary dreams about evangelisation and colonisation. This would ultimately culminate in the imperial vision of the Civilising Mission.10 It is in this historical context, with the Age of Discovery gathering momentum and modern imperialism emerging in its frst forms, that the literary utopia fnds its inaugural moment in the publication of Thomas More’s eponymous work in 1516. Critics often point to the complex but clear connections between the literary utopia and the rise of imperialism. Antonis Balasopoulos, for instance, holds that the early-​modern period produces the ‘most explicit tropings of utopia in expansionist terms and of expansionism in utopian ones’.11 More concretely, Bill Ashcroft sees More’s text as the literary precursor to the imperial project.12 After all, the wealth of More’s utopian society relies on imperial expansion: Utopia’s foundation and subsequent growth is based on dispossessing and displacing the indigenous people into whose lands it expands.13 The genre and the context of its foundation, therefore, reveal a very tightly knit interrelation between the literary form of utopia and the ideology of imperialism.

 Morgante XXVIII, 233. My translation.  It is worth keeping in mind, however, that Pulci’s Morgante, although it is deliberately placed within the tradition of the Chanson de Geste, is shot through with burlesque episodes, and that its evangelist vision of a Christian Antipodes carries traces of irony, especially since it is voiced by the demon Astarotte. 11  Antonis Balasopoulos, ‘Unwordly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism’, Utopian Studies 15, no. 2 (2004): 4. 12  Bill Ashcroft, ‘Critical Utopias’, Textual Practice 21, no. 3 (2007): 415. 13  The passage in question is ‘Quod si forte per totam insulam plus aequo moles intumuerit, tum ex qualibet urbe descriptis ciuibus in continente proximo ubicumque indigenis agri 9

10

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At the same time (as the previous chapter has shown), Terra Australis became an increasingly distinct and prominent topos in the utopian imagination. The strong attraction exerted by the not-​ yet-​ discovered continent spawned a rich array of utopian writings from all over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of these works are strongly reminiscent of More’s inaugural Utopia. By exploiting the epistemological uncertainty that defned Terra Australis in the early-​modern period, these ‘Austral Utopias’ use Antipodal space as blank canvas on which all kinds of societal blueprints could be drawn up in response to the various social challenges of Europe at the time. In their deployment of Terra Australis as a fctional counterfoil to European societies, these texts clearly follow More in harnessing the critical and subversive potential of utopia. But they also, with remarkable consistency, couch fantasies of survival, exploration and conquest in More’s narrative framework. Frequently, the Austral Utopias feature a complex blend of misogyny and imperialism with a touch of hetero-​erotic fantasy. Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pine (1667/​8) is a good example, as it tells the story of an Englishman, who, stranded with four women, takes it upon himself to populate an uninhabited island near Terra Australis.14 Another notable example is Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1750), a highly popular adventure romance with similar erotic undertones, in which a castaway Englishman discovers an isolated Antipodean society. It is by virtue of his superior European technology that Peter Wilkins soon acquires a position of power over his Antipodean hosts. This implicit narrative of conquest heavily indulges the imperial fantasy that the colonised eventually come to acknowledge and appreciate the process of colonisation by themselves and without force. As Christian Marouby explains: On the purely fctive level of a kind of wish fulfllment, this [fantasy] performs a crucial function:  that of justifying European rule. If the natives themselves recognize the superiority and natural authority of their multum superest, & cultu uacat; coloniam suis ipsorum legibus propagant, ascitis una terrae indigenis si conuiuere secum uelint.’ See Thomas More, De optimo reip. statu, deque noua insula Vtopia … (Basel, 1518), 87. 14  Alfred Hiatt, ‘Terra Australis and the Idea of the Antipodes’, in European Perceptions of Terra Australis, ed. Anne M. Scott, Alfred Hiatt, Claire McIlroy and Cristopher Wortham (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 9–​44, 13; on The Isle of Pine, see also Neil Rennie, Far-​Fetched Facts: The Literature of Trabel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 66f; W.  T. James, ‘Nostalgia for Paradise:  Terra Australis in the Seventeenth Century’, in Australia and the European Imagination, ed. Ian Donaldson (Canberra:  ANU, 1982), 77f; and Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–​1750 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 72f.

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civilized guest, there is no need to appeal to any right of conquest or manifest destiny. In these utopian versions of colonialism, Europeans do not have to impose their sovereignty on native populations; they merely acquiesce to their desire to be ruled by someone they consider their superior.15 Peter Wilkins therefore acts out, as Paul Arthur puts it, ‘scenes that symbolise Europe taking colonial control over the Antipodes’.16 As such, Peter Wilkins and the works that follow in the same vein represent fctional precursors to the Civilising Mission and its underlying fantasy of ‘benign colonisation’, in which indigenous peoples welcome colonial domination by a supposedly superior European power.17 Although it has been argued that it was primarily the British who produced utopian works which fagrantly indulged in imperial fantasies about Terra Australis, there are also a number of Austral Utopias from France that explore very similar themes.18 Take, for example, Nicolas Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s La Découverte Australe par un Homme-​volant (1781), a novel that engages explicitly with the issue of ‘civilising’ native peoples. It tells the story of Victorin, a Frenchman who invents mechanical wings that allow him to travel to the Southern Hemisphere. Victorin and his sons go on to found a colony in the ‘Austral lands’, where they encounter a multitude of ‘homme-​bêtes’ (bestial men), hybrid creatures that are described as half human, half animal. They eventually decide to capture a male and female of each of these humanoid species, so that they can be ‘studied and educated as humans’.19 The Frenchman’s ‘civilising’ of the homme-​bêtes is praised in the preface of Rétif ’s novel as a better, more humane approach to colonisation, in explicit contrast to the Spanish conquest of the Americas:  ‘during the discovery of the Austral Islands, the conduct of the French heroes is quite the opposite to the one of the Spaniards and those other Europeans who discovered

 Christian Marouby, ‘Utopian Colonialism’, North-​Dakota Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1988): 149.   Paul Longley Arthur, Virtual Voyages:  Travel Writing and the Antipodes, 1605–​ 1837 (New  York:  Anthem P, 2010), 191; for further discussion of Peter Wilkins, see David Fausett, Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 72f. 17  Arthur, 75, 76. 18  Jean Garagnon, ‘French Imaginary Voyages to the Austral Lands in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Australia and the European Imagination, ed. Ian Donaldson (Canberra: ANU, 1982), 91–​92. 19   Giulia Pacini, ‘Colonial Predicaments, Eugenic Experiments, and the Evacuation of Compassion:  “Perfecting” the Hybrid Creatures in Rétif ’s La Découverte Australe’, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 60, no. 3 (2006): 172. 15 16

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America’.20 However, Rétif ’s promotion of the idea of a benign Civilising Mission has to be viewed against the historical background, specifcally France’s colonial aspirations and the need for cheap labour in the French colonies.21 Colonial utopias such as Rétif ’s may oppose more violent forms of imperial conquest, but they merely translate colonial oppression into a less overt, internalised form, whereby utopia’s emancipatory force only becomes more deeply buried in the compensatory structures of imperial ideology. Since the Austral Utopias assisted in this way in advocating the idea of a benign Civilising Mission as a framework within which colonial expansion becomes morally justifable, it is unsurprising that France and Great Britain, the two emerging colonial powers of the time, produced by far the greatest number of  them.

The Euchronic Vision With the onset of British colonisation, the temporal profle of Australia as a ‘terra nondum cognita’, as the not-​yet of European expansionism, reached its apex. The painting A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove (1794) by the convict artist Thomas Watling provides a remarkable example of this –​not least because it manages, in spite of the representational limitations of the visual arts with respect to time, to successfully articulate a temporal vision. Watling’s painting gives us a rare impression of what Sydney may have looked like in its very early days. Directing the eye of the viewer towards the man-​made architecture and constructions, the ships, buildings, fences and plantations that dominate its lower centre, the painting ofsets the fedgling settlement against the nature that surrounds it. This tension between settlement and environment is responsible for the painting’s intriguing sense of movement and activity, because in contrast to the superfcial tranquillity of the depicted scene, the painting conveys the impression of bustling progress and growth. Through an opening in the static and still undomesticated dark wilderness of the foreground, Watling’s painting presents the advance of British colonialism in a shining light. As Bill Ashcroft puts it, looking ‘through an opening in the bush towards a town arranged in the orderly ranks of a military parade, we see how the civilizing efect of colonialism creates order out of chaos, produces urban settlement in the wilderness’.22 This is a picture of imperial progress, a  ‘dans la découverte des Îles australes, la conduite des Héros français est l’antipode de celle des Espagnols & des autres Peuples de l’Europe, qui ont fait des découvertes en Amérique’; Nicolas Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, La Découverte Australe par un Homme-​volant, ou Le Dédale français; Nouvelle très-​ philosophique, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1781), 7; cf. Pacini, 172. 21  Pacini,  171. 22  Bill Ashcroft, ‘Reading Post-​Colonial Australia’, in Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, ed. Nathanael O’Reilly (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010), 21. 20

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Figure 2.1  Thomas Watling, A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove, 1794, oil on canvas, 91.0 x 121.0 cm, Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

static representation of the expansion of European society under the guise of the Civilising Mission. This notion of ‘the civilizing efect of colonialism’ is deeply ingrained in early colonial representations of Australia. It particularly manifests itself in the temporal orientation of their internal organisation. Governor Phillip’s description of the very frst moments of colonisation in Australia, the landing of the First Fleet, provides another good example of this. Phillip can hardly conceal his delight at the view of his party progressively clearing the frst tracts of land and erecting the frst signs of settlement: There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement, arising gradually out of tumult and confusion; and perhaps this satisfaction cannot any where be more fully enjoyed than where a settlement of civilized people is fxing itself upon a newly discovered or savage coast. The wild appearance of the land entirely untouched by cultivation, the close and perplexed growing of trees, interrupted now and then by barren spots, bare rocks, or spaces overgrown with weeds, fowers, fowering shrubs, or underwood, scattered and intermingled in the most promiscuous manner, are the frst objects

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that present themselves; afterwards, the irregular placing of the frst tents which are pitched, or huts which are erected for immediate accommodation, wherever chance presents a spot tolerably free from obstacles, or more easily cleared than the rest, with the bustle of various hands busily employed in a number of the most incongruous works, increases rather than diminishes the disorder, and produces a confusion of efect, which for a time appears inextricable, and seems to threaten an endless continuance of perplexity. But by degrees large spaces are opened, plans are formed, lines marked, and a prospect at least of future regularity is clearly discerned, and is made the more striking by the recollection of the former confusion. 23 Revolving around the idea of improving a state of chaos into a state of order, this passage outlines the particular type of narrative that characterises early-​ colonial representations of Australia. It presumes the strictly linear progression of a certain trajectory:  Governor Phillip is narrating events here that take place, so to speak, right in front of him, but their signifcance for him lies entirely in their ability to bring about ‘future regularity’. Assessed from an imaginary viewpoint in the future, present events become meaningful only as anticipations of this preconceived future, as preludes of a narrative whose main events take place in a time to come. This type of narrative is part of what Paul Carter labels ‘imperial history’. Imperial history has, according to Carter, as its focus facts which, in a sense, come after the event. The primary object is not to understand or to interpret:  it is to legitimate. This is why this history is associated with imperialism –​for who are more liable to charges of unlawful usurpation and constitutional illegitimacy than the founders of colonies? Hence, imperial history’s defensive appeal to the logic of cause and efect: by its nature, such a logic demonstrates the emergence of order from chaos.24 Carter is right to emphasise the legitimating function of this narrative; but he seems to neglect one important fact, namely, that history usually relies on the past, not the future, to legitimate the present. Instead, the type of narrative we are dealing with here is propelled, to borrow the words of the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, by the ‘splendid visions to which  Arthur Phillip, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, 3rd ed. (London, 1790), 144–​45.  Carter,  xvi.

23 24

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the march of civilisation gives birth’.25 It is the vision of a civilised future that informs and structures the perception of the present in this narrative. Tocqueville, although writing at a later time and about a markedly diferent environment, exemplifes the phenomenon of imperial history brilliantly when he describes how these ‘fugitive images of civilisation’ come to represent ‘facts as certain as if they were made’.26 The efect, then, is that ‘the imagination, rather than trying to return to the past, on the contrary sprang forward, and was lost in a boundless future’.27 Instead of a remembered past, the imperial narrative invokes an imaginary future to understand and legitimise actions and events in the present. As such, it celebrates a colonial utopia that does not yet exist, a colonial utopia that remains contingent upon the hypothetical triumph of the Civilising Mission. The crude circumstances of early settlement in Australia certainly contributed to a signifcant extent to this longing for a better future; but this type of thinking was also highly en vogue because, as Andrew Milner explains, at the time ‘notions of historical progress increasingly tended to substitute the idea of a better (future) time, literally euchronia, for that of a better place’.28 The narrative of the Civilising Mission is, accordingly, best described as euchronic. This diferentiates it clearly from the Quirósque vision of an immediately available pleasure garden.

Improving the ‘Savage Shores’ As part of the Civilising Mission, the colonisation of Australia was viewed as the praiseworthy act of bringing Enlightenment to the distant ‘savage shores’ of the Antipodal continent. ‘To introduce an European population’, Reverend Sydney Smith wrote, ‘and consequently the arts and civilisation of Europe, into such an untrodden country as New Holland, is to confer a lasting and important beneft upon the world.’29 This understanding of the Civilising Mission as part of the Enlightenment’s universal commitment to the future welfare of all mankind was integral to the self-​conception of the burgeoning

 ‘magnifques images que la marche de la civilisation fait naître’; Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Quinze Jours au Désert: Souvenirs d’un Voyage en Amerique’, Revue Des Deux Mondes, 1 December 1860, 604. 26  ‘faits aussi certains que s’ils étaient accomplis’; ibid., 605, 603. 27  ‘l’imagination, au lieu d’aller en arrière et de chercher à remonter vers le passé, s’élançait au contraire en avant, et se perdait dans un immense avenir’; ibid., 603. 28  Andrew Milner, ‘Meditations on the Impossible’, Arena 25/​26 (2006): 7–​8. 29  Qtd in John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 7. 25

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British settlement at Port Jackson. As Nicole Graham argues, the ‘twin ideologies of English Enlightenment and empire’ are highly compatible, with the former giving theoretical legitimation to the latter.30 The Enlightenment, in other words, has to be understood as part of the utopian façade that curtained and buttressed the imperial project in Australia at the time. Particularly the vision of a civilised, well-​organised city utopia gave direction and moral legitimacy to it. As Bill Ashcroft writes, ‘A colonial utopia, in which civilization, prosperity and amenity are established, a utopia regulated by the ordering power of a higher civilization, is absolutely fundamental to imperialism’s discourse of self-​justifcation.’31 The central ideologeme in this discourse of self-​justifcation was the notion of ‘improvement’. It allowed the British colonisers to rationalise their expropriation and transformation of Aboriginal land as part of a supposedly universal progress of mankind. Improvement places imperial ideology squarely within the utopianism of the Enlightenment movement and thus allows the frst discourse to slide under the second. In the complex language of colonial administration the ideologeme of improvement became translated into the legal fantasy of terra nullius. Interestingly, much of this was already foreshadowed in Thomas More’s original Utopia:  the legislation of More’s ideal commonwealth explicitly authorises aggressive expansion in cases where land could be improved that was left ‘idle and waste’ by its natives.32 In the Australian context, the notion of improvement specifcally confates societal development with agricultural growth, which means that the colonisers’ transformation of land was also understood as a form of moral improvement. This provides further insight into the utopian mindset behind imperial history, with regard to its peculiar sense of time. Prima facie, the reliance of the Civilising Mission on Enlightenment discourses suggests that it corresponds to what Karl Mannheim, in his typology of utopian mentalities, labels the ‘normative-​liberal’ or ‘liberal-​humanitarian’ mentality, and describes as ‘experiencing historical time as unilinear progress and evolution’.33 Closely afliated with modern capitalism, this liberal mentality defers the realisation of its utopia into the future, but ‘sees it as arising out of the process of becoming

 Nicole Graham, Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law (New York: Routledge, 2011), 90.  Ashcroft, ‘Critical Utopias’, 413. 32  The passage in question is ‘Quod si forte per totam insulam plus aequo moles intumuerit, tum ex qualibet urbe descriptis ciuibus in continente proximo ubicumque indigenis agri multum superest, & cultu uacat; coloniam suis ipsorum legibus propagant, ascitis una terrae indigenis si conuiuere secum uelint.’ See More, 87; cf. Ashcroft, ‘Critical Utopias’, 414–​15; and Balasopoulos, 5. 33  Mannheim,  200. 30 31

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in the here and now’.34 Erasmus Darwin, Arthur Phillip and Thomas Watling provided good examples of this. What needs to be emphasised, though, is that this euchronic perspective is per se not necessarily ideological. As Bloch explains, when utopia ‘is transposed into the future, not only am I not there, but utopia itself is also not with itself […] But it is not something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it’.35 Precisely because it focuses on active engagement in the process of creating utopia, the euchronic perspective has a strong emancipatory and subversive potential –​by contrast, the imagination of an immediately accessible body utopia always verges on what Ricœur calls a ‘logic of all or nothing which ignores the labor of time’, and because of this readily deteriorates into nostalgic escapism and the ‘eclipse of praxis’ (the Quirósque vision described in the previous chapter provides ample evidence of this).36 So at least in theory, an imperial utopia is not without emancipatory potential. Due to its connection to Enlightenment discourses the Civilising Mission displays some characteristics of the liberal mentality; but it also exhibits certain traits of what Mannheim calls the conservative mentality. This may seem paradoxical, especially since Mannheim underscores the fact that the ‘conservative mentality as such has no utopia. Ideally it is in its very structure completely in harmony with the reality which, for the time being, it has mastered. It lacks all those refections and illuminations of the historical process which come from a progressive impulse.’ But as Mannheim continues to explain, once the conservative status quo is challenged by external forces, the conservative mentality produces its own ‘counter-​utopia which serves as a means of self-​orientation and defence’.37 Ironically, the utopian mindset behind the imperial project derives this counter-​utopia from the very utopia that challenges it in the frst place –​that is, the ‘liberal-​humanitarian’ utopia of the Enlightenment. Glimpses of this can be seen in late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century Britain, where public discourse regularly associated a utopian vision of the Australian colonies with the preconceived view that European civilisation was under threat of social and cultural devolution. Joseph Banks, for example, who in his role as principal advisor to the House of Commons suggested Botany  Ibid.,  203.  Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, by Ernst Bloch; trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT P, 1988), 3; emphases in the original. 36  Ricœur, ‘Ideology and Utopia’, 17–​28. 37  Mannheim,  206. 34 35

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Bay as a suitable site for a future penal settlement, voiced his concerns about the state of Great Britain in a letter to Governor Hunter, dated 1797: How matters are diferent, we have of late seen too many symptoms of declining prosperity not to feel an anxious wish for better times. I keep up my spirits & those of my Family as well as I am able, but in truth my dear Sir could it be done by Fortunatus’s wishing cap, I  have no doubt that I should this day remove myself & Family to your quarters & ask for a grant of Lands on the banks of the Hawksbury [sic] […] I see the future prospect of Empires & Dominions which now cannot be disappointed who knows but that England may servive [sic] in New South Wales when it has sunk in Europe.38 William Lisle Bowles  –​an eminent poet of the time who was admired by Romantics such as Coleridge and Southey, but later reduced to ridicule by Lord Byron –​also expressed similar sentiments. He sounded the death knell for Great Britain in The Spirit of Discovery by Sea (1804), a lengthy poem that was strongly infuenced by the heavy impacts on Britain’s political and economic stability experienced during the French Revolution and the ensuing Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: My heart has sigh’d in secret, when I thought That the dark tide of time might one day close, England, o’er thee […] and such as now thou art, Perhaps new-​holland be.39 It appears, therefore, that a dystopian perception of the state of the imperial centre sparked and nourished a euchronic vision of the colonial periphery. Notions of what Barbara Goodwin calls ‘cyclical revival’ combine with the perception of a motherland beset by ‘progressive decadence’ to posit the imperial utopia as a critical alternative.40 Crucially, Banks, Bowles and their contemporaries did by no means view the Australian colonies as a form of independent successor but as a continuation of Great Britain. As Banks

 Joseph Banks to Governor Hunter, 30 March 1797. Sir Joseph Banks Papers, sec. 7, ser. 38, frame CY 3005/​169 and CY 3005/​170, State Library of  NSW. 39  William Lisle Bowles, The Spirit of Discovery. A Descriptive and Historical Poem, in Five Books. With Notes, 2nd ed. (London, 1809), 111–​12; cf. Dixon, Course of Empire, 3; and Smith, European Vision, 114. 40  Barbara Goodwin, ‘Taking Utopia Seriously’, in The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice, by Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 22–​23. 38

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prophesies, it will be England that survives in New South Wales –​not one of its colonial ofshoots turned independent. In order to understand the rise of the colonies as the conservation of the old order, the conservative mentality had to be grafted onto the euchronic framework of the Enlightenment. The colonial present thus became the colonisers’ past, and the colonial future was imagined as a continuation of the colonisers’ present. It is this intensifed sense of time and space that characterises the euchronic vision of the Civilising Mission. The imperial appropriation of the euchronic perspective rested strongly on an understanding of improvement that presupposes terra nullius: in order to successfully integrate Enlightenment utopianism, the narrative of the Civilising Mission relied on an assumption that before the arrival of Europeans, the Australian landscape was in a ‘state of nature’, that is, it was a chaotic, uncultivated wilderness. For example, by contrasting the ‘savage coast’ with the ‘civilized people’ that were to colonise it, Phillip took pains to emphasise that it was British ‘order and useful arrangement’ that gradually carved the space of the future settlement out of a ‘land entirely untouched by cultivation’. Phillip’s principal legal ofcer, David Collins, places similar emphasis on the primitive and uncultivated condition of the land, and its transformation at the hands of the British: The confusion that ensued will not be wondered at, when it is considered that every man stepped from the boat literally into a wood. Parties of people were every where heard and seen variously employed; –​some in clearing ground for the diferent encampments; others in pitching tents, or bringing up such stores as were immediately wanted; and the spot which had so lately been the abode of silence and tranquillity was now changed to that of noise, clamour, and confusion: but after a time order gradually prevailed every where. As the woods were opened and the ground cleared, the various encampments were extended, and all wore the appearance of regularity.41 In much the same way as his governor, Collins celebrates in this passage the industry of the British colonisers. What according to him had previously been nothing but a barren wilderness has now, through the exertion of the British landing party, been turned into a blank canvas awaiting the inscription of its new masters. The same tension is prominent in Watling’s painting: homing in on the rigorous arrangement of the settlement and its thriving plantations, his

 David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1 (London, 1798), 6 [ST NSW: Q79/​60]; cf. Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise,  43–​44.

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painting foregrounds the colonisers’ eforts and achievements, while relegating Australian nature to the margins. Unsurprisingly, it is in this wild margin that we can make out a faintly visible group of indigenous people. Similar to Phillip’s ‘savage coast’, we witness here how Aboriginal people are fused with the Australian landscape into a single, indistinguishable cipher of ‘savagery’ that awaits the moral and economic improvement of its ‘civilisers’. In the end, improvement becomes equated with the industry of the ‘civilized people’; and it is in this form that improvement functions as an ideologeme propelling the narrative of the Civilising Mission forward from its starting point of a wild ‘savage coast’ towards its euchronic horizon.

Working-​Class Arcadia From an economic perspective, Australia’s colonisation began in earnest only after 1820. The frst step was taken when Governor Macquarie relaxed the restrictions on settlement beyond the Sydney basin, followed by ofcial approval of the pastoral use of inland plains given by the secretary of state for the colonies. With lusher regions like the Hunter Valley becoming available, the colonial frontier was rapidly expanding, leading to a veritable squatting rush that saw settlers spread out far and wide across the country. In the 1830s the new settlements of Port Phillip in Victoria, Adelaide in South Australia, and Swan River and Albany in Western Australia were forming, shifting the previously exclusive focus on Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land. This geographic expansion was simultaneously an economic one. It led to a rapid increase in the production of wool, which was quickly replacing whale oil as the colony’s main export so that by the 1850s, Australia had established itself as the largest supplier of wool to the British market.42 But with its population spreading out more widely and its economy growing rapidly, Australia was facing a labour shortage. As the previous chapter has shown, the Arcadian vision of Australia provided an ideal solution to symbolically coordinate the colony’s promising future in large-​scale pastoralism with its need for manual labour. What’s more, the Arcadian vision was also able to address the stain of convictism, which threatened to degrade Australian settlements to mere disposal sites for society’s outcasts and reduce imperial ofcers to jail wardens, seriously undercutting their self-​understanding as sophisticated agents of the Civilising Mission. Since pastoralism ofered to remove the convict population to the inland frontier as labourers, it ofered an efective solution to convictism –​all the more so since pastoral labour was thought to be benefcial in terms of  Lennon and Pearson, 31; Attard.

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convict rehabilitation. Take, for instance, the example of colonial entrepreneur John Macarthur, who arrived in the colony indebted but quickly became rich from breeding merino sheep; he believed that the seclusion of the bush and the hardship of rural, and specifcally pastoral, work would facilitate the moral rehabilitation of convicts and release them from the ‘disorders’ of modern civilisation in general: I am confrmed in the opinion, that the labours which are connected with the tillage of the earth and the rearing and care of sheep and cattle, are but calculated to lead to the correction of their vicious habits –​when men are engaged in rural occupations their days are chiefy spent in solitude –​they have much time for refection and self-​examination, and they are less tempted to the preparation of crimes than would herded together in towns, a mass of disorders and vices.43 This example gives a frst indication of how the ideologeme of improvement and the narrative of the Civilising Mission could be woven into an Arcadian vision of Australia: as Macarthur demonstrates, both tie neatly into the Arcadian vision and its nostalgic yearning for a pre-​modern utopia in the countryside. By re-​establishing improvement in this way as an ideologically meaningful concept in both economic and moral terms, the Arcadian vision secured the symbolic integrity of the Civilising Mission against the threat of convictism. In its rendition as an Arcadian utopia, Australia came to be understood as a means of relieving Britain not only of its criminals, but also its surplus working-​class population. The labour shortage spawned by the pastoral boom lent particular weight to this imagining. As Carol Lansbury remarks, the ‘vision of an Australia of English yeomen farmers living contentedly on their own land in a restoration of a Golden Age was made credible by a shortage of labour in the colony’.44 A core group of people can be identifed as the main architects behind this blend of the Civilising Mission with the Arcadian vision of Australia. Charles Dickens in particular stands out as one individual with sufcient cultural capital to actively shape public discourse in this way, particularly through his immensely successful literary magazines. But Dickens and his coterie of authors were preceded by writers who, though less well known, in many ways laid the foundation of Dickens’s vision by working the ideologeme of improvement into the pastoral vision of Australia.

 Qtd in Hoorn, 53; cf. Carter, 227.  Lansbury,  64–​65.

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First among these earlier writers is the native-​born Australian William Charles Wentworth and his poem ‘Australasia’. In a way, it is only ftting that Wentworth was among the frst to clearly connect the notion of improvement with the pastoral vision of Australia, since he also headed the 1813 expedition across the Blue Mountains, an event that led to the colony’s spread over the inland plains and thus efectively launched large-​scale pastoralism in New South Wales. Wentworth’s ‘Australasia’ was an unsuccessful entry for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal, a poetry competition at Cambridge University, in 1823. In the following lines his vision of the colony’s future becomes evident: Soon, Australasia, may thy inmost plains, A new Arcadia, teem with simple swains; […] Be their’s the task to lay with lusty blow The ancient giants of the forest low, […] With cautious plough to rip the virgin earth, And watch her frst born harvest from its birth, […] Their’s too the task, with skilful hand to rear The varied fruits, that gild the ripen’d year; Whether the melting peach, or juicy pear, Or golden orange, most engage their care:–​ […] Such be the labours of thy peaceful swains, Thus may they till, and thus enrich thy plains45 Wentworth integrates the ideologeme of improvement by establishing a particular form of work ethos as the social code that underpins his Arcadian vision. Emphasising the link between agricultural work and Arcadian contentment, this ethos centres on the labour of ‘simple’ and ‘peaceful swains’, and results in the depiction of Australia as a form of working man’s paradise, a ‘new Arcadia’, in which the British labourer can fnd bliss in rural simplicity while furthering the imperial appropriation of the continent through agricultural work. Of key importance here is the leitmotif of labour, which functions as a visible marker for improvement. With its imagery of agricultural labour indexing the progress of the imperial project, Wentworth’s poem

 W. C. Wentworth, ‘Australasia’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 25 March 1824, 4.

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demonstrates how seamlessly the Civilising Mission could be integrated into an Arcadian vision of Australia. Interestingly, the pastoral tradition is bifurcated when it comes to the degree to which agricultural labour is actually visible. Labour is heavily present in the genre’s frst cornerstone, the Theocritean Idylls46; but its second cornerstone, the Virgilian Eclogues, sustains instead the fantasy that a shepherd’s life is mainly dominated by leisure.47 In fact, Virgil moved the topic of agriculture from his Eclogues to his Georgics, and set up the Epicurean ideal of otium (a peaceful state of leisure) as the central ethos of the pastoral, and negotium (employment or business) as the distinctive ethos of the georgic.48 This binary of otium/​negotium is of importance because an Arcadian vision of Australia that emphasises leisure relates more to Quirós’s vision of a body utopia and its underpinning idea of natural bounty, while an Arcadian vision glorifying labour ties more directly into the Civilising Mission’s tenets of improvement and progress. Wentworth’s vision, therefore, should be labelled as ‘georgic’, and it was his introduction of georgic imagery that was particularly meaningful to the appropriation of the Arcadian utopia by imperial ideology. Thomas K. Hervey’s poem ‘Australia’ (1824), which was an entry for the same competition as Wentworth’s, also represents Australia as a land of promise in which the hard-​working Briton can fnd a healthy and successful life in Arcadian simplicity. There is no evidence that Hervey ever set foot in Australia, which is perhaps why his Arcadian vision is even more fanciful and pronouncedly utopian than Wentworth’s49: I see bright meadows, decked in livelier green, The yellow corn-​feld, and the blossomed bean: A hundred focks o’er smiling pastures roam, And hark! the music of the harvest-​home! Methinks I hear the hammer’s busy sound, The cheerful hum of human voices round; The laughter, and the song that lightens toil, Sung in the language of my native isle!50  Terry Giford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1992), 2, 4.  Karina Williamson, ‘ “From Arcadia to Bunyah”: Mutation and Diversity in the Pastoral Mode’, in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 568. 48  Ibid.,  569. 49  Vivian Smith, ‘Australian Colonial Poetry, 1788–​1888: Claiming the Future, Restoring the Past’, in Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 75. 50  Thomas K.  Hervey, Australia:  With Other Poems, 2nd ed. (London:  Hurst, Robinson, 1824),  36–​37. 46 47

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Even though Hervey’s luscious, late-​aestival imagery is reminiscent of Quirós’s vision of a bountiful paradise, the georgic theme that runs through these lines (the ‘busy sound’ of industry and toil, and the imagery of the harvest home) clearly aligns the poem’s vision with the Civilising Mission. Hervey’s poem exhibits a complicated tension between the imperial drive to ‘civilise’ the land and the vision of Australia as a pre-​industrial, untainted utopia. Perhaps it is because Hervey’s poem, based as it is only on second-​hand information, is purely imaginary, but the landscape he describes seems even more generic and removed from Australia than Wentworth’s vision in ‘Australasia’. Wentworth’s poem also exhibits similar, perplexing tensions. As a historical fgure, he stands out as an ardent supporter of the Australian cause. Not only did he consistently emphasise that he was a ‘native of New South Wales’, but he was also closely involved in the successful 1852 bid for self-​government for New South Wales.51 It is unsurprising, therefore, that his poem ‘Australasia’ –​ a panegyric addressed to the ‘land of my birth!’  –​has been applauded as ‘one of the frst outbursts in Australian literature of nationalistic pride’.52 Yet Wentworth’s sense of belonging appears deeply conficted. While he shows remarkable pride in his birthplace, he also asserts, with almost robotic allegiance to imperial ideology, the importance of advancing British civilisation. Take, for instance, the following lines from ‘Australasia’: And, oh Britannia! Shouldst thou cease to ride despotic empress of old ocean’s tide; –​ […] should e’er arrive that dark disastrous hour, when bow’d by luxury, thou yield’st to pow’r; […] may all thy glories in another sphere resume, and shine more brightly still than here; may this, thy last-​born infant –​then arise, to glad thy heart, and greet thy parent eyes; and Australasia foat, with fag unfurl’d, a new Britannia in another world!53 Wentworth pursues here the common theme of the continuation of Empire, which we also saw characterise the imperial utopianism of Banks and Bowles.  T he Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, ed. William H. Wilde et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), s. v. ‘Wentworth, William Charles’. 52  Ibid. 53  Wentworth,  4. 51

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Wentworth’s Arcadian vision of Australia seems, therefore, not yet developed enough to foster and sustain a proper national counter-​utopia, despite his occasional forays into national self-​determination. He succumbs instead to imperial ideology and its cyclical framework. Another noteworthy aspect of ‘Australasia’ is its plea for abolishing penal transportation. For Wentworth, it is the ‘felon’s shame’ that clouds Australia’s ‘op’ning fame’. Again, his solution to the convict question takes the form of a georgic work ethic, for as he prophesies, it is the hard work of free emigrants that would help erase the stain of convictism: Land of my hope! soon may this early blot, Amid thy growing honours, be forgot: Soon may a freeman’s soul, a freeman’s blade, Nerve ev’ry arm, and gleam thro’ ev’ry glade; Nor more the outcast convicts’ clanking chains Deform thy wilds, and stigmatize thy plains54 At frst sight it may seem as if Wentworth was siding with the working-​class emigrants who he envisions would bring his Arcadian utopia to fruition. But it should not be overlooked that he was in fact actively lobbying for the large-​ scale pastoralists who came to prominence at that time in the Australian colonies. He saw it as a personal responsibility towards his birthplace to ‘divert from the United States of America to [Australian] shores, some of the vast tide of immigration which is at present fowing thither from all parts of the world’.55 To this end, Wentworth not only appealed directly to the public through his poetic and non-​fctional writings, but also made ofcial requests to the government, advocating the emigration of Britain’s labouring classes to provide the rapidly growing pastoral industry in Australia with the required workforce.56 As such, Wentworth’s Arcadian vision is the frst instance of what may justly be called a form of emigration propaganda. Projecting pastoral imagery onto the supposedly untainted Australian landscape, this propaganda attracted working-​class migrants by tapping into escapist nostalgia for an apparently lost Arcadian England. Finally, what we can see emerging here is the utopianism of settler colonialism. This propagandistic dimension of the Arcadian vision becomes even more evident in ‘Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales’, a poem by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell. The poem’s inspiration was a scene of  Ibid.  Qtd in Hoorn, 55. 56  Ibid.; also 55. 54 55

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impoverished workers emigrating to Australia. While Campbell explores the migrants’ emotions about leaving their homeland for the far-​distant colony, he also casts, as Olga Sudlenkova writes, ‘a prophetic glance into the future of the continent’.57 The future Campbell imagines for his emigrants is unmistakeably Arcadian: in time, these migrants –​forced from England, the ‘home that could not yield them bread’58  –​become self-​sufcient yeoman farmers in Australia, living a modest but comfortable life. As the following lines demonstrate, Campbell lightens a largely georgic work ethic with pastoral notions of leisure: There, marking o’er his farm’s expanding ring New feeces whiten and new fruits upspring, The grey-​haired swain, his grandchild sporting round, Shall walk at eve his little empire’s bound, Emblazed with ruby vintage, ripening corn, And verdant rampart of acacian thorn, While, mingling with the scent his pipe exhales, The orange-​grove’s and fg-​tree’s breath prevails; Survey with pride beyond a monarch’s spoil His honest arm’s own subjugated soil59 The last line in particular illustrates how efortlessly the Arcadian ethos in its georgic formulation of hard agricultural labour ties into the ideologeme of improvement. Moreover, in its narrative extension this ethos translates efortlessly into the legal fantasy of terra nullius, where it forms the central tenet that working the land establishes a rightful claim to it. Much like Wentworth, Campbell continues to trace the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission through his Arcadian vision of Australia. Similarly, albeit less explicitly but with recourse to the common metaphorical understanding of the British Empire as a family, Campbell also entrenches the notion of Australia as a continuation of British civilisation: Delightful land, in wildness ev’n benign, The glorious past is ours, the future thine! As in a cradled Hercules, we trace The lines of empire on thine infant face.46  Olga Sudlenkova, ‘Fair Australasia:  A Poet’s Farewell to Emigrants’, in Missions of Interdependence: A Literary Directory, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 273. 58  Thomas Campbell, ‘Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales’, in The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell, vol. 2 (London, 1837), 243. 59  Ibid.,  244. 57

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Associated with the powerful hero and demigod Hercules, Campbell gives Australia considerable signifcance –​although of course in this analogy Britain corresponds to the supreme god Zeus, so it still ranks substantially higher. Ultimately, what can be extrapolated from Campbell’s poem (and more than Wentworth’s but as much as Hervey’s with its generic fctional landscape) is that the Arcadian vision imagines Australia as a second-​class ersatz England, set aside for Britain’s surplus working population.

Dickensian Arcadianism Without doubt, the georgic vision of an Arcadian Australia found its most infuential form in the numerous Australian stories featured in Charles Dickens’s popular Victorian weekly Household Words. The English journalist Samuel Sidney played a key role in the formation of this particular blend of Dickensian Arcadianism. Sidney was the author of the highly successful Australian Hand-​book, a remarkably detailed guide for potential migrants which was replete with practical information (such as the costs and provisions necessary for the passage from England to Australia, and a price list for ‘What a complete Sheep Station should contain’). Samuel Sidney had no frst-​hand knowledge of Australia except for the experience of his brother John; but he had considerable expertise in animal husbandry and other agricultural matters, which manifests itself clearly in the instructional focus of his Hand-​ book on manual labour and other practicalities.60 It was in the less practical writings that followed the Hand-​book that Sidney’s Arcadian vision for Australia took on its most compelling form. A frst idea of this may be gathered from the following passage, which is taken from his 1853 work, Three Colonies of Australia: Australia  –​New South Wales  –​Botany Bay. These are the names under which, within the memory of men of middle age, a great island-​ continent at the antipodes has been explored, settled, and advanced from the condition of a mere gaol, or sink, on which our surplus felonry was poured  –​a sheep-​walk tended by nomadic burglars  –​to be the wealthiest ofset of the British crown –​a land of promise for the adventurous –​a home of peace and independence for the industrious –​an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and the easiest best-​paid employments are to be found; where every striving man who  Lansbury, 63; in 1874, for example, Samuel Sidney published an infuential monograph on horses; see ibid., 60–​61.

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rears a race of industrious children may sit under the shadow of his own vine and his own fg-​tree –​not without work, but with little care –​living on his own land, looking down the valleys to his herds, and towards the hills to his focks, amid the humming of bees which know no winter.61 What is fascinating about this passage is that Sidney simply pushes aside the prevalent concerns over Australia’s convict origins, and overwrites them with the notion of Australia as a land of plenty, ‘an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined’. However, this is not a Land of Cockaigne like Quirós’s Austrialia; instead, Sidney takes care to depict Australia as a working man’s paradise, in which ‘the adventurous’, ‘the industrious’ and ‘every striving man’ can fnd a ‘home of peace and independence’. According to Sidney, the Australian utopia is not defned by readily accessible and excessive riches, but instead depends on thriftiness and perseverance. Peace and self-​sufciency in rural simplicity only awaits those who are willing to submit to the georgic work ethic of hard labour; it is strength of character, therefore, that grants entrance into Sidney’s Arcadia. In a similar but more pronounced manner than Campbell and Hervey, Sidney flls out his Arcadian utopia with georgic sentiments that tie directly into the Civilising Mission and its underpinning notion of improvement. What Sidney was ofering to his readers was, as Coral Lansbury so fttingly puts it, ‘the beguiling appeal of a fairy-​tale expressed in the most businesslike terms’.62 This working-​class fairy-​tale took on an entirely new quality when Sidney began to collaborate with Charles Dickens, the cultural juggernaut of the time. The success of Sidney’s Hand-​book had made a favourable impression on Dickens, whose journal Household Words, targeted at a large audience with a peak circulation of 100,000 copies, provided the perfect platform to communicate Sidney’s georgic dream.63 The literary format of Dickens’s journal allowed Sidney to move away from the practical format of his previous writings, and express his vision in imagery and narratives that were more accessible and compelling to a mass audience. The following excerpt from Household Words gives a good demonstration of how Sidney used the new format to weave several discursive threads together: The skill and industry of a North-​country farmer, with a large supply of labour in his own family, applied to fertile soil, ready for the plough  Samuel Sidney, Three Colonies of Australia:  New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia; their Pastures, Copper, Mines, & Gold Fields (London, 1853), 11. 62  Lansbury,  77. 63  Ibid., 93; also Mendelawitz, ‘Introduction’, xvii. 61

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without clearing, under a climate without winter and without droughts, had done wonders. The crops were splendid; but, to an eye accustomed to good Scotch or English farming, everything seemed rude, slovenly and unfnished. But, as the old man truly observed, ‘Good, neat farming, don’t pay in the colony: labour is dear, and land cheap. A crop might be got out of fve acres while you were stumping one acre. For the same reason, no man can make a living as a farmer who cannot work with his own hands, and get help in his own family […] Spend nothing you can help, and do all you can for yourself. That’s the secret of Colonial success.’64 Like Campbell, Hervey and Wentworth, Sidney places strong emphasis on a georgic work ethic, which at times even borders on austerity. But he also draws on notions of a welcoming environment (‘fertile soil, ready for the plough without clearing’, ‘a climate without winter and without droughts’) that are reminiscent of the Quirósque vision and its reliance on the trope of bounty. Of course, all of this downplays (if not outright suppresses) the actual environmental circumstances and social organisation of the Australian colonies. But what is most interesting about Sidney and his contributions to Dickens’s journals is that his from-​rags-​to-​riches narratives, which due to their focus on practicalities appear highly realistic and concrete, often individualise the ideologeme of improvement. The progress of the Civilising Mission and the creation of imperial history thus takes on the form of a personal quest: ‘Australia has no Past’, Sidney writes in the same story, ‘but she has a Future, and it should be the endeavour of every colonist to make that Future read well.’65 The working-​class emigrant now fnds himself a direct agent of the imperial project. In the end, Sidney’s Dickensian Pastorals vested the Civilising Mission with a highly engaging, emotionally charged and culturally meaningful form of representation, in which the concrete-​utopian impulses associated with the proto-​socialist vision of a working man’s paradise were carefully held in check by an Arcadianism that was as nostalgic as it was divorced from colonial reality. By a curious irony of history, some aspects of the dream of a working man’s paradise in Australia found at least partial fulflment by the end of the nineteenth century. To a large extent this was due to the unique labour market that developed in the bush: Australia’s remote inland exhibited a rigid two-​ class society of pastoral landholders (the squattocracy) and itinerant workers, who, especially for the frst half of the century, were almost entirely males of  Sidney, ‘Father Gabriel; Or, the Fortunes of a Farmer’, 70.  Ibid.,  68.

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mostly Irish and mostly convict background. This quasi-​nomadic bush proletariat was quite diferent from the vision of the Dickensian Pastoral with its free settlers livingly independently of their own land; although not quite living the Arcadian dream, Australia’s rural workers nevertheless enjoyed relative economic security because of the need for labour that accompanied the pastoral boom, which allowed them to wield comparatively strong bargaining powers with respect to their working conditions. By the turn of the century Australia had justly earned the reputation of being a working man’s paradise as it boasted an eight-​hour working day, universal male sufrage, industrial wage boards and invalid pensions (even though conditions difered substantially in diferent parts of the country and from industry to industry). Many of these achievements, however, were later heavily clouded by the infamous White Australia policy, which tightly wrapped up the working man’s utopia in racist ideology. In many ways, the ‘Anglo-​Machismo’66 behind the White Australia policy stemmed directly from imperial ideology, so that this national vision ultimately failed to escape the legacies of the Civilising Mission.

 I have borrowed this term from Hoorn, 257.

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Chapter 3 ANTIPODAL INVERSION  Australia’s place in the Western imagination is fundamentally defned by its Antipodal relationship with Europe. This is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the colloquial description of Australia as Down Under. When considering how much the notion of the continent’s Antipodality has shaped conceptions of Australia throughout its diferent incarnations in the European imagination, it is, of course, important to remember that Europe’s exact geographic antipode is actually not the Australian continent, but a region of mostly ocean somewhere south-​east of New Zealand in the South Pacifc. Yet the fact that Australia isn’t really Europe’s antipode reinforces all the more the point that Australia’s role and signifcance as Europe’s Antipodes is not a geographical one, at least not in any strict sense of the term. Rather, the Antipodal relationship between Australia and Europe is a symbolic one that was initiated and continues to be maintained by Eurocentric desires for an Antipodal counterpart. It is the purpose of this and the following chapters to uncover parts of the discursive history of Antipodality and to discuss key aspects that determine how Australia functions as an Antipodal utopia in the European imagination. This chapter will focus on the frst and most fundamental aspect of Antipodality: the principle of Antipodal inversion. It will be argued that Antipodal inversion confers a particular kind of utopian spatiality onto Australia, which stands in a tense relationship with the ideology of imperialism.

Antipodality and the Principle of Antipodal Inversion Antipodality itself is an idea that rests frmly on the premise of a round Earth. This is because the conception of the Earth as a globe naturally entails the assumption of diametrically opposed places. In Europe, thoughts about Antipodality and about Europe’s Antipodes date as far back as classical Greece, where mathematical and geographical discussions about the other side of the World reached a level of sophistication. The Ancient Greek word ‘antipous’ (άντίπους) meant ‘with the feet on the opposite side’, the idea being that people in locations on exactly opposite sides of the Earth stand with their

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feet placed against each other. One of the frst written sources of the word is the Platonic dialogue Timaeus, the text which also relates the myth of Atlantis and addresses the utopian question of what an ideal city would look like.1 Historically, thoughts about Antipodality emerged at a time when ancient Greek astronomers used a simple device called a gnomon to plot the course of the Sun. Using the gnomon, the Greeks learnt that the Sun’s path varied by location, which provided irrefutable evidence of the Earth’s roundness and thus proved the idea of antipodal hemispheres. As these origins demonstrate, Antipodality is deeply connected to attempts at shifting towards a global perspective, gathering information about the World and one’s place in it, and reaching (literally as well as fguratively) past one’s own horizon. In a sense this is already present in the word’s etymological roots, which connects places and people that are geographically farthest removed from each other, situating them in a binary relationship that (as we will see in this and following chapters) readily translates into Eurocentric tensions of Self and Other. Antipodality, therefore, is an idea that quickly extends beyond its geographic origins to take on a diferent and much broader meaning. So it is that the imagination of Antipodes (i.e., of places or people on the side of the Globe opposite to the person imagining) quickly moves beyond mathematical models and basic geography to speculations about similarities and diferences in terms of cultural and societal characteristics. Antipodality represents, therefore, not simply a geographical relationship between two places, but rather an imaginary exploration of how this relationship defnes and distinguishes them. In Europe, thoughts about Antipodality regularly amounted to a metaphysical exercise in cosmography, as the idea of Antipodality served not only to construct a cultural or societal counterpart in the form of Europe’s Antipodes, but also to feed back into much broader refections on Europe itself and its place in the World. This cosmographic imaging is, more often than not, motivated and shaped by one core principle: that of Antipodal inversion. Antipodal inversion is the idea that in Europe’s Antipodes, everything is the opposite of what it should be. Like in a camera obscura, everything is turned on its head: binary oppositions such as up and down, inside and outside, black and white are reversed. Australia’s early colonial history is replete with examples of this, with European explorers marvelling at rivers apparently running upstream and trees shedding their bark instead of their leaves.

1

 Plat. Tim. 63a. Plato, however, is more concerned with issues regarding the nature of spheres than with Antipodality as a symbolic or geopolitical relationship; cf. Avan Judd Stallard, ‘Origins of the Idea of the Antipodes: Errors, Assumptions, and a Bare Few Facts’, Terra Incognitae (2010): 37–​38.

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John Lort Stokes, an admiral of the Royal Navy who travelled with Charles Darwin on the famous HMS Beagle, said about ‘this extraordinary continent’: The strange contrasts to the rest of the world which it afords were enumerated and commented upon  –​its cherries with their stones growing outside  –​its trees, which shed their bark instead of their leaves –​its strange animals –​its still stranger population –​its mushroom cities –​and, fnally, the fact that the approach of human habitation is not announced by the barking of dogs, but by the barking of trees!2 True to the principle of Antipodal inversion, John Oxley concluded that in Australia, ‘everything seems to run counter to the ordinary course of nature in other countries’.3 There was even a poem written about Antipodal inversion (which is often attributed to Richard Whately): There is a place in distant seas Full of all contrarieties; […] There parrots walk upon the ground; And grass upon the trees is found; […] Stones are outside the cherries put; Swans are not white, but black as soot. […] Now of what place can such strange tales Be told with truth but New South Wales?4 At frst sight, Antipodal inversion may appear to be a straightforward and rather innocent phenomenon, but it comes with its own methodological complexities. This is particularly the case where Antipodal inversion merges or clashes with preconceived notions of the Antipodes as a distinctly utopian space. The frst point to note about Antipodal inversion is that it is a form of representation that is (consciously or not) highly self-​refective. What this means is perhaps best illustrated in a short text by the Syrian rhetorician and satirist Lucian of Samosata (AD ca. 125–200), which also testifes to how far back this principle reaches in European history. The text belongs to the

 John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, vol. 2 (London, 1846), 519; emphases in the original. 3  John Oxley, Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales (London: Murray, 1820), 81. 4  Anon., ‘LAND OF CONTRADICTIONS,’ The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA: 1833–​1847), 14 November 1840, 3. 2

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ancient literary genre of the chreia, a succinct anecdote with a moral but often comical message: Καὶ μὴν καὶ φυσικόν τινα περὶ τῶν ἀντιπόδων διαλεγόμενον ἀναστήσας καὶ ἐπὶ φρέαρ ἀγαγὼν καὶ δείξας αὐτῷ τὴν ἐν τῷ ὕδατι σκιὰν ἤρετο, Τοιούτους ἄρα τοὺς ἀντίποδας εἶναι λέγεις;5

And once, after a physikos (natural philosopher) lectured about the Antipodes, (Demonax) made him get up, led him to an artifcial well, showed him their refections in the water and asked: ‘Is this what you call the Antipodes?’

This anecdote, which forms part of Lucian’s commemorative and possibly entirely fctional biography of the philosopher Demonax, serves Lucian to underline Demonax’s worldly pragmatism and his dislike of abstract theorising. But another point Lucian is making is that the imagination of one’s Antipode is, in a sense, a highly self-​refective endeavour: the refection in Demonax’s well forces the physikos to realise the speculative and to a certain degree vain nature of theorising about the Antipodes, and thus what such theorising says about himself. This exemplifes a crucial efect of Antipodal inversion, namely, that Antipodality, through the principle of inversion, holds up a mirror to the onlooker, because the counter-​images produced by projections of otherness onto Antipodal space ultimately return what is best described as a negative of the projecting self. Herein lies the formidable satirical potential of Antipodal inversion, which is immediately apparent in the punch line of Lucian’s anecdote: whether intentional or not, imaginations of Antipodality say more about the person who is imagining them than about their Antipode. As such, instances of Antipodal inversion provide a vivid demonstration of the Eurocentric narcissism that forms the conceptual core of Antipodality. Demonax’s well also provides signifcant insight into the utopian spatiality of the Antipodes, which follows as a direct corollary of Antipodal inversion. Even though Classical cosmography was capable of substantiating the idea of a round Earth and therefore of Antipodal places with fairly sophisticated mathematical tools, Lucian’s anecdote illustrates the fact that Antipodal inversion produces a vision of the Antipodes that is less geographic than imaginative and symbolic in nature. Hence in his witty retort to the physikos, Demonax exposes the Antipodes as an intellectual construct that corresponds not so much to a real space, a ‘somewhere’, as to a fctional space, a ‘nowhere’. Here it needs to be remembered that the word ‘utopia’ means ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’, and that it is this ‘topographical fguration “nowhere” ’6 that provides the functional kernel of utopia because as Paul Ricœur explains, it is from this fctional, ‘extraterritorial’ viewpoint that ‘an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which

5 6

 Luc. Demon. 22; via LOEB Classical Library, LCL 14: 156–​57; my translation.  Ricœur, ‘Ideology and Utopia’, 25.

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suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted’.7 Demonax’s well shows how Antipodality, through the principle of Antipodal inversion, creates the type of defamiliarising, self-​refective efect characteristic of utopia. Lucian drew on the idea of Antipodality again in what is probably his most famous work, the Vera Historia or True Stories. The work is a selection of Münchhausenesque tales satirising the literature popular in the Roman Empire, in particular the often more fctional than factual travel writings of the time. The protagonist of the True Stories undertakes absurd journeys to imaginary countries, including a trip to the Moon, only to fnd himself shipwrecked in the end on the Antipodes. The narrative fnishes here, promising that a forthcoming (but of course never written) sequel would recount journeys and adventures on the Antipodal continent.8 While Lucian’s anecdote about Demonax’s well provides revealing insight into the self-​refective and satirical aspect of Antipodality, his True Stories adds to that by delineating a clear framework for imagining the Antipodes. This becomes apparent when it is declared right from the start of the True Stories that the work tells nothing but lies, and that none of its content is based on evidence. This declaration is very pointedly directed at the chief targets of Lucian’s satire, which include acclaimed writers such as Ctesias, Herodotus, Iambulus and Antonius Diogenes, and even Homer and his Odyssey. ‘I took to lying’, Lucian writes, ‘But my lying is far more honest than theirs, for though I  tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar’.9 With this Lucian sets his True Stories apart from the works against which his satire was directed, because where they take great care to profess the veracity of their accounts, he openly claims for himself the freedom of poetic licence.10 What we have to keep in mind here is that conceptually, works of Ancient literature like Homer’s Odyssey occupied a space in which fact and fction, history and myth were inextricably entwined. It is against this background that Lucian’s open espousal of poetic licence (i.e. of the lie which emphasises its own untruthfulness) represents a provocative, if not radical, conceptual break. Historiographically this can be interpreted as a departure from Classical understandings of literature that points towards more modern conceptions of fction; but the main point regarding the idea of Antipodality is that Lucian’s open use of poetic licence as a representational framework removes, as Gabriella Moretti has argued, the Antipodes from the factual plane of geography and relocates them in the realm of fction.11 This further reinforces  Ricœur, Lectures, 16.  Luc.  VH 47. 9  Ibid.,  4. 10  Lucian speaks of the freedom to lie: ‘τῆς ἐν τῷ μυθολογεῖν ἐλευθερίας’ (ibid.). 11  Moretti, 248–​49. 7 8

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the utopian spatiality of the Antipodes because it highlights their ‘topographical fguration “nowhere” ’, that is, their location outside of factual geography. With his True Stories, Lucian furthermore issued the Antipodes with a poetic licence for satire. In the end, his unfulflled promise of a second part (which was supposed to relate adventures on the Antipodal continent) is left as an open invitation to imagine Antipodality within the fctional framework he had set up for it. Given the extraterritorial position aforded to them by Antipodal inversion, the Antipodes are thus set up as a powerful counter-​space to Europe.

Joseph Hall: Utopia Turned Upside-​Down More than a millennium later the early-​modern novel Mundus Alter et Idem by Anglican bishop Joseph Hall honoured Lucian’s promise of an Antipodal adventure by delivering a story that, in a sense, takes up where Lucian’s satire left of. It is in Hall’s novel that for the frst time, the principle of Antipodal inversion comes fully to the fore. The original Latin edition of Hall’s work was published anonymously in 1606. In 1609 it was followed by John Healy’s popular translation into English, which was notoriously coarser and bawdier in its humour. The plot of Mundus Alter et Idem is quickly summarised: following a debate with friends about the mysterious blank that the Antipodes were leaving on European maps, the ‘wandering academic’ and fctional author of the text, Mercurius Britannicus, sets out to discover and explore Terrra Australis (the Antipodal avatar of the early-​modern period). After 30 years of travelling across the southern continent, Mercurius returns to Europe, where he publishes his account of the Antipodeans’ manners and mores. Before discussing Hall’s extensive use of Antipodal inversion, it is worth noting that his work opens with an imaginary map that clearly references the cartographical achievements of the early-​modern period. His map strongly resembles contemporary Mercator maps, which championed the type of cylindrical projection still frequently used on maps today.12 Hall’s cartographical mimicry frmly situates his work in the geographical discourse of the time, in which the largely speculative World map of Antiquity came under increasing scrutiny as a result of new information which explorers and colonists gathered in their expeditions beyond the limits of the Old World. For example, the region ‘Nova Gynia’ on Hall’s map quips on the Greek word for woman and the Latin name for New Guinea, which on early-​modern maps often featured as a promontory  Compare the map in Joseph Hall, Another World and Yet the Same, trans. John Millar Wands (New Haven:  Yale UP, 1981), 18, with Mercator’s Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio … in National Library of Australia, Mapping Our World: Terra Incognita to Australia (Canberra: NLA, 2013), 88.

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of the mythical Terra Australis. Similarly, Hall’s Pamphagonia mocks Magellan’s Patagonia. The cartography of Mundus Alter et Idem thus represents a burlesque of early-​modern travel accounts. Even more than in Lucian’s parody of classical travel literature, Hall heightens the sense of utopian extraterritoriality of his Antipodes while satirising the attempts of his time at mapping the world. Lucian’s key achievement with regard to Antipodality was to stake out some of its fundamental aspects, but it was Hall in his Mundus Alter et Idem who explored and extensively exploited the wider literary possibilities of it. The principle of Antipodal inversion governs his novel to a great degree and often produces a comical absurdity that is characteristic of Antipodality. Mercurius reports, for example, that the people of the Austral country Fooliana, in true Antipodal fashion, go ‘bare-​brested, & thin attired in the depth of winter, to take ayre the better’, but ‘in the heate of summer, they were rugge gownes, and cloakes above that, to keep out heate the better’.13 In Shrewesbourg, a part of Sheland, the women ‘observe a fashion directly contrary to ours, for they clip their haire and let their nailes grow long’.14 These examples illustrate how Antipodal inversion organises the overall structure of Hall’s novel by depicting Terra Australis as a topsy-​turvy reversal of the nations and peoples of Europe: countries and cities with telling names like Tenter-​belly (the land of gluttony) and Thee-​vingen (the land of thieves) are set up as parodies mocking the vices of their more-​or-​less obvious counterparts in Europe.15 For instance, Mercurius’s description of Fooliana clearly voices Hall’s contempt for Catholicism: ‘For whereas it is divided into two Provinces, Trust-​fablia, and Sectaryvoa, (the former beeing farre the larger of the two) yet is it so wholie given over to a sort of rotten Ceremonies, that the Inhabitants thereof are all of this opinion, that one cannot doe God better service then in the utter neglect of themselves.’16 Hall here takes a good swipe not only at the ‘Portugales’ and ‘French-​men’, but at European Catholics at large. Through the looking-​glass of Antipodality, Mundus Alter et Idem satirically magnifes many religious, political and cultural stereotypes of early-​modern Europe. Hall’s Terra Australis thus maps out a moral landscape whose telling topography decries what he views as the vices of his fellow Europeans. In

 Joseph Hall, The Discovery of a New World: or, A description of the South Indies, trans. John Healy (London, 1609), 125–​26 [79r-​80l]; here and elsewhere I rely on Healy’s translation as I fnd that his English translation often has a more immediate efect on the reader. Fooliana is called Moronia in the Latin original. 14  Hall, The Discovery of a New World, 118 [76l]; Sheland is called Viraginia in the original. 15   The names of these countries in the Latin original are Crapulia and Lavernia (respectively). 16  Hall, The Discovery of a New World, 219. 13

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the same way as his unofcial literary precursor Lucian, Hall uses Antipodal inversion as a mirror in which the onlooker is confronted by a hyperbolic, if not carnivalesque, version of themselves. The publisher William Knight proudly announces this Antipodal refection in his foreword to the novel’s frst edition:  ‘If you will accurately observe this world’s members and features, and carefully ponder them, you will say that you have gazed at the true and living ideal of the world in which we dwell and its epitome.’17 As the work’s Latin title indicates, the New World discovered by Mercurius is another (alter) world, but yet it stays the same (idem). It becomes apparent from this that Hall’s novel attempts by no means to imagine true alterity. Instead, the novel’s Antipodal inversion of European manners, mores and moralities presents its readers with a defamiliarised, topsy-​turvy copy of Europe, and it is by way of this ostensible otherness that the novel’s Antipodal world, in very much the same manner as Demonax’s well, refects back the gaze of its European spectators, turning it onto themselves. Instead of alterity, Hall’s Antipodes create an alienating sameness, in which readers are supposed to recognise their own distorted selves. It is, therefore, by way of Antipodal inversion that Hall articulates his rather puritan critique of what he views as the cultural and religious shortcomings of the Europe of his day. Given the modern understanding of utopia as a place of perfection, Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem seems hardly to qualify as a utopia. Even though the novel was frequently bound back-​to-​back with Thomas More’s Utopia and Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis, two of the most famous literary utopias in the European tradition, scholarly literature generally highlights the darker aspects of Hall’s novel and often classifes it as a dystopia.18 This classifcation is, to a limited extent, understandable given the often truly grotesque societies Hall’s protagonist encounters in the Antipodes. However, not only is it anachronistic (insofar as the literary dystopia is a modern genre), but it also misses the most decisive feature of Mundus Alter et Idem: what Hall’s Antipodal utopia provides is, frst and foremost, a carnivalesque mock-​image of existing society in which his contemporaries are supposed to recognise themselves. A classic dystopia, by contrast, projects specifc societal trends into the future and imagines their worst-​possible outcomes. Another way of putting this is to say that where a classic dystopia mobilises in its messaging the dichotomies of fear and hope, Hall’s novel relies on laughter and embarrassment. What we are dealing with   ‘Si enim singula huius membra & lineamenta rectes perpenderis, accurateque contemplatus fueris; veram ac vidam huius, in quo degimus, mundi ideam & σύνοψιν te perspexisse dixeris’; trans. in Hall, Another World, 4. 18  Werner von Koppenfels, ‘Mundus Alter Et Idem: Utopiefktion und Menippeische Satire’, Poetica 13, no. 1–​2 (1981): 20. 17

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in Hall’s case is, as Giampaolo Zucchini said so aptly, a ‘utopia capovolta’,19 a utopia turned upside-​down: it is not a dystopia, nor simply a utopia. It is an Antipodal utopia. As a fnal observation on Mundus Alter et Idem, it is noteworthy that from the perspective of ideology, the novel is intriguingly ambiguous. It certainly testifes to Hall’s lifelong opposition to travelling: throughout his life, Hall campaigned against travelling abroad because he strongly held that it represents a serious threat to the cultural and moral integrity of the traveller. He argued that exposure to other cultures and religious practices distracts from the duties of Christian life, and thus may result in the proliferation of vices. This position is made particularly explicit in his polemical piece Quo Vadis? A lust Censure of Travell as it is commonly undertaken by the Gentlemen of our Nation (1617). Here Hall points out that ‘God […] hath placed [Britain] apart, for the singularity of our happinesse, not for restraint’.20 Hall rejects claims that travel could be educational or spiritually uplifting, but recommends armchair travelling instead: What if I say, that […] these lessons may bee as well taken out at home: I have knowen some that have travelled no further then their owne closet, which could both teach and correct the greatest Traveller, after all his tedious and costly pererrations, what doe wee but lose the beneft of so many iournals, maps, hystoricall descriptions, relations, if we cannot with these helps, travell by our owne fre-​side? This clearly refects the conservative –​bordering on xenophobic –​opinion of a moralistic bishop who opposes everything foreign and unfamiliar. But Hall’s position also needs to be viewed historically: in the context of emerging colonial ambitions in England and Europe more generally, Hall’s stand against travel can be interpreted as a certainly highly idiosyncratic but nevertheless vaguely anti-​ expansionist stance. From this perspective, Hall’s Antipodes emerge as a counter-​space to European imperialism.

Richard Brome: Critical Topsy-​Turvydom In his comedy The Antipodes, the Caroline playwright Richard Brome further refned the literary deployment of Antipodal inversion. Brome’s satirical play  Giampaolo Zucchini, ‘Utopia e Satira nel Mundus Alter et Idem di Joseph Hall’, in Studi sull’Utopia, ed. Luigi Firpo (Firenze: Olschki, 1977), 96. 20  Joseph Hall, Quo Vadis? A lust Censvre of Travell as it is commonly vndertaken by the Gentlemen of our Nation (London, 1617), 1–​2; cf. David McInnis, ‘Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900 52, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 454. 19

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centres on the ironically named character Peregrine, whose pathological obsession with travel literature, especially with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, has estranged him from his wife and parents. To cure Peregrine from what David McInnis has called his ‘wanderlust-​as-​mental-​illness’,21 the play’s characters stage an elaborate journey to the Antipodes, creating a fctional ‘Anti-​London’ right within the actual London. In their imaginary Anti-​London the vision of the Antipodes as a topsy-​turvy mundus inversus is taken to new heights; as one of the characters puts it: ‘The comedy being the world turn’d upside down.’22 What at frst appears to be nothing but a ridiculous exaggeration of the principle of Antipodal inversion soon turns out to be a clever reversal of traditional European power structures. So it is that in Brome’s Anti-​London, the robbed victim is punished instead of the thief, children supervise their parents, maids abuse gentlemen, patients advise doctors, and courtiers beg for food as clowns feast on exotic fruits. While carnivalesque inversions such as fencing women and stitching men would seem to challenge traditional gender stereotypes, Brome’s play largely continues along the conservative lines that are also discernible in Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem. Like Hall’s rejection of travel for fear of moral degeneration, Brome’s play can also be viewed as reactionary, since its provocative charade of Antipodal perversity ultimately works as a therapeutic deterrent that cures Peregrine of his abnormal behaviour and reinstates him as a functional and respectable citizen, husband and son. So as much as Brome’s play challenges social conventions at times, it also ultimately reinforces them. As in Hall’s vision of the Antipodes, much of the humour in Brome’s play is cheerfully burlesque, but often with an aftertaste of irony and moral fnger-​ wagging. In a scene in which the protagonist Peregrine is introduced to the Antipodal way of administering justice, he witnesses how the law is turned on its head in Anti-​London. Hearing what are basically bankruptcy cases, Peregrine learns that Antipodal law bestows ‘common charity […] towards the recovery of their lost estates’ to notorious ne’er-​do-​wells and spendthrifts, for example, a gamester who ‘by misfortune of the Dice lost all’ and a bon-​ vivant bawd who lost her wealth in ‘prodigall feasts and Fidlers, /​And lavish lendings to debauch’d Comrades’.23 Moreover, Peregrine is informed that the ‘Law punisheth /​The rob’d, and not the thiefe, for surer warning’, while ‘picke-​pockets’ are ‘cherish’d’ in the Antipodes.24 This, in interesting ways,  McInnis,  447.   Original quotations taken from Richard Brome, The Antipodes, ed. Ann Haker (London: Arnold, 1966), 28, II.i 12–​14; references are to act, scene and line. 23  P.35r/​p. 95 | IV.x.1–​77. 24  Ibid. 21 22

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anticipates some of the discourses around Australia’s European origin as a dumping ground for British criminals. Curiously, Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem also fed into this preconception with its Antipodal land of Theevingen, which, as the name suggests, is run by thieves. In an interesting twist, Brome’s play takes on a diferent quality when read against the historical context of English overseas ambitions in the seventeenth century. Even more than Hall with his puritan aversion to travel, Brome shows how the Antipodes, as a symbol of excessively remote space, challenge emerging ideologies of expansionism and imperialism. This dimension of the play becomes clearest when Peregrine, absorbed in the Antipodal charade staged for him, declares himself the king of the Antipodes. It is probably not coincidental that this takes place after he accidentally enters a dressing room full of stage props which he, in an almost iconoclastic ft, destroys. This is how the character Byplay reports the scene: Byplay: […] When on the suddaine, with thrice knightly force, And thrice, thrice puissant arme he snatcheth downe The sword and shield […] Rusheth amongst the foresaid properties, Kils Monster, after Monster; takes Puppets Prisoners, knocks downe the Cyclops, tumbles all Our jigambobs and trinckets to the wall. […] And […] with a reverend hand, He takes the imperiall diadem and crownes Himselfe King of the Antipodes, and beleeves He has justly gaind the Kingdome by his conquest.25 What happens here is that Peregrine, in an act of remarkable metafctional agency, takes control of the play-​in-​the-​play:  as a frst step, he destroys all the monsters, puppets and cyclops (in short, all the stage props that could represent Antipodal Monstrosity), and then, once he believes he has cleared Anti-​London of the elements that unsettle him, he crowns himself, ironically, with a crown that is just another theatre prop, the Conqueror of the Antipodes. Peregrine’s behaviour in this scene indicates a much wider concern of Brome’s play with issues of aggressive conquest and foreign rule than might be at frst expected. Given the play’s historical context of emerging colonial  Richard Brome, The Antipodes: A Comedie. Acted in the yeare 1638. By the Queenes Majesties Servants, at Salisbury Court in Fleet-​street (London, 1640), 3.5; cf. Brome, The Antipodes, 1966, 3.6.14–​31.

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aspirations in England, this substantiates an interpretation of Peregrine’s ‘wanderslust-​as-​mental-​illness’ as a form of proto-​imperial ambition, so that his mental condition comes to signify an inhibited drive for imperialistic expansion. This in turn means that below the play’s relatively conservative surface, and its Antipodal subversions of societal norms which are eventually overridden, a much deeper and critical dimension emerges in response to the ideology of imperialism. Importantly, on this layer of interpretation the Antipodes no longer simply fgure as a realm of perversity that frightens Peregrine back into socially acceptable behaviour. Instead, they take on an anti-​ideological function. This is largely due to the extraterritoriality of Brome’s Anti-​London, which is and at the same time is not the actual London –​ in other words, it is a no place, a utopia. This utopic spatiality is all the more pronounced because Brome’s nesting of one play within another foregrounds the fctionality of the play as such. In his work on utopia, Ernst Bloch continuously emphasised the concrete-​utopian, emancipatory function of the stage, arguing that theatrical performance, which he links to the ‘tempting wish to undergo a transformation’, liberates both actor and spectator.26 In the case of Brome’s play, this wish is equally located on the level of characters and metafction. What should become apparent here is that the play-​ within-​ a-​ play in Brome’s The Antipodes stages an Antipodal utopia that subtly but substantially critiques the emerging historical reality of English imperialism. As such, Brome’s play exhibits the subversive, ideology-​critical gesture of utopia. The critique expressed by this utopian vision becomes all the more poignant when it is borne in mind that Jacobean travel literature participated at least discursively, but often even more directly, in the formation of the ideologies of expansionism and imperialism in the seventeenth century; Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, which Bill Ashcroft rightly describes as an ‘imperial utopia’,27 amply illustrates the co-​opting of literature for the imperial project. Against this historical background, Brome’s play, which itself satirises but also forms part of contemporary travel literature, articulates a metafctional commentary that provides a self-​refective glimpse inside the workings of this ideologically charged literary discourse.

 Ernst Bloch, ‘The Stage Regarded as a Paradigmatic Institution and the Decision within It’, in The Utopian Function of Arts and Literature:  Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes et  al. (Cambridge: MIT P, 1988), 224; for the utopic quality of Brome’s The Antipodes, see also Mathew Boyd Goldie, The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People and Voices (New York: Routledge, 2010), 78f. 27  Ashcroft, ‘Critical Utopias’, 415. 26

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Brome’s Anti-​London allows the players to critically work through the imperial ambition personifed by Peregrine, and in the end to reorient the expansionist desires he stands for. The topsy-​turvy utopia they stage for him ultimately provides a controlled environment in which Peregrine can act out his fantasies of overseas adventure and expansion. Hence Letoy, the ‘fantastic lord’ in charge of the Antipodal charade, simply responds with the calm direction ‘Let him injoy his fancy’ when Peregrine, as the newly clothed emperor, sets of on his imperial quest ‘to reduce the manners /​Of this country to his owne’.28 Confronted with increasingly perverse examples of Antipodal inversions, Peregrine’s imperial longing for foreign places abates little by little, and it is this gradual release of psychic tension that is able to ‘sooth him into’s wits’. On a basic level of interpretation this means that Peregrine is restored as a respectable member of society; but in the historical context of emerging British imperialism, this also needs to be viewed as a satirical and critical response to fantasies of imperial expansion. With Peregrine’s attempts at ‘reform’ consistently thwarted by the subversive and antagonistic nature of the Antipodal space he is trying to bring under his control, Peregrine is frustrated out of his ‘wanderslust-​as-​mental-​illness’  –​that is, his imperial mindset  –​and fnally returns rehabilitated to his familiar environment. His expansionary ambition, in other words, is cured by way of utopia. Similar to Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem, we witness here an interesting interplay of utopia and ideology: while Brome’s Antipodal utopia subverts imperial ideology, it nevertheless ultimately folds back into a conservative position. Jonathan Swift: Antipodal Satire Even though this is not the major accomplishment with which Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is usually associated today, this timeless piece of world literature certainly contains some exquisite examples of Antipodality, which will be discussed in this and the following chapters. A contemporary reader may easily overlook the fact that Gulliver ‘coast[s]‌New Holland’ multiple times, is stranded on the Antipodal continent at one point and at several others enters what in today’s geopolitical landscape represents Australian territorial waters. According to Gulliver’s nautical specifcations, the sister islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu would be located somewhere in the Great Australian Bight, and Houyhnhnm Land would lie just of the southern tip of Western Australia. Since Lilliput and Houyhnhnm Land form the opening and closing parts of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s novel is bookended by Antipodal episodes.

 Brome, The Antipodes, 1640, 3.5.

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Gulliver’s Travels provides a prime example of how Antipodality can function as a spatial relay for social criticism. Without exception, all the fctional societies Gulliver encounters serve a satirical purpose of one kind or another. Swift’s critique of Georgian England immediately acquires a bitingly personal infection during Gulliver’s adventures on Lilliput in Book I. The existence of supplements like Edmund Curll’s A Key […] upon the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver clearly evidence that Swift’s novel was readily understood and read as a roman à clef, and that his contemporary readership meticulously deciphered the historical personalities ridiculed in their Lilliputian counterparts. Notoriously, the at that time Lord of the Treasury and later frst British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (whom Swift disliked politically as well as personally), fnds his Antipodal doppelgänger in Flimnap, the jealous Treasurer of Lilliput who intrigues against Gulliver after hearing absurd rumours about Gulliver having an afair with his wife. In Lilliput, we again fnd the Antipodes functioning as a distorting mirror, producing a carnivalesque and more-​or-​less thinly veiled satire of European politics and society. The crucial diference is that Antipodal inversion in Lilliput results not, as in Hall’s or Brome’s Antipodes, in a ‘utopia capovolta’, a realm of topsy-​ turvydom, but in a reversal of perspective. Here it needs to be stressed that what starts as the novel’s Lilliputian lampoonery of prominent fgures in eighteenth-​ century Great Britain quickly gains a deeper dimension. Gulliver’s adventure in Lilliput, a country which essentially represents a miniature of British society, is cast into sharp relief by his second adventure in Brobdingnag, the land of giants. After his experience of Brobdingnag, Gulliver comments that while in Lilliput he was regarded as ‘the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World’, in Brobdingnag he was nothing but a Lilliputian himself.29 The macroscopic self-​image Gulliver gained in Lilliput is shattered by his microscopic experience of Brobdingnag. This drastic reversal of physical scale, and the humbling loss of power and control that accompanies it, signals the beginning of a process in which Swift gradually unravels Gulliver’s understanding of himself and his European homeland. Importantly, as Swift scholar Clement Hawes claims, the novel’s ‘manipulation of scale’ should be understood as ‘a hyperbolic fguration of British colonial power’.30 Hawes, criticising readings of Gulliver’s Travels as an atemporal classic, places the novel at the centre of eighteenth-​century debates on imperial expansion. Within this historical context, he argues, Gulliver’s Travels represents an ‘ironic appropriation of colonial  Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: In four parts By Lemuel Gulliver … (Dublin, 1726), 67. 30  Clement Hawes, ‘Three Times Round the Globe:  Gulliver and Colonial Discourse’, Cultural Critique 18 (Spring 1991): 197. 29

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discourse’ that explicitly subverts the tropes and topoi on which imperialism as an ideology is founded.31 Accordingly, the novel’s reversal in terms of physical scale should be understood as an inversion of the power relations that characterise colonialism; the almighty European giant which Gulliver represented in Lilliput is forced into the ‘perspective of the dominated’ in Brobdingnag. The subversive dimension of this role reversal from oppressor to oppressed becomes most evident when the Brobdingnagians start to exhibit Gulliver ‘for Money as a publick Spectacle’ –​a bitingly satirical allusion to the common practice in eighteenth-​ century Europe of displaying colonial hostages as exotic curiosities under often inhumane conditions.32 A similarly radical example of Swift’s critique of the clichés of imperialism can be found in Gulliver’s discussion of the Brobdingnagian skin. Rather than interpreting this episode as motivated by misogynist spite or as an instance of Swift’s misanthropy, it should, as Hawes rightly points out, be understood as a ‘demystifcation of white skin’, and subsequently as a critique of the ‘dermatological fetishism’ that forms a thematic mainstay of imperial ideology.33 It is, again, by means of Antipodal inversion, and specifcally from the microscopic viewpoint of the Lilliputians, that Gulliver comes to criticise the imperial ideal of white skin: I Remember when I  was at [sic] Lilliput, the Complexions of those diminutive People appeared to me the fairest in the World, and talking upon this subject with a Person of Learning there, who was an intimate Friend of mine, he said that my Face appeared much fairer and smoother  Ibid., 198. It should be acknowledged that other interpreters have problematised a reading of Gulliver’s Travels as a critique of imperialism. Bruce McLeod, for instance, considers it a proto-​colonial novel that acts as an ‘unofcial agent of imperialism’; see McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–​1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 177. However, while McLeod’s evaluation of Robinson Crusoe in these terms is plausible, it seems less applicable to Gulliver’s Travels. Swift scholar Claude Rawson’s comprehensive study God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarianism and the European Imagination, 1492–​ 1945 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) is much more persuasive in this respect, arguing more radically for Swift’s deeply misanthropic nihilism. While Rawson succeeds in seriously challenging Swift’s ‘good “anti-​colonialist” credentials’, he does so chiefy by contrasting Gulliver’s Travels with Swift’s other, non-​literary writings. Rawson, therefore, may have a point that it cannot convincingly (or at least consistently) be argued that Jonathan Swift himself was a critic of imperialism. But as far as I see it, this autobiographical dimension does not (or at least not substantially) alter the discursive signifcance of Swift’s novel. So by and large, Hawes’s argument that Gulliver’s Travels articulates a critique of imperialism and colonialism still holds. 32  Swift, 77; cf. Hawes, 198. 33  Hawes,  200. 31

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when he looked on me from the Ground, than it did upon a nearer View when I took him up in my Hand, and brought him close, which he confessed was at frst a shocking sight.34 Reversal of physical scale translates here into an almost metaphysical change of perspective, in which Gulliver begins to question his own aesthetic and ideological beliefs:  ‘This made me refect upon the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a magnifying Glass, where we fnd by Experiment that the smoothest and whitest Skins look rough and coarse, and ill coloured.’35 Caught in a complex house of mirrors, Gulliver fnds his imperial self refracted through the kaleidoscopic prisms of Antipodal inversion. Repeated reversals of perspective and role lead Gulliver to challenge and ultimately abandon imperial rhetoric. The bird’s-​eye view of Lilliput, which reveals to him the pettiness of British politics, is followed by the physically humbling experience of Brobdingnag, which ends up as an intellectual embarrassment, in particular when the king demonstrates higher ethical standards than Europeans in his categorical rejection of Gulliver’s proposal to make gunpowder. Gulliver thus witnesses how another key element to the ideology of imperialism (i.e. the notion of European technological and moral superiority) is dismantled. But it is the last of Gulliver’s Antipodal adventures, his stay in Houyhnhnm Land, that deals the fnal blow to his European sense of self. Houyhnhnm Land represents an ingenious application of Antipodality:  by contrasting the consummately rational but horse-​like Houyhnhnms with the beastly and manlike Yahoos, the classic animal/​human binary is inverted in this topsy-​turvy utopia. Gulliver’s reluctant realisation that he (and by metonymic extension, imperial Europe) is more Yahoo than Houyhnhnm fnally signals that Antipodal inversion has reached full force in Swift’s novel. In a manner reminiscent of Demonax’s well, Gulliver becomes more familiar with his Antipodal distortion in the form of the Yahoos than his own refection: ‘When I happened to behold the Refection of my own Form in a Lake or a Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and Detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own Person.’36 Antipodal inversion turns Gulliver’s cognitive map upside-​down, leaving him in a disorienting state of defamiliarisation.  Swift,  72–​73.  Ibid.,  72. 36  Ibid., 234–​35. 34 35

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The gradual dissolution of Gulliver’s imperial ego eventually causes him to abandon his ‘duty as a Subject of England’. First he simply neglects his responsibility as an agent of British imperialism to claim the countries he had discovered for the British crown: ‘I confess it was whispered to me, that I was bound in duty as a Subject of England, to have given in a Memorial to a Sectary of State, at my frst coming over; because, whatever Lands are discovered by a Subject, belong to the Crown.’37 This then culminates in Gulliver denouncing the very premise of colonialism: But I had another Reason which made me less forward to enlarge his Majesty’s Dominions by my Discovery. To say the Truth, I had conceived a few Scruples with relation to the Distributive Justice of Princes upon those Occasions. For Instance, A Crew of Pirates are driven by a Storm they know not whither, at length a Boy discovers Land from the Top-​ mast, they go on Shore to Rob and Plunder; they see an harmless People, are entertained with Kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for their King, they set up a rotten Plank or a Stone for a Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return home, and get their Pardon. Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the frst Opportunity, the Natives driven out or destroyed, the Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free License given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust, the Earth reeking with Blood of its Inhabitants:  And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.38 It is the constant shifts and reversals of perspective  –​in other words the disruptive experience of Antipodal inversion  –​that turns Gulliver in the end into a dysfunctional agent of imperialism. Not only does Gulliver, like Peregrine in Brome’s play, eventually let go of imperial ambition; in Gulliver’s case, Antipodal reversals overshoot the mark so that Europe, the original reference point of Antipodal inversion, is ultimately turned on its head, becoming efectively the new Antipodes. Even more than Hall and Brome, Swift deploys Antipodal inversion as a satirical and critical response to imperial ideology.  Ibid.,  270.  Ibid., 271; emphases in the original. Note that this passage is followed by a caveat, in which Gulliver apparently excludes the British Empire from his imperial critique. The bitter sarcasm of the passage in question, however, seems to be rather obvious.

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Colonial Inversions With the onset of colonisation at the end of the eighteenth century, the relationship between Antipodality and imperial ideology changed signifcantly. As the previous chapters have shown, utopian discourses around Australia were largely bundled together into a particular form of Arcadianism that, more often than not, fed into ideologically charged discourses around emigration. The main function of Arcadia was to provide a refuge far away from what was perceived to be a Europe marred by the forces of Modernity. Antipodality further reinforced this notion by emphasising the absolute distance between Europe and its Antipodes. Take, for instance, the following anecdote: Just before I embarked [to Australia], I visited my grandmother, in order to take leave of her for ever […] She shed abundance of tears, and then became extremely curious to know every particular about the place to which I was going. I rubbed her spectacles whilst she wiped her eyes, and having placed before her a common English chart of the world, pointed out the situation of New Holland. She shook her head. ‘What displeases you, my dear Madam?’ said I.  ‘Why’, she answered, ‘it is terribly out of the way  –​down in the very right hand corner of the world.’ […] English people generally do consider New Holland ‘terribly out of the way’. Out of the way of what? Of England? […] But, without inquiry, a moment’s refection would lead them to use other words. They do not mean, though they say so, out of the way with respect to England, but positively out of the way –​that is, isolated and distant from the rest of the world –​‘down in the corner’, as my grandmother said.39 Australia’s Antipodal location, its ‘Down-​Underness’, further strengthens the perception of it as a retreat from whatever wrongs or ills are associated with Europe. As an interesting aside, this passage comes from the Letter from Sydney, a highly provocative piece published anonymously by the British politician Edward Gibbon Wakefeld. Wakefeld would later become a central fgure in the history of British colonialism, and his recommendations for reform would exert signifcant infuence over much of the colonisation of South Australia and New Zealand.40 At the time he was writing the Letter, Wakefeld was actually

 Edward Gibbon Wakefeld, A Letter from Sydney: The Principal Town of Australasia (London, 1829), 114–​17. 40  Biographic information on Wakefeld is taken from David J. Moss, ‘Wakefeld, Edward Gibbon (1796–​1862)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004). 39

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imprisoned in Newgate for abducting the heiress Ellen Turner  –​which adds a fne touch of irony to his description of the prison continent of Australia, a country in which he had not set foot in and which he knew only from studying travel accounts. Wakefeld’s vision of Australia is, therefore, entirely fctional, which makes him an armchair traveller who, just as in pre-​colonial times, visited the Antipodes only by way of the imagination. But Wakefeld’s vision also signals a shift in how Antipodal inversion was deployed in the context of imperialism. Another insightful example of how Antipodal inversion played out in discourses around colonisation and emigration to Australia can be found in a short story by Samuel Sidney, which was titled ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’ and published in Dickens’s popular journal Household Words. It tells the story of two hard-​pressed gentleman squatters, who have wasted all their inherited capital in the colonies and invite themselves to the Christmas dinner of a working-​ class emigrant from Devonshire. The scene of their arrival at the Devonshire man’s station demonstrates how Antipodal inversion weaves notions of class and labour into Arcadian emigration propaganda: ‘Hurrah’, cried Jack, ‘no starvation here:  there’s a six pair oxen dray unloading, by a whole generation of younkers [sic]; sugar-​plums in plenty; and look at the black fellow grinding away at the hand-​mill –​how fat the rascal looks. Well, we’ve reached the land of plenty this time’. ‘Why you see, Bullar’, said Martyn, ‘in this country all the rules go by contraries. It is Christmas Day, and, instead of frost and snow, it is a burning sun and green leaves we are perspiring under. Instead of a skate, I am thinking of a swim; and, in the same way, while in old England, very often it’s the more mouth, the less to eat; here, as every mouth has a pair of hands under it, the more mouths, the more food. So you see, Jack, while you and I, with a balance at the bank to start with, often have to put up with Lenten fare, this hard worker has contrived to make comforts we can’t buy’.41 Through a number of Antipodal inversions, Christmas is turned inside-​out in Australia, the country of ‘contrarieties’:  while in the imperial homeland Christmas falls into the physically and economically hard times of European winter, it becomes a verdant and sunny celebration of summer in the Antipodal colony; and while in ‘old England’ large families spell poverty (particularly for the lower classes), in the Australian Outback they translate into wealth. In an almost complete inversion of the power structures and roles in Dickens’s

 Samuel Sidney, ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’, Household Words, 21 December 1850, 309.

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Christmas Carol, it is now the previously needy and poor who give handouts to the originally better-​of. Noticeably, Sidney takes some pain to highlight the fact that Australia, the Arcadian ‘land of plenty’, is not simply a Quirósque dreamland in which milk and honey fow spontaneously and for all. Instead, it is the tireless ‘hard worker’ who, with diligence and perseverance, can carve out a decent life in the Australian Outback. Other stories from Dickens’s Household Words make the point even more forcefully, for example, when Jem Carden –​a rebel who, after being transported for destroying threshing machines, prospers in the pre-​ industrial Arcadia of Australia by virtue of his hard work  –​passes on his advice to poverty-​stricken workers in his native country: They have now a station and farm of their own; they are growing rich, as all such industrious people do in Australia, but they have not forgotten that they once were poor. […] ‘Oh, sir’, said the happy husband and father, ‘tell the wretched and the starving how honest, sober labour is sure of a full reward here. Tell them that here poverty may be turned to competence, crime to repentance and happiness’.42 Sidney’s vision here presents a new facet of Antipodal inversion: as the fip-​ side of Europe, Australia is able to turn things around for the poor and disadvantaged because it provides a utopian space in which poverty and crime can be transformed into their social opposites. The previous chapter has already discussed how a georgic work ethic, with its conception of hard agricultural labour as a socially rehabilitative intervention, was intimately connected to the Civilising Mission and its associated ideologeme of improvement. Sidney’s story shows how Antipodal inversion can be deployed to enhance and extend the pervasiveness of this ethic so that it reaches deep into the symbolic fabric of sociopolitical complexes such as the ‘stain of convictism’ and working-​class migration to Australia. By the middle of the nineteenth century it had become a commonplace that Antipodal inversion somehow results in a form of therapeutic or rehabilitative improvement, so that in the Jules Verne novel In Search of the Castaways (1867–​68) the geologist Paganel speaks of the natural, almost autonomous ‘moral regeneration’ that is facilitated and expedited through immersion in Antipodal space: Here metals do not get rust on them by exposure to the air, nor men. Here the pure, dry atmosphere whitens everything rapidly, both linen and souls. The virtue of the climate must have been well known in England  Samuel Sidney, ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’, Household Words, 6 April 1850, 43.

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when they determined to send their criminals here to be reformed […] And the convicts transported into this reviving, salubrious air, become regenerated in a few years. Philanthropists know this. In Australia all natures grow better.43 This integration of the ideologeme of improvement, and thus the appropriations of Antipodal inversion by imperial ideology, features prominently in the Australian stories in Dickens’s Household Words. It is an interesting side-​efect of these ideological appropriations that they often produce visions with strong concrete-​utopian content. For example, a vision of how Britain’s grim social underbelly with its manifestations of crime and poverty fnds ‘improvement’ in Australia eventually results in a celebration of convicts as legitimate and productive members of Australian society, and disadvantaged working-​ class migrants fnding meaningful employment in the Australian colonies. However, by embedding these concrete-​utopian motifs of convict rehabilitation and upward socio-​ economic mobility into the vision of Australia as an Arcadian workingman’s paradise, these kinds of Antipodal inversions become part of an ideological narrative which, as the previous chapters have shown, substantially subdue their emancipatory potential in the end. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson, these stories arouse concrete-​utopian desires strategically within carefully constructed containment structures, and only to the extent that their subversive power can be laid to rest again.44 The concrete-​utopian force of such Antipodal inversions thus remains closely kept in check by the ideology of imperialism. By now it has probably become apparent that the projection of opposites which lies at the heart of Antipodal inversion is by no means a precise or uniform operation that always yields the same results. Instead, what the inadvertently self-​refective process of Antipodal inversion produces depends entirely on the Eurocentric anxiety which motivated it in the frst place. So it is that next to the Dickensian vision of Australia as a rehabilitative space in which social wrongs are being righted, there existed an alternative vision which, very much reminiscent of Brome’s Anti-​London, viewed Australia as a somewhat unstable, topsy-​turvy space in which law and order have been turned on their heads. In this version of the Antipodes, as the well-​known verse goes, ‘every servant gets his place /​By character of foul disgrace. /​There, vice is virtue, –​ virtue, vice, /​And all that’s vile is voted nice’. Antipodal inversion reverses here not simply the fate of the socially disadvantaged that Britain disposed  Jules Verne, In Search of the Castaways or, The Children of Captain Grant, Australia, cpt. 9, 225.  Cf. Jameson, ‘Reifcation and Utopia’, 141.

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of in Australia, as it does in the containment structures of the Dickensian Pastoral; it produces a ‘utopia capovolta’ instead, in which the social order itself is reversed, so that what was previously considered deviant behaviour becomes suddenly socially acceptable and rewarding. Great cases in point are the colourful, often larger-​than-​life stories of convicts transported to Australia. With the economic and political rise of the middle classes towards the end of the eighteenth century, private property emerged as a key locus of cultural anxiety and with it, the thief as a symbolic fgure threatening the social order. In this context, Antipodal inversion and stories of penal transportation were frequently woven together into topsy-​turvy visions of a ‘land of thieves’ in the Antipodes in which social anxieties over property and theft could be worked through. Take, for instance, George Barrington, a pickpocket infamous for stealing the diamond snufbox of Prince Orlof at Covent Garden, who was transported to the Australian colonies in 1790. After only a few years in the colony he had managed to become chief constable at Parramatta, where he owned a house and several acres of land on the Hawkesbury. Barrington’s story is not that of a convict who, as the Dickensian Pastoral would have it, repents his crimes and then fnds redemption in the parsimonious life of a rural small-​holder in the Australian Outback; instead, it is the story of someone who contests the social structure of Britain through deviant behaviour and is rewarded with a position of power and respect in the colonies –​or at least this is how it was largely perceived by the interested British public, who dubbed Barrington the ‘Prince of Pickpockets’ and savoured the many fake accounts published in his name. One such text is the famous ‘Barrington Prologue’, which he supposedly read at the opening of the frst Australian theatre in Sydney: ‘From distant climes o’er wide-​spread seas we come, /​Though not with much eclat or beat of drum, /​True patriots all; for be it understood, /​We left our Country for our Country’s good.’45 Although the author’s punchline is very much tongue-​ in-​cheek, it cannot mask a certain anxiety elicited by the subversiveness embodied by fgures like Barrington. The enduring public fascination with convicts and similar delinquents testifes to the way in which they challenge social norms. It was their association with Australia that gave rise to a vision of the Antipodal continent as an unsettling counter-​space to the social reality  It has been established that the Prologue was written by Henry Carter, an Englishman who never visited Australia. See William H.  Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, ‘Barrington, George’, in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (Oxford UP, 1994). See also Susanna Watts and George Barrington, Original Poems, and Translations; Particularly Ambra, from Lorenzo de’Medici, Chiefy by Susanna Watts (London:  F.  and C.  Rivington, 1802),  106–​9.

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of Europe. The Australian stories in Dickens’s journals may be able to control the concrete-​utopian potential of their Antipodal inversions, but the notion that at the other end of the World there exists an Antipodal utopia for social deviants nevertheless succeeded in releasing part of the subversive, concrete-​ utopian force of Antipodality. In the end the relationship between Antipodal inversion and imperial ideology remains highly tense and ambiguous. While it has been seen that Antipodal inversion usually involves a highly refective and self-​critical gesture that stands in a contentious if not antagonistic relationship with imperialism, the Antipodal utopias of Hall and Brome showed that this ideological critique could nevertheless be contained within a largely conservative message. Similarly, Antipodal inversion generated some concrete-​utopian ideas through its depiction of Australia as a space of reparation in which social injustices of poverty and criminalisation could be reversed, but even this concrete-​utopian content was readily appropriated and safely contained within the Dickensian Pastoral and its georgic Arcadianism. However, as the example of Gulliver’s Travels illustrates, in its extreme form Antipodal inversion appears to escape the bounds of imperialism and manages to articulate a consistent, critical response to imperial ideology; however, in the case of Gulliver this ultimately results in a form of nihilistic disorientation, which lacks utopian perspective as much as it surmounts ideological obstacles. Antipodal inversion, it seems, is precariously poised between utopian subversion and ideological containment.

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Chapter 4 THE ANTIPODAL UNCANNY  Australia’s place in the Western imagination is substantially determined by Antipodality. Antipodality, in turn, is largely based on Antipodal inversion, that is, the notion that Australia, as Europe’s Antipodes, is somehow like Europe except with the opposite sign. In what amounts to an almost symptomatic phenomenon, this notion frequently reveals itself incidentally, and even actively, in the form of the Antipodal uncanny. Diferent conceptions of Antipodal space as somehow unsettling and threatening to the European subject cohere in the theme of the Antipodal uncanny. During the nineteenth century, this theme acquired great poignancy as it began to penetrate deeply into the ideology of settler colonialism and its subliminal feelings of guilt over European invasion and Aboriginal dispossession. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Antipodal uncanny had become so entrenched that it surfaced explicitly in Kangaroo, a 1923 novel by the English writer D.  H. Lawrence which was based on his only month-​long visit to Australia. The following passage from Lawrence’s novel provides one of the best examples of the Antipodal uncanny: And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-​trunks like naked pale Aborigines among the dark-​soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a sign of life –​not a vestige. Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude, dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush, overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his hair began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence. He looked at the weird, white, dead trees, and into the hollow distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home. And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold with terror. What of ? He knew quite well it was nothing. He knew quite

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well. But with his spine cold like ice, and the roots of his hair seeming to freeze, he walked on home, walked frmly and without haste.1 Note how the experience of the bush, which by the end of the nineteenth century had essentially become metonymical with Australia as such, is described as disturbing, even frightening. The European subject in this passage clearly feels out of place, if not haunted, in the Antipodal environment. In an ideological gesture reminiscent of Watling’s painting of Sydney Cove, we also fnd here Aboriginal people fused with the Australian landscape into a single, indistinguishable cipher; but in Lawrence’s case this cipher is not hidden away in the margin but foregrounded, and it has an uncanny, even threatening, quality to it. The focus of this chapter will be to explore which discourses produced precisely this sense of the Antipodal uncanny and how it relates to the ideology of imperialism. It will be argued that the Antipodal uncanny emerges prevalently on the fault line between imperial ideology and the utopian spatiality of Australia as a way of expressing the uneasy tension between them.

Zonal Theory, the Anti-​ecumene and the Uncanny As is the case with Antipodal inversion, the frst documented examples of the Antipodal uncanny date back to classical Greece, particularly in instances where thoughts about Antipodality were defned by what has come to be known as the theory of climatic zones. Even more than the notion of a round Earth, zonal theory set clear parameters for Europe’s relationship with its Antipodal counterpart. The precise origin of the theory is contested: common attributions to Pythagoras have been criticised, and although classical sources seem to favour Parmenides, the frst reliable account can be found in Aristotle’s Meteorologica.2 There appear to be several versions, but in its most infuential formulation zonal theory suggests a horizontal division of the Earth into fve climatic zones: it separates the two hemispheres by means of a central ‘torrid zone’ (believed to be impassable because of its intolerable heat), then posits a temperate, inhabitable zone in each hemisphere, and also defnes both of the Earth’s polar caps as frigid, uninhabitable zones. This division would prove highly infuential and provide the basis of the Antipodal uncanny because it sets up the inhabitable zones as Antipodal twins which are somehow similar 1 2

 D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (New York: Standford UP, 1923), 9–​10. Google Books.  Aristot. Metr. 2.5.362b; see also Stallard, 39f; Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 16; also Gabriella Moretti, Gli Antipodi:  Avventure Letterarie di un Mito Scientifco (Parma:  Nuova Pratiche, 1994), 20.

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because they share the same climate, but which are also perpetually separated from each other because of the impassable torrid zone around the equator. This idea of antipodal twin hemispheres was given further defnition by a cosmographic theory that is usually credited to Crates of Mallos. Without going into too much detail, it is important to note that the Cratesian system essentially divided the globe into two domains: the frst domain, the Ecumene (οίκουμένη, related to οΐκος meaning ‘household, home’), comprised the whole World as it was known to Antiquity. The Ecumene literally referred to the home world of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, encompassing all the land stretching from Europe’s eastern borders to the promontories of the Strait of Gibraltar –​an important landmark called the Pillars of Hercules, which was believed to designate the limits of the known (and in many ways, knowable) World. The second domain consisted of those parts of the World which were believed to exist yet thought to be forever secluded from the Ecumene, and for that reason essentially unknowable. This domain represented the Anti-​ ecumene. The binary of Ecumene/​Anti-​ecumene is integral to the Antipodal uncanny: cut of from the Ecumene, from the known home world of Antiquity, the Antipodes formed part of the Anti-​ecumene, the opposite to and of home; but because of the idea that the hemispheres were, at least climatically, twins, the Anti-​ecumene was also somehow perceived as the Ecumene’s double. A frst literary appearance of the Antipodal uncanny can be found in the short hymn Hermes by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (ca. 285–​194 BCE). Given Antipodality’s deep roots in ancient cosmography and geography, it is perhaps unsurprising that Eratosthenes was not just a poet but also a geographer and mathematician. In fact, he is now mostly known for his remarkably accurate calculation of the Earth’s circumference. Eratosthenes’ diverse interests in poetry, geography and astronomy make him a perfect representative of the Alexandrian age, a period that was characterised by the extension of cultural and geographical knowledge. His poem Hermes describes how the eponymous god, after he constructed the frst kithara, a lyre-​like instrument, ascends to the heavens to discover that the music of his newly invented instrument harmonises perfectly with the celestial spheres. In Hermes, Eratosthenes gives a literary colouring to the astronomic and geographical theories of his day. This becomes particularly apparent when he describes in great detail the Earth’s climatic zones during Hermes’s celestial ascent. In line with zonal theory, the poem describes two zones (one in the Northern and another in the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth) as equally fertile and inhabited by humans. On one hand zonal theory aligns here with notions of Antipodality because it too stipulates a certain similarity between antipodal zones –​we saw a similar relationship in Lucian where the Antipodes represent the mirror image of Europe. However, zonal theory’s fundamental

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binary of Ecumene/​ Anti-​ ecumene complicates this relationship between opposing zones so that it becomes an uneasy one of oscillation between familiarity and strangeness: as part of the Anti-​ecumene, the Antipodes are unknown and (because of the impassable torrid zone) essentially unknowable; yet as the zone antipodal to Europe, the Antipodes also simultaneously resemble Europe, and therefore appear strangely familiar.3 Drawing on their defnitional inaccessibility, Eratosthenes suspends the Antipodes dialectically between being at the same time disconnected and in opposition, but also similar and linked, to the Ecumene. It is this fuctuation between familiarity and strangeness that forms the core of the Antipodal uncanny. In keeping with Sigmund Freud’s seminal defnition of the term, the Antipodes exhibit the paradoxical ambivalence of the German word unheimlich (‘uncanny’). As Freud explains, the word unheimlich ‘belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very diferent from each other –​the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden’.4 Freud showed how in German the meaning of the word unheimlich coincides with its antonym heimlich. Antipodality is characterised by the same confation of conficting meanings: for one thing, the Antipodes are unheimlich in the sense of ‘strange, foreign’ because they form part of the Anti-​ecumene. But at the same time they are heimlich in the sense of ‘familiar, homelike’ because they lie in a climatic zone identical to the Ecumene. They are, furthermore, unheimlich in the sense of ‘accessible, unconcealed’ because their position in a similar climatic zone allows the drawing of comparisons and is suggestive of similarities, but they are also heimlich in the sense of ‘secret, inaccessible’ because of their definitional inaccessibility. Eratosthenes’ poem Hermes gives a frst insight into the kind of uncanniness that so readily arises in tandem with Antipodality. The Antipodal uncanny is further reinforced by mythopoetic associations of the Antipodes with the Underworld, the realm of the dead. This can be traced back as far as Virgil, who in his Georgics describes the Earth’s underside as the Netherworld, where the Styx fows through the realm of shadows.5 Virgil’s fourth-​century commentator Servius, in an attempt to consolidate the Georgics with other classical authorities, refned this association of the Underworld with the Antipodes by introducing the concept of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls). Servius reinterpreted the Antipodes as the place where the souls of the dead from the Northern Hemisphere become reincarnated, after they are purifed  Goldie,  16.  Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 132. 5  Verg. G. 1.242–​3; cf. Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 24. 3 4

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by crossing the torrid zone around the equator. This laid the foundation for the notion that the Antipodes are, as Alfred Hiatt puts it, a dark and infernal ‘place of purgation, the destiny of souls after death’.6 Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ provides another infuential example from Classical Antiquity in which Antipodality is discussed in an uncanny, even supernatural, context. The ‘Dream of Scipio’ forms the fnal chapter of Cicero’s seminal work De Republica and relates a dream of the Roman general and consul Scipio Aemilianus, in which the ghost of the consul’s adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus, takes him on a celestial journey during which they glimpse the Antipodes. Regarding the Antipodal uncanny, Cicero’s text is remarkable in two ways: frst, in its deployment of celestial ascension as a fctional device, which also featured in Eratosthenes’ Hermes. Celestial ascension is interesting insofar as it turns the experience of Antipodal space into a profoundly unsettling one:  while the godlike perspective from above (which Gabriella Moretti has described as ‘astronautic vision’)7 ofers a truly sublime view, it is literally removed from the mundane world. This sublime and otherworldly experience forms an integral part of the Antipodal uncanny. Second, there is the pairing of Scipio Aemilianus with his ghostly doppelgänger Scipio Africanus, which fnds a direct parallel in the twin zones of Europe and the Antipodes. As was seen in Lucian’s anecdote about Demonax’s well, this kind of doubling is a fundamental feature of Antipodality and contributes signifcantly to its sense of uncanniness.

The Alienating Sameness of the Antipodal Uncanny The theme of the Antipodal uncanny found further expression and elaboration in the early-​modern period. As the previous chapter showed, Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem capitalises in its use of Antipodality primarily on Antipodal inversion. But the novel also provides a sense of the Antipodal uncanny. Most prominently, the confation of conficting meanings that characterises the antonymic pair heimlich/​unheimlich can also be found in the alienating sameness that defnes Hall’s Terra Australis:  the countries and people Mercurius encounters on the Antipodal continent are decidedly unheimlich in the sense of ‘strange, foreign’ because they form part of the Anti-​ecumene, the opposite of home. At the same time they are also heimlich in the sense of ‘familiar, homelike’ because for the most part, Hall’s Antipodes represent a kind of carnivalesque doppelgänger of the diferent European societies they mock in satirically exaggerated form. Furthermore, Hall’s Antipodes are 6 7

 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 42.  Moretti, Gli Antipodi, 24: ‘visione astronautica’.

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heimlich/​unheimlich in the sense of ‘accessible/​secret’ because of the fact that their thinly but nevertheless carefully veiled parodies of European manners and mores require deciphering by the reader. This overall uncanny oscillation between familiar and foreign is immediately present in the work’s Latin title, which (as mentioned before) declares the New World discovered by Mercurius to be another (alter) world, yet at the same time the same (idem) as the one he has left behind. Hall’s work thus provides a frst illustration of the subversive potential of the Antipodal uncanny: in his Mundus Alter et Idem the Antipodal uncanny serves to defamiliarise the reader with their Ecumenical surroundings, and in doing so makes them only more conscious of the shortcomings of their homelands. The fact that the coupling of Ecumene and Anti-​ecumene (idem/​alter) in Hall’s novel maps efortlessly onto the pair heimlich/​unheimlich also suggests a deeper link between the uncanny quality of the Antipodes and their intrinsically utopian spatiality. As suggested in the previous chapter, Antipodality evinces a frst utopian dimension in the way the principle of Antipodal inversion positions Australia as a symbolic counter-​space to Europe. At frst it may seem counter-​intuitive that the Antipodal uncanny would give further depth to this utopian spatiality, especially when approached with a conventional understanding of utopia as the good place. However, keeping in mind Freud’s defnition of the uncanny as relating intimately to what is ‘familiar and comfortable’, the surprising fact that utopian thinking forms a crucial part of the Antipodal uncanny gradually emerges. Etymology provides further clues here: as mentioned earlier, the Greek word Ecumene (οίκουμένη) relates to a sense of home, just as the word unheimlich in German is based on the root Heim, which also means home. Ernst Bloch expands this into the concept of Heimat, which forms the ultimate utopian horizon of all human striving in his philosophy: as Bloch explains, Heimat (often translated as homeland) is something which ‘shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been’.8 Homeland, according to Bloch, is the utopia everybody knows but no one has reached yet. The defamiliarisation caused by Antipodality, which becomes most acute in the Antipodal uncanny, highlights precisely this: by collapsing the distinction between Ecumene and Anti-​ecumene, it makes conscious the fact that Heimat does not yet exist, and that the Ecumene is, therefore, just as unheimlich as the Antipodes. Richard Brome’s satirical comedy The Antipodes can be viewed as the frst key text of the Antipodal uncanny. As mentioned, Brome’s play centres on the ironically named character Peregrine, whose pathological obsession 8

 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1376.

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with travel literature has led to estrangement from his wife and parents. It is Peregrine’s refusal to consummate his marriage that forms the main driver behind the play’s motivational dynamics, which gives The Antipodes a sometimes ridiculous, sometimes quasi-​Freudian quality. To cure Peregrine, his family seeks help from a certain Doctor Hughball, who devises a rather peculiar antidote: the Doctor bands together with the eccentric Lord Letoy and his group of semi-​professional actors to stage an elaborate imaginary voyage. This family therapy in the form of drama rests, as David McInnis explains, on the idea that only the experience of a ‘complete removal from home, from the familiar’ will rehabilitate Peregrine with his domestic environment and ‘sooth him into’s wits’.9 Since ‘Arabia, Paphlagonia, /​ Mesopotamia, Mauritania, /​ Syria, Thessalia, Persia, India’ are ‘all still […] too neare home’, only the Antipodes will do as the imaginary destination of this travel therapy for Peregrine.10 Without ever leaving London, the play’s characters create an Antipodal ‘Anti-​London’ for Peregrine. It is introduced as ‘the Antipodes /​To the grand city of our nation:  /​Just the same people, language, and religion, /​But contrary in manners’.11 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Antipodality in Brome’s play starts of with the usual burlesque episodes of topsy-​turvy reversals. However, this takes a sharp turn to the Antipodal uncanny once Peregrine’s family members begin to take part in the Antipodal stage play. When Peregrine, so far blissfully absorbed in the fantasy created for him, encounters his wife Martha in what he sincerely believes to be Anti-​London, he is shocked in two ways: frst, when it is explained to him that Martha is the only daughter of the late king of the Antipodes and that he is expected to marry her in order to secure his ascension to the Antipodal crown: ‘Sir be happy in a marriage choyce, /​That shall secure your title of a king.’ Seeing Martha, who is both herself and her Antipodal doppelgänger, must trigger an uncanny sense of familiarity in Peregrine, if not a kind of déjà vu that makes him aware of the unconscious, blocked fantasy that leaks into reality here. This sense of uncanniness then becomes further intensifed when Peregrine is told (after having stressed that he is married already) that his wife back home has suddenly passed away.12 When Peregrine meets Martha  –​who is all at  McInnis, 451; cf. Lawrence Babb, Elizabethan Malady:  A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (New York: Michigan State UP, 1951), 123. Original quotations taken from Brome, 1640, 4.8; cf. Brome, The Antipodes, 1966, 4.10.116–​124: references are to act, scene and line. 10  Brome, The Antipodes, 1640, 1.6; cf. Brome, The Antipodes, 1966, 1.6.67–​70. 11  Brome, The Antipodes, 1966, II.iv.l38–​42. 12  Ibid., 102.IV.xi ll24–​29. 9

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once his old wife and his new –​the boundary between Ecumene and Anti-​ ecumene, between the familiar and the foreign, collapses. He is made to believe that the spirit of his deceased wife has found reincarnation in this ghostly doppelgänger in a sort of fash metempsychosis: ‘[Martha’s] feeting spirit /​ Is fowne into, and animates this Princesse.’ In this scene, Brome provides an outstanding example of the Antipodal uncanny, in which numerous of the theme’s diferent aspects come together. The antonymic tension between heimlich/​unheimlich and Ecumene/​Anti-​ ecumene is present throughout the entire structure of Brome’s play. His Antipodes feature as an uncanny realm that duplicates but also distorts the Ecumene, and thus turns the familiar and homely into the strange. This is particularly evident in the play-​within-​the-​play, in which Brome uses numerous Antipodal inversions to turn Anti-​London into a topsy-​turvy territory of the strange and foreign, but since all this takes place in the actual London, it is at the same time familiar and homelike. In comparison to Hall, Brome succeeds in creating a much more disturbing feeling of uncanniness, because while Hall’s Antipodes mostly exaggerate stereotypes of European manners and mores for satirical efect, Brome’s play makes the Anti-​ecumene literally coincide with the Ecumene:  it is Peregrine’s own home and family which he is unable to recognise during the Antipodal fantasy staged for him.

The Unsettling Efect of the Antipodal Uncanny The kind of alienating sameness that is generated by Antipodal inversion and that produces a sense of the Antipodal uncanny in Hall and Brome is brought to its extreme conclusion is Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. As mentioned before, Swift’s home world fnds an Anti-​ecumenical duplicate in Lilliput, a miniature Britain populated by Antipodal doppelgängers (for instance, Flimnap, who mocks Sir Robert Walpole). Throughout the course of Swift’s novel, this alienating sameness intensifes as each of the places that Gulliver visits estrange him further and further from what he is familiar with. In the last episode (Gulliver’s sojourn in Houyhnhnm Land), this gradual defamiliarisation culminates in complete alienation. The contrast between the superegotic Houyhnhnms, whose cold rationalism Gulliver admires and aspires to, and the Yahoos, the bestial It with which he reluctantly identifes, delivers the fatal blow to his already damaged self-​image so that Gulliver fnally fnds himself estranged from his own species. The Antipodal utopia of Houyhnhnm Land produces an alienation so complete in Gulliver that he can no longer simply return home. Fearing that he might ‘degenerate into the Vices and Corruptions of my own Species’, Gulliver prefers reclusion to returning back

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home and is horrifed by the idea of living ‘in the Society and under the Government of Yahoos’.13 In Gulliver’s experience of the Antipodal uncanny, Europe and the Antipodes ultimately cancel each other out. So while in Brome’s Antipodes the Antipodal uncanny successfully frightens Peregrine back into socially acceptable behaviour and reinstates him as a functional and respectable citizen, the Antipodal uncanny in Gulliver’s Travels dissociates the protagonist so severely from himself and his people that Gulliver is no longer able to identify himself with his familial and social role upon his eventual return to Britain: My Wife and Family received me with great Surprize and Joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the Sight of them flled me only with Hatred, Disgast [sic] and Contempt, and the more by refecting on the near Alliance I had to them […] And when I  began to consider, that by copulating with one of the Yahoo-​Species I had become a Parent of more, it struck me with the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror.14 Gulliver’s reluctant realisation that it is the beastly Yahoos (instead of the civilised Houyhnhnms) that represent his Antipodal fgure of identifcation leaves him with self-​contempt not only for himself, but for his entire species. Gulliver’s travels to the Anti-​ecumene, it seems, have induced such an intense feeling of the Antipodal uncanny in him that it spills over to the Ecumene, rendering his home as uncanny as the Antipodes. As in Brome, the Antipodal uncanny in Gulliver’s Travels has a decidedly anti-​ imperial edge to it. This becomes particularly evident when Gulliver, wishing that the Houyhnhnms would colonise Europe, proposes something close to a reversed Civilising Mission:  ‘Instead of Proposals for conquering that magnanimous Nation, I  rather wish they were in a Capacity or Disposition to send a sufcient Number of their Inhabitants for civilizing Europe, by teaching us the frst Principles of Honour, Justice, Truth, Temperance, Publick Spirit, Fortitude, Chastity, Friendship, Benevolence, and Fidelity.’15 In Gulliver’s Travels, Antipodality reveals much of its utopian potential, not only because it provides the extraterritorial viewpoint from which a critique of imperialism can be articulated, but also because its sense of the Antipodal uncanny draws attention to the fact that the Ecumene is as uncanny as the Anti-​ecumene, and that Heimat is not something already attained but still on the utopian horizon.  Swift,  260.  Ibid.,  267. 15  Ibid.,  271. 13 14

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Haunting the Imperial Subject The issue of the Antipodal uncanny took centre stage with the onset of colonisation in Australia. As previous chapters have already indicated, many aspects of the symbolic coordination of Australian colonialism sought to project feelings of homeliness and belonging onto the colonial landscape. Unsurprisingly, many instances of such mappings of the Ecumene onto the Anti-​ecumene gave rise to a sense of the Antipodal uncanny. While some writers such as Mary Ann Parker, who spoke exuberantly about how much the native plants of New South Wales reminded her of her home country, managed to gloss over aspects that could disrupt feelings of belonging, many others pointed out how treacherous these feelings of familiarity often were. James Edward Smith, for example, wrote in his ground-​breaking work A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland (1793): When a botanist frst enters on the investigation of so remote a country as New Holland, he fnds himself as it were in a new world […] Whole tribes of plants, which at frst sight seem familiar to his acquaintance, as occupying links in Nature’s chain, on which he has been accustomed to depend, prove, on a nearer examination, total strangers, with other confgurations, other œconomy, and other qualities; not only all the species that present themselves are new, but most of the genera, and even the natural orders.16 Smith was the founder and frst president of the Linnean Society of London, a scientifc organisation in pursuit of the ‘universal’ taxonomy of Carl Linné, which promised an unambiguous naming system for all biological organisms. His remark clearly testifes to the excitement Smith and his fellow European scientists must have felt at the discovery of large numbers of endemic species in Australia; but it also reveals a certain anxiety over the ‘Otherness’ that these Australian natives displayed in their ‘confgurations’, ‘œconomy’ and ‘qualities’. As Smith points out, the initial sense of familiarity or acquaintance with Australia’s fora and fauna soon turns into uncanniness as these ‘total strangers’ threaten to undermine Linné’s scientifc system of nomenclature. During the early-​colonial period, this sense of the Antipodal uncanny frequently emerged whenever the experience of the Australian continent was perceived to challenge the coloniser’s sense of moral, scientifc and technological dominance.  James Edward Smith, A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland, vol. 1 (London, 1793), 9–​10.

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One context in which the Antipodal uncanny emerged strongly was in the frequent disappointment of the sense of the homely and familiar that arose from associations of the Australian landscape with a ‘gentleman’s park’. Many Britons travelling through early-​colonial Australia reported that they frequently felt transported back to the motherland as the country’s beguiling park-​like appearance inspired a feeling of Heimat in them; but this feeling was uncannily deceptive, because there was no British homestead waiting for the colonial traveller at the end of Australia’s open, park-​like ranges. Henry Thomas Ebsworth, secretary of the London-​based Australian Agricultural Company, voiced his frustration over this false expectation: ‘The land is lightly timbered, resembling a Gentleman’s park occasionally, but the traveller is soon obliged to lose this idea by fnding no Mansion at the end of the scene: He journeys on, as it were, from Park to Park all day.’17 For Australia’s European colonisers, the country’s park-​like appearance generated a false ‘prospect of home’18 that often ended in frustration and disappointment. The homely associations of the notion of a ‘gentleman’s park’ sometimes conjured up complex visions that had a gloomy or even haunting quality to them. Take, for example, the following comments made by travel author William Howitt during his tour of the Yarra Valley and surroundings: One cannot, every now and then, help fancying that, on some height or slope amongst the trees, we shall catch sight of some gentleman’s seat, or perceive a carriage, with all its fnished appointments, rolling downward to the road. But a moment’s refection reminds you that all is solitary wilderness; that there is no road in reality; and that such houses and carriages lie, perhaps, hundreds of years in the background. Even where human life has yet enlivened the waste wood, it is only in a few widely-​lying farms, and in huge, lonely, and wholly unfenced sheep and cattle-​stations.19 Howitt’s remarks indicate how quickly the coloniser’s feeting sense of belonging in the colonial landscape came to be replaced by the feeling of vulnerable isolation that was also evident in the passage quoted from D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo. Similarly, Army Captain Foster Fayns commented on the peculiar kind of melancholy he experienced when the vision of a gentleman’s park, with the phantasmagoria of a welcoming European  Ebsworth, 67. Henry Thomas Ebsworth papers. State Library of NSW, Sydney; cf. Gammage, 15. 18  Carter, 243; see also Smith, European Vision, 180. 19  William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold: or, Two Years in Victoria…, vol. 1 (Boston, 1855), 79. 17

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homestead at the end of it, continued to dissolve into disappointment: ‘The country between Timboon and the Hopkins River would remind any person lately from home of a nobleman’s park, with the expectation of coming soon to a magnifcent house. Many a dreary ride I have had over this magnifcent, splendid country, lying waste and idle.’20 Both Howitt and Fayns provide illuminating insight into how profoundly the perception of Australia was shaped and predetermined by imperial ideology. A key feature to note in their comments is the notion of ‘wasteland’. As will become apparent shortly, the notion of land ‘lying waste and idle’ is part of a complex conceptual nexus which is, via Lockean conceptions of private property, intimately linked to the centrepiece of imperial ideology: the legal fantasy of terra nullius. To begin with, the mentioning of wasteland in Australia is directly linked to the ideologeme of land improvement, which (as discussed in Chapter 3) constitutes the conceptual juncture at which the discourses of Enlightenment and Empire intersect. Wasteland provides not only the benchmark for assessing the progress of the Civilising Mission, but since it forms the legal and economic ground for imperial expansion, it more importantly represents the material basis on which the idea of Empire is founded. This understanding of wasteland derives directly from Lockean conceptions of private property; according to John Locke, entitlement to land is based on the labour invested into the improvement of that land: ‘Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.’21 As mentioned before, the ‘gentleman’s park’ which Howitt and others were visiting was not in a ‘state of nature’ but represented the type of hunting ground produced by Aboriginal fre-​stick farming. The notion of wasteland, accordingly, denotes a site of dispossession:  by displacing the indigenous labour that produced these ‘gentlemen’s parks’, they are designated as terra nullius, as land at the coloniser’s disposal because it appeared, according to their standards, unproductive. As Graham explains: ‘ “Improved” and productive land use practice was the logical basis of private entitlement to property. The idea of terra nullius was, therefore, never one expressing the absence of Indigenous people from their lands. Terra nullius was ultimately a code for the absence of agricultural use of those lands, particularly intensive agriculture.’22 Through connecting the Enlightenment notion of improvement to a Lockean conception of property, wasteland played a central role in supporting  Qtd in Carter, 243.  John Locke, Two Treatises of Government … (London, 1690), II. 5. 27, pp. 25–​64. 22  Graham,  95. 20 21

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the euchronic vision of the Civilising Mission. But the status of wasteland was ambivalent and could cut both ways. It did represent a crucial legitimising symbol of imperial ideology, but as an indexing marker of the Civilising Mission, it was also a constant visual reminder of how much of that mission had actually been accomplished. If more wasteland presented itself to the colonisers than they could make use of, then their entitlement to that land came into question. As Locke emphasises, entitlement to land is proportional to labour power: ‘As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of; so much is his Property. He by his Labour does as it were inclose it from the Common.’23 Locke’s comment on the enclosure of private property can be directly read back into Howitt’s comments: particularly Howitt’s reference to ‘wholly unfenced sheep and cattle-​stations’, which reveals his concern about the fact that the colonial estates he visited were not marked of from the surrounding wastelands through enclosure  –​ which, following Locke’s defnition, threatened their status as private properties. All of this was exacerbated by the ambiguous status of the so-​called gentlemen’s parks: they had the uncanny appearance of being land improved by Europeans, but they evidently were not. This ambiguity relating to the diference between improved and unimproved land put immediate pressure on the Civilising Mission and threatened the colonisers’ self-​conception as benevolent agents in the improvement of Australia. It is in this context that feelings of the Antipodal uncanny arise: the Antipodal uncanny, it seems, emerges as a spectre that haunts the imperial project.

Struggles of Belonging With British colonisation gathering momentum, the Antipodal uncanny increasingly retreated to the still largely unexplored Australian inland. Interestingly, the exploration of the inland was carried by a particular kind of colourful and utopian overoptimism about what the continent’s unchartered interior might hold. For example, it was the popular speculation about a vast sea in the centre of Australia that motivated the inland expeditions of the British explorers Charles Sturt and Edward John Eyre. Sir Thomas Mitchell, however, was driven by a diferent utopian fantasy because he sought to fnd the great Kindur, a fabled river that was thought to traverse Australia’s interior.24 The enigmatic inland, it seemed, provided a space that resisted colonisation and in which Australia’s last secrets could survive. Sturt described  Locke, II. 5. 32, p. 250.  For the fascinating origins of the Kindur myth in convict lore, see: Dean Boyce, Clarke of the Kindur: Convict, Bushranger, Explorer (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2013).

23 24

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the mysterious attraction of Australia’s interior thus: ‘A veil hung over Central Australia that could neither be pierced nor raised. Girt round by deserts, it almost appeared as if Nature had intentionally closed it upon civilised man, that she might have one domain on earth’s wide feld over which the savage might roam in freedom.’25 With Australia’s coastal fringes becoming increasingly colonised, the focus moved to the inland as the terra nondum cogita. But the heart of Australia, it turned out, was an empty desert. The confrontation with the seemingly infnite space of the interior’s salt deserts and barren plains aroused a feeling of awe and terror in European explorers  –​ an experience Paul Carter has fttingly described as ‘spatial nausea’.26 As Bill Ashcroft explains, the terror evoked by the lack of any topographical relief in Australia’s boundless deserts expressed itself as the ‘Horizonal Sublime’.27 While the Horizonal Sublime is documented in great detail in the journals of Edward Eyre, Ludwig Leichhardt and Charles Sturt, it is probably best illustrated by paintings such as E.  C. Frome’s First View of Salt Desert, called Lake Torrens or G.  F. Angas’s Emus in a Plain. Here the ‘psychic line’ of the Australian horizon reveals the absolute placelessness and displacement of the coloniser and foregrounds their vulnerable position outside the pale of European civilisation. The experience of the Horizonal Sublime had two interesting efects in the discursive context of visions of Australia:  for one thing, it reinforced classical and medieval notions of the Antipodes as the ‘land of the damned’. This gained particular salience due to the brutal fact that the exploration of Australia’s interior turned into a deeply frustrating, often even life-​threatening enterprise for European adventurers. Since the arid inland persistently and dramatically thwarted the utopian expectations of European explorers, their expeditions could no longer be rendered within the conventional literary format of the discovery journey; in order to convey some sort of achievement they needed to be remodelled into what Robert Sellick has called a ‘contest between explorer and land’.28 These journeys consequently became less an exploration of the external world, than an internal exploration of the self, an inner struggle of volition and persistence. Hence the journals of Ludwig Leichhardt and Eyre, but most paradigmatically those of Sturt (whom Ross Gibson called the ‘surveyor of the “country of

 Qtd in McLean, 83–​84; see Charles Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, vol. 2 (London, 1849), 2. 26  Carter, 147; see also Hoorn, 130. 27  Bill Ashcroft, ‘The Horizontal Sublime’, Antipodes 19, no. 2 (2005): 144. 28  Robert Sellick, ‘From the Outside In: European Ideas of Exploration and the Australian Experience’, in Australia and the European Imagination, ed. Ian Donaldson (Canberra: ANU, 1982), 181. 25

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the mind” ’)29 were turned into spiritual explorations of the awe-​inspiring and mysterious force of Australia’s inland. It is now the European explorers, it seems, who have turned into spectres haunting the Antipodal landscape. In terms of wish fulflment, this suggests an interesting transformation:  with the expected body utopia of a lush inland vanishing like a mirage, the utopian desire driving the explorers forward is re-​channelled into a utopia of the mind. Another important discursive efect of the Horizonal Sublime was that it forcefully opposed constructions of the Australian landscape through a utopian prism. By painfully exposing the radical disparity between visions of Australia as a fertile Arcadia and environmental reality it put particular pressure on the Dickensian Pastoral and other utopian articulations of settler ideology. By magnifying the diferences between Australia and Europe, the Horizonal Sublime dramatised feelings of estrangement and vehemently denied the imperial subject a sense of belonging within the colonial environment. This meant that the Antipodal conception of Australia as the Anti-​ecumene found a real foundation in the experience of Australia’s excessively wide and excessively empty space. It is, furthermore, in ‘the horizonal Australian experience’ that the connection between the Antipodal uncanny and the aesthetic of the sublime becomes most manifest because as Bill Ashcroft explains, the ‘uncanniness of that experience, its “not-​at-​home-​ness” is a direct consequence of sublime plenitude of place’.30 Since the Antipodal uncanny is at its core nothing but the sublimation of this feeling of ‘not-​at-​home-​ness’, the Horizonal Sublime can be viewed as the most acute expression of the Antipodal uncanny. Conversely, Antipodality can be thought of as sublime due to its oppositional Otherness, and the Antipodal uncanny as a mechanism of self-​preservation seeking to contain the terror evoked by Antipodality. What should become apparent here is that the Antipodal uncanny emerges as an aesthetic response to the tension between Antipodality and imperial ideology. The Horizonal sublime with its associated feelings of placelessness and not-​at-​homeness clearly ties into a larger collective anxiety over European settlement in Australia. This complex struggle over belonging in and to the Australian environment found another fascinating form of expression in the so-​called Lost Race Romances, an ofshoot of the genre of adventure romance.31 The Lost Race Romances closely follow the ‘Haggard template’,  Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise, 127.  Ashcroft, The Horizontal Sublime, 143. 31  This is not a defnite list, but the following novels can safely be classifed as Lost Race Romances:  [Richard Whatley:] Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland (1837); [Anonymous:] Oo-​a-​deen or, the Mysteries of the Interior Unveiled (1847); James Francis Hogan: The Lost Explorer (1890); W. Carlton Dawe: The Golden Lake (1891); 29 30

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which derived from H. R. Haggard’s adventure romance King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Robert Dixon describes the blueprint of the genre as follows: There are a number of recurring plot functions that defne the genre’s overall shape. Typically, a group of English adventurers plans a journey into unexplored regions to revive their fagging spirits and fortunes. At or near their destination they encounter a relatively advanced white, or partly white, civilisation presided over by a queen […] In addition to this fctional lost race, the adventurers also meet more realistic native peoples who are often divided into warring factions. If one of the Englishmen falls in love with a native woman of either the lost or the native race, she usually dies. Generally speaking the lighter the skin the greater her chances of surviving. In the end, having established order, the Englishmen get what they came for –​usually some form of wealth –​ and depart.32 Lost Race Romances specifcally addressed cultural anxieties over a perceived lack of Anglo-​Australian history and national identity, which contributed signifcantly to a sense of homelessness and grew increasingly stronger towards the end of the nineteenth century –​the same time when the genre also reached its heyday. The Romances developed their own idiosyncratic response to this anxiety in the form of the eponymous ‘lost race’. These lost races were usually imagined as a technologically advanced, white or at least partially white, civilisation that somehow survived undiscovered and hidden in Australia’s remote interior. Since these races are usually depicted as culturally and often even genetically related to ancient European or Mediterranean civilisations, they provide a direct genealogical link between Ecumene and Anti-​ecumene. Since they thus helped allay feelings of not-​at-​homeness, the Lost Race Romances also provided a way to re-​negotiate the Antipodal uncanny and the ideological tensions it stood for. One of the most interesting aspects of the Lost Race Romances is that their imaginations of lost civilisations were often deeply rooted in nineteenth-​ century debates in anthropology and geology that had a distinctly utopian tinge

Ernest Favenc: The Secret of the Australian Desert (1896); Ernest Favenc: Marooned on Australia (1896); John David Hennessey: An Australian Bush Track (1896); George Firth Scott: The Last Lemurian (1898); Rosa Praed: Fugitive Anne. A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902); Alexander MacDonald:  The Lost Explorers (1906); William Sylvester Walker:  The Silver Queen (1908). 32  Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure:  Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-​Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 62.

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to them. Especially the new, and frequently pseudoscientifc, theories about the geographical origin of mankind that followed in the wake of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) provided a fertile and rich context for the genre. An idea central to the Lost Race Romances was a proposition supported by reputable biologists such as Philip Sclater and Ernst Haeckel that the cradle of humanity was to be found in a prehistoric continent stretching from Africa’s east coast to south-​east Asia, which was now largely submerged under the ocean. This hypothetical continent was frequently called ‘Lemuria’ because it also helped explain the geographical distribution of the lemur species, which is now known to be endemic to Madagascar but was then believed to include similar-​ looking mammals from the Indian subcontinent and the Malay archipelago. Some proponents of the Lemuria hypothesis thought that the Australian continent was the largest remnant of this prehistoric landmass. The number of Lost Race Romances that actively embraced or at least acknowledged this pseudoscientifc vision of Australia as the last remains of humanity’s primordial origin-​place were sufcient in number for J. J. Healy to call the period the ‘Lemurian Nineties’.33 Regarding the Antipodal uncanny, two points are interesting to note about the association of Australia with the prehistoric continent of Lemuria. For one thing, this identifcation efectively collapsed the distinction between Ecumene and Anti-​ ecumene by turning Australia into the ancient homeland, the Ur-​Heimat, of humankind. The Lost Race Romances enriched this vision further by weaving through Judeo-​Christian themes and motifs that often equated the Australian inland with the original seat of the Garden of Eden. But what is even more intriguing is the fact that the word lemures in Latin (commonly translated as the ‘shades of the departed’) referred to deceased members of a household that came back to haunt the living as wandering, vengeful spirits. It is often argued that the iconic Madagascan primates were named thus due to their spectre-​like face and their notoriously mischievous behaviour. The word ‘Lemuria’ accordingly means the land of the haunting spirits. By imagining the Antipodes as an uncanny realm in which the souls of the dead of the Northern Hemisphere become reincarnated, the Lemurian vision entrenches further ancient notions of Antipodal space as a type of underworld that date back to Virgil. Given its connotation of a land of ghostly shades or shadows, Lemuria ties readily into the wider thematic feld of Antipodality and connects particularly to the notion that Australia is populated by uncanny doppelgängers of the Ecumene. Although the Lemurian theme is very strong in Rosa Pread’s Fugitive Anne (1902), the Lost Race Romance that capitalises the most on the pseudoscientifc vision of Lemuria is certainly George Firth  J. J. Healy, ‘The Lemurian Nineties’, Australian Studies 8, no. 3 (May 1978).

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Scott’s The Last Lemurian (1898). The Antipodal uncanny features prominently in Scott’s novel, for example, in the form of one of the main characters, a rugged bushman who is introduced as ‘the Hatter’ but later revealed to be Sir Claude Digby, a once-​wealthy British baron now fallen on hard times. Here the Antipodal version of the character is a mere shadow of his former European self. However, it is in forms such as the fallen European that the Antipodal uncanny frequently spills over into another form: Antipodal monstrosity.

Marcus Clarke’s ‘Weird Melancholy’ The Antipodal uncanny developed in the European imagination over many centuries, yet the frst text which can be viewed as clearly articulating something close to a poetics of the Antipodal uncanny –​if not of Antipodality as such –​was Marcus Clarke’s preface to the 1893 collection of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poetry. Although Clarke was ostensibly driven by Anglo-​Australian nationalism and the desire for a new aesthetic of the bush, his vision frequently backslides into tropes of imperialism. This is not particularly surprising since nationalism in Australia grew out of and largely continued to carry the ideological baggage of settler colonialism. Take, for instance, the following passage from Clarke’s preface: Australia has rightly been named the Land of the Dawning. Wrapped in the mist of early morning, her history looms vague and gigantic. The lonely horseman riding between the moonlight and the day sees vast shadows creeping across the shelterless and silent plains, hears strange noises in the primeval forest, where fourishes a vegetation long dead in other lands, and feels, despite his fortune, that the trim utilitarian civilisation which bred him shrinks into insignifcance beside the contemptuous grandeur of forest and ranges coeval with an age in which European scientists have cradled his own race.34 Clarke clearly seeks to lay the literary foundation for a new national aesthetic here, but in doing so he extensively draws on core ideologemes of imperialism. Foremost there is the notion that Australia has no history or that Australia is somehow lost in time, a notion which precipitately erases any form of indigenous history and bears a strong resemblance to the Lemurian hypothesis of Australia as humanity’s primeval origin. As such, Clarke’s vision of a ‘Land of the Dawning’ amounts efectively to what anthropologist Johannes Fabian  Marcus Clarke, ‘Preface’, in Poems of the Late Adam Lindsay Gordon (Melbourne: Massina, 1893), vi.

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calls a ‘denial of coevalness’, meaning that although the ‘primeval forest’ exists in and at the same time as the European subject riding through it, it is relegated to an atemporal plane marked as ‘decadent’, ‘prehistoric’ and ‘obsolete’.35 Part and parcel of this construction of the Australian landscape through the prism of imperialism is, of course, the nearly complete erasure of Aboriginal presence. But this conspicuous absence fnds a diferent mode of expression via the Antipodal uncanny. Haunting Clarke’s preface here in the form of ‘vast shadows creeping across the shelterless and silent plain’, the Antipodal uncanny makes felt not only the fault line between Ecumene and Anti-​ecumene but also the absence of Aboriginal people. What is striking and signifcant about Clarke’s preface in light of his indebtedness to imperial ideology is that he manages to weave the Antipodal uncanny through his national vision without materially diminishing the ideological tension that it encapsulates. In fact, he appears to achieve a kind of sublation of the Antipodal uncanny, in which its threatening, unsettling quality is not cancelled out but preserved and, to a certain extent, even given prominence within his promise of an entirely new aesthetic. This becomes particularly apparent in the following passage: What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry –​Weird Melancholy […] The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-​human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like monstrous sea-​calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fre dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-​inspiring and gloomy. No bright fancies are linked with the memories of the mountains. Hopeless explorers have named them out of their suferings –​Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair. As when among sylvan scenes in places […] the soul is soothed and satisfed, so, placed before the frightful grandeur of these barren hills, it drinks in their sentiment of defant ferocity, and is steeped in bitterness.36

 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 25f; also cf. Hawes, 196. 36  Clarke,  v–​vi. 35

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Clarke’s ‘Weird Melancholy’, I  would argue, is largely if not exclusively a product of the nervous, unresolved tension between imperialism and the often counter-​intuitively utopian spatiality of Antipodality. In other words, Clarke’s ‘Weird Melancholy’ presents an aesthetic that is shaped and dominated by imperial ideology, but which also tightly embraces the Antipodal uncanny as a marker of unresolved antagonism.

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Chapter 5 ANTIPODAL MONSTROSITY  Antipodality is based on the principle of Antipodal inversion, which in turn often gives rise to the Antipodal uncanny. Where the Antipodal uncanny becomes increasingly salient and distinctly articulated, it often reveals a new dimension in the form of Antipodal monstrosity. Great instances of this can be found in the frst European descriptions of Australian fora and fauna. French naturalist François Auguste Péron, for example, emphasised that ‘the animals and vegetables of this singular continent’ had their own ‘peculiar laws’,1 while the chronicler James O’Hara wrote: ‘In numerous instances, animals were discovered which might at frst sight be considered monstrous productions, such as an aquatic quadruped, about the size of a rabbit, with the eyes, colour and skin of a mole, and the bill and web-​feet of a duck.’2 The animal referred to here is, of course, the platypus, the discovery of which caused a small commotion in the scientifc community of the early nineteenth century. European zoologists fercely debated whether this ‘monstrous’ creature was an entirely new class of vertebrates, the missing link between reptiles and mammals, or simply a hoax by a skilled taxidermist who had glued together the limbs of several animals. In some ways, the platypus is emblematic of Antipodal monstrosity in general: European naturalists expected Australia to bring forth entirely new and diferent creatures. However, as in the case of the platypus, sometimes their own utopian expectations were surpassed by the fantastical diferences of the Antipodal utopia. It is this excess in utopian expectation that gives rise to Antipodal monstrosity.

Medieval Origins It appears that Antipodal monstrosity frst took on a distinct form in the early middle ages. It seems to have emerged as something close to a by-​product of Antipodality, particularly in the context of medieval cosmography and cartography, where the Antipodes featured increasingly as a space denoted ‘here  François Auguste Peron, A Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Hemisphere (London: Richard Phillips, 1809), 291. 2  James O’Hara, The History of New South Wales (London: J. Brettell, 1818), 54. 1

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be dragons’. It is a strange stroke of irony that St Augustine of Hippo, who fercely contested the existence of the Antipodes, can be identifed as the originator of their association with monstrosity. Augustine and the early Church Fathers realised that the hypothetical existence of the Antipodes posed severe challenges to Christian doctrine. Their argument ran thus:  the Ecumene’s geographical segregation from an inhabitable continent on the opposite side of the globe was irreconcilable with Holy Scripture, which stated that the Earth in its entirety was given to the sons of Adam to be populated. If the Antipodes were populated, then this would contradict the Bible’s account of human monogenesis because no descendant of Adam could have populated the Antipodes. They were, according to Classical geography, unreachable because of the impassable torrid zone around the equator. Moreover, an Antipodal population would put stress on the Christian imperative to ‘go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to the whole creation’ (Mark 16.15-​16). At stake, therefore, was the integrity of nothing less than scripture itself.3 In order to reconcile the notion of a round Earth and other Ancient theories of geography with the Bible, Augustine had to presume that the human population was asymmetrically distributed. Here is his riposte to the Antipodal proposition, which showcases with eloquent but sometimes misleading rhetoric his intimate familiarity with Classical geography: Quod vero et antipodas esse fabulantur, id est homines, a contraria parte terrae, ubi sol oritur quando occidit nobis, adversa pedibus nostris calcare vestigia, nulla ratione credendum est. Neque hoc ulla historica cognitione didicisse se adfrmant sed quasi ratiocinando coniectant eo quod intra convexa caeli terra suspensa sit eundemque locum mundus habeat et infmum et medium; et ex hoc opinantur alteram terrae partem quae infra est habitatione hominum carere non posse. Nec adtendunt, etiamsi fgura conglobata et rutunda mundus esse credatur sive aliqua ratione monstretur, non tamen esse consequens ut etiam ex illa parte ab aquarum congerie nuda sit terra; deinde etiamsi nuda sit, neque hoc statim necesse esse ut homines habeat. Quoniam nullo modo scriptura

3

Regarding the fable of the Antipodes, that is, that there are men on the opposite side of the Earth, where the sun rises when it sets for us, men who plant their footsteps against ours:  there is no reason to believe in this. For it is not proved whether this is based on historical knowledge, or rather inferred from calculation based on the fact that the Earth hangs suspended from the vault of Heaven, and that the Earth looks the same on every side:  but from this they conjecture that the lower half of the Earth must be populated. They do not take into account that  –​even if it is presumed or scientifcally demonstrated that the Earth is of a round and spherical shape  –​the other side may be covered by water; and even if there is no water, that this does not necessarily mean that it is populated.

 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 38; see also Moretti, ‘The Other World’, 263.

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ista mentitur quae narratis praeteritis facit fdem eo, quod eius praedicta conplentur, nimisque absurdum est ut dicatur aliquos homines ex hac in illam partem, Oceani inmensitate traiecta, navigare ac pervenire potuisse ut etiam illic ex uno illo primo homine genus institueretur humanum.4

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For Scripture, which proves its truthfulness by the fulflment of its prophecies, never lies, and it is too absurd to say that some men from this hemisphere could have traversed the wide Ocean and sailed to the other, so that even down there the human race descended from the one First Man.

To support his own argument, Augustine emphasises the lack of empirical knowledge about the Antipodes and stresses the speculative nature of previous claims about them. He grants the possibility of their existence at least in theory but comes to the conclusion that Antipodal regions are either entirely covered by water, or not inhabited by human beings. It is this latter theory which (probably unintentionally) invited speculation that the Antipodes are populated by a non-​human –​in other words monstrous –​race. The context of the quoted passage supports such a misreading:  as Alfred Hiatt points out, Augustine’s excursion into the Antipodal question is preceded by a discussion of monstrous races and deformities addressing the question of ‘what constitutes the “genus humanum” ’.5 Given this context, it is understandable that Augustine’s comments were later misread as proposing that the Antipodes are populated by monsters. This example from Augustine shows that right from the beginning, the association of Antipodal space with monstrosity had such a strong and controversial resonance in the European imagination that it even tempted to more or less wilfully misunderstand church authorities. Augustine’s comment was taken up by Isidore of Seville, the late antique encyclopaedist who wrote on the topic of monstrous races in his extensive Etymologiae. Antipodeans feature frequently in Isidore’s encyclopaedia, in particular when he lists the diferent human gentes in book nine, where he groups them together with other fantastical creatures such as titans, fsh-​ eating Ichtyophagi, dog-​headed Cynocephali and Sciapodes, who were said to have only one gigantic foot, with which they shade themselves from the scorching sun. Confusingly, the eleventh book of Isidore’s Etymologiae states that the ‘antipodes’ (here understood as a people) live in Africa, and that they have feet that point in the opposite direction to their bodies.6 This use of the term suggests a misinterpretation of the word ‘antipous’, which, instead of meaning people on the other side of the earth, here seems to refer to an abnormal orientation

 Aug. De civ. 16.9; via Loeb Classics Library, LCL 415: pp. 48–​50; please note that my translation here is not strictly literal; I have simplifed some of the geographical terminology. 5  Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 59; on the subject of St Augustine and monstrous Antipodeans, see also Fausett, 11; and Eisler, The Furthest Shore,  9–​10. 6  Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 81. 4

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of the feet. Given this reinterpretation and the aforementioned association of the Antipodes with the one-​footed Sciapodes, it is unsurprising that these two monstrous races became confated in the Middle Ages, when some authors located monstrous people with feet turned backwards in the Antipodes. This creative reinterpretation of the Ancient Greek word ‘antipous’ in terms of physiology instead of geography has been described by Rudolf Wittkower as ‘a masterstroke of mediaeval logic’.7 Contrary to Augustine’s intentions, what appeared to be his accidental admission of an Antipodes populated by monsters came to be favoured among artists and authors during the Middle Ages. So it is that the Osma Beatus map of 1203 depicts the Antipodes as being inhabited by a monstrous race:  its southern continent features a Sciapode shading itself from a red-​hot sun with its gigantic foot. Other medieval maps such as the Psalter World Map of 1265 locate on their Austral periphery an entire pantheon of monsters lifted from the historical works of Pliny the Elder, Herodotus and other Classical authorities. Medieval cartography not only reinforced and promoted, but also greatly extended, the link between Antipodality and monstrosity so that Antipodal space increasingly came to be understood as a repository of monstrosity. This association of Antipodality and monstrosity reached new heights as the Age of Discovery gathered momentum. While the monsters and marvels of old were pushed further and further aside as more detailed and reliable information streamed in from the ‘new’ worlds of the Americas, many found a refuge in Terra Australis, one of the last cartographical blanks on the increasingly accurate maps of the early-​modern period.

Early-​Modern Reinterpretations Here again, Joseph Hall’s novel Mundus Alter et Idem provides a paradigmatic example:  in the course of the protagonist’s travels through Terra Australis the reader is presented with a veritable bestiary strongly reminiscent of those that appeared on medieval maps –​there are bizarre quadrupeds; two-​faced and two-​tongued people, half dog and half ape; crocodilian amphibians; and hog-​headed monstrous men. Crucially, Hall also introduced a new facet to Antipodal monstrosity because, as a product of his experimentations with Antipodal inversion, he equates monstrousness not only with bizarre physiologies but also with abnormal behaviours. In particular, in the description of Sheland, Hall clearly depicts the Antipodal reversal of traditional gender roles as monstrous: ‘Ah what a beastly sight was it to see a distafe and 7

 Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 182.

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a spindle in a mans hand, and a sword and buckler in a womans.’8 This behavioural ‘beastliness’ fnds its epitome in an island of Sheland that forms the geographical Antipode to the Isle of Man: this so-​called Double-​sex Ile is entirely populated by hermaphrodites. The ‘monstrosity’ of this gender-​ bridging fnds a frst refection in the inhabitants’ combination of male and female names:  ‘There was Mary Philip, Peter-​alice, Iane-​Andrew and George-​audry, and many more that I remember not.’9 Antipodal inversion appears to be twice reinforced on ‘Double-​sex Ile’ as the inhabitants’ system of half-​and-​half cross-​ dressing adds a new dimension to the island’s topsy-​turvyness:  ‘Those that bare the most man about them’, Mercurius reports, ‘wore spurres, buootes and britches from the heeles to the hanshes: and bodies, rebatoes and periwigges from the crupper to the crowne; and for those that were the better sharers in woman kind, they weare doublets to the rumpe, and skirts to the remainder.’10 The narration throughout the entire section dealing with Double-​sex Ile is characterised by a deeply sarcastic undertone that clearly betrays Hall’s ideological bias. However, even though Hall does his best to ridicule the island’s subversive disordering of gender roles, he ultimately struggles to contain some of the more utopian ideas that spring up from his own invention. For instance, in an attempt to further underline his point about the monstrousness of the inhabitants’ hermaphroditism, Hall extends the idea of cross-​dressing to the island’s fora. But the result falls far short of a clear sharpening of his satire: In this Ile nature hath so orderly disposed all things to one forme, that I could fnde no one plant in all the soile but was of a double kinde; no tree, but beare two kinde of fruites or one fruite of two severall kindes & names: there was your Peare-​apple, your Cherry-​damsen, your Date-​alimond, your Chestnut-​fylberd, and a thousand of these conclusions of nature.11 These Antipodal monstrosities sound objectively delicious, and this retrospectively renders ambiguous the mocking undertone of the preceding passages on gender reversals. The result is an uneasy tension between the mocking conservatism in the voice which describes and the concrete-​utopian potential in the thing described, which becomes more obvious when Mercurius concludes that ‘truely you may observe in them all, besides their shapes, both a mans wit, and a womans craft’.12 It appears that not even Hall’s pronounced misogyny  Hall, Mundus Alter et Idem, 116.  Ibid.,  111. 10  Ibid. 11  Ibid., 110–​11. 12  Ibid.,  112. 8 9

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is capable of properly keeping in check the concrete-​utopian ideal behind his gender-​bridging imaginations. As with Augustine, the subversive force of Antipodal monstrosity manages to undermine the author’s apparent ideological position. Of course, an equally biased but also similarly subversive play on gender roles can be seen in Brome’s The Antipodes. Here the Antipodal inversion of gender is consistently termed ‘monstrous’, particularly whenever a male-​ dominated hierarchy is turned on its head (‘women upon men, the strangest doings’).13 But an even more interesting extension of Hall’s interpretation of Antipodal monstrosity as hermaphroditism can be found in Gabriel de Foigny’s late seventeenth-​century novel A New Discovery of Terra incognita Australis. Causing a public outcry because of its heretic and sensual content, the French original was published in 1676 and translated into English in 1693. Foigny, a former Franciscan turned Protestant, took the Anglican Bishop’s vision of Antipodal monstrosity a step further as he envisions Terra Australis populated by an advanced civilisation of hermaphrodites with six-​toed feet and a second, smaller pair of arms. Foigny’s novel capitalises extensively in its deployment of narrative strategies such as fctional editorship and factual contextualisation on the ambiguous epistemology held by Terra Australis at the turn of the eighteenth century. A New Discovery of Terra incognita Australis succeeded in blurring the lines between fact and fction to such a degree that some print runs of the novel were bound together with some of the factual journals of Australia’s actual European explorers.14 Foigny’s novel purports to tell the true story of James Sadeur, a French sailor and adventurer. Shipwrecked on Terra Australis, Sadeur encounters a people he calls ‘Australians’. As an interesting aside, the Oxford English Dictionary cites this as the frst known appearance of the word. Customarily, Foigny’s Australians kill all strangers who come to their country but fortunately for Sadeur, he is accepted by the Australians into their society because like them, he is a hermaphrodite. In many respects, Foigny’s A New Discovery of Terra incognita Australis is a classic utopia, best described perhaps as somewhere between Thomas More’s Utopia and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.15 The novel features what Fredric Jameson fttingly describes as the ‘standard guided tour of Utopia’,16 that is, the type of detailed and lengthy exposition on a fctional society that forms the backbone  Brome, The Antipodes, 1966: 16 (I.iii. lines 5–​11).  David Fausett, translator’s introduction to Gabriel de Foigny, A New Discovery of Terra incognita Australis, or the Southern World … [1676], trans. David Fausett (New York: Syracuse UP, 1993), xxxii. 15  Ibid.,  xi. 16  Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso Books, 2005), 50. 13 14

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of the utopian genre. Describing the customs, religion and institutions of the hermaphrodite Australians, Sadeur gives an account of the perfect social harmony they have achieved. According to him, the Australians have surmounted all social antagonisms: they live in a communist society in which all property is held in common and where no social or class diferences are known. They have standardised the architecture and layout of their settlements, even levelled out their entire country, so that no local idiosyncrasy can stand in the way of their social unison. Their hermaphroditism provides the foundation of their homogeneous society because it allows them to sidestep the issues of patriarchy and gender inequality that divide European societies. Enthralled by the Australian utopia, Sadeur frequently contrasts it with his homeland: ‘They know not how to distinguish between mine and thine, they have all things in common amongst them, with so much sincerity and disinterestedness, which charm’d me so much the more, because I had never seen the like in Europe.’17 Foigny’s Australians pride themselves on being a particularly rational people. They claim that they have internalised pure reason as their sole principle of guidance, and that they have overcome the irrational defects that trouble European societies. Sadeur’s Australian guide convinces him in a series of debates that the entire social order of Europe is fawed, for the simple reason that European societies are not based on logical principles. Everything –​religious beliefs, political systems, economic structures, even the diet of the Europeans –​is found to be far inferior to the Australian way of life. Sadeur’s Australian guide points particularly to the injustices that arise from diferences in education, and most of all, from the unequal distribution of wealth, as factors that render social harmony in Europe impossible. When Sadeur is forced to admit that not everyone in his home country has the beneft of a proper education, his elderly guide is scandalised. ‘As for us’, the Australian explains, ‘we make a Profession of being all Equal, Our glory consists in being all alike, and to be dignify’d with the same Care, and in the same manner; all the diference there is, is only in the divers Exercises to which we apply our selves, so as to fnd out new Inventions, that the Discoverers may contribute them to the Publick Good.’18 Sadeur is impressed by the Australian philosophy:  ‘I confess, that I  could not hearken to this Discourse without admiration! and nothing ever edifyed me more than this purity of Morals, inspir’d by the only light of Nature and Reason.’19 This focus on rationalism and equality clearly marks Foigny’s novel as one of the frst Enlightenment utopias in the European tradition.  De Foigny, 64; emphases in the original.  Ibid., 74; emhasis in the original. 19  Ibid.,  73. 17 18

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In terms of its use of Antipodal monstrosity, Foigny’s novel gives the theme a surprising new twist. The extra limbs of his Australians clearly reinforce medieval conceptions of physiological diference as a marker of the monstrous, while their hermaphroditism satisfes early-​modern notions of monstrosity in a more behavioural sense. But in addition to this Foigny also puts another spin on Antipodal monstrosity by inverting the inversion: his novel clearly aims at highlighting the shortcomings of European societies and in particular of the absolutist France of Louis XIV; so as with all Antipodal inversions, Europe is the butt of the novel’s satire since Europe forms the always-​present foil against which Antipodean society unfolds, and into which it always ultimately folds back. But while in Hall and Brome Antipodal inversion produces a carnivalesque topsy-​turvyness that may spill over into the Antipodal uncanny or Antipodal monstrosity, Antipodality operates diferently in Foigny’s novel:  the physiological and sexual monstrosity of the Australians does not diminish their cultural achievements in the slightest. Quite the contrary, the superiority of their social institutions casts Europe in a light that is all the more damning precisely because of the monstrousness of the Australians. Foigny manipulates Antipodal monstrosity in such a way that it represents no longer, as it did in Hall’s and Brome’s Antipodes, a deterrent in the form of physiological or sexual perversity that aims at frightening readers back into accepting conservative Europe as a social exemplar. Instead, Foigny’s version of Antipodal monstrosity highlights the relativising, subversive and self-​critical dimensions of Antipodality. The relativism that underpins Foigny’s novel is driven deeper when Sadeur discovers aspects of Australian society that put their Antipodal utopia seriously in question. While initially enthused by the rationalism of the Australians, his impression drastically changes when he begins to fnd faws in the fabric of their society. Sadeur catches a frst glimpse of the repressiveness of their rationality when he learns that the Australians consider all physical functions, including eating and sleeping, as shameful: ‘They hide themselves, and only eat in secret; they sleep very little, because they are persuaded, that Sleep is too Animal an Action, from which man ought if it was possible, wholly to abstain.’20 How exactly Foigny’s hermaphrodite Australians reproduce remains a secret. It becomes increasingly apparent to Sadeur that the price the Australians pay for their social harmony is social conformity. Finally, Sadeur’s enthusiasm for the uncompromising rationalism of the Australians turns to horror when he witnesses the ferce inhumanity with which they

 Ibid.,  88.

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eradicate their enemies, a sexually dimorphic people called ‘Fondins’. At war, the rationalism of the Australians turns into a crude instrument of mass destruction, resulting in what could with good reason be described as the genocide of the Fondins.21 In contrast to his earlier enthusiasm, Sadeur’s description now turns bleak:  ‘The slaughter was there general, and they spared neither Women, old People, nor Children, all were enveloped in one common Massacre.’22 During the war, Sadeur is caught with a female Fondin, an act that is punishable by death in Australian society, but he manages to escape his sentence by feeing the country. It is in this last episode of Sadeur’s Australian adventure that the uncompromising rationalism of the Australians is revealed to be an inhuman aversion to nature, and to any emotional or physical attachment to the World. Although their idealisation of reason allows them to rise past the irrational defects of their European counterparts, it has made Foigny’s Australians merciless and intolerant. Here their monstrosity re-​emerges, this time in an ethical sense. Foigny’s Antipodal utopia, built around Enlightenment values of equality and reason, thus capsizes into a dystopia. The rationalism of the Australians –​initially praised as the bedrock of their social achievements –​ eventually takes on an inhumane, even totalitarian dimension in its tendency to denaturalise and dehumanise people. In this, Foigny’s book is not only an intriguing forerunner of the dystopian genre, but also largely anticipates the critique of instrumental reason which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would articulate more than 250 years later in their response to the atrocities of the Second World War. With its movement from utopia to dystopia, which illustrates how uncompromising rationalism can backslide into totalitarian ideology, Foigny’s seventeenth-​century novel exemplifes a point very similar to the Enlightenment critique of the Frankfurt School. Finally, A New Discovery of Terra incognita Australis pushes radical relativism to the fore in a twofold take on Antipodal monstrosity: frst the novel turns common hierarchies on their heads in its Antipodal vision of Australians who despite their monstrous physiology put European civilisation to shame; then the novel relativises the Australians’ apparent superiority by dramatically exposing their ethical monstrosity –​without, however, reinstating the European superiority that was negated in the frst place. In the end, Foigny’s novel thus erases both source and target of its critical analogy, leaving nothing but unsettling subversion.

 Thomas Schölderle, ‘Gabriele de Foigny und die “Terre Australe” ’, in Geschichte der Utopie. Eine Einführung (Weimar: Böhlau, 2012), 92–​98; Fausett, Writing the New World, 135. 22  De Foigny, 152–​53. 21

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Refective Monstrousness It is hard to dispute that A New Discovery of Terra incognita Australis infuenced Gulliver’s Travels to a not inconsiderable degree. Clearly Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Yahoos found literary precursors in Foigny’s rational hermaphrodites and their primitive enemies, the Fondins. It is further reasonable to say that Swift drew substantial inspiration from Foigny’s novel, in particular from the way its narrative dissolves the civilised/​barbaric binary into the disillusioned alienation of the protagonist. Of course, this is not to suggest that Gulliver’s Travels is derivative, especially in terms of how it conceives the monstrous; as much as Swift deepens the critical dimension of Antipodal inversion and intensifes the efects of the Antipodal uncanny in comparison to Hall and Brome, so Swift amplifes Antipodal monstrosity when compared with Foigny. One notable diference between Swift and Foigny lies in the way in which Swift radicalises the cultural relativism that results from Gulliver’s Antipodal experience by not turning the Yahoos into a vehicle for empathy (as Foigny ultimately does with his Fondins), but into an Antipodal mirror in which Gulliver recognises his own monstrousness. In Gulliver’s frst encounter with a Yahoo, he still feels entirely unrelated to the ‘ugly Monster’, which he describes in a removed and scientifcally objective manner, commenting:  ‘Upon the whole, I  never beheld in all my Travels so disagreeable an Animal, or one against which I  naturally conceived so Strong an Antipathy.’23 This antipathy against his Antipodal counterpart quickly turns into abject horror when Gulliver realises that these monsters are just as human as he is: My Horror and Astonishment are not to be described, when I observed, in this abominable Animal, a perfect human Figure; the Face of it indeed was fat and broad, the Nose depressed, the Lips large, and the Mouth wide. But these Diferences are common to all Savage Nations, where the Lineaments of the Countenance are distorted by the Natives sufering their Infants to lie grovelling on the Earth, or by carrying them on their Backs, nuzzling with their Face against the Mother’s Shoulders. The Fore-​ feet of the Yahoo difered from my Hands in nothing else, but the length of the Nails, the coarseness and brownness of the Palms, and their hairiness on the Backs. There was the same Resemblance between our Feet, with the same Diferences, which I knew very well, tho’ the Horses did not, because of my Shoes and Stockings; the same in every Part of our Bodies, except as to hairiness and colour, which I have already described.24  Swift,  200.  Ibid.,  206.

23 24

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Swift clearly draws here on the ethnographical discourses of his time. His descriptions of the Yahoos probably owe much to Gulliver’s alleged ‘cousin’ William Dampier and his deeply negative and derogatory description of the Aboriginal people he met on Australia’s west coast. Dampier, the frst Englishman to set foot on Australian soil, not only declared Australia’s indigenous people to be ‘the miserablest People in the World’, but also stripped them of their humanity entirely when he wrote that they only ‘grinn’d like so many Monkeys’ when asked to assist in the buccaneer’s search for water.25 It is probably no coincidence that Dampier’s reduction of Aboriginal people to primates comes at a moment of their resistance to European authority. Although Swift imitates the racist language of Dampier to a certain extent, the crucial diference is that he does not deploy the simian trope to diferentiate Gulliver from the Yahoos in the way Dampier uses it to reframe an embarrassing rebuttal of European dominance via the imperial binary of civilised/​bestial. Quite the contrary, Gulliver’s recognition of the monkey-​like features of the Yahoos occurs simultaneously with his recognition of the physical likeness between himself, a European, and these monstrous doppelgängers; this represents the frst step in the unravelling of his imperial ego. Dampier’s and Swift’s use of the simian trope as a way to capture Antipodal monstrousness (albeit with very diferent results) was taken further in the utopian novel Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Incognite Australi by Zaccaria Seriman, frst published in 1749 and then expanded in 1764. The frst part of the novel takes the protagonist, a young Englishman named Enrico (Henry), to the Antipodal regno delle scimie, the kingdom of the apes. As a classic Antipodal inversion, the simian kingdom is a satire clearly aimed at Seriman’s hometown of Venice, lampooning in true Enlightenment fashion the citizens of the lagoon republic’s baroque refnement of manners and customs. Antipodal monstrosity serves here again as a form of embodied satire that articulates by way of physiological otherness a feeling of alienating sameness. In other words, Seriman’s kingdom of the apes is not monstrous because of its beastlike inhabitants, but because it raises the question of whether the Antipodeans ape their European counterparts, or vice versa. Monstrosity in Seriman’s Antipodal utopia is, in the end, an excess of sameness. Seriman provides another monstrous example of an Antipodal turn of the tables. After his adventure in the kingdom of the apes, Enrico Wanton reaches the kingdom of the Cynocephali. These dog-​ headed humanoids, which could have been taken directly from the bestiary of Isidore’s Etymologiae, subject Enrico to an in-​depth examination by their royal scientists, who fnd the European to be an ‘animale ragionevole’. Their report reads: ‘Enrico Wanton,

 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1699), 464, 468.

25

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a rational animal called human; similar to the Cynocephali in every part except the head.’26 Similar to Gulliver’s humbling experience in Brobdingnag, this is a clear Antipodal inversion of the Enlightenment practice of showcasing non-​European peoples as exotic under scientifc pretences. The noteworthy diference in Seriman’s novel, however, is that the epistemological framework for what constitutes monstrosity has been turned on its head, too: the obvious, even positively medieval, monstrousness of the Cynocephali contrasts sharply with their pseudoscientifc identifcation of Enrico as a lusus naturae, a freak of nature, which the European visitor eventually comes to accept. What is more, the manifestly non-​human nature of his hosts stands in direct opposition to the inspiring humanity of their civilisation: their Antipodal utopia, despite its ostensibly dystopian monstrousness, is a veritable Enlightenment eutopia, in which the European philosophes’ ideals of a humane and justly governed state fnd concrete realisation. Antipodal monstrosity, it seems, emerges here as a strategy to both emphasise, but also make the societal advances achieved by the Cynocephali more palatable to the European reader.

Criminal Monstrosity: The Colonial Gentleman As was the case with Antipodal inversion and the Antipodal uncanny, the meanings and associations of Antipodal monstrosity changed signifcantly with the onset of British colonisation in the late eighteenth century. An important aspect in this context was that the frst Australian settlements were founded as penal colonies, which meant that the civilising mission was now inextricably intertwined with the issue of criminality. Barron Field, for instance, had to endure the perpetual gibes of his intellectual friends back in Europe, who teased him about his appointment as judge of the civil Supreme Court in the penal colonies: ‘Well, and how does the land of thieves use you?’, Field was asked by the infuential essayist Charles Lamb in a letter, and how do you pass your time in your extrajudicial intervals? Going about the streets with a lantern, like Diogenes, looking for an honest man? You may look long enough, I fancy. Do give me some notion of the manners of the inhabitants where you are. They don’t thieve all day long, do they? No human property could stand such continuous battery. And what do they do when they an’t [sic] stealing?27  Zaccaria Seriman, Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Incognite Australi (Berna, 1764), 86–​87/​ ‘Enrico Wanton animale ragionevole, detto Uomo; simile a’ Cinocefali in ogni parte, fuoriché nel capo’. 27  Qtd in Lansbury, 11. 26

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The following excerpt from the 1838 Molesworth Report, described by Leon Litvack as a ‘sensationalised catalogue of antipodean horrors’, probably provides an accurate refection of the contemporary image of Australia: The community was composed of the very dregs of society; of men proved by experience to be unft to be at large in any society, and who were sent from the British gaols, and turned loose to mix with one another in the desert, together with a few taskmasters, who were to set them to work in the open wilderness; and with the military, who were to keep them from revolt.28 By the turn of the nineteenth century, Botany Bay (which metonymically stood for the entire continent) had become proverbial for the dubious morality of its inhabitants. Following the association of Australia with criminality in the public imagination, Antipodal monstrosity was increasingly reinterpreted in moral terms. This was even read back into the native animals of Australia: Charles Lamb, for example, went so far as to treat the kangaroo as an emblem of the pickpocket: ‘with those little short fore puds, looking like a lesson framed by Nature to the pickpocket! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-​shifters as the expertest loco-​motor in the colony’.29 As mentioned before, this further expressed itself in the unsettling vision of Australia as an Antipodal utopia in which deviant behaviour found reward, not punishment. Interestingly, the notion of what constituted deviancy gradually broadened to encompass not only criminality in the conventional sense, but also certain types of behaviour that run counter to the imperial vision of Australia, specifcally in its Arcadian rendition as a cut-​price ersatz England for Britain’s surplus working population. Good examples of this can be found in the numerous variations of the ‘turning gentleman’ motif in Victorian visions of penal Australia. This term is borrowed from a story by Samuel Sidney in Dickens’s popular Household Words, in which the ‘plain Yeoman style of life’ is favourably contrasted to the act of ‘turning “gentleman”, after the vulgar colonial fashion’.30 It describes a recurring motif that thematically ties into the georgic work ethic of hard labour as a form of social redemption, and manifests itself frequently as a negative  Report from the Select Committee on Transportation (1838), iv.  Charles Lamb, The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb, ed. Percy Fitzgerald, vol. 3 (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 305. 30  Sidney, ‘Father Gabriel; Or, the Fortunes of a Farmer’, 67. 28 29

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counterpoint to Arcadian visions of Australia as a working man’s paradise. An insightful example of this can be found in Edward Gibbon Wakefeld’s Letter from Sydney (1829). Published anonymously, the writer of Wakefeld’s Letter professes to be a young settler with expert knowledge of the Australian colonies who wants to propose a better and more comprehensive system for colonising Australia. The letter begins by relating how the fctional author ventured to Australia with sizable capital to establish himself as a country gentleman, a dream which was quickly disappointed after it turned out that his 20,000-​ acre property was worth close to nothing and all his attempts at improving it using convict labour were in vain. ‘I did not’, the letter’s author confesses, ‘intend to become a Farmer.’31 He soon realises just how ill-​conceived his grandiose plan to become a landed magnate in Australia is:  ‘My mansion, park, preserves, and tenants, were all a dream.’32 The problem as he conceives it is not his own ambition but the deplorable lack of competent labour; as he sees it, the shortage of skilled workers is so severe that it threatens to upend the social order of the Australian colonies. A short anecdote about a runaway servant provides an instance of the ‘turning gentleman’ motif which reveals much about the letter-​writer’s broader anxieties regarding Australia’s social make-​up: My own man, who had served me for eight years in England, and had often sworn that he would go the wide world over with me, seeing that I was the best of masters, never reached my new abode. He had saved about £150 in my service; and I had advised him to take the money out of a London Savings’ Bank, under an idea that he might obtain ten per cent. for it at Sydney. He followed my advice. About a month after our arrival I  missed him one morning. Before night I  received a letter, by which he informed me that he had taken a grant of land near Hunter’s River, and that he ‘hoped we parted friends’. He is now one of the most consequential persons in the Colony, has grown enormously fat, feeds upon greasy dainties, drinks oceans of bottled porter and port wine, damns the Governor, and swears by all his gods, Jupiter, Jingo and Old Harry, that this Colony must soon be independent. 33 Wakefeld’s upper-​class indignation about such cases of social mobility is palpable as he describes in this passage how the colony’s favourable labour  Edward Gibbon Wakefeld, A Letter from Sydney: The Principle Town of Australasia (London, 1829), 8. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid.,  12–​13. 31

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market transformed his obedient servant into that monstrosity, the colonial gentleman. This sort of behaviour, the anonymous letter-​writer complains, was epidemic: given the ‘dearness of labour’ on the one hand and the ‘superabundance of land’ on the other, why would any labourer drudge for a master, when they could acquire land for next to nothing, and be their own masters?34 To correct this unseemly disproportion between available land and labour, Wakefeld proposes what is now known as the ‘sufcient price theory’: crown land should be fxed at a sufciently high price so as to discourage the lower classes from acquiring land. Ultimately, the ‘sufcient price theory’ was supposed to prevent, as Coral Lansbury puts it rather bluntly, ‘convicts and the like from buying large estates and aping their betters’.35 As the motif of ‘turning gentleman’ shows, the height of Antipodal monstrosity in the Victorian era was the colonial subaltern whom the Antipodal utopia of Australia had promoted to peer of the European gentleperson. The most famous literary example of this is, of course, Abel Magwitch. For the longest time in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Magwitch, the convict sentenced to transportation to Australia, is nothing but a ghostly shadow who haunts Pip with his anonymous wealth. It is only when Magwitch makes himself known to Pip as the benefactor who had been fnancing the boy’s transformation into a gentleman all along that the Antipodal monstrosity of this transported felon is fully exposed. Magwitch is monstrous, frst, because he is a lower-​class criminal, a deviant subaltern who was banished to the prison hulks and then to the farthest corner of the earth; but more importantly, he had the utopian audacity to climb beyond his lowly station in life and to return, illegally but rich and successful, from the penal colony to the imperial centre. This is probably the most monstrous feat of all, because, as Edward Said explains, ‘Magwitch is in fact unacceptable, being from Australia, a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not repatriation of transported English criminals’.36 For an Antipodal monstrosity like Magwitch, there is only one possible denouement: the deviant monster has to be killed, but not before forfeiting its treasures. It is no coincidence that Magwitch’s colonial wealth is stripped from him in a fnal court sentence, and with the normal order of things thus comfortably re-​established, the monster is allowed to die, weakened and impoverished, in a London infrmary. In the Victorian imagination, Antipodal monstrosity commonly also took on another form, which was in many ways oppositional to the notion of ‘turning gentleman’ and could be labelled ‘going native’. This motif relates directly  Ibid., 156–​57.  Lansbury, 50; see also Wakefeld, 169f. 36  Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994), xv. 34 35

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and intimately to what Robert Dixon has called ‘post-​imperial paranoia’,37 that is, the general anxiety over the future direction of imperial culture in Australia. With the Australian colonies becoming increasingly self-​sufcient, the question arose whether they would follow the cultural model established by the British empire, or whether a discrete Australian identity would assert itself over the concept of ‘Englishness’. Finally, there was also the fear that without direct political, economic and cultural governance from Great Britain, Anglo-​ Australian culture might deteriorate and collapse altogether. In the course of the nineteenth century, a range of visions and predictions of the future of the British Empire was put forward, addressing the fear of cultural devolution. Many settler societies responded to this perceived threat of a fagging empire with visions of ‘the Coming Man’.38 In Australia, fears of devolution became particularly pronounced towards the end of the nineteenth century when a national Anglo-​Australian identity began to crystallise. Hence it is unsurprising that anxieties over imperial culture shaped and manifested themselves heavily in one of the distinctive genres of the time –​the ‘lost race’ romances. In many ways, these romances are caught between articulating a form of independent national identity and a colonial identity organised around the concept of ‘Englishness’. Within the narrative arc of the novels, this tension frequently expresses itself in the form of confict between British and Australian members of exploration teams that venture into the Australian inland. Lost race romances sublimated anxiety over the loss of imperial culture into their version of ‘the future Australian’, a vision which commonly took on utopian and dystopian characteristics alike. In fact, due to the romances’ complicated economy of information, in which a character’s cultural background is often withheld or repeatedly contested, the symbolic value which they place on their articulations of an Australian identity are usually highly ambiguous, and more often than not spill over into notions of Antipodal monstrosity. The mysterious character called ‘The Hatter’ in George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian is again a great example. The Hatter is initially depicted in heroic terms as a prime example of the Australian bushman; that is, someone who, toughened by his experience of the Australian outback, has found a way of belonging within an environment that usually rejects the European subject. An explicit connection with indigenous peoples is not uncommon or coincidental in the genre; the fact that the Hatter, for example, has ‘gone native’ is refected in his ability to speak several indigenous languages and his mystical understanding of the bush, which is at least superfcially indebted to  Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure, 64.  Ibid.,  3.

37 38

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Aboriginal spirituality. In his adaptation to the Antipodal environment, the Hatter ostensibly fulfls the utopian promise of the ‘Coming Australian’.39 However, this is dramatically reinterpreted towards the end of the novel, when it becomes clear that the Hatter is actually the corrupt Englishman Sir Claude Digby, who came to Australia to restore his reputation after ruining his family in England, but who then lost his mind and ultimately became an impotent slave of the Lemurian queen. The ‘future Australian’ is thus revealed to be another Antipodal monstrosity, namely, the hysterical barbarian into which the European subject inevitably degenerates when exposed to the Antipodal utopia.40 What all of these examples demonstrate is that Antipodal monstrosity ultimately represents a form of coping mechanism against the critical, subversive and often uncanny nature of the Antipodal utopia of Australia. It often emerges where there is an excess of utopian Antipodality, be it that the Antipodal utopia turns out to be too radically diferent or, conversely, too alike, so that in its similarity it reveals a deeper and previously unknown truth about the European subject who is imagining it. At other times it sublimates imperial anxieties about the status of European civilisation, particularly, as the motif of ‘turning gentleman’ has shown, where the Antipodal utopia threatens to turn the established social order on its head. Ultimately, it functioned as a response to the perceived threat of a colonial, Anglo-​Australian identity. In many ways, it can be said that the utopian spatiality of Australia fnds its most acute and purest expression in Antipodal monstrosity.

 Ibid.,  72.  Ibid.

39 40

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CONCLUSION  Australia’s place in the European imagination is squarely on the precarious fault lines between Antipodality and imperialism. Given the utopian spatiality that Australia holds as a result of its cosmographic signifcance as Europe’s imaginary counterpart, this means for one thing that Australia is inherently antagonistic and critical to imperial ideology. But it also means that Australia is an emblem of the European desire to explore, discover and conquer, a desire which, as this book has documented, expressed itself long before any European caught sight of the Australian continent. This was seen in the strong discourse of Arcadianism which developed gradually out of ancient and medieval visions about mythical lands at the other end of the world. In one rendition of this Arcadian dream, which was especially propelled forward by Captain Quirós, the Antipodal utopia turned out to be built on the highly ideologically infected trope of bounty, which implicated it deeply in the ideologies of European imperialism and expansionism. In another but related rendition, the Arcadian utopia was found to be conscripted into the civilising mission, the narrative central to modern forms of imperialism and settler colonialism. However, in the form of Arcadia the Antipodal utopia also stands as a direct and critical counterpoint to the unsustainable excesses and emotional poverty of European modernity, and as such provides concrete-​utopian content that was highly appealing in the past and rings all the more true in today’s era of late capitalism and climate change. The dialectical tension between Arcadia and imperialism becomes even stronger when it is remembered that imperialism essentially represents, as Bill Ashcroft commented at the beginning of this book, the expansionist arm of European modernity. Arcadianism, however, was just one form of the Antipodal utopia. The principle of Antipodal inversion, as this book has attempted to show, is theoretically capable of producing an infnite number of utopias, each of which interprets the Antipodal relationship between Europe and Australia in diferent ways and with diferent emphases. If, as Marx and Engels write in the German Ideology, ‘in all ideology humans and their circumstances appear upside down

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as in a camera obscura’,1 then Antipodal inversion turns ideology’s distortion on its head again –​not to produce, so to speak, an upright representation of reality, but to provide a negative of ideology’s inversion, in which its topsy-​ turvyness comes fully to the fore. This is how, in essence, Antipodality opposes ideological closure and ofers in its stead a utopian opening. As was seen in the examples of the Antipodal uncanny and Antipodal monstrosity, this opening is not always shaped in the form of what is conventionally understood as ‘utopian’. In many cases it is much rather a space that is subversive and critical in its opposition to imperialism. The Antipodal uncanny, for instance, marks specifcally those moments in which imperialism’s projection of a feeling of belonging onto the Antipodal environment fails dramatically and leaves the European subject with a sense of displacement and not-​at-​homeness. But even in the Antipodal uncanny’s denial of belonging, a utopian trace can be made out because it highlights the fact that true belonging, what Bloch calls Heimat, is something that does not yet exist, that still actively needs to be brought into being. Antipodal monstrosity is perhaps an even better example of how an ostensibly dystopian aspect of Antipodality reveals a decidedly utopian quality in the face of imperial ideology. As was demonstrated, Antipodal monstrosity provided a coping mechanism against anxieties over imperial devolution and colonial independence, specifcally when it came to expressions of a national, Anglo-​Australian identity in the fgure of the bushman. It was in this last form that Antipodal monstrosity revealed one of its strongest utopian aspects, and it was also in this form that it became eventually converted into an enduring positive icon of Australian nationalism. Beginning with Marcus Clarke’s embrace of ‘this fantastic land of monstrosities’ in his preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems, and followed by the paradoxically idyllic dystopias of the bush in Henry Lawson’s stories, this culminated in the much more conventionally utopian vision found in Banjo Peterson’s poetry. More generally, it provided substantial impetus and material for what is now generally known as the Australian Legend. Of course, all of these articulations of an Antipodal utopia in the form of the Australian bush are, in their own ways, susceptible to a diferent but closely related ideology: nationalism. However, as is amply refected in the substantial number of twentieth-​and twenty-​frst-​century visions of national, but also increasingly postcolonial utopias, the complex dialectic between Australia’s utopian Antipodality and ideology has not yet come to an end. 1

 ‘Wenn in der ganzen Ideologie die Menschen und ihre Verhältnisse wie in einer Camera obscura auf den Kopf gestellt erscheinen’: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1969), 26.

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Moss, David J.  ‘Wakefeld, Edward Gibbon (1796–​1862)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Mathew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. National Library of Australia. Mapping Our World:  Terra Incognita to Australia. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2013. O’Hara, James. The History of New South Wales. London: J. Brettell, 1818. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, edited by William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Pacini, Giulia. ‘Colonial Predicaments, Eugenic Experiments, and The Evacuation of Compassion:  “Perfecting” the Hybrid Creatures in Rétif ’s La Découverte Australe’. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 60, no. 3 (2006): 171–​86. Peron, M. F. A Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Hemisphere. London: Richard Phillips, 1809. Rawson, Claude. God, Gulliver, and Genocide:  Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–​ 1945. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Rennie, Neil. Far-​Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Ricœur, Paul. ‘Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination’. Philosophic Exchange 2, no. 2 (1976): 17–​28. —​—​—​. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1994. Sargent, Lyman Tower. ‘ “Ideology and Utopia”:  Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricœur’. Journal of Political Ideologies 13, no. 3 (2008): 263–​73. Sellick, Robert. ‘From the Outside In: European Ideas of Exploration and the Australian Experience’. In Australia and the European Imagination, edited by Ian Donaldson, 173–​83. Canberra: Australian National UP, 1982. Seriman, Zaccaria. Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Incognite Australi, ed ai regni delle scimie e de’cinocefali: nuovamente tradotti da un manoscritto inglese. Berna, 1764. Sidney, Samuel. ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’. Household Words, 21 December 1850. Dickens Journals Online. —​—​—​. ‘Father Gabriel; Or, the Fortunes of a Farmer’. Household Words, 12 October 1850. Dickens Journals Online. —​—​—​. Three Colonies of Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia; their Pastures, Copper, Mines, & Gold Fields. London, 1853. Google Books. Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacifc, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harper, 1985. Smith, James Edward. A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland, vol. 1. London, 1793. Archive.org. Smith, Vivian. ‘Australian Colonial Poetry, 1788–​1888:  Claiming the Future, Restoring the Past’. In Cambridge History of Australian Literature, edited by Peter Pierce, 73–​92. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Stallard, Avan Judd. ‘Origins of the Idea of the Antipodes:  Errors, Assumptions, and a Bare Few Facts’. Terrae Incognitae 42 (2010): 34–​51. Stoke, John Lort. Discoveries in Australia … vol. 2. London, 1846. Google Books. Sturt, Charles. Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia … vol. 2. London, 1849. Google Books. Sudlenkova, Olga. ‘Fair Australasia:  A Poet’s Farewell to Emigrants’. In Missions of Interdependence: A Literary Directory, edited by Gerhard Stilz, 267–​74. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

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Swift, Jonathan. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: In Four Parts … Dublin, 1726. Eighteenth Century Collection Online. Tocqueville, Alexis de. ‘Quinze Jours au Désert:  Souvenirs d’un Voyage en Amerique’. Revue Des Deux Mondes, 1 December 1860. Verne, Jules. In Search of the Castaways, or The Children of Captain Grant. Via Wikisource: https://​ en.wikisource.org/​wiki/​In_​Search_​of_​the_​Castaways;_​or_​Captain_​Grant%27s_​ Children. Wakefeld, Edward Gibbon. A Letter from Sydney: The Principle Town of Australasia. London, 1829. Google Books. Wands, John Millar. Introduction to Another World and Yet the Same, by Joseph Hall, xiii–​xviii. Translated by John Millar Wands. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981. Wentworth, William Charles. ‘Australasia’. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 25 March 1824. Trove, National Library Australia. Williams, Glyndwr. The Great South Sea:  English Voyages and Encounters 1570–​1750. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Williamson, Karina. ‘ “From Arcadia to Bunyah”: Mutation and Diversity in the Pastoral Mode’. In A Companion to Poetic Genre, edited by Erik Martiny, 568–​83. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. Wittkower, Rudolf. ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 159–​97. Wright, Judith. ‘Australia’s Double Aspect’. Literary Criterion 6, no. 3 (1964): 1–​11. Zipes, Jack. ‘Introduction: Toward a Realization of Antipatory Illuminaion’. In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, by Ernst Bloch, translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, xi–​xliii. Cambridge: MIT P, 1988. Zucchini, Giampaolo. ‘Utopia e Satira nel Mundus Alter et Idem di Joseph Hall’. In Studi sull’ Utopia, edited by Luigi Firpo, 71–​98. Firenze: Olschki, 1977.

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135

INDEX

ABC of Colonization, The (Chisholm), 30 Aboriginal land management, 18, 23–​24, 50 Aboriginal/​indigenous peoples,  54 absence of, 107 agronomic practices, 19 colonial domination, 45 frestick farming, 23 Adorno, Theodor, 117 Age of Discovery, 43 agriculture, 56–​57 labour, 57 native, 19 Alexander the Great, 13, 41 alienating sameness, 72, 93, 96, 119 All the Year Round, 28 Andrade, David, 36–​38 Angas, G. F., 102 Anglo-​Australian identity, 124, 125 Anglo-​Machismo,  64 Antarctica, 3 Anti-​ecumene, 90–​94, 96–​98, 103–​5, 107 Anti-​London, 74–​77, 85, 95, 96 Antipodal inversion, 4, 65, 66–​70, 87, 120 Brome’s use of, 73–​77 Hall’s use of, 70–​73 self-​refective process of, 67–​68, 85 Sidney’s use of, 84 Swift’s use of, 77–​81 Verne’s use of, 84–​85 Antipodal monstrosity, 4, 106, 109, 128 criminal monstrosity, 120–​25 early-​modern reinterpretations,  112–​17 medieval origins, 109–​12 refective monstrousness, 118–​20

Antipodal satire, 77–​81 Antipodal uncanny, 2, 4, 89, 128 alienating sameness of, 93–​96 and Anti-​ecumene,  91 and belonging, 101–​6 Clarke’s use of, 106–​8 in Gulliver’s Travels, 97 Hall’s use of, 93 and imperial subject, 98–​101 unsettling efect of, 96–​97 zonal theory, 90–​93 Antipodality, 65–​66, 69, 82, 103, 128 colonial inversions, 82–​87 defamiliarisation caused by, 94 Antipodes, The (Brome), 73–​77, 94–​96, 114 Arcadia/​Arcadianism, 4, 25–​26, 28–​29, 30, 82, 127 Arcadian communitarianism, 36–​38 Arcadian simplicity, 30, 57 Tucker’s vision, 37–​38 working-​class Arcadia,  54–​61 armchair travelling, 73 Arthur, Paul, 45 Ashcroft, Bill, 43, 46, 50, 76, 102, 103, 127 Austral Arcadia, 25–​26 Austral Utopias, 44, 45–​46 ‘Australasia’ (Wentworth), 56–​57, 58–​59 ‘Australia’ (Hervey), 57–​58 Australia Felix, 25 Australian Hand-​book (Sidney), 61–​62 Australian Legend, 128 Australian Outback, 83–​84, 86, 124 ‘Australian Ploughman’s Story, An’ (Household Words), 31 Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, La, 15–​17, 19

136

136

AUSTRALIA AS THE ANTIPODAL UTOPIA

Balasopoulos, Antonis, 43 Banks, Joseph, 51–​53 Barrington, George, 86 ‘Barrington Prologue,’ 86 Bellamy, Edward, 6 belonging, 4, 23, 29, 36, 58, 98, 101–​6 Bermúdez, Luis Belmonte, 17 Bloch, Ernst, 6, 8–​9, 26, 51, 76, 94, 128 body utopia, 17–​19, 40, 51, 57, 103 Botany Bay, 15, 20–​22, 39, 51–​52, 121 Bowles, William Lisle, 52 Brazil, 13–​14 Bretonne, Nicolas Edme Rétif de la, 45–​46 Brome, Richard, 73–​77, 85, 87, 94–​96, 114 Burns, Ian, 33 Campanella, Tommaso, 72 Campbell, Thomas, 59–​61 Carden, Jem, 31 Carter, Paul, 21, 33, 48, 102 Cartesian system, 91 Catholicism, 71 celestial ascension, 93 Chisholm, Caroline, 30–​31 Christianity, 42, 71, 110 Christmas Carol (Dickens), 84 ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’ (Sidney), 83–​84 Cicero, 93 city utopia, 17, 20, 40, 50 Civilising Missions, 40, 84, 127 and early imperial imaginations, 41–​46 and Enlightenment, 50–​51, 100–​101 euchronia, 53 and ideologeme, 55 narrative of, 48–​49 Savage Shores, 49–​54 and wasteland, 100 working-​class Arcadia,  54–​61 Civitas Solis (Campanella), 72 Claeys, Gregory, 5 Clarke, Haunting, 107–​8 Clarke, Marcus, 106–​8, 128 classical Greece, Antipodal uncanny in, 90 Cliford, James, 19 Collins, David, 53 colonialism/​colonisation, 24, 32, 36, 39, 43, 46–​47, 81, 98

and Antipodal monstrosity, 120 colonial inversions, 82–​87 and productivity, 26–​27 utopias, 45–​46 Columbus voyages, 43 communitarianism, Arcadian, 36–​38 concrete-​utopia, 10, 16, 19, 38, 63, 76, 85, 87, 113–​14, 127 conservatism, 113 conservative mentality, 51, 53 contemplative quietism, 26 continuing culture, 9 convictism, 54–​55, 59, 84 Cook voyages, the, 20 Botany Bay, 20–​22 fnancial support to, 20 and Tench, 21 co-​operation,  37 cosmography, 3, 66, 91 counter-​utopia,  51, 59 Crates of Mallos, 91 criminal monstrosity, 120–​25 cultural anxieties, 86, 104 cultural inheritance, 9–​10 Curll, Edmund, 78 Dante, 13 Darwin, Charles, 105 Darwin, Erasmus, 39–​41, 51 Découverte Australe par un Homme-​volant, La (Bretonne), 45 Demonax’s well, 68–​69, 72, 80, 93 desire, management of, 10 Dickens, Charles, 27–​28, 55, 83–​84, 87, 123. see also Household Words Dickensian Arcadianism, 61–​64 Dickensian Pastoral, 37 Digby, Sir Claude, 106, 125 Direct North General View of Sydney Cove, A (Watling), 46, 47f, 53–​54, 90 Divina Commedia, La (Dante), 13 Dixon, Robert, 41, 104, 124 double aspect, of Australia, 1 Douglas, Bronwen, 20 ‘Dream of Scipio’ (Cicero), 93 droughts, 33, 36, 37, 63 dystopia, 1, 5 classic dystopia, 72

137

INDEX 137 Ebsworth, Henry Thomas, 99 Eclogues (Virgil), 57 Ecumene, 91, 97 and Anti-​ecumene, distinction between, 94, 107 Eden/​Paradise nexus,  18–​19 egalitarianism, 16 Eighth Memorial (Quirós), 17, 20, 41–​42 Eisler, William, 14 Elysian Fields, 13 Emus in a Plain (Angas), 102 Engels, Friedrich, 8, 127 English parks, 23 Englishness, 27 Enlightenment, 49–​50, 53, 100, 117 entitlement to land, 101 Eratosthenes of Cyrene, 91–​92 escapism, 8, 26, 31, 34–​35, 51, 59 Etymologiae (Isidore), 111–​12, 119 euchronia, 4, 5, 46–​49, 51 Eurocentric, 2, 3, 65, 66, 68, 85 eutopia, 3, 4, 5, 13–​14, 16, 87, 120 evangelisation, 43 expansionism, 43, 46, 73, 75, 76–​77, 127 Eyre, Edward John, 101, 102 Fabian, Johannes, 106–​7 false consciousness, 7, 9 Fayns, Foster, 99, 100 federation, of Australia, 36 Field, Barron, 120 First View of Salt Desert, called Lake Torrens (Frome), 102 fora and fauna, 98, 109 Foigny, Gabriel de, 114–​16 Fooliana, 71 France Austral Utopias, 45 colonialism, 46 Freud, Sigmund, 92, 94 Frome, E. C., 102 Fugitive Anne (Pread), 105 Gammage, Bill, 22, 23 Garden of Eden, 13, 18 gentleman’s parks, 22–​24, 28–​29, 99–​101 georgics, 57–​63, 84, 87, 92, 121 Georgics, 92 German Ideology, 127–​28

global fnancial crisis, 36 Glover, John, 27 gnomon, 66 Golden Summer, Eaglemont (Streeton), 33–​34 Goodwin, Barbara, 52 Gordon, Adam Lindsay, 106, 128 Graham, Nicole, 50 Great Britain, 52–​53, 55 Great Expectations (Dickens), 123 Greece, 65 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 77–​81, 87, 96–​97, 114, 118 Haeckel, Ernst, 105 Haggard, H. R., 104 Hall, Joseph, 70–​73, 74, 75, 87, 93–​94, 112–​14 Hawes, Clement, 78–​79 Hawkesworth, John, 20 Healy, John, 70, 105 Heidelberg School, 33 Heimat, 94, 97, 99, 128 heimlich/​unheimlich, 92–​94 hermaphroditism, 114–​15 Hermes (Eratosthenes of Cyrene), 91–​92 Herodotus, 112 Hervey, Thomas K., 57–​58 Hiatt, Alfred, 42, 93, 111 Hof, Ursula, 33 homeliness, 23, 27, 29, 98 Hoorn, Jeanette, 35 Horizonal Sublime, 102, 103 Horkheimer, Max, 117 Horne, R. H., 30 Household Words, 26–​29, 31, 61–​63, 83, 84, 85 Howitt, William, 99, 100, 101 Hunter, Governor, 52 Hunter, John, 22 ideologemes, 11, 50 and Civilising Mission, 55 of imperialism, 106 of improvement, 84–​85 Quirós’s vision, 19 Ideologie und Utopie (Mannheim), 6–​7 ideology-​critique,  6 Idylls (Theocritus ), 57 imperial history, 48–​49, 50, 63

138

138

AUSTRALIA AS THE ANTIPODAL UTOPIA

imperial ideology, 2, 4, 6, 46, 50, 57, 58–​59, 79–​82, 85, 87, 101, 107, 127–​28 imperial imaginations, early, 41–​46 imperial utopia, 51–​52, 58, 76 imperialism, 4, 43–​44, 48, 50, 65, 73, 75–​77, 79–​81, 85, 106, 127 In Search of the Castaways (Verne), 84–​85 Indigenous peoples. see Aboriginal/​ indigenous peoples inland exploration, 101–​3 iocoserium, 6 Isidore of Seville, 111–​12, 119 Isle of Pine, The (Neville), 44 Jameson, Fredric, 6, 10–​11, 31, 85 Joachim of Fiore, 16 Kangaroo (Lawrence), 89–​90, 99 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 104 Labor Party, 36 labour shortage, 55 Lamb, Charles, 120, 121 land of exile, 1 Lansbury, Caral, 55 Lansbury, Coral, 27, 62, 123 Last Lemurian, The (Scott), 105–​6, 124–​25 Lawrence, D. H., 89–​90, 99 Lawson, Henry, 128 Leichhardt, Ludwig, 102 Lemuria hypothesis, 105–​6 Letter from Sydney (Wakefeld), 82–​83, 122–​23 Lewis, C. S., 6 liberal mentality, 50–​51 liberal-​humanitarian mentality,  50–​51 Lindsay, Lionel, 35 ‘Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales’ (Campbell), 59–​60 literary utopia, 36, 43, 72 Litvack, Leon, 121 Locke, John, 100–​101 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 6 Lost Race Romances, 103–​6, 124 Lucian of Samosata, 67–​70, 93 Macarthur, Elizabeth, 22 Macarthur, John, 55

MacDonald, J. S., 34 Macquarie, Governor, 54 Mannheim, Karl, 6–​7, 50, 51 Marouby, Christian, 44–​45 Marx, Karl, 127 ideology-​critique,  6 McCubbin, Frederick, 35 McLean, Ian, 35 McLeod, Bruce, 79 medieval cartography, 112 Melbourne, 33–​34 Melbourne Riots and How Harry Holdfast and His Friends Emancipated the Workers, The (Andrade), 36–​38 Mercurius, 71 metempsychosis, 92 metropolis, 15, 33–​34 Milner, Andrew, 49 Mitchell, Sir Thomas, 24–​25, 101 journals, 25 Martin’s Range drawing, 25 modern imperialism, 43 Modernity, 31, 32, 35, 37 Molesworth Report (1838), 121 moral improvement, 50 moral regeneration, 84 More, Thomas, 5, 6, 43, 44, 50, 72, 114 Moretti, Gabriella, 41, 69–​70 Morgante (Pulci), 42–​43 mortgage crisis, 36 Münchhausenesque tales, 69 Mundus Alter et Idem (Hall), 70, 74, 75, 93–​94, 112–​14 mythical avatars, 3 mythological eutopias, 13 nationalism, 128 natural bounty, 57 Neville, Henry, 44 New Arcadia: An Australian Story, The (Tucker), 36–​37 New Discovery of Terra incognita Australis, A, 114–​16, 117 New Holland, 49, 98 New Jerusalem, 15 New South Wales, 23–​24, 56, 58, 98 New Zealand, 3, 82 Non-​Plus Ultra,  41

139

INDEX 139 normative-​liberal mentality,  50 ‘nowhere,’ 7–​8, 68, 70

Purple Noon’s Transparent Might, The (Streeton), 35

O’Hara, James, 109 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 105 Osma Beatus map, 112 Otherness, 98, 103 Oxley, John, 67

Queensland, 25 Quirós, Pedro Fernández de, 14–​20, 27, 41–​42, 127 body utopia, 17–​19, 57 claim of discovery of a true ‘terrestriall Paradise’, 18 fnancial situation, 16–​17 ideologeme, 19 and Joachim, 16, 17 religious enthusiasm, 15, 16 and Terra Australis, 16 trope of bounty, 19–​20, 23 Vanuatu, description of, 15–​16, 23 quixotism, 16 Quo Vadis? A lust Censure of Travell as it is commonly undertaken by the Gentlemen of our Nation (Hall), 73

Paltock, Robert, 44 Panglossian utopianism, 36 paradise, 18–​19, 63–​64, 122 Parker, Mary Ann, 23–​24, 29, 98 Parkinson, Sydney, 22 parks. See gentleman’s parks pastoralism, 54–​55 and labour shortage, 55 in New South Wales, 56 paradigm, 24–​32 penal colonies, 39 Péron, François Auguste, 109 Peter Wilkins (Paltock), 44, 45 Peterson, Banjo, 128 Phillip, Arthur, 21–​22, 39–​40, 47–​48, 51, 53 Pickwickian England, 28 ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’ (Household Words), 26–​27, 29, 31 picturesque, aesthetic of, 25, 28–​29 Plato, 66 platypus, 109 pleasure garden, 14, 18, 21–​24, 27, 30, 40, 49 pleasure ground, 4, 18, 22–​23, 25 Pliny the Elder, 112 Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Jameson), 11 Polo, Marco, 41 Port Jackson, 50 Port Stephens, nearby country, 22 post-​imperial paranoia,  124 Pread, Rosa, 105 primitivism, 19–​20, 29–​30 private property, 6, 86, 100, 101 Psalter World Map of 1265, 112 pseudoscientifc theories, 105 Pulci, Luigi, 42–​43

racist ideology, 64 rationalism, 115, 116, 117 Rawson, Claude, 79 reality-​transcending ideas,  7 refective monstrousness, 118–​20 rehabilitative space, Australia as, 85 Republica, De (Cicero), 93 Ricoeur, Paul, 6, 7–​8, 26, 51, 68–​69 Rousseauian primitivism, 20 rural simplicity, 25, 27, 30, 37, 56, 62 rural workers, 64 Sadeur, James, 114–​17 Said, Edward, 123 satire, 5–​6, 69–​70, 77–​81, 113, 116, 119 Savage Shores, 49–​54 Sclater, Philip, 105 Scott, George Firth, 105–​6, 124–​25 self-​justifcation,  50 Sellick, Robert, 102 Seriman, Zaccaria, 119 Servius, 92 Shakespeare, William, 76 Shrewesbourg, 71 Sidney, Samuel, 31, 61, 62, 63, 83–​84, 121 Skinner, B. F., 6 Smith, Bernard, 35

140

140

AUSTRALIA AS THE ANTIPODAL UTOPIA

Smith, James Edward, 98 Smith, Sydney, 49 social order, 7–​8, 86, 115, 122, 125 socially symbolic act, 11 South Australia, 82 Spate, Oskar, 15 Specimen of the Botany of New Holland, A (Smith), 98 Spirit of Discovery by Sea, The (Bowles), 52 St Augustine of Hippo, 110–​11, 114 Stokes, John Lort, 67 Streeton, Arthur, 33–​35 Arcadian utopia, 32–​36 idolised as a national icon, 35 Sturt, Charles, 101–​2 Sudlenkova, Olga, 60 sufcient price theory, 123 superstructure, 9 Swift, Jonathan, 77–​81, 96–​97, 114, 118, 119 Sydney, 46 Sydney Cove clay, medallion made out of, 39–​40 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 76 Tench, Watkin, 21 Terra Australis, 14, 15, 16, 20, 41–​45, 71, 93, 112 terra nullius, 19, 50, 53, 60, 100 theatrical performance, 15, 76 Theevingen, 75 Theocritus, 57 Three Colonies of Australia (Sidney), 61–​62 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 48 topsy-​turvy, 4, 41, 74 topsyturvyness, 77, 78, 85, 128 totalitarianism, 117 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, The, 41, 74 trope of bounty, 19–​20, 23, 25, 28–​29, 63, 127 True Stories (Vera Historia) (Lucian), 69–​70 Tucker, Horace, 36–​38 ‘turning gentleman’ motifs, 121–​22, 123, 125

unheimlich. See heimlich/​unheimlich Ur-​Heimat, 105 utopia, 1 concept of, 5–​6 and dystopia, boundary between, 5–​6 and ideology, 7–​11, 77 pathological side, 26 and satire, 5, 6 and social reality, 26 Utopia (More), 5, 6, 44, 50, 72, 114 utopia capovolta, 86 utopian mentalities, 7, 50, 51 utopian surplus, 9–​10 Vanuatu, 15–​16, 23 Verne, Jules, 84–​85 Vespucci, Amerigo, 13–​14, 17 Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle Terre Incognite Australi (Seriman), 119 ‘View of the Artist’s House and Garden, A’ (Glover), 27 Virgil, 57, 92 Wakefeld, Edward Gibbon, 82–​83, 122–​23 Walden Two (Skinner), 6 Walpole, Sir Robert, 78 wasteland, 100–​101 Watling, Thomas, 46, 51, 53–​54, 90 Wedgwood, Josiah, 39 ‘Weird Melancholy’ (Clarke), 108 Wentworth, William Charles, 56–​59 White Australia policy, 64 Wilkins, Peter, 44 Wittkower, Rudolf, 112 Woods, G. A., 15 wool production, 24, 54 working man’s paradise, 63–​64, 122 working-​class Arcadia,  54–​61 working-​class migration,  84 Wright, Judith, 1, 2 zonal theory, 90–​93 Zucchini, Giampaolo, 73