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THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Hempel Surname or Family name:
Christoph First name:
PhD Abbreviation for degree as given in the Un iversity calendar:
School of the Arts and Media School:
The interplay of utopia and ideology in visions of Australia Title:
Daniel Other name/s:
Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences Faculty:
Abstract 350 words maximum:
Australia has a fascinating hi story of visions. As the Antipode to Europe, the continent provides uniquely fertile ground for
imagining places, spaces and societies radically different from Europe. But since one man's utopia is always another man's
dystopia, these visions usually come with their own ideological baggage. It is this interplay of utopia and ideology in visions of
Australia that forms the overarching theme of this thesis, the central aim of which is to determine the place of Australia in the
utopian imagination. Tracing the major transformations and adaptations which the interplay of utopia and ideology has
undergone, the thesis maps out how visions of Australia evolved from the pre-colonial to the modern period. To this purpose, it
draws on utopian theory to provide a conceptual frame\vork for analys ing the interplay of utopia and ideology in a wide range of
texts and their broader discursive and historical contexts. Offering an innovative approach to Marxist ideology-critique, this
conceptual framework is based on the work of Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricamr and Frederic Jameson. As such, this
thesis represents not only the first systematic study of the role of utopian thought in the literaty imagination of Australia, it also
provides an original and insightful perspective on Australian history, and furthers our theoretical understanding of the complex
interplay of utopia and ideology. While the central finding of the thesis is that none of the visions of Australia has succeeded in
completely salvaging utopia from ideology's oppressive hold, it also uncovers that Austral ia's place in the utopian imaginat ion
holds tremendous critical and concrete-utopian potential.
Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation
I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.
I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).
The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances a nd require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research.
FOR OrFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements fo r Award:
TI l/S SHEET IS TO BE GLUIW TO TI IE !NS/DE FRONT COVEil OF TllE TI lliSIS
The Interplay of Utopia and Ideology in Visions of Australia
Daniel Hempel
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
UNSW
School of the Arts & Media Faculty of the Arts & Social Sciences
Submitted August 2016
Originality Statement: I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged. Copyright Statement: I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation. Authenticity Statement: I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.
Signed.......................................
Date..........................................
3
Abstract: Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the Antipode to Europe, the continent provides uniquely fertile ground for imagining places, spaces and societies radically different from Europe. But since one man’s utopia is always another man’s dystopia, these visions usually come with their own ideological baggage. It is this interplay of utopia and ideology in visions of Australia that forms the overarching theme of this thesis, the central aim of which is to determine the place of Australia in the utopian imagination. Tracing the major transformations and adaptations which the interplay of utopia and ideology has undergone, the thesis maps out how visions of Australia evolved from the pre-colonial to the modern period. To this purpose, it draws on utopian theory to provide a conceptual framework for analysing the interplay of utopia and ideology in a wide range of texts and their broader discursive and historical contexts. Offering an innovative approach to Marxist ideology-critique, this conceptual framework is based on the work of Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricoeur and Fredric Jameson. The thesis systematically analyses the role of utopian thought in the literary imagination of Australia up to the twentieth century, and as such provides not only an original and insightful study of Australian history, but also furthers our theoretical understanding of the complex interplay of utopia and ideology. While the central finding of the thesis is that none of the visions of Australia has succeeded in completely salvaging utopia from ideology’s oppressive hold, it also uncovers that Australia’s place in the utopian imagination holds tremendous critical and concrete-utopian potential.
4
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Bill Ashcroft, my supervisor. I am especially grateful for how generous he was with his time. His vast knowledge and insight into the subject matter were a never-failing source of inspiration, and his critical readings and constructive comments supported this thesis from its vague beginnings to its hectic end. I am also greatly appreciative of my co-supervisor, Fiona Morrison, whose guidance and feedback encouraged and supported me during the confirmation process. My sincerest thanks also to Chris Danta, who was not only a constructive reader at my first review, but also a wonderfully supportive postgraduate convenor afterwards. Finally, heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Amy. You have been a most supportive, critical and, at times, painstakingly precise reader of my work.
5
Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 7
Scope and Chapter Outline........................................................................................ 8
Discussion of the Conceptual Framework .............................................................. 11
Mannheim: the Criterion of Incongruence .............................................................. 12
Ricœur: Utopia as Social Critique .......................................................................... 16
Bloch: the Utopian Surplus ..................................................................................... 20
Jameson: Compensatory Structures and the Ideologeme ........................................ 23
CHAPTER 1 – The Antipodean Vision of Utopic Nowhereness ............................... 26
Origin of the Antipodes in Ancient Geography ...................................................... 28
The Unheimlichkeit of the Antipodes ..................................................................... 30
Antipodal Monstrosity ............................................................................................ 33
Joseph Hall: Mundus Alter et Idem ......................................................................... 36
Richard Brome: The Antipodes ............................................................................... 41
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels ......................................................................... 45
CHAPTER 2 – The Quirósque Vision of a Eutopic Paradise ..................................... 52
Quirós’ Vision of Austrialia Del Espíritu Santo ..................................................... 55
The Discourse of Tropicalism ................................................................................. 62
The Cook Voyages .................................................................................................. 65
“A Gentleman’s Park”............................................................................................. 70
CHAPTER 3 – The Civilising Mission: a Vision of Colonial Euchronia .................. 74
The Antipodes: Emblem of Imperial Desire ........................................................... 76
Terra Australis and the Austral Utopias .................................................................. 81
The Euchronic Narrative of the Civilising Mission ................................................ 84
The Ideologeme of Improvement ............................................................................ 88
Macquarie’s Vision ................................................................................................. 93
CHAPTER 4 – Colonial Melancholy and the Imperial Picturesque ........................... 98
Melancholy, Colonialism and Utopia ................................................................... 100
The Unpicturesqueness of Australia ..................................................................... 105
The Aesthetic of the Picturesque........................................................................... 107
The Imperial Picturesque ...................................................................................... 109
Thomas Watling and the Unimprovability of the Landscape ............................... 112
Barron Field and the Unpicturesqueness of Australia........................................... 117
6
CHAPTER 5 – The Dickensian Pastoral: Arcadian Visions of Australia ................ 124
Picturesque Pastoral: Mitchell’s Australia Felix ................................................... 129
Pastoral and Arcadia ............................................................................................. 132
Arcadian Australia: A Working-man’s paradise ................................................... 134
Wakefieldian Arcadianism .................................................................................... 141
Samuel Sidney and the Dickensian Pastoral ......................................................... 147
CHAPTER 6 – The National Vision and the Utopia of the Bush ............................. 155
The Utopia of the Bush: Critique of the Australian Legend ................................. 158
Ideological Legacies of the Dickensian Pastoral .................................................. 164
Arthur Streeton’s Arcadian Australia.................................................................... 170
Early Twentieth-Century Pastoraphilia ................................................................. 174
CHAPTER 7 – Purgatorial Visions of Australia ...................................................... 177
Purgatorial Antipodes............................................................................................ 179
Robert Southey: Romantic Conceptions of Penal Transportation ........................ 180
The Horizonal Sublime ......................................................................................... 183
Henry Lawson: Utopian Vorschein in “The Drover’s Wife” ................................ 186
White Suffering ..................................................................................................... 193
EPILOGUE – Modernism and Beyond..................................................................... 197
Modernism: Waning of the Utopian Impulse ....................................................... 198
Post-Modernism: A New Hope? ........................................................................... 202
Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 209
BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................... 213
7
INTRODUCTION
Napier Waller’s painting The Pastoral Pursuits of Australia (1927) is intriguing for
several reasons. First of all, there is the painting’s grandiose size: with a width of more
than four metres, its epic ambitions are clearly staked out. The painting is also highly
ambitious in terms of style: its imitation of Hellenistic and baroque art is plainly
evident, but the Pre-Raphaelite and art-nouveau influences on its tonality and
composition, as well as the impressionist air of its background, also betray its
indebtedness to modern art. What is most intriguing, however, is the painting’s subject
matter: in even light and soft, warm colours, the painting presents us with shepherd
figures that, scantily clad in Grecian-style draperies, recline in classical poses and enjoy
the fruits of a grapevine while they graze their flocks in an undulating landscape. Were
it not for the place name in the painting’s title, it would be hard to guess that this
Arcadian scene is supposed to be set in Australia.
Clearly, Napier envisions a utopia, in the sense that his depiction of Australia
transcends reality. It is a vision of peace and harmony, which is particularly meaningful
given that the painting is historically couched between the First World War and the
Great Depression. “In this antipodean utopia”, cultural historian Ana Carden-Coyne
writes about Napier’s painting, “there are no disabled people; instead of war, it is a
prosperous and peaceful civilization inhabited by supermodels of classical perfection”.1
In Napier’s dream of a perfect world, there is no trace of post-war trauma, only
demonstrations of the nation’s health and virile strength, and instead of signs of
economic decline, there is the celebration of pastoralism as the nation’s source of wealth
and well-being. As such, the painting’s depiction is clearly incongruent with the social
reality that surrounds it, envisioning not what is or was, but perhaps what should be. On
closer inspection, however, the painting’s celebration of youthful vitality proves to be
an exclusive celebration of whiteness and masculinity. What should become apparent
here is that while Napier’s vision is positively utopian in its celebration of a peaceful,
idyllic Australia, at the same time it also feeds into the ideology of Australian
nationalism: celebrating Anglo-Australian virility and sovereignty over the land, it
forecloses any issues antagonistic to this utopia, and thus negates the country’s
1 Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 200.
8
continuing social tensions. In the end, we find utopia and ideology inextricably
entangled in Napier’s vision.
It is precisely this interplay of utopia and ideology in visions of Australia that forms
the overarching theme of this thesis, the central aim of which is to determine the place
of Australia in the utopian imagination. Tracing the major transformations and
adaptations which utopian and ideological elements underwent both in their individual
organisation as well as in relation to each other, this thesis maps out how visions of
Australia evolved from the pre-colonial to the modern period. To this purpose, the thesis
draws on utopian theory to provide a conceptual framework for analysing the interplay
of utopia and ideology in a wide range of texts and their broader discursive and
historical contexts. This conceptual framework, which offers an innovative approach to
Marxist ideology-critique, is inspired by the work of Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Paul
Ricœur and Fredric Jameson. The thesis systematically analyses the role of utopian
thought in the literary imagination of Australia up to the twentieth century, and as such
provides not only an original and insightful study of Australian history, but also furthers
our theoretical understanding of the complex interplay of utopia and ideology.
Scope and Chapter Outline
It should be stated from the outset that the ambitious scope of this thesis inevitably
meant that it was necessary to narrow the research focus to a manageable body of texts.
I approached the subject with an eye for broader discursive similarities, which often
came at the expense of individual differences. The guiding idea in the selection of
material was to present a narrative that traces how visions of Australia developed and
transformed over time, thus producing a reasonably coherent but necessarily incomplete
picture of the different visions of Australia. This thesis, consequently, does not aim for
encyclopaedic coverage. As a second caveat, it should be remarked that although this
thesis attempts to make its exploration of Australia’s place in the utopian imagination as
diverse as possible, it pays only passing attention to indigenous utopianism. The focus
lies predominantly on European and Anglo-Australian visions. The main reason for this
is that a comprehensive discussion of Aboriginal utopianism would require
archaeological and anthropological research that is beyond the scope of this study.
9
Nevertheless, the issue of Aboriginal displacement forms a central part of this thesis’
investigation of utopia’s role in colonial and imperial ideology.
The historical reach of this thesis can be divided into roughly four periods: the pre-
discovery, the imperial, the national, and the post-national or post-colonial period. The
first period covers visions that predate the actual discovery and colonisation of Australia
by Europeans; these are utopian imaginations of what a continent on the opposite side
of the world to Europe might look like. As Andrew Milner reminds us, “European
writers made extensive use of Australia as a site for utopian imaginings from well
before the continent’s actual conquest, exploration and colonisation, for the very
obvious reason that it remained one of few real-world terrae incognitae still available
for appropriation by such fantasy”.2 This resulted in the creation of what I call
Australia’s pre-discovery and pre-colonial avatars, most prominently the Antipodes,
Terra Australis and New Holland. A major objective behind the discussion of these pre-
discovery visions is to demonstrate that they critically influenced later conceptions of
the actual continent, and that Australia’s place in the utopian imagination is, in fact,
fundamentally shaped by Antipodality. It is important to emphasise that in this thesis,
the Antipodal relationship between Australia and Europe is not 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 South Pacific Ocean. Rather,
the relationship between Europe and the Antipodes is a symbolic one, maintained by the
Eurocentric desire for an Antipodal counterpart. To emphasise this conception of
Antipodality as a symbolic rather than geographic relationship, the term is capitalised.
The pre-discovery and pre-colonial period is covered in chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 1
focuses on the Antipodes’ place in the utopian imagination, and explores the Antipodes’
utopian potential for social critique against the background of their symbolic
relationship with Europe. It concentrates on classical, medieval and early-modern texts.
Chapter 2 traces the emergence of an alternative tradition, in which the other end of the
world was imagined as a true eutopia. It explores the focal role played by the
Portuguese captain Pedro Fernández de Quirós in shaping the utopian expectations of
Australia’s European explorers. Special attention is paid to the ideological contexts of
Quirós’ vision. Throughout the thesis, but especially in these first chapters, I have tried
to work with original sources as much as possible to avoid historical and linguistic 2 Andrew Milner, Locating Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012), 183.
10
misunderstandings and to ensure accuracy. Original orthography has been maintained as
a visible reminder of the material’s historical nature.
Chapters 3 to 5 cover what can be denoted as the imperial vision. The central focus
here lies on the imperial ideology that emerges in the early-modern period, and its
connections to imaginations of the other end of the world as a space to be conquered
and colonised. The chapters draw primarily on British and Anglo-Australian material
from the late eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, but earlier texts
articulating expansionist fantasies about Australia’s pre-colonial avatars are also taken
into account. Chapter 3 starts this discussion by examining the vision behind the
Civilising Mission. It analyses in particular the time-sense of the vision that drove
settlement in early-colonial Australia, which came to provide the ideological framework
for subsequent visions. Chapter 4 focuses on the melancholy sentiment that
accompanied the early stages of colonisation in Australia, and explores the complex
interconnections between melancholy, colonialism and utopia, specifically in relation to
the aesthetic of the picturesque. Chapter 5 discusses the rise of one of the central
utopian paradigms, the Arcadian vision of Australia. The chapter inquires into the
connections between pastoral aesthetics, the socio-economic conditions of early
modernity, and the conception of Australia as a working-man’s paradise. A central
objective behind the discussion of the imperial vision is to demonstrate how pre-
discovery visions (that is, classical, medieval and early-modern understandings of
Europe’s Antipodes) have been carried over or transformed during this period to
influence the actual colonisation of Australia.
Chapters 6 and 7 cover the next overarching period, which is characterised by the
emergence of the national vision of Australia. The relationship between the national
vision and its ideological inheritances from British imperialism defines the dynamic of
utopia and ideology in this period. Chapter 6 focuses on Russel Ward’s seminal thesis
on the Bush ethos and examines the utopian qualities of the Bush and the Bushman.
Particular attention is paid to the way in which the utopia of the Bush opposes, but also
continues the imperial vision. Chapter 7 traces an alternative version of the national
vision, in which Australia is imagined as a more dystopian, specifically purgatorial,
space. It shows how the conception of Australia as Purgatory is shot through by
moments of utopian anticipation, but also discusses the purgatorial vision’s ideological
assistance in the displacement of colonial violence against indigenous people. Finally,
11
the thesis’ epilogue casts a brief glance at the twentieth- and twenty-first century to
outline the situation of the post-national or post-colonial vision today, and then draws a
general conclusion about Australia’s place in the utopian imagination.
In order to explain how this thesis analyses the interplay of utopia and ideology, I
will now discuss the conceptual framework in more detail, especially in its relation to
ideology-critique.
Discussion of the Conceptual Framework
The study of ideology has undergone various phases of development after Marx and
Engels first introduced ideology-critique (Ideologiekritik) as a powerful tool for cultural
analysis. However, at the present time it seems that the scholarly debate on ideology has
come to a premature standstill. Theoretical attention for ideology probably reached its
apex in the 1970s with Althusser’s structuralist re-interpretation of Marxism. But
following the general decline of Marxist thought, as well as Althusser’s tragic
committal to a psychiatric hospital, Foucauldian discourse analysis would seem to have
gradually supplanted the study of ideology. As sociologist Krishan Kumar describes it,
when orthodox Marxism established a strictly negative view of ideology as “false
consciousness” and extended ideology’s scope to a universal dimension, it initiated the
eclipse of ideology-critique: “One might speculate that ideology was killed by its own
success, or perhaps its excesses. Its inflation, not to say its imperialism, at the hands of
the Althusserians in the 1970s made of ideology so encompassing a concept as to render
it well-nigh unserviceable. If ideology is everything, it is nothing – or at least, not much
can be done with it”.3
However, this thesis suggests that ideology-critique can be revived as a productive
method of analysis when combined with the study of utopian thought. The interrelation
of ideology with utopia provides a constructive way out of the dead-end into which
orthodox Marxism has led ideology-critique: the dogmatism of a one-sided, solely
negative ideology-critique can be dissolved by placing the interplay of utopia and
ideology at the centre of analysis. Instead of reducing cultural texts to mere
manifestations of a ruling-class’ self-serving interests with what Douglas Kellner calls 3 Krishan Kumar, “Ideology and Sociology: Reflections on Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia,”
Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 2 (2006): 171.
12
“the heavy hammer of the ideology critic”,4 a more promising research avenue can be
found when the interactions between utopia and ideology are taken into account. “This
interplay of ideology and utopia”, Paul Ricœur writes, “appears as an interplay of the
two fundamental directions of the social imagination”.5 Placing both phenomena into
the framework of a social hermeneutics, Ricœur goes on to argue that utopia and
ideology may work as correctives for each other, and that utopia moreover offers an
otherwise unattainable, even creative possibility for criticising false consciousness from
within. However, in light of this critical potential it is rather surprising how little
scholarly attention has been paid to the link between ideology and utopia.6 Addressing
this gap, the following outlines the conceptual framework of this thesis, starting with
Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricœur, Ernst Bloch and lastly, Fredric Jameson.
Mannheim: the Criterion of Incongruence
In the main, the correlation of utopia and ideology has been examined by three
central thinkers: Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricœur. This being said, one
immediately has to add that Fredric Jameson also made substantial, albeit less
systematic, contributions to this discussion. It is a curious fact that although Bloch was
chronologically the first to touch on the subject in his 1918 Geist der Utopie, and
moreover towers as the most significant utopian thinker of the last century, it is
Mannheim who takes the place of the founding father in this triumvirate.7 Perhaps
4 Douglas Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique,” In Existential Utopia: New
Perspectives on Utopia Thought, eds. Michael Marder et al. (London: Continuum, 2011), 85. 5 Paul Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination,” Philosophic Exchange 2, no. 2 (1976):
27. 6 Cf. with Lyman Tower Sargent, “Ideology and Utopia: Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricœur,” Journal of
Political Ideologies 13, no. 3 (2008): 263; for a more recent discussion, see Lyman Tower Sargent, “Ideology and Utopia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 439-49.
7 It seems at least that Ricœur assigns this position to Mannheim, since Ricœur bases his work predominantly on him, taking hardly any serious notice of Bloch. E.g., Ricœur merely nods towards Bloch in: Paul Ricœur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics: Ideology, Utopia and Faith,” in Protocol of the Colloquy of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, ed. W. Wuellner (Berkeley, CA: The Center, 1976), 27. Mannheim, well-acquainted with Bloch’s early work, at least mentions Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution, albeit tucked away in a footnote; see: Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1948), 191; 194. The fact that Mannheim knew Geist der Utopie very well is reflected in his rather mixed review of it. For a German translation of the Hungarian original from 1919, see: Karl Mannheim, “Ernst Bloch: Geist der Utopie,” in Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis, eds. Éva Karádi et al. (Frankfurt a. M.: Sendler, 1985), 254-9.
13
Mannheim owes this presiding position to the fact that his conception of the interplay of
utopia and ideology is more readily accessible than the elusive and sometimes
impenetrable mysticism of Bloch. In any case, it was in Mannheim’s 1929 work
Ideologie und Utopie that he linked both concepts to each other as part of the book’s
central issue, the “sociology of knowledge”. Sparking a heated debated about the
sociological connection between knowledge and ideology, this work is still widely
regarded as Mannheim’s most important scholarly contribution.
Yet how exactly did Mannheim relate both concepts to each other? In order to define
the interrelation of utopia and ideology he placed two determining criteria at the core of
their relationship: an inclusive one, which locates utopia and ideology within the same
category, and an exclusive one, which defines them as oppositional aspects of that
category. The first one, the criterion of incongruence, allowed Mannheim to group
ideologies, thought of as “situationally transcendent ideas which never succeed de facto
in the realization of their projected contents”, together with utopias, which he
characterised as something that “is incongruous with the state of reality within which it
occurs”.8 According to this first criterion, utopia and ideology are similar insofar as they
both refer to representational forms that transcend the existing order of reality. As such,
utopia and ideology misrepresent the reality from which they originate. It follows from
the criterion of incongruence that utopia and ideology are both forms of false
consciousness.
The second criterion Mannheim introduced is the criterion of realisability.9 While the
criterion of incongruence groups both concepts together as “reality-transcending
ideas”,10 this second criterion is supposed to differentiate between them. Although
utopias and ideologies are both incongruent with the social order to which they relate,
utopias differ from ideologies in that they succeed in transforming the status quo:
“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”.11 Mannheim’s indebtedness to Marxist
8 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 175; 173. 9 To be precise, Mannheim speaks of the criterion of “realization”; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia,
184. The term “realizability” is used by Paul Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 178, as well as Bryan Turner, “Mannheim’s Utopia Today,” Political Studies (1995): 33.
10 Turner, “Mannheim’s Utopia Today,” 33-4. 11 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 176.
14
thought, particularly to historical materialism, becomes noticeable here: as utopian
scholar Ruth Levitas has pointed out, Mannheim’s usage of the terms utopia and
ideology links both concepts closely to class struggle, with ideology being the
representational structure that, appertaining to the dominant but also declining class,
aims at maintaining or even strengthening the dominance of that class.12 In a constantly
advancing historical process, ideology is, accordingly, orientated towards the past as it
seeks to preserve a configuration of society that is becoming obsolete. Utopia, on the
other hand, is associated with the lower, suppressed but also rising classes, and, pointing
towards the future, operates as a “catalyst of emergent reality” within the historical
process.13 As a result, ideology comes to represent a legitimising and conservative
force, and utopia a force of critique and transformation.
However, what should now become apparent is that while the inclusive criterion of
incongruence is fairly straightforward, the criterion of realisability poses significant
methodological challenges. In the first place, the definitions of utopia and ideology that
follow from it are confusingly counterintuitive. In fact, one might be tempted to think
that Mannheim defines utopia as that which exists, and ideology as that which does not.
The criterion of realisability, it would seem, is in conflict with the criterion of
incongruence. This is partially a result of Mannheim’s imperfect terminology: his term
“realization” seems to imply that utopia is actualised, that is to say, turned into reality,
whereas Mannheim often suggests that utopias actually bring reality merely “more in
accord with their own conceptions”; utopias, therefore, do not necessarily become
reality; the important point is rather their transformative effect, their “counteractivity”
through which they “shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at
the time”.14 To a limited extent, this issue can be traced back to the translation of
German “Verwirklichung” into English “realisation”: in the German original,
Mannheim quips on the word’s root in “wirken”, which means “to effect”, yet this
dimension is lost in the English version, surfacing only in the translation of “Wirksame
Utopie” as “effective utopia”.15 The emphasis on effectiveness in Mannheim’s use of
12 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Syracuse UP, 1990), 74-5. 13 Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 75. 14 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 173. 15 Cf. Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 181 (italics
in original), with Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 187; Mannheim’s indirect reference to the etymology of “Verwirklichung” becomes most apparent on p. 172, where he contrasts “Seinswirklichkeit” with the “Gegenwirkung” of utopia (translated as “existing historical reality” and “counteractivity” respectively; note that italics are original).
15
the German terms suggests that the criterion of realisation is more concerned with
utopia’s transformative effect than its actualisation.
At least to some degree, Mannheim was aware of the fact that the realisability
criterion is difficult to apply. He pointed out that “another difficulty in defining
precisely what, at a given period, is to be regarded as ideology, and what as utopia,
results from the fact that the utopian and ideological elements do not occur separately in
the historical process. The utopias of ascendant classes are often, to a large extent,
permeated with ideological elements.”16 But even with this caveat in mind, his
realisability criterion still causes further methodological issues. For one thing, it can
only be determined in retrospect, since the criterion is only met when an idea has
already proved itself as utopian by having transformed social reality. Bryan Turner
summarises this problem as follows:
ideas prove themselves to have been utopian by being “realized” some time after they were first formulated and appeared on the political stage, while ideas prove themselves to have been ideological by not being realized beyond the historical context in which they supported a given state of affairs. […] This realizability criterion has dissatisfied several commentators and led to Mannheim’s account of utopia being dismissed in favour of the apparently more interesting account of ideology. For if it can only be decided retrospectively whether a set of ideas is utopian or ideological, there appears to be a built-in teleology to the ideology-utopia relationship in which ideas that were once utopian are destined to become ideological and ideas that were once ideological are destined to disappear.17
The problem, then, is that Mannheim’s model cannot satisfactorily differentiate between
utopia and ideology. One also has to add Kumar’s admonition that Mannheim’s focus
on “commitment to practice, and to intended or actual realization” may “leave out a
large, perhaps the major part, of the utopian inheritance”.18 As such, Mannheim’s
second criterion puts a twofold strain on the concept of utopia, curtailing the concept on
one hand and conflating it with ideology on the other. This inconsistency offers a good
entry point for introducing the modifications Ricœur made to Mannheim’s conception
of the interplay of ideology and utopia, because as Ricœur states:
For the sociologist the utopia is the realizable, whereas for those in power the utopia is precisely what they refuse, what they find to be incompatible with their order. A contradiction exists within the criteria according to who
16 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 183. 17 Turner, “Mannheim’s Utopia Today,” 33-4. 18 Kumar, 175.
16
uses the criteria. […] Realizability is a nearly useless criterion for present controversies, because we are always caught in the conflict not only between ideologies but also between rising and dominant groups. The conflict between dominant and ascendant involves the polemics, the dialectics, of utopia and ideology.19
Before turning to Ricœur’s revision of Mannheim’s theory, it is worth noting that
Mannheim draws up four Gestalten or “ideal types” of “utopian mentalities” to describe
particular historical formations of the utopia – ideology interplay. Each of these
mentalities is characterised by a specific “time-sense”, that is, “the connections which
exist between each utopia and the corresponding historical time-perspective”.20 When
appropriate, this thesis draws on Mannheim’s distinctions between utopian mentalities
and his description of their different time-senses or time signatures in order to further
the discussion of Australian utopianism.
Ricœur: Utopia as Social Critique
Strictly speaking, Paul Ricœur published only two articles on the interplay of utopia
and ideology, an English one in 1976, which resulted from his lectures on the subject at
the University of Chicago, and another one in French presented at a symposium in the
same year. In 1986 the transcripts of the Chicago lectures, combined with Ricœur’s own
notes, were published under his supervision, and represent now probably the most
comprehensive account of his thoughts on the subject. Admittedly, the concept of utopia
features only briefly in Ricœur’s work, yet it is disappointing, as utopian scholar Lyman
Tower Sargent points out, that previous scholarship on Ricœur has emphasised the role
of ideology, but has ignored or given little weight to utopia – especially so since
Ricœur’s “work on ideology and utopia came at the peak of his career, which makes its
neglect particularly difficult to understand”.21 This lack of scholarship is even more
striking considering that, as the book’s editor George H. Taylor demonstrates, the
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia play a significant role in relation to the rest of
Ricœur’s work, in particular to his theory of a social hermeneutics.22 In fact, Ricœur
19 Ricœur, Lectures, 178. 20 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 189. 21 Sargent, “Ideology and Utopia: Mannheim and Ricœur,” 271, n. 5. 22 See George H. Taylor, introduction to Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, by Paul Ricœur, ed. George
H. Taylor (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), xi-xxxv.
17
states at the beginning of the lectures that his treatment of the concepts of utopia and
ideology aims to establish a general theory of the “social and cultural imagination”.23
So how did Ricœur develop a general hermeneutic theory out of the interplay of
ideology and utopia? Essentially, he made two revisions to the definitions of utopia and
ideology that Mannheim proposed. First of all he pushed Mannheim’s criterion of
incongruence into a more radical direction: adopting Clifford Geertz’ theory of ideology
as a cultural system, he argues that to define ideologies as “unactual representations”
that are opposed to the sphere of material action – in other words “the Real” – is
problematic. Such definitions commit the fallacy of assuming that a non-mediated
representation of reality is possible: “What these theories of ideology fail to
understand”, Ricœur writes, “is that action in its most elementary forms is already
mediated and articulated by symbolic systems”.24 While Mannheim tried to prove the
potential of the social scientist as an uninvolved, perfectly neutral observer freed from
all ideological distortion, Ricœur presupposes that this position is impossible. Drawing
on Geertz, Ricœur declares ideological distortion to be inevitable since the human
actions and interactions that constitute “real life” are already symbolic by definition. As
Taylor explains, since “social action is already symbolically mediated”,25 every possible
way of representing the existing order of society is already distorted, takes already place
within a false consciousness. It will be shown later that this universality of
incongruence leads Ricœur to a non-pejorative, positive revaluation of ideology.
The second amendment Ricœur makes to Mannheim’s theory regards the criterion of
realisability. Ricœur basically shifts the definition of utopia away from realisability to
the potential of social critique, the critical opposition against the existing order of
society. This revision is at least partially in line with Mannheim’s initial definition, as it
seems to derive from Mannheim’s description of utopia as that which tends “to shatter,
either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time”.26 Ricœur sees this
determining criterion represented by the central idea that utopia, as its Greek meaning
implies, is situated “nowhere”:
What must be emphasized is the benefit of this kind of extra-territoriality for the social function of utopia. From this “noplace,” an exterior glance is cast
23 Ricœur, Lectures, 1 (italics in original). 24 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 23. 25 Taylor, xix. 26 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 173; Taylor, xx.
18
on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now opened beyond that of the actual, a field for alternative ways of living. […] Utopia is the way in which we radically rethink what is family, consumption, government, religion, etc. The fantasy of an alternative society and its topographical figuration “nowhere” works as the most formidable contestation of what is.27
Ultimately, then, Ricœur adjusts Mannheim’s exclusive criterion by distinguishing
utopia from ideology on the basis that utopia assumes a critical stance towards a given
order of society: “The critical mark of utopia is then not realizability but the
preservation of distance between itself and reality”.28
Besides revising Mannheim’s definitions, Ricœur furthermore situates the interplay
of utopia and ideology within a much broader sociological context. Criticising the
orthodox Marxist correlation of ruling ideas with a ruling class, Ricœur argues that a
causal connection of the economic base to the ideological superstructure does not
suffice to explain the complex phenomenon of social domination.29 In order to
understand why certain ideologies become ruling ideas he borrows a motivational
framework from Max Weber, and claims that domination can only be properly
understood if the dynamics between a claim to authority and the belief in that claim is
taken into consideration:30
Ideology enters here because no system of leadership, even the most brutal, rules only by force, by domination. Every system of leadership summons not only our physical submission but also our consent and cooperation. […] Ideology must bridge the tension that characterizes the legitimation process, a tension between the claim to legitimacy made by the authority and the belief in this legitimacy offered by the citizenry. The tension occurs because while the citizenry’s belief and the authority’s claim should correspond at the same level, the equivalence of belief with claim is never totally actual but rather always more or less a cultural fabrication. […] This discrepancy between claim and belief may mark the real source of what Marx called surplus-value (Mehrwert). […] The difference between the claim made and the belief offered signifies the surplus-value common to all structures of power.31
Ricœur thus sees the main function of ideology in closing what he calls the “credibility
gap” in “the legitimacy of the given systems of authority”.32 This credibility gap is
bridged with an ideological surplus. With recourse to his definition of action as 27 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 25. 28 Ricœur, Lectures, 180. 29 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 21-2. 30 Cf. with Taylor, xvi. 31 Ricœur, Lectures, 13-4. 32 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 22.
19
articulated by a symbolic system, Ricœur also claims in this context that ideology is
deeply rooted in the field of rhetoric, and points out to the characteristics of figurative
language found in ideologies.33
In the end it can be said that Ricœur essentially redefines 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 sides: Ricœur describes the oppressively
deceptive representation of reality as the pathological or dysfunctional aspect of
ideology, while utopia’s negative side is escapism, that is, “the eclipse of practice, the
denial of the logic of action”.34 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.35 Utopia’s positive function consists in criticising ideology “without
having to step outside its influence”36, and thus in subverting and disrupting an order of
society that is established and maintained by a certain ideology. Given the antithetical
dynamic that takes place between utopia and ideology, Ricœur’s definition of the
positive as well as negative aspects of both concepts offers not only an innovative
approach to ideology-critique; moreover, it represents the starting point for his theory of
a social hermeneutics. For while the positive aspect of utopia works to respond to the
pathological side of ideology, the opposite is also the case. “We only take possession of
the creative power of imagination”, Ricœur concludes, “through a relation to such
figures of false consciousness as ideology and utopia. It is as though we have to call
upon the ‘healthy’ function of ideology to cure the madness of utopia and as though the
critique of ideologies can only be carried out by a conscience capable of regarding itself
from the point of view of ‘nowhere’”.37
Concluding the discussion of Ricœur, one shortcoming of his theory has to be
emphasised: in the main, his approach remains on a very abstract level of analysis. He
does not really present any case studies, so that his discussion of the interplay of utopia
and ideology is often closer to speculative sociology than critical cultural analysis. What
is more, although he calls for a “dialectics of utopia and ideology”, he often treats both
as isolated forces. Bloch, however, provides precisely such a dialectics that allows for
33 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 23. 34 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 26. 35 Ricœur, Lectures, 311. 36 Sargent, “Ideology and Utopia: Mannheim and Ricœur,” 269. 37 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 28.
20
the conception of utopia and ideology as not just contradictory opposites, but as
interlocked forces that are separate and mutually interpenetrative at the same time.
Bloch: the Utopian Surplus
Ernst Bloch is a very unique figure in twentieth-century philosophy. In 1972 the New
York Review of Books tried to characterise Bloch’s philosophy by comparing him to
Marx and Moses; this comparison is quite apt since Bloch’s writings are frequently
situated at the complicated junction of religion and Marxism. It is precisely this
unorthodox approximation of Marxist critique to religious propheticism that makes his
work so distinctive and innovative. Bloch’s originality has been praised by critics such
as Douglas Kellner, who describes Bloch’s “method of cultural criticism” as “one of the
richest treasure houses of ideology critique found in the Marxian tradition”.38 But
Kellner also acknowledges the problems of appropriating Bloch for cultural analysis,
admitting that Bloch’s main work, The Principle of Hope, is “extremely difficult,
elusive, and extremely long (over 1,400 pages in the English translation)”.39 In any
event, Bloch’s philosophy is of great importance for the study of ideology, particularly
because it allows for a more dialectical conception of utopia and ideology, which in
many aspects is more intricate than that of Mannheim or Ricœur.
A good starting point for introducing Bloch’s conception of the interplay of utopia
and ideology is what he calls the “problem of cultural inheritance”, that is, the vexed
question for Marxists of why elements of past ideologies should be retained. 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”.40 This cultural inheritance should “not only
be preserved but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common
property of the whole of society”.41 The fact, however, that society’s cultural
inheritance is drenched in the ideologies of the past poses a fundamental problem for a
38 Kellner, 83. 39 Kellner, 83. 40 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. with 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): 135-6.
41 Engels, 325.
21
Marxist defense of it. In heavy Marxist terms, Bloch therefore asks the question why
“works of the superstructure progressively reproduce themselves in cultural
consciousness even after the disappearance of their social bases”.42 In other words,
should we, for instance, continue to draw inspiration from 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 significant 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 off 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.43
Bloch’s proposition, then, is that the continuing significance 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.”44 Inevitably, this surplus is of a
utopian nature because “this very surplus is produced by nothing other than the effect of
the utopian function in the ideological creations of the cultural side”.45 Bloch then
reveals that ideology depends on utopia to achieve its deceptive and compliant effect:
“Indeed, false consciousness alone would not even be sufficient 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 contradictions”.46 Transcending ideological affiliations, 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 final predicate of every great statement, in Strasbourg
42 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1986),
1:154. 43 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, MA: MIT P, 1988), xii.
44 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:156. 45 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:156. 46 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:156.
22
cathedral and in the Divine Comedy, in the expectant music of Beethoven and in the
latencies of the Mass in B minor.”47 Thus Bloch’s answer to the “problem of cultural
inheritance” is that the inheritance claimable from the great works of the past consists
of the as yet unfulfilled or unsatisfied hope-content of their utopian surplus.
Bloch also gives more insight into the concrete textual workings of the utopian
function. He explains that the utopian function often manifests itself as archetypes,
ideals and symbols. Outlining wished-for, yet unattained, goals, these tropes contain
unsatisfied or unbecome hope-contents. He lists a long catalogue of examples of such
“archetypally encapsulated hope”,48 pointing out how archetypes such as Romeo and
Juliet, the Land of Cockaigne or the Storming of the Bastille, all present a certain
unfulfilled hope-content, that is, they express what Bloch describes as the
“undischarged tendency-latency beneath the cloak of fantasy”.49 What Bloch means by
this is that utopian archetypes are not just impossible pipe dreams, but in fact anticipate
something that is not yet possible or fully achieved, that is, something which has not yet
found its means of realisation in material reality. The Marxist thought on which Bloch
draws here is the notion that in order for social change to take place, the conditions of
the economic base must correspond to the development of the superstructure, and vice
versa.
As a concluding remark on Bloch, it should be mentioned that this thesis 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., the actual possibilities for 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.50
47 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:157-8. 48 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:164. 49 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:163. 50 See Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:157; cf. with Sargent, “Ideology and Utopia,” 443; Levitas, Concept
of Utopia, 88.
23
Jameson: Compensatory Structures and the Ideologeme
The final figure in our discussion of the conceptual framework is Fredric Jameson.
Archaeologies of the Future is Jameson’s most recent attempt at compiling and
synthesising his thoughts on utopia and ideology. Although in his previous works
Jameson devoted significant critical attention to utopia itself, in this volume he
subordinates utopia to science fiction, following Darko Suvin’s provocative suggestion
that utopia is merely a “socio-political subgenre of Science Fiction”.51 The usefulness,
therefore, of Jameson’s Archaeologies to this thesis is somewhat limited, and for this
reason the conceptual framework relies more on his earlier works. In fact, Jameson’s
engagement with utopia and ideology dates back to his earliest academic writings. He
already discusses Bloch’s conception of utopia in his 1971 study Marxism and Form,
yet it is not before his 1979 article “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” that he
begins to explore the dialectic of ideology and utopia.52 In an innovative attempt to
extend the Freudian concept of repression to the social mechanisms that underpin mass
culture, Jameson construes here the dialectic of utopia and ideology as a “management
of desire”.53 He interprets utopia as a desire seeking fulfilment, and ideology as the
force that represses utopian desire through false gratification: “To rewrite the concept of
a management of desire in social terms now allows us to think repression and wish-
fulfillment 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”.54 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”.55 The specific dynamic Jameson is referring to here derives
from a particular configuration of a text, a configuration in which, to the degree that
utopian desire is invoked, that desire is neutralised by an ideological structure that
enacts a symbolic consummation of it. This represents an instance where the symbolic
compensation provided by an ideological structure undermines the subversive potential 51 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
(London: Verso, 2007), 393. 52 Peter Fitting, “The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson,” Utopian Studies 9, no. 2
(1998): 9. 53 Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 141. 54 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 141. 55 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 141.
24
of utopia. Jameson’s compensatory structure provides a key conceptual tool for the
analysis of the interplay of utopia and ideology throughout this thesis.
In his seminal The Political Unconscious, Jameson introduces the concept of the
ideologeme, which represents another highly useful conceptual tool for this thesis. As
the subtitle of The Political Unconscious suggests, Jameson’s notion of the ideologeme
is anchored in his conception of Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Behind this
conception of narrative lies Jameson’s intention to widen the interpretative horizon of
his analysis beyond the formalistic plane of close-readings to include the social plane on
which ideology operates.56 The individual text is, accordingly, understood as a “socially
symbolic act”, meaning that the text is thought to betoken actual social tensions and
conflicts, 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,
find 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”.57 This is where Jameson’s concept of
the ideologeme enters into the picture. Analogous to the Saussurean differentiation of
parole from langue, Jameson defines 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”.58 Since the
ideologeme marks the site where ideology finds a concrete expression, the concept
greatly facilitates the textual criticism of ideology:
The advantage of this formulation lies in its capacity to mediate between conceptions of ideology as abstract opinion, class value, and the like, and the narrative materials with which we will be working here. The ideologeme is an amphibious formation, whose essential structural characteristic may be described as its possibility to manifest itself as pseudoidea – a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or prejudice – or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the “collective characters” which are the classes in opposition. This duality means that the basic requirement for the full description of the ideologeme is already given in advance: as a construct it must be
56 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1981), 76. 57 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 79. 58 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 76.
25
susceptible to both a conceptual description and a narrative manifestation all at once.59
Accordingly, Jameson suggests the textual level of the ideologeme as the departure
point for a cultural analysis of ideology: it is on this level that actual social tensions and
contradictions find their symbolic expression in narrative, which thereby becomes
meaningful as a socially symbolical act.
Throughout this thesis, I draw on the concepts of this framework to examine the
interplay of utopia and ideology in visions of Australia. As a final 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.
59 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 87.
26
CHAPTER 1 – The Antipodean Vision of Utopic Nowhereness
“All the people like us are We, And every one else is They. And They live over the sea, While We live over the way
[…] But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way, You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!”
Kipling, “We and They”
In his ground-breaking work Specimen of the Botany of New Holland (1793), the
English botanist James Edward Smith made the following remark about Australia:
When a botaniſt firſt enters on the inveſtigation of ſo remote a country as New Holland, he finds himſelf as it were in a new world. […] Whole tribes of plants, which at firſt 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 configurations, 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.60
This remark testifies to the excitement Smith and his fellow European scientists must
have felt at the discovery of large numbers of endemic species in Australia. Smith was
the founder and first president of the Linnean Society of London, a scientific
organisation in pursuit of the “universal” taxonomy of Carl Linné, which promised an
unambiguous naming system for all biological organisms. It is interesting how Smith
describes his first encounters with Australian natives: despite their resemblance to
European species, he finds them to be “total strangers”, oscillating between a feeling of
familiarity and alienation. When confronted with their “Otherness” in terms of
“configurations”, “œconomy” and “qualities”, Smith appears bewildered by these
uncanny strangers that threaten to turn his scientific system of nomenclature upside
down.
60 James Edward Smith, A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland, vol. 1 (London, 1793), 9-10.
27
This suspension between identifying connections but feeling estrangement actually
harks back to a millennia-old tradition in European thought. It is a curious fact that long
before any European actually set foot on the continent’s shore, Australia already loomed
large in the European imagination. It was prefigured by such mythical pre-discovery
avatars as Terra Australis or the Great Southland, all of which were rooted in the
geographic speculation of the Antipodes, the hypothetical continent on the opposite side
of the world from Europe. The fact that the Antipodes provide the bedrock on which the
European imagination of Australia is grounded reverberates even today in Australia’s
colloquial description as “Down Under”. The Antipodes, evolving beyond their original
geographical definition, came to represent more than simply a space diametrically
opposed to Europe. They provided a topsy-turvy realm of inversion that signified
Europe’s opposite Other not only geographically, but more importantly,
environmentally and culturally, all the while retaining an uncanny, unsettling
Sameness.61
This chapter traces the history of the Antipodes in the European imagination. More
specifically, it canvasses how the Antipodes developed into a utopic anti-space that
served as a stage on which Europeans could satirically imagine a cultural Other, and in
doing so re-imagine themselves. The chapter first surveys the conceptual origins of the
Antipodes in ancient geographical and cosmological theories, and then examines the
essential Unheimlichkeit that characterises Antipodal space. Discussing Lucian of
Samosata’s use of the Antipodes as a mirror that satirically duplicates European space,
and their medieval conception as a realm of monstrosity, the chapter examines the
subversive potential of the Antipodes against the background of their extra-territoriality.
Next, it explores the critical relationship in which the utopic anti-space of the Antipodes
stands towards the major ideology emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth century:
European imperialism. With Joseph Hall’s early-modern novel Mundus Alter et Idem as
a reference point, the subversive nowhereness of the Antipodes is surveyed in Richard
Brome’s The Antipodes, where it results in a carnivalesque distortion of Europe, and
then in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where it reaches its satirical apogee.
61 Bill Ashcroft, “Introduction,” Textus 24, no. 2 (2011), 213.
28
Origin of the Antipodes in Ancient Geography
The origin of the Antipodes is riddled with gaps and inconsistencies. Although it is
safe to say that the concept of antipodality first emerged in ancient Greek geography, it
proves rather difficult to reconstruct how the hypothesis of a continent on the opposite
side of the world from Europe came into being. What complicates the matter is the fact
that the concept’s scarce sources are partially inconsistent and have frequently been
misinterpreted. The historian Avan Judd Stallard has demonstrated that modern
scholarship commonly proceeds from one of two erroneous assumptions: it is either
presumed that ancient conceptions of the Antipodes were driven by aesthetic ideas
about “cosmographic symmetry” or that the Antipodes were based on the belief that the
northern land mass “must necessarily be balanced by an equal quantity of land in the
southern hemisphere”.62 Both assumptions appear ill founded, for classical sources
provide no convincing evidence in support of either of them.63 Nevertheless, the
concept of the Antipodes can clearly be traced back to two geographic principles: the
conception of the earth as a sphere, and the theory of climatic zones. Before we start
inquiring into the cultural significance of the Antipodes, it is useful to briefly reflect on
these origins.
In the first place, the concept of antipodality rests firmly on the premise of a round
earth. The reason for this is that conceiving of the earth as a sphere necessarily implies
the assumption of opposing hemispheres. Questions about the hemisphere opposite to
Europe therefore arise quite naturally from the notion of a spherical earth. While
Parmenides and Pythagoras are frequently cited as the first proponents of a round earth,
the first source that clearly discusses this topic is Timaeus, the Platonic dialogue that
addresses the question of the ideal city and relates the myth of Atlantis.64 Timaeus is
also credited with the first known usage of the word “antipous” (άντίπους), which
means “with the feet opposite” and refers to people whose feet are placed against each
other – in other words, people on opposing sides of the globe.65 Stallard, however,
claims that Plato’s treatment of sphericity in Timaeus is more geometrical than it is
geographical, meaning that the text is more concerned with general mathematical 62 Avan Judd Stallard, “Origins of the Idea of the Antipodes: Errors, Assumptions, and a Bare Few
Facts,” Terrae Incognitae 42 (2010), 34. 63 Stallard, 34-5. 64 Stallard, 35-6; see also Matthew Boyd Goldie, The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices
(New York, London: Routledge, 2010), 17. 65 Plat. Tim. 63a; see also Moretti, Gli Antipodi, 18.
29
abstractions about the nature of sphericity than with actual geopolitical relations.66 But
even so, Plato’s text already lays out a specific Antipodal logic: its concept of
antipodality connects diametrically opposed places and people, expressing a
relationship which readily translates into a eurocentric tension between centre and
periphery.
The second geographic principle that circumscribed the Antipodes is the theory of
climatic zones. Even more so than the notion of a round earth, zonal theory defined the
relationship between Europe and its Antipodal counterpart. Its precise origin is
contested: the common attribution to Pythagoras has been criticised, and while classical
sources seem to favour Parmenides, the first reliable account can be found in Aristotle’s
Meteorologica.67 In its most influential formulation, zonal theory suggests a horizontal
division of the earth into five climatic zones: it separates the two hemispheres by means
of a central “torrid zone” (believed to be impassable because of its intolerable heat),
posits a temperate, inhabitable zone in each hemisphere, and defines both of the earth’s
polar caps as frigid, uninhabitable zones.68 Importantly, this division defines the
Antipodes as potentially inhabitable, but positions them forever out of reach because of
the impassable torrid zone around the equator. It further suggests a climatic similarity
between the two inhabitable zones. This meant that while the Antipodes were believed
to be eternally separated from Europe, they represented at the same time Europe’s
climatic mirror image, and therefore remained intricately linked to it.69
This mimetic relationship between the Antipodes and Europe was specified further
by an influential cosmographic theory commonly credited to Crates of Mallos.70
Without going into too much detail, it is important to note that the Cratesian system
essentially divided the globe into two domains: the first domain, the ecumene
(οίκουμένη, related to οΐκος meaning “household, home”), comprised the whole world
as it was known to antiquity. The ecumene was thought to cover 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 66 Stallard, 37-8. 67 Aristot. Metr. 2.5.362b; see also Stallard, 39ff; Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before
1600 (London: British Library, 2008), 16; also Gabriella Moretti, Gli Antipodi: Avventure Letterarie di un Mito Scientifico Parma: (Nuova Pratiche, 1994), 20.
68 Moretti, Gli Antipodi, 20; see also Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 16. 69 Cf. with Martianus Capella’s claims about the stars and seasons in the southern hemisphere; see
Goldie, 30. 70 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 17.
30
limits of the known world.71 The second domain consisted of those parts of the world
which were assumed to exist, yet thought to be eternally separated from the ecumene,
and therefore essentially unknowable. This domain represented the anti-ecumene. The
binary of ecumene / anti-ecumene has important implications for the Antipodes:
excluded from the ecumene, from the known “home world” of antiquity, the Antipodes
formed part of the anti-ecumene, the opposite to and of home.
These hypotheses of ancient geography provided a broad framework for the
imagination of Antipodal space. While the idea of the earth’s roundness posits the
Antipodes as the global opposite to the ecumene, the division into climatic zones
characterises the Antipodes as unreachable and essentially unknowable, but also as
somehow similar to the ecumene.
The Unheimlichkeit of the Antipodes
It is perhaps unsurprising that the first literary use of the Antipodes was by a Greek
geographer and mathematician, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who is well-known for his
fairly accurate calculation of the circumference of the earth.72 His multifarious interests
in geography and astronomy mark him as a representative of the spirit of the
Alexandrian age, a period that was characterised by the extension of cultural and
geographical knowledge.73 Eratosthenes gave current geographical theories a literary
colouring in his poem Hermes, which illustrates the celestial ascent of its eponymous
hero with vivid images of the earth’s five climatic zones.74 In line with zonal theory,
Eratosthenes’ text describes two zones, one in the northern, one in the southern
hemisphere, as equally fertile, and inhabited by men. Notably, his poem sets up a
relationship between the ecumene and the Antipodes that oscillates between familiarity
and strangeness: while the Antipodes are explicitly defined as unknown and, because of
the impassable torrid zone, as essentially unknowable, they are simultaneously thought
to resemble the ecumene, and thus appear strangely familiar.75 Eratosthenes’ poem
furthermore inaugurates the classical motif of celestial ascension, in which the godlike 71 Goldie, 20. 72 Peter Marshall Fraser, “Eratosthenes,” in Who’s Who in the Classical World, eds. Simon Hornblower
et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), Oxford Reference Online. 73 Moretti, Gli Antipodi, 21. 74 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 16-7; cf. also Moretti, Gli Antipodi, 22ff. 75 Goldie, 16.
31
point of view from above enables an “astronautic vision”.76 It is within the poetic
framework of this viewpoint from nowhere that Antipodal space becomes accessible,
for only the literally transcendental experience of stellar ascent allows for the
description of Antipodal space. Eratosthenes’ poem marks an important stage in the
classical conception of the Antipodes: moving away from Plato’s solely geometrical,
abstract approach, Hermes introduces a more poetic appreciation of Antipodal space.
Drawing on their essential inaccessibility, Eratosthenes shows the Antipodes caught up
in a dialectical tension of being at the same time disconnected and in opposition, but
also similar and linked, to the ecumene.
This fluctuation between familiarity and strangeness is integral to the Antipodes. In
keeping with Sigmund Freud’s seminal definition 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 different from each other – the one relating to what is familiar
and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden.”77 Freud shows how in
German the meaning of the word unheimlich coincides with its antonym heimlich. It is
precisely this very conflation of conflicting meanings that also characterises the
Antipodes: for one thing, the Antipodes are unheimlich in the sense of “strange,
foreign” because they form part of the anti-ecumene. 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, but
they are also heimlich in the sense of “secret, inaccessible” because of their definitional
inaccessibility. What Eratosthenes’ poem Hermes illustrates, therefore, is the
quintessential Unheimlichkeit that constitutes the Antipodes.
Because of their uncanny relation to the ecumene, the Antipodes took on a specific
cosmological function. A short anecdote by Lucian of Samosata neatly captures this
cultural significance of Antipodal space. In his eulogistic, but probably entirely fictional
biography of the Cynic philosopher Demonax, Lucian writes:
76 Moretti, Gli Antipodi, 24: “visione astronautica”. 77 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 132.
32
καὶ μὴν καὶ φυσικόν τινα περὶ των άντιπόδων διαλεγόμενον άναστήσας καὶ επὶ φρέαρ αγαγὼν καὶ δείξας αυτω τὴν εν τω υδατι σκιὰν ηρετο, Τοιούτους αρα τοὺς αντίποδας ειναι λέγεις78
And once, after a natural philosopher (physikos) lectured about the Antipodes, Demonax made him get up, led him to an artificial well, showed him his shadows on the water and asked: “This is, presumably, what you understand by Antipodes?”
What Lucian’s anecdote illustrates is how the imagination of Antipodal Otherness, of
Antipodal space and its inhabitants, ultimately folds back into imaginations of the
European Self. Owing to their geographical relation and climatic similarity to the
ecumene, the Antipodes represent Europe’s inverted counter-image, but because they
remain inaccessible and unknown, they constitute a cipher that ultimately refers back to
its originator. Lucian here demonstrates the satirical potential of this cipher: the
Antipodes, enforcing a “reversal of perspective”, confront the natural philosopher with
his own image, and thus end up functioning like a mirror.79 What this exemplifies is not
only how projections of Otherness onto Antipodal space result in duplications of the
ecumene, but the formidable critical potential that lies in these duplications, too.
Next to Demonax, Lucian produced another important work with regard to the
Antipodes. While his anecdote about the well already demonstrates their satirical
potential, it is in Lucian’s most influential work, The True History, that he elaborates
this into a new representational framework for Antipodal space. Lucian’s True History
is a selection of Münchausenesque tales in which he satirises contemporary travel
literature, specifically the popular genre of imaginary voyages. After a fantastic odyssey
through imaginary countries, Lucian’s protagonist is ultimately shipwrecked upon the
Antipodes. The narrative ends here, yet it is promised that a forthcoming (but of course
never written) sequel would recount the journeys and adventures on the Antipodal
continent.80 Importantly, Lucian declares right from the start that his True History tells
nothing but lies, and that he has neither heard nor seen any of the things reported in it.
This declaration sets his text apart from the pseudo-historical and pseudo-authentic
works against which his satire was directed, and which often went to great lengths to
profess the veracity of their accounts.81 Lucian thus endows the Antipodes with a new
poetic license: his exculpatory preamble, announcing that the True History contains
nothing but lies, effectively releases him from any obligation to scientific and historical
78 Luc. Demon. 22; my translation. 79 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 31; see also Moretti, Gli Antipodi, 35-7. 80 Luc. VH 47. 81 Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, “Lukianos von Samosata: Phantastische Reisen,” in Kindlers Literatur
Lexikon, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009) in Kindlers Literatur Lexikon Online.
33
accuracy, in fact, any form of realism, and consequently allows him to ignore the
definitional inaccessibility of the Antipodes. As Moretti suggests, Lucian’s satirical
scepticism removes the Antipodes from the factual plane of geography, and relocates
them in the realm of fiction.82 As a result, Lucian inaugurates the genre of the imaginary
voyage as the fictional framework within which the Antipodes could function as a
satirical mirror of the ecumene.
Antipodal Monstrosity
The satirical potential of the Antipodes which Lucian’s work outlined was further
enhanced when during the Middle Ages the Antipodes came to be perceived as a
repository of monstrosity. Ironically, St Augustine of Hippo, who seriously questioned
the existence of the Antipodes, can be identified as the originator of this association.
Augustine and the early Church Fathers realised that the existence of a continent on the
opposite side of the globe would pose severe challenges to Christian doctrine. The
geographical segregation of Antipodal space from the ecumene seemed irreconcilable
with passages from Holy Scripture stating that the earth in its entirety was given to the
sons of Adam to be populated. Since no descendant of Adam could have populated the
unreachable Antipodes, their inhabitation would contradict the bible’s account of human
monogenesis, and moreover refute the principle of global dispersal of the Christian
message of salvation.83 At stake, therefore, was “the integrity of scripture itself”.84 If
Augustine wanted to approve of the notion of a round earth, he had to presume that the
human population of earth was asymmetrically distributed.85 This is his riposte, which
demonstrates, in eloquent rhetorics, his remarkable familiarity with classical geography:
Quod uero et antipodas esse fabulantur, id est homines a contraria parte terrae, ubi sol oritur, quando occidit nobis, aduersa pedibus nostris calcare uestigia: nulla ratione credendum est. Neque hoc ulla historica cognitione didicisse se adfirmant, sed quasi ratiocinando coniectant, eo quod intra conuexa caeli terra suspensa sit,
Regarding the fable that there are Antipodes, that is, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets for us, men who tread in the footsteps opposite to ours: there is no reason to believe that. For it is not proved whether this is based on historical knowledge, or rather inferred from calculation based on the fact that the earth
82 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, eds. Wolfgang Haase et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 248-9.
83 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 38; see also Moretti, “The Other World”, 263; as well as Ashcroft, “Introduction,” 213-4.
84 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 38. 85 Hiatt, “Terra Australis,” 22.
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eundemque locum mundus habeat et infimum et medium; et ex hoc opinantur alteram terrae partem, quae infra est, habitatione hominum carere non posse. Nec adtendunt, etiamsi figura conglobata et rutunda mundus esse credatur siue 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 ista mentitur, quae narratis praeteritis facit fidem eo, quod eius praedicta conplentur, nimisque absurdum est, ut dicatur aliquos homines ex hac in illam partem, Oceani inmensitate traiecta, nauigare ac peruenire potuisse, ut etiam illic ex uno illo primo homine genus institueretur humanum.86
hangs suspended within the vault of heaven, and that the world has the same room on one side as on the other: but from this they conjecture that the other part of the earth, which is beneath, must be populated. They do not take into account that, even if it is presumed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical shape, the other side of the earth may be covered by water; and even if it is bare of water, that does not necessarily mean that it is populated. For Scripture, which proves the truth of its account by the fulfilment 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 there the human race descended from that one first man.
To support his own argumentation, Augustine emphasises the lack of empirical
knowledge about the Antipodes, and stresses the speculative nature of previous claims
about them. Hypothetically at least he grants the possibility of their existence, yet he
comes to the conclusion that Antipodal regions are either entirely covered by water, or
not inhabited by human beings. It is this latter admission which (most likely
unintentionally) invited the misinterpretation that the Antipodes are populated by a non-
human, that is, monstrous race. In fact, the context of the relevant passage supports such
a misreading: as Hiatt points out, Augustine’s excursion to the Antipodes is preceded by
a discussion of monstrous races and deformities, in which the early Church Father
addresses the question of “what constitutes the ‘genus humanum’”.87 Given this context,
it is rather understandable why Augustine’s comment could have been misread as
proposing that the Antipodes are populated by a monstrous race.
Curiously enough, this interpretation was favoured among artists and authors during
the Middle Ages. So it is that the Osma Beatus map of 1203 depicts a monstrous race
inhabiting the Antipodes: its Austral continent features a specimen of mythical people
called Sciapodes, who were said to have only one gigantic foot, with which they shade
themselves from the scorching sun of the southern hemisphere. Other medieval maps
such as the Psalter World Map of 1265 locate in their Austral periphery an entire
pantheon of monsters, which they derive from the historical works of classical
86 Aug. De civ. 16.9; my translation. 87 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 59; on the subject of St Augustine and monstrous Antipodeans, see also David
Fausett, Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 11; as well as William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 9-10.
35
authorities such as Pliny the Elder and Herodotus.88 Similarly, some medieval authors
imagined Antipodeans as a monstrous people with feet turned backwards. This creative
translation of the original Greek word “antipous” in terms of physiognomy instead of
geography has been described by the art historian Rudolf Wittkower as “a masterstroke
of mediaeval logic”.89 Antipodal space thus became the repository of monstrosity, the
region where “there be monsters” – a conception which reinforced and significantly
intensified the Unheimlichkeit of the Antipodes.
The preceding discussion enables us now to describe the spatial dynamics of the
Antipodes in more detail. The main point to be made is that due to their definition as
unreachable and fantastical, the Antipodes exhibit the particular spatial properties that
characterise utopia. At first sight this may appear counter-intuitive: given that in the
popular mind utopia is held to be a place of perfection, the Antipodes, with their
association with monstrosity and uncanniness, would seem anything but utopian.
However, as Bill Ashcroft emphasises, “the critical feature of utopian thinking is not
that it imagines perfection – a eutopia – but that it speaks to the present from a position
that exists nowhere”.90 What we have to bear in mind is that the word “utopia”,
combining the Greek words ου (“no, not”) and τοπος (“place”) with the Latin suffix -ia,
literally means “no place”.91 Ricœur identifies this “topographical figuration
‘nowhere’”92 as the functional kernel behind utopian thinking, because utopia’s
“exteriorization ‘nowhere’” enables its “fantasy of an alternative society” to work as 88 Cf. with Laura Joseph, “Brimstone Flowers: Towards an Antipodean Poetics of Space,” PhD diss.,
UNSW, 2010, 39. 89 Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 182; also cf. with Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 12.
90 Bill Ashcroft, “The Horizon of the Future,” Southerly 74.1 (2014): 13. 91 At this point I would like to problematise the common conflation of “utopia” with “eutopia”. I
believe there is good reason to question whether Thomas More actually intended this conflation, foremost because it rests on the homophonic realisation of “utopia” and “eutopia” as /juːˈtəʊpɪə/. It seems reasonable to doubt that More and the Humanist circle involved in the publication of Utopia would have pronounced “utopia” and “eutopia” as Anglophones do today. Rather, these sixteenth-century Humanists, who came from all over Europe and possessed expert knowledge of Latin and Greek, would have distinguished clearly in their pronunciation of both words. The fact that Jeremy Bentham, for example, wrote that “The law is an Utopia” instead of “a Utopia” may indicate that in 1827, the word was still pronounced with a true vowel at the beginning (perhaps something like /yˈtʊpɪə/, the pronunciation common in continental Europe today). It could, consequently, be argued that it is a rather recent phenomenon that both words are pronounced the same way and that the conflation of “utopia” and “eutopia” has been caused by the modern English pronunciation of Greek and Latinate words. Additionally, scepticism about an intentional pun on “eutopia” is supported by the fact that the word “eutopia” does not actually feature in More’s text, but only in the six-line poem preceding it, which (although part of the first editions of Utopia) is of unknown authorship (the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia, for example, omits it entirely).
92 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 25.
36
“one of the most formidable contestations of what is”.93 It is from the view point of
utopia’s “no place”, Ricœur explains, that “an exterior glance is cast on our reality,
which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the
possible is now open beyond that of the actual; it is a field, therefore, for alternative
ways of living.”94 Accordingly, utopia’s extra-territoriality, its fictional position
nowhere, effects a form of estrangement from present reality that allows the present to
be critiqued. As Jean-Luc Nancy describes it, utopia is “a chimerical dream, foreign to
the real”95 – much in the same way as the Antipodes are foreign, unheimlich, to the
ecumene. The unreachable and fantastical Antipodes constitute a utopic space insofar as
they offer the reflexive distance necessary for criticism, that is, they provide an exterior
perspective onto the ecumene. What is more, the Antipodes’ utopian potential for social
critique is further augmented by their intrinsic relational dependence on the ecumene:
because they function as a mirror in which the European spectator is confronted with a
monstrous version of themselves, the Antipodes provide a unique and fertile ground for
satirical sketches that criticise the present status quo. As a result of these utopic
properties, the Antipodes came to represent a highly subversive space in the European
imagination.
Joseph Hall: Mundus Alter et Idem
The early-modern novel Mundus Alter et Idem by the Anglican bishop Joseph Hall
represents one of the first texts that extensively exploits this utopic potential of the
Antipodes. It is worth noting that Hall’s work, opening with an imaginary map of Terra
Australis that resembles contemporary Mercator maps, situates itself in the geographical
discourse of its time.96 Although the emergence of Terra Australis on early-modern
maps signals an important shift in the cosmological significance of Antipodal space, this
cartographical fantasy carries on the tradition of imagining the other end of the world as
a subversive no-space in various ways. While classical speculations about the anti-
93 Ricœur, Lectures, 16. 94 Ricœur, Lectures, 16. 95 Jean-Luc Nancy, “In Place of Utopia,” in Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought,
eds. Michael Marder et al. (London: Continuum, 2011), 4. 96 Compare the map in Joseph Hall, Another World and yet the Same, trans. John Millar Wands (New
Haven, London: 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.
37
ecumene were undoubtedly put under serious pressure by the wave of new information
collected by early-modern explorers, evangelists and merchants, they were not simply
discarded in response, but rather integrated into the newly emerging world view.97 That
is to say, the imagination of Terra Australis did not replace the Antipodes, but rather
represents their early-modern adaptation to the challenges posed by the Age of
Discovery.98
The original Latin edition of Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem was published
anonymously in 1606. It was followed by John Healy’s popular English translation in
1609, which was notoriously coarser and bawdier in its humour.99 The plot of Mundus
Alter et Idem is quickly summarised: following a debate with friends about the
mysterious but still unknown Terra Australis, the “wandering academic” and fictional
author of the text, Mercurius Britannicus, sets out to discover and explore the southern
continent.100 Finally, after 30 years of travelling across Terra Australis, Mercurius
returns to Europe and publishes his account of the Antipodeans’ manners and mores.
Since Mercury is the Roman equivalent of the Greek God Hermes, Hall’s British
Mercury signals a close alignment with the tradition initiated by Eratosthenes’
eponymous poem.
It is an interesting fact that Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem was frequently bound back-
to-back with More’s Utopia and Campanella’s Civitas Solis.101 In spite of this
association with what can justifiably be called two of the most representative texts of
the utopian genre, contemporary critics almost unanimously classify Hall’s text as a
dystopia.102 To a certain extent, this classification is understandable, given the often
truly grotesque societies Hall’s protagonist encounters in the Antipodes – yet it misses
the most decisive feature of Mundus Alter et Idem, because what we are dealing with
97 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 186. 98 Hiatt, “Terra Australis,” 14-5. 99 John Millar Wands, introduction to Another World and Yet the Same, by Joseph Hall, trans. John
Millar Wands (New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1981), lv; John Hall, The Discovery of a New World, or, A description of the South Indies, trans. John Healy (London, 1609).
100 Note that this “British Mercury” mirrors Eratosthenes’ Hermes. Hall thus follows in this tradition of imagining the Antipodes.
101 Werner von Koppenfels, “Mundus Alter Et Idem: Utopiefiktion und Menippeische Satire,” Poetica 13, no. 1-2 (1981), 20.
102 See, for example, Paul Longley Arthur, Virtual Voyages: Travel Writing and the Antipodes 1605-1837 (New York: Anthem P, 2010), 36; John Dunmore, Utopias and Imaginary Voyages to Australasia: A lecture delivered at the National Library of Australia, 2 September 1987 (Canberra: NLA, 1988), 9; Wands, xxv; Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570-1750 (New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1997), 71.
38
here is, as the historian Giampaolo Zucchini said so aptly, an “utopia capovolta”: a
utopia turned upside-down.103 In Hall’s novel this Antipodal inversion finds, for
instance, obvious examples in the Antipodean land of Fooliana, where fools are
respected as sages, women rule over men, and people go naked in winter to save their
warm clothes for summer.104 In fact, this principle of inversion organises the entire
work, giving rise to an Antipodal world that is a topsy-turvy reversal of Europe, in
which countries with telling names such as Tenter-belly (the land of gluttony), Shee-
landt (the land of shrewishness) and Thee-uingen (the land of thieves) parody the vices
of their European equivalents.105 Mercurius’ description of Fooliana, for instance,
makes a mockery of Roman Catholicism: “For whereas it is diuided into two Prouinces,
Truſt-fablia, and Sectaryuoa, (the former beeing farre the larger of the two) yet is it ſo
wholie giuen ouer to a ſort of rotten Ceremonies, that the Inhabitants thereof are all of
this opinion, that one cannot doe God better ſeruice then in the vtter neglect of
themſelues”.106 Satirically magnifying religious, political, and cultural stereotypes of
continental Europe in this way, Hall similarly distorts other nations through the
carnivalesque mirror of the Antipodes.107 He thus transforms Terra Australis into a
moral landscape, whose expressive topography maps out his own catalogue of vices.108
The work’s publisher William Knight already announces this carnivalesque reflection in
his foreword: “Si enim ſingula huius membra & lineamenta rectè perpenderis,
accurateque côtemplatus fueris; veram ac vidam huius, in quo degimus, mundi ideam &
σύνοψιν te perspexiſſe dixeris”.109 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 now that Hall’s text attempts by no means to imagine true
alterity, but rather to reimagine European identity. As the philologist Werner von 103 Giampaolo Zucchini, “Utopia e Satira nel Mundus Alter et Idem di Joseph Hall,” in Studi sull’Utopia,
ed. Luigi Firpo (Firenze: Olschki, 1977), 96. 104 Klaus Stierstorfer, “Antipodean Geographies: John Rastell, Ben Jonson, and Richard Brome,” in
Reading without maps? Cultural landmarks in a post-canonical age. A Tribute to Gilbert Debusscher, ed. Christophe Den Tandt (Brussel: Lang, 2005), 284, n. 12.
105 These names are from Healy’s translation; the Latin originals are Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronia, Lavernia (respectively); cf. with Arthur, 32.
106 Hall, Discovery of a New World, 219. 107 For a discussion of the utopian dimension of Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, see Michael
Gardiner, “Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as Critique,” Utopian Studies 3, no. 2 (1992): 21-49. 108 Koppenfels, 19. 109 “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”; trans. in Hall, Another World, 4; see also: Mercurio Britannico, Mundus Alter et Idem: Sive Terra Australis ante hac ſemper incognita longis itineribus peregrini Academici nuperrime lustrata (Hannover, 1607), np.
39
Koppenfels reasons, the novel is a fantastical travesty of European manners and mores,
which, by way of perspectival inversion and hyperbole, creates an alienating
sameness.110 Hall employs, much like Lucian in his anecdote about Demonax’ well, the
Antipodes as a carnivalesque mirror that reflects back the gaze of its spectator. This
topsy-turvy duplication of the ecumene reveals the utopian quality of his text: it is from
the extra-territorial viewpoint of Terra Australis that, to paraphrase Ricœur, an exterior
glance is cast onto the ecumene, which begins to look just as strange as the Antipodes.
By way of its pretended Otherness, Hall’s text forcibly uproots the European reader
from their ecumenical surroundings, only to transplant them back into it.
Instead of describing Hall’s novel as a dystopia, it seems more appropriate to label
Mundus Alter et Idem a “utopian satire”, which Sargent defines as a “non-existent
society […] the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of that
contemporary society”.111 Bearing in mind that Lucian’s True History finishes with the
unfulfilled promise of a second part which was supposed to relate the adventures on the
Antipodal continent, Hall’s novel can be read as a sequel to the True History, taking up
the story where Lucian’s satire left off. As such, Hall’s text continues and refashions the
satirical tradition initiated by Lucian, at the core of which lies the principles of the
Menippean satire. Subscribing to the jocular, but nevertheless bitingly satirical style of
this traditional literary form, Mundus Alter et Idem is, in fact, firmly rooted in the
literary tradition of the Menippea.112 The genre which emerges here under the auspices
of Lucian, with Hall’s novel as its first representative, could be called, for want of a
better term, the “Antipodean Menippea”.
Even though the Antipodean Menippea essentially represents a utopian satire, it is
worthwhile to examine its affinities with what in utopian studies has become known as
the “critical utopia”. Tom Moylan developed the idea of the critical utopia in his
seminal work Demand the Impossible to describe certain feminist, anarchist and eco-
critical writings that emerged out of the oppositional culture in the United States of the
late 1960s. Rejecting hierarchies and forms of social domination, the critical utopia is
110 Koppenfels, 18-20; cf. with Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 251. 111 Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 4, no. 1 (1994),
9. 112 Koppenfels; David Fausett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great
Southern Land (New York: Syracuse UP, 1993), 44; Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 39-40; cf. also Chris Baldick, “Menippean Satire,” in Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3. ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008).
40
being critical, as Moylan writes, “in the Enlightenment sense of critique – that is
expressions of oppositional thought, unveiling, debunking, of both the genre itself and
the historical situation”.113 In this respect, the Antipodean Menippea qualifies as a
critical utopia: its satirical imagination of the Antipodes as a topsy-turvy ecumene not
only unveils and opposes the vices of European societies, it also ridicules the utopia and
travelogue genres. However, the crucial difference is that while the strength of the
critical utopia lies in “the very act of portraying a utopian vision itself”,114 the
Antipodean Menippea is devoid of any positive visionary content. The latter’s
carnivalesque inversion forcefully highlights the shortcomings of the historical
situation, but does not present a better alternative. So while the Antipodean Menippea
may count as a critical utopia in terms of critique and self-reflexivity, it does not have
the same anticipatory force.
As a final observation, it is worth mentioning that Mundus Alter et Idem testifies to
Hall’s vehement opposition to travelling. In his view, travelling represents a serious
threat to the cultural and moral integrity of the traveller. Hall believed that exposure to
other cultures and religious practices distracts from the duties of Christian life, and may
lead to the proliferation of vices.115 For example, in his polemical piece Quo Vadis? A
Iust Censvre of Travell as it is commonly vndertaken by the Gentlemen of our Nation
(1617) Hall points out that “God […] hath placed vs [Britain] apart, for the ſingularity
of our happineſſe, not for reſtraint”.116 Hall rejects claims that travel could be
educational or spiritually uplifting, for the purpose of which he proposes arm-chair
travelling instead: “What if I ſay, that […] theſe leſſons may bee as well taken out at
home: I haue knowen ſome that haue trauelled no further then their owne cloſet, which
could both teach and correct the greateſt Traueller, after all his tedious and coſtly
pererrations, what doe wee but loſe the benefit of ſo many iournals, maps, hyſtoricall
deſcriptions, relations, if we cannot with theſe helps, trauell by our owne fire-ſide?”117
Although at first sight this appears to be nothing but the conservative opinion of a
113 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Methuen: New
York and London, 1986), 10. 114 Moylan, 26. 115 Robert J. Mayhew, “Historical geography 2008–2009: Mundus alter et idem,” Progress in Human
Geography 34, no. 2 (2010): 244; also Wands, xlv. 116 Joseph Hall, Quo Vadis? A Iust Censvre of Travell as it is commonly vndertaken by the Gentlemen of
our Nation (London, 1617), 1-2; cf. with David McInnis, “Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 52, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 454.
117 Hall, Quo Vadis?, 33; cf. with McInnis, 456.
41
moralistic bishop who opposes everything foreign and unfamiliar, it is of some
importance to notice that at the dawn of English expansionism, Hall’s anti-travel
position and his advocacy of vicarious voyaging effectively represents an anti-
imperialist stance. This already suggests a certain ideology-critical tendency behind the
Antipodean Menippea.
Richard Brome: The Antipodes
Hall’s vision of a topsy-turvy world of inversion was taken up and developed further
by the Caroline playwright Richard Brome in his satirical comedy The Antipodes.
Brome’s play centres on the ironically named character Peregrine, whose pathological
obsession with travel literature, especially with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, has
led to estrangement from his wife and parents. Above all, Peregrine refuses to
consummate his marriage – an aspect which gives the play a quasi-Freudian quality. His
family finally seeks help from a certain Doctor Hughball, who devises a rather peculiar
antidote: to cure Peregrine of what might best be called his Fernweh (longing for
foreign places), the Doctor bands together with the eccentric Lord Letoy and his group
of semi-professional actors to stage an elaborate imaginary voyage for Peregrine. This
psychiatric therapy in the form of drama rests, as Shakespeare scholar David McInnis
explains, on the idea that experiencing a “complete removal from home, from the
familiar” will rehabilitate Peregrine with his domestic environment and “ſooth him
into’s wits”.118 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 therapeutic voyage.119 While never actually leaving
London, the play’s characters create an Antipodal “Anti-London” for Peregrine that
adds new satirical depth to the conception of the Antipodes as an inherently subversive,
utopian space: what at first 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, women learn how to 118 McInnis, 451; cf. with 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 Richard Brome, The Antipodes: A Comedie. Acted in the yeare 1638. By the Queenes Majeſties Servants, at Salisbury Court in Fleet-ſtreet (London, 1640), 4.8; cf. with Richard Brome, The Antipodes, ed. Ann Haaker (London: Arnold, 1966), 4.10.116-124; references are to act, scene, and line.
119 Brome, Antipodes, 1640, 1.6; cf. with Brome, Antipodes, 1966, 1.6.67-70.
42
fence and men how to sew, children supervise their parents, maids abuse gentlemen, and
courtiers beg for food while clowns feast on exotic fruits. However, similar to Hall’s
rejection of travel for fear of moral degeneration, Brome’s play can likewise be viewed
as reactionist, for this 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. Brome’s play, therefore,
challenges social norms not so much as it reinforces social conventions.
But this overall rather conservative message should not detract from the fact that the
imagination of the Antipodes as a subversive anti-space reaches new heights in Brome’s
play. And what is more, again similar to Hall, his play offers a fascinating example of
how the Antipodes, as a symbol of excessively remote space, could challenge the
emerging ideologies of English expansionism and imperialism. This dimension of the
play becomes apparent when Peregrine, absorbed in the Antipodal fantasy staged for
him, declares himself the king of the Antipodes. Interestingly, this takes place after
Peregrine accidentally enters a dressing room full of stage props which he, in an almost
iconoclastic fit, 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.120
What happens here is that Peregrine, in an act of remarkable metafictional quality, takes
control over the play-in-the-play: as a first 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 these strange and uncanny
creatures, 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 wider
concern of Brome’s play with issues of aggressive conquest and foreign rule. It is from
120 Brome, Antipodes, 1640, 3.5; cf. with Brome, Antipodes, 1966, 3.6.14-31.
43
this perspective that I want to suggest that Peregrine’s Fernweh expresses a form of
proto-imperialist sentiment.
Once we widen our interpretation of Peregrine’s behaviour to a more discursive
understanding so that his eccentricity comes to signify an inhibited drive for
imperialistic expansion, the play’s conservative message gains a much deeper and
critical dimension. Importantly, the Antipodes no longer simply figure as a realm of
perversity that frightens Peregrine back into socially acceptable behaviour. Instead, they
take on an anti-ideological function. This is due to their essentially utopian nature:
although Brome’s Antipodes correspond to a real place in space and time, they remain
an imaginary place, and as such maintain the extra-territorial quality of nowhere.
Representing the inverted mirror image of London, the actual place in which the
Antipodal performance takes place, Brome’s Anti-London is and at the same time is not
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
fictionality of drama as such. Bloch continuously emphasises 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.121 In the case of Brome’s play, this wish can be located on the level of the
characters as well as on the meta-fictional level.
What should become apparent here is that The Antipodes, as an Antipodean
Menippea, exhibits the subversive quality of critical utopia insofar as its play-within-a-
play stages a satirical “utopia capovolta” that renounces the present historical situation.
What is more, by virtue of its metafictional structure, Brome’s play voices a self-
reflexive comment on contemporary travel writing. In this context it is important to bear
in mind that Jacobean travel literature discursively participated in the concurrent
formation of the ideologies of European expansionism and imperialism. Shakespeare’s
The Tempest, which Ashcroft rightly describes as an “imperial utopia”,122 can be seen as
a paradigmatic example of this. Against this background, the metafictional commentary
Brome’s play articulates provides a self-reflexive glimpse inside the workings of this
ideologically charged literary discourse.
121 Ernst Bloch, “The Stage Regarded as a Paradigmatic Institution and the Decision within it,” in The
Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 224; for the utopic quality of Brome’s Antipodes, see also Goldie, 78ff.
122 Ashcroft, “Critical Utopias”, 415.
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Crucially, the nowhereness of Brome’s Anti-London allows the players to critically
work through the proto-imperialist sentiment personified by Peregrine, and finally, to
countervail his expansionist desires. In other words, the utopic space of Anti-London
provides a controlled environment in which Peregrine can act out his proto-imperialist
fantasies. Hence Letoy, the “fantastic lord” in charge of the Antipodal fantasy, simply
responds with the calm direction “Let him injoy his fancy” when Peregrine, as the
newly clothed emperor, sets off on his imperial agenda “to reduce the manners / Of this
country to his owne”.123 Confronted with increasingly perverse examples of Antipodal
inversions, Peregrine’s psychic tension, his expansionary longing for foreign places, is
progressively released, thus “ſooth[ing] him into’s wits”. On a basic level of
interpretation this means that Peregrine is restored as a respectable member of society,
yet in the historical context of emerging English imperialism, this should be understood
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 colonise, Peregrine is frustrated out of his
expansionary mindset and finally returns rehabilitated to his ecumenical, familiar (and
familial) environment. Thus Peregrine’s expansionary drive 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 utopic Antipodes subvert imperial ideology, they
ultimately fold back into a conservative position.
As a last remark, it is worth noting that Brome also develops further the notion of
Antipodal monstrosity. For one thing, the Antipodes in his play feature again as an
uncanny realm that duplicates but also distorts the ecumene, and thus turns the familiar
and homely into the strange. In comparison to Hall, Brome actually creates a more
intense feeling of Unheimlichkeit, because while Hall’s Antipodes simply exaggerate
and magnify European clichés for satirical effect, in Brome’s play the anti-ecumene
literally coincides with the ecumene: it is Peregrine’s own home and family which he is
unable to recognise during the Antipodal fantasy staged for him. Notably, in Brome’s
play monstrosity is not so much expressed through physiognomy but through behaviour,
as a form of behavioural or moral monstrousness. Particularly in this last aspect, Brome
overcomes medieval notions of monstrosity and translates them into a more modern
understanding.
123 Brome, Antipodes, 3.5.
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Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
The Antipodean Menippea, with its satirical strategies of Antipodal inversion and
estrangement, finds probably its most well-known and matured formulation in Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Even though this is not the major accomplishment
with which Swift’s timeless classic is associated today, Gulliver’s Travels certainly set
new standards for imagining the Antipodes as a subversive no-space. It is a fact often
overlooked by modern readers that at several points in the novel, Gulliver enters what
today represent Australian territorial waters, and, “coasting New Holland” multiple
times, is even stranded on the continent at one stage.124 The Australian geography of the
book still goes further, because according to Gulliver’s nautical specifications, the sister
islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu are located somewhere in the Great Australian Bight,
and Houyhnhnm Land lies just off the southern tip of Western Australia. Since Lilliput
and Houyhnhnm Land form the opening and closing adventure of Gulliver’s Travels,
Swift’s novel is bookended by Antipodal episodes.
Gulliver’s Travels clearly utilises the Antipodes as a spatial relay for social criticism.
Without exception, all the fictional societies Gulliver encounters serve a satirical
purpose in one way or another. Starting with Gulliver’s adventures on Lilliput in Book
I, Swift’s social critique sets off as a parody with bitingly personal inflection. As
evidenced by the existence of such supplements as Edmund Curll’s A Key, Being
Observations and Explanatory Notes, upon the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver, Swift’s
contemporary readership often read his novel as a roman à clef, meticulously
deciphering the historical personalities ridiculed in their Lilliputian counterparts. Most
notoriously, the at the time Lord of the Treasury and later first British Prime Minister
Sir Robert Walpole, whom Swift disliked politically as well as personally, finds his
Antipodal Doppelgänger in Flimnap, the jealous Treasurer of Lilliput who intrigues
against Gulliver after (obviously absurd) rumours about him having an affair with his
wife. In Lilliput, we again find the Antipodes functioning as a distorting mirror,
producing a more or less thinly veiled duplication of the ecumene for the purpose of
satire.
124 For discussions of Gulliver’s Travels in relation to its Austral setting, see Ross Gibson, The
Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia Sydney: Angus, 1984), 14ff; also Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, 39ff.
46
What starts as the novel’s Lilliputian lampoonery of contemporary figures of British
politics quickly gains a much broader dimension. Gulliver’s adventure on 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.125 In other words, 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 self-
understanding of himself and his European homeland. A critical moment in this process
is Gulliver’s interview with the king of Brobdingnag, in which the king, after hearing
Gulliver’s “Panegyrick” of the “Government of England”, finally decides that “I cannot
but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the moſt pernicious Race of little odious
Vermin that Nature ever ſuffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”126 As the
Brobdingnagian king’s condemnation of Gulliver’s countrymen undermines the
foundation of Gulliver’s national and personal self-conception, it already indicates the
universal scope of Swift’s social critique, pointing towards the novel’s final position of
cultural and moral relativism.
Importantly, as Swift scholar Clement Hawes claims, the novel’s “Manipulation of
scale” should be understood as “a hyperbolic figuration of British colonial power”.127
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 discourse” that explicitly subverts the tropes and topoi on which the ideology
of imperialism rests.128 Accordingly, the novel’s reversal in terms of physical scale
125 Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: In four parts. By Lemuel
Gulliver… (Dublin, 1726), 67. 126 Swift, 107; 113. 127 Clement Hawes, “Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse,” Cultural
Critique 18 (Spring 1991): 197. 128 Hawes, 198. I would like to acknowledge 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 “unofficial agent of imperialism”; see McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580-1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 177; cf. with Joseph, 29. However, while I agree with McLeod’s evaluation of Robinson Crusoe in these terms, I find it implausible as a characterisation of Swift’s novel, particularly since McLeod fails to provide convincing textual evidence. Swift scholar Claude Rawson’s comprehensive study God, Gulliver, and
47
should be understood as an inversion of the power relations that characterise
colonialism, meaning that the almighty European giant that Gulliver represents in
Lilliput is forced into the “perspective of the dominated” in Brobdingnag.129 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.130
A similarly radical example of Swift’s critique of the clichés of imperialism can be
found in Gulliver’s discussion of the Brobdignagian skin. Rather than interpreting this
episode as a misogynist spite or an instance of Swift’s pathological misanthropism, it
should, as Hawes rightly points out, be understood as a “demystification of white skin”,
and subsequently as a critique of the “dermatological fetishism” that forms a thematic
mainstay of imperial ideology.131 It is, again, by way of Antipodal inversion, and more
specifically from the utopic 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 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 firſt a ſhocking ſight.”132 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 reflect 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
Genocide: Barbarism 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 chiefly 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, in fact, alter the discursive significance of Swift’s novel. I consequently maintain, in line with Hawes’ by now classic argument, that Gulliver’s Travels articulates a critique of imperialism and colonialism.
129 Hawes, 198. 130 Swift, 77; cf. with Hawes, 198. 131 Hawes, 200. 132 Swift, 72-3.
48
magnifying Glaſs, where we find by Experiment that the ſmootheſt and whiteſt Skins
look rough and coarſe, and ill coloured.”133 Caught in a complex house of mirrors,
Gulliver finds his imperial Self refracted through the utopic prisms of Antipodality.
The experiences of his travels lead Gulliver to challenge and ultimately abandon the
commonplaces of 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 categorically rejects on ethical grounds Gulliver’s proposal to make gunpowder.
Gulliver thus witnesses how another commonplace integral to the ideology of
imperialism, the notion of European technological and moral superiority, is dispelled.
This progressive dissolution of Gulliver’s imperial ego causes him to completely
neglect his “duty as a Subject of England”, that is, his mission as an agent of British
imperialism to claim the countries he 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 firſt coming over; becauſe, whatever Lands are
diſcovered by a Subject, belong to the Crown”.134 In the end, the constant shifts,
reversals of perspective and the disruptive experience of Antipodal Otherness turn
Gulliver into a dysfunctional agent of colonialism.
Throughout the course of the novel, it is the extra-territorial perspective of the
utopian places Gulliver visits that estranges him from what he is familiar with,
removing him further and further from his homeland and culture. In its last episode
(Gulliver’s sojourn in Houyhnhnm Land), this process of utopian defamiliarisation is
taken to its extreme conclusion: 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 identifies, delivers the fatal blow to
his self-image so that Gulliver finds himself estranged from his own species. The
Antipodal utopia of Houyhnhnm Land produces an alienation so complete that Gulliver
can no longer successfully return to his homeland. Fearing he might “degenerate into
the Vices and Corruptions of my own Species”, Gulliver is horrified by the idea “to live
in the Society and under the Government of Yahoos”, and would prefer reclusion to
133 Swift, 72. 134 Swift, 270.
49
returning to Europe.135 In an interesting reversal to Brome’s Antipodes, Gulliver is no
longer able to identify himself with his familial and social role upon his inevitable
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
filled me only with Hatred, Diſgaſt and Contempt, and the more by reflecting 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.”136 His travels beyond the ecumene, it seems, have
overshot the mark, leaving him with anti-imperial self-contempt. At one point he even
suggests something close to a reversed Civilising Mission, hoping the Houyhnhnms
would colonise Europe: “inſtead of Propoſals for conquering that magnanimous Nation,
I rather wiſh they were in a Capacity or Diſpoſition to ſend a ſufficient Number of their
Inhabitants for civilizing Europe, by teaching us the firſt Principles of Honour, Juſtice,
Truth, Temperance, Publick Spirit, Fortitude, Chaſtity, Friendſhip, Benevolence, and
Fidelity.”137 For Gulliver, the ecumene has become the anti-ecumene, and vice versa.
All of this finally culminates in what Hawes has called Gulliver’s “justly famous
denunciation of the colonial process”:138
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 known 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 firſt Opportanity, 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.139
135 Swift, 260. 136 Swift, 267. 137 Swift, 271. 138 Hawes, 207. 139 Swift, 271. 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,
50
Let me conclude with a brief remark on Swift’s use of the horse metaphor as an
innovative application of Antipodality. It represents an ingenious modification of
Plato’s chariot allegory, in which man, representing reason or intellect, controls the
“horse of passion”. Swift, in another example of the Antipodal reversal of the master-
and-slave relation, turns this allegory on its head, and has, figuratively speaking, the
horse ride the man. As such, Swift translates the medieval principle of Antipodal
monstrosity from physiognomy into metaphor, and, in line with Brome, reinforces its
moral dimension.
***
This chapter has demonstrated that the understanding of Antipodal space as
somehow reflecting Europe, but also as unreachable, fictional, and inhabited by
monsters, ultimately meant that the Antipodes represented a utopic space that
persistently subverted ideological closure. Foremost, their satirical duplication of the
ecumene criticised and renounced the emerging reality of European overseas expansion.
What is more, because of this distorting reflection of the ecumene the Antipodes
challenged European identity: their uncanny distortion of Europe into an unsettlingly
familiar strangeness meant that the Antipodes effected an alienation of the European
Self from itself. McLean is therefore right when he points out that “To be Antipodean is
to be out of place in one’s place”.140 As such, the Antipodes represented, at least to a
certain extent, an anti-ideological space.
However, what our analysis has indicated is that while the utopic imagination of the
Antipodes as a carnivalesque space of subversion challenged in particular the early-
modern ideology of imperialism, it largely failed to convert this critique into a concrete-
utopian impulse because of its lack of a positive vision. As Andrew Milner reminds us,
“the whole point of utopia or dystopia is to acquire some positive or negative leverage
on the present”141 – yet when the present is characterised by social change, then an
exclusively negative utopia is in danger of turning into a form of conservatism that
advocates the preservation of the vanishing status quo. This was witnessed in Hall’s
Mundus Alter et Idem and Brome’s The Antipodes, where the critique of imperial
ideology tapers off into an uneasy endorsement of conservative thinking, resisting the
seems to me rather obvious.
140 McLean, 94. 141 Milner, Locating Science Fiction, 98.
51
changes of the early-modern period. This confronts us with the paradox that while these
utopian satires oppose the emerging realities of expansionism and imperialism, they
nonetheless are reactionary, not progressive or emancipatory, because instead of
outlining a social alternative, they dimly argue in favour of preserving the vanishing
status quo. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels largely evades this relapse into conservatism, but
likewise fails to develop a positive vision: the superegotic utopia of Houyhnhnm Land
cannot properly function as such, leaving Gulliver paralysed in self-contempt. In
conclusion, Australia’s Antipodal prefiguration in the European imagination set up a
strong anti-ideological, and specifically anti-imperial, foundation, but this foundation is
essentially hollow because it lacks a forward-looking, concrete-utopian vision, and for
this reason may stagnate in conservatism.
52
CHAPTER 2 – The Quirósque Vision of a Eutopic Paradise
Mary Ann Parker, the first woman to write a travel report on Australia, gave us the
following description 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 flower ſhrubs, natives of this country, that grow apparently from rock itſelf. The gentle aſcents, the winding valleys, and the abundance of flowering ſhrubs, render the face of the country very delightful. The ſhrub which moſt attracted my attention was one which bears a white flower, very much reſembling our Engliſh Hawthorn; the ſmell of it is both ſweet and fragrant, and perfumes the air around to a conſiderable diſtance.142
Parker’s description is remarkable in several respects. While other early-colonial writers
paint the first Australian settlement in much bleaker colours, and depict Australia as a
desolate and forbidding place, Parker evokes, by contrast, the image of a flower garden.
Her continuous repetition of the word “shrub” is particularly interesting, for shrubs
commonly refer to small trees or woody plants like brushwood, that is, wood that has
been cut or otherwise reduced in size. Further, in comparison to James Edward Smith
whose more or less positive botanical description was set out at the beginning of the
previous chapter, it is noteworthy that Parker emphasises how much Australian plants
remind her of flowers at home and how familiar she feels with them. In this Parker
apparently refuses to construct Australia along the binary of ecumene / anti-ecumene,
and resists the common trope of Antipodal strangeness. Instead, on closer inspection it
becomes apparent that Parker’s description rests upon a different representational
device: the trope of bounty. As such, her picture of the “beauties” of New South Wales
hinges on notions of spontaneous and “natural” wealth that, rather than being viewed as
the product of indigenous land management, is understood as a present of God
(“Providence”). Parker, as a result, calls forth the image of a divinely created garden.
Parker’s travel report points us in the direction of another long-established tradition
in European thought, which, parallel but also somewhat in opposition to the Antipodal
conception of Australia as utopic anti-space, imagines the other end of the world as a
pronouncedly eutopic space. In the course of this alternative tradition, numerous
142 Mary Ann Parker, A Voyage Round the World, in the Gorgon Man of War (1796; repr., Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2010), 87.
53
dreamlands of different epochs have been located in the region that is now Australia.
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”.143 Likewise, legend has
it that a Satyr called Silenus told King Midas that beyond Europe, Asia and Africa, there
lies a land far south of the great ocean, where the people suffer no hardship or want, for
the earth provides them with much more than they need.144 Other mythological eutopias
such as the Blessed Isles and Hesiod’s Golden Age have also been repeatedly associated
with this region. Sargent also mentions the “Insulae Solomonis,” “Nova Guinea,” and
“Faerie Land”.145 Perhaps the most prominent examples is the Garden of Eden, which,
crowning Mount Purgatory, is located in Antipodal space in Dante’s La Divina
Commedia. While Dante deliberately posited Eden in accordance with Christian
cosmology as the antipode of Jerusalem,146 the placement of other garden eutopias in
Antipodal space was at times rather accidental. Amerigo Vespucci, for instance, the
Italian name-giver of America, confusingly located Brazil, which he describes as a
veritable tropical paradise, in the Antipodes:
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’infinite alberi verdi, e molti grandi, e mai non perdono foglia, e tutti anno odori soavissimi, e aromatici, e producono infinite frutte, e molti di esse buone al gusto e salutifere al Corpo e campi producono molta erba, e fiori, e radici molto soavi, e buone, che qualche volta mi maravigliavano de’soavi odore dell’erbe, e dei fiori, e del sapore d’esse frutte, e radici, tanto che infra me pensavo, esser presso al Paradiso terrestre.147
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 beneficial to well being, and the fields produce so many herbs and flowers and roots, all delicious and excellent, that at times I wondered at the delicious fragrances of these herbs and flowers, the tastes of these fruits and roots, thinking to myself, I must be close to the earthly Paradise.
143 Hom. Od. 4.563-9. 144 Credited to the Greek historian Theopompus, this is related in Ael. VH 3.18; cf. with G. A. Woods,
The Discovery of Australia (London: Macmillian, 1922), 1; also McLean, 8-9. 145 See Lyman Tower Sargent, “Australian Utopian Literature: An Annotated, Chronological
Bibliography 1667-1999,” rev. ed. of id., “Australian Utopian Literature: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography 1667-1999,” Utopian Studies 10, no. 2 (1999): 138-73.
146 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 128-9. 147 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), 170-1; my translation. See also Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 193.
54
Vespucci’s placement of Brazil in the Antipodes was not completely unwarranted, for in
the sixteenth century the Antipodes were still believed to cover most of the southern
hemisphere. There are numerous early-modern maps that document similar slippages
and transfers of toponyms from such already discovered “New Worlds” as the Americas
to the Antipodal continent of Terra Australis.148 In contrast with the impenetrable
cartographical blank that represented the Antipodes in classical time, their early-modern
avatar Terra Australis allowed for the flexible and creative inscription of place names
and geographical information. So it is that “psittacorum regio” (“land of parrots”), a
name Vespucci gave to a region in Brazil, found its way onto one of Terra Australis
eastern promontories.149 Similarly, Marco Polo’s legendary kingdoms of Beach, Lucach
and Maleatur were placed on the northern tip of what would now correspond to
Australia. This translocation of paradisal gardens and mythical lands of natural wealth
to Antipodal space culminated in a “mosaic image of Terra Australis”.150
Returning to Vespucci and Parker, it is noteworthy that both foreground the sweet
smells and luscious appearance of the vegetation in their Antipodal eutopias and thus
evoke the image of a paradisal garden. While Vespucci makes this association explicit
in his comparison of Brazil to the “Paradiso terrestre”, Parker leaves it largely implicit
in her reference to the “hand of Providence”. Etymology provides significant insights
into the mythological nexus of 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.151 It is, therefore, the notion of a pleasure garden that
underpins the interrelated dreams of Eden and Paradise. This mythological nexus has, of
course, a profound symbolic significance in European culture. According to Christian
belief, Eden represents the “lost abode of man”, the birthplace and original homeland
from which humankind has been banished, but to which it may eventually return.
Importantly, this underlying narrative of Paradise-Lost-and-Regained collapses the
148 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 209. 149 Fascinatingly, an erotic utopia has been dedicated to Vespucci’s “land of parrots”, titled: Pſittacorum
Regio. The Land of Parrots: Or, the She-lands. With A Deſcription of other ſtrange adjacent Countries, in the Dominions of Prince Del’ Amour, not hitherto found in any Geographical Map (1669). As Fausett remarks, this work ultimately represents an extended, but largely plagiarised version of Healey’s English translation of Mundus Alter et Idem; see Fausett, Writing the New World, 51.
150 Eisler, 37. 151 Dennis T. Olson, “Eden, The Garden of,” in The Oxford Guide to People and Places of the Bible, eds.
Bruce M. Metzger et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 62.
55
binary of ecumene and anti-ecumene that characterises the utopic tradition of the
Antipodes as anti-space, and in its stead offers a circular trajectory of homecoming that
already hints at a latent predisposition to imperial expansionism. Another crucial
difference is that the eutopic conception of the Antipodes clearly contains the positive
visionary content we found wanting in the utopic tradition. The vision of an Edenic
garden fits well into Sargent’s category of “body utopias”, which he also describes as
“utopias of sensual gratification”.152
This chapter traces the emergence of the eutopic vision of Australia as a pleasure
garden. As a first step, it explores the origins of this tradition in captain Pedro
Fernández de Quirós’ fantastical vision of Austrialia (sic) del Espíritu Santo, and
discusses how Quirós’ vision of a bountiful tropical garden paradise was inscribed into
the psyche of the South Pacific’s European explorers. Special attention is paid to the
trope of bounty, an ideologeme that unhinges the connection between agricultural
wealth and its creation by native people, and thus replaces indigenous labour with
notions of natural abundance. The chapter then inquires into the influence of the
Quirósque vision on the Cook voyages, particularly in relation to their perception of
Tahiti and Australia. Finally, it is demonstrated how in the early-colonial period, the
Quirósque vision of a pleasure garden reverberates in the refraction of Aboriginal
hunting-grounds through the lens of the trope of bounty into “gentleman’s parks”.
Quirós’ Vision of Austrialia Del Espíritu Santo
“Quiros gilded its image in men’s thoughts” (Mudie, “This is Australia”, 71)
In December 1605 the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós,
commanding three Spanish ships, set sail from the Peruvian port of Callao and headed
for the South Pacific. 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’ 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 as a continental coastline, and convinced
152 Sargent, “Three Faces”, 4.
56
himself that he had found his final destination, the great Southland of Terra Australis.153
In a ceremonial procession of remarkable theatrical intensity, Quirós took possession of
the island on the 14 of 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 then 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 the Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.154 With great visionary zeal Quirós
appointed numerous magistrates for the municipal administration of his future city,
amongst others a justice of peace and a registrar of mines.155 The climax of the
ceremony was when Quirós initiated the Order of the Holy Ghost, of which he made
every single member of his expedition, including native hostages, a knight.156 Only a
few weeks later, Quirós’ expedition suddenly left the archipelago for as yet unknown
reasons. We can only speculate, but indications about the crew’s discontent with their
captain suggest they may have opposed his command. At the same time the relations
with the island’s indigenous people became increasingly hostile, and may have forced
the Spaniards to recede. Quirós finally returned to Spain in 1607, and spend the rest of
his life writing petitions to the Spanish crown, pleading unsuccessfully for another
expedition to his Austrialia del Espíritu Santo.
Historical scholarship has often referred to Quirós’ frenzied religiosity to explain his
actions and behaviour on Vanuatu. The historian G. A. Woods, for example, called the
Portuguese captain the “Don Quixote of the South Sea”, and commented that it was well
Quirós “died with the divine madness still ablaze”.157 Similarly, the geographer Oskar
Spate described Quirós as a “man in the grip of religious mania”.158 Re-evaluating these
positions, recent scholarship has taken a more sympathetic approach by drawing on
baroque and early-modern frameworks to interpret the “deranged theatrics” Quirós had
153 Miriam Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita: The Spanish Quest for the mysterious Great South Land
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006), 158. 154 Estensen, 168. 155 Cf. with Margaret Jolly, “The Sediment of Voyages: Re-membering Quirós, Bougainville and Cook
in Vanuatu,” in Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, eds. Margaret Jolly et al. (Canberra: ANU eP, 2009), 67; Woods, 176; Estensen, 166.
156 Estensen, 66. 157 Wood, 203. 158 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 Hierusalem in 1606,” The Journal of Pacific History 40, no. 2 (2005): 133-4.
57
staged on Vanuatu.159 In particular the Christian utopianism of the medieval mystic
Joachim of Fiore offers a promising model to understand Quirós’ actions. Joachim
prophesied that the final stage of history, the Age of the Holy Spirit, would see new
religious orders transforming the world and ushering in paradise on earth. Scholars have
already suggested a strong connection between the utopianism of Joachim of Fiore and
Quirós, especially since Quirós’ Portuguese hometown of Évora was a centre of
Joachimite thought.160 Joachimite utopianism, with its leitmotif of the Holy Spirit, runs
through all the events on Vanuatu: it manifests itself especially in Quirós’ naming
practices, most obviously in the name Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, which associates
Terra Australis with the Holy Spirit, and in Quirós’ Order of the Holy Ghost, which
imitates Joachim’s visionary ordo novus.161 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 indicates Joachimite
influence.
Reviewing the events on Vanuatu in the light of Joachimite utopianism finally allows
us to conclude the following: irrespective of his religious fervour, Quirós’ behaviour on
Vanuatu was far from unsystematic. Instead, evidence points more towards a deliberate
attempt on his part to establish a Christian utopia on what he thought was Terra
Australis. As such, one should not dismiss Quirós’ vision of Austrialia del Espíritu
Santo as simply quixotic, but acknowledge his unsuccessful effort to establish an
intentional community that, as the Order of the Holy Ghost suggests, appears driven by
such progressive, concrete-utopian impulses as egalitarianism. In fact, Quirós exhibits
the kind of utopian mentality Mannheim would classify as “chiliastic”, which
Mannheim describes as an attitude characterised by “tense expectation”, and driven by
“utopian dreams which are laden with the corporeal content of the world”.162
Importantly, the time-sense of this utopian mindset is entirely focused on the “here and
now on the spatial and temporal stage”.163 Because of this imagination of a temporally
and spatially accessible good-place, Quirós’ chiliasm differs significantly from the
Antipodean Menippea with its imagination of extra-territoriality.
159 See esp. Luque and Mondragón, and Jolly. 160 Luque and Mondragón, 139-40; also Jolly, 68-9; 146-7; and Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 21. 161 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 21. 162 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 195; 197. 163 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 193.
58
After his unfortunate return to Spain, Quirós began to make strategic alterations to
his vision of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo that were to prove highly influential.
Although he was being denounced publicly by his former crew members and virtually
reduced to poverty, Quirós began to petition determinedly for another expedition to the
South Seas. The fact that he sold his clothes and bedding to raise the money necessary
for printing his petition pamphlets may illustrate the degree of his desperate
determination to return to Vanuatu.164 Given his pressing financial situation, it is
perhaps unsurprising that Quirós’ descriptions of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo became
characterised by an increasing tendency to fantastical exaggeration. Notably, Quirós
became fixated on the image of a land of plenty. As Margaret Jolly argues, the
hyperbolic and euphemistic tone which began to characterise Quirós’ descriptions of
Austrialia del Espíritu Santo should be interpreted as a rhetorical strategy that, brushing
over adverse reports from his critics, was supposed to ensure financial support from the
Spanish crown.165 So it is that his travel narrative, for which he commissioned the
young poet Luis Belmonte Bermúdez,166 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 adopted to
raise plants and all that Europe and the Indies produce, could not be found”.167
This vision of a healthy, fertile land unfolded most prominently in Quirós’ so-called
Eighth Memorial. In a language and style reminiscent of Vespucci’s panegyric on
Brazil, Quirós claims in this pamphlet that the country he had discovered is a true
“terreſtriall Paradiſe”.168 It is in the Eighth Memorial, one could argue, that Quirós
reduces the complexities of his original Jochamite utopia to the simpler vision of a land
of plenty. In the main, this means that he moves away from his “city utopia” of New
Jerusalem to what Sargent would call a “body utopia” or “utopia of sensual
gratification”, that is, to a simpler form of social dreaming.169 Intended as another
164 Clements Markham, The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, 1595-1606, vol. 1 (London:
Hakluyt, 1904), xxx. 165 Jolly, 68-9. 166 Estensen, 123-4. 167 Markham, 1:271. 168 Ferdinand de Quir, Terra Australis Incognita, or A new Southerne Discouerie, Containing a fifth part
of the World, trans. W. B. (London, 1617), 4. The Spanish original reads: “vn Paryſo terrenal”; see Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, Señor: el capitan Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, con este son ocho los memoriales que a V.M. … (Madrid 1609), par. 1.
169 Sargent, “Three Faces”, 10.
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petition to the Spanish Crown, but extensively translated and circulated all over Europe
in the seventeenth century, the Eighth Memorial proclaims that Austrialia del Espíritu
Santo is “the fifth 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 vnto your Maieſtie”.170 In fact, it is “as
great as all Europe & Aſia the leſſe”.171 Quirós then proceeds to sketch the picture of a
veritable Land of Cockaigne. In what reads like a catalogue of colonial desiderata,
Quirós acquisitively lists an abundance of spices such as nutmeg, ginger, pepper,
cinnamon, cloves and anise seed, different “Garden-fruits” such as melons, pears and
oranges, but also wine, vinegar, honey, sugar cane and other natural riches such as
pearl, ebony and silver, including, finally, the prospect of gold – all of which are only
waiting to be harvested.172 Raving about the “Wholeſomeneſs and Pureneſs” of the
country, its melodious birds and sweet-smelling flowers, Quirós paints with bold strokes
the picture of an idyllic, paradisal garden 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”.173 Binding together previous conceptions of a pleasure garden in his vision of
Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, Quirós thus brings the eutopic tradition to a focus in his
body utopia of a tropical paradise. As will be shown below, this Quirósque vision of a
commercially highly appealing pleasure garden would come to exert a major influence
over European, and especially British, preconceptions of both the South Pacific and the
Australian continent. For this reason the historian William Eisler credits Quirós with the
“invention of the myth of a South Pacific / Australian paradise”.174
The key feature of the Quirósque vision is the conception of Terra Australis as a
form of paradise, a pleasure garden in which leisure dominates over work, and natural
170 Quir, 4; 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 Quiros, Señor, par. 1.
171 Quir, 4; the original reads: “La grandeza de las tierras nueuamente deſcubiertas […] es tanta como la de toda Europa, Aſia menor”, see Quiros, Señor, par. 1.
172 Quir, 7-11; cf. with Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 22. 173 Quir, 14-5; the original reads: “La comodidad y guſtoſa vida ſera tanta quanta ſe vee en vna tan
cultiuada, alegre, y freſca tierra”, see Quiros, Señor, 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’ original “cultivada” with “manurable”.
174 Eisler, 46.
60
riches are conveniently at hand. This makes it essentially a eutopic space: a good-place
that is accessible and immediately available. But its spatio-temporal organisation is
more complex than that, for even though the Quirósque body utopia is situated in the
immediate here and now, the fantasy of an Edenic place of abundance and leisure that
forms its mythic kernel is retrospective in its temporal orientation. To borrow
vocabulary from the anthropologist James Clifford, the construction of Terra Australis
through the nexus Eden / Paradise produces “structures of retrospection”: the paradisal
garden of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo represents an “island out of time”, which due to
its “prelapsarian appeal” signifies a lost place of innocent bliss.175
At the core of this vision lies a specific ideologeme: the trope of bounty. In essence,
this ideologeme unhinges the connection between a country’s agricultural wealth and its
creation and management by native people.176 As cultural critic Beth Tobin explains, it
does so by replacing any forms 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 effort or intervention, effects the erasure of indigenous
peoples’ agronomic practices and their usually highly sophisticated management of the
local environment.177 Evoking the fantasy of a benevolent, all-supplying nature, the
trope of bounty relegates indigenous producers to the position of passive by-standers
and consumers – or put more bluntly: to naïve children living off mother nature’s gifts.
As such, the trope exhibits an ideological function in the classic Marxian sense of
obfuscating actual relations of production (Marx: Produktionsverhältnisse), or in
Ricœur’s terminology, of distorting social reality.178 In Quirós’ case, this ideologeme
evidently governs his description of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo: it is quite evident to
the attentive reader that while Quirós was conducting his colonial stocktaking of
Vanuatu, his landing party was raiding the villages and gardens of the local people.179
However, this is not to say that Quirós’ vision displays what Mannheim would label a
“particular ideology” (“partikulare Ideologie”), which conforms basically to the
175 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture, eds. James Clifford et al. (Berkley:
U of California P, 1986), 110-12. 176 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820
(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2005), 36. 177 Tobin, 33-36; 53. 178 Tobin, 42. 179 Jolly, 67; I should point out, however, that Quirós seemed to be at least partially aware of gardening
on Vanuatu. Nonetheless, this did not delimit his vision of a naturally bountiful paradise.
61
“commonsense notion of the lie”;180 rather, it seems more useful to think of the
ideological operation here in Jamesonian terms as a “compensatory structure”: the trope
of bounty sublimates the social tension produced by the European invaders’
overburdening of the island’s economy so that the ensuing vision of an unlimited body
utopia gives the “optical illusion of social harmony”.181 Such eutopic fantasising is also
what Bloch has in mind when he speaks of “Pure wishful means, pure via regia, to reach
by the shortest route (in the fairytale) what nature itself, outside of the fairytale, denies
man”.182 Importantly, Quirós’ ideological repression of indigenous labour in his fantasy
of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo foreshadows in important ways later conceptions of
Australia on the ground of the legal fiction of terra nullius. What began as a positive
vision of Joachimite Chiliasm thus developed a significant ideological underbelly.
The spatio-temporal friction of the Quirósque body utopia caused by its backward-
looking orientation finds another refiguration in the paradoxical ambivalences of soft
primitivism: Quirós lives out fantasies of European superiority, yet he simultaneously
entertains contradictory notions of the noble savage. While at times this verges on pre-
Rousseauvian primitivism, the trope of bounty persistently undermines native
agency.183 Instances, however, of native opposition are encapsulated in what Brownen
Douglas construes as “countersigns” in which soft primitivism and the noble savage are
transformed into their hard and ignoble counterparts. As a concluding remark, it should
be noted that this interplay between utopian vision and ideological revision points
towards the paradoxical oscillation of representations of Australia along two axes: first,
the fluctuation between the poles of naturalness and artificiality, between body and city
utopia, and second, between the garden as a sign of native ownership and as an emblem
of civilising forces.
180 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 49. 181 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 141. 182 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:357. 183 Bronwen Douglas, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511-1850 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillian, 2014), 21.
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The Discourse of Tropicalism
It is a fascinating phenomenon that Quirós’ vision of a tropical paradise, undeterred
by Dutch reports to the contrary, came to define the European exploration of Australia.
Quirós clearly never set foot on the Australian continent, while the Dutch actually
visited Australia’s north-west coast and the southern tip of Tasmania, of which they
gave substantial and more credible accounts. Nevertheless, their condemnatory reports
of a worthless wasteland were persistently overwritten by Quirós’ fantasy of a bountiful
paradise. The persistence and mutability with which the Quirósque vision of Austrialia
del Espíritu Santo spread throughout Europe can be gathered from eighteenth-century
maps. French cartographers in particular conflated Quirós’ tropical paradise with the
growing body of information on the Australian continent provided by the Dutch, thus
producing increasingly bold representations of New Holland (at the time the
cartographical avatar of the Antipodes).184 Robert de Vaugondy, for instance, blended
the detailed maps of Dutch explorers with the semi-fictional cartography of Quirós’
Austrialia del Espíritu Santo in his “Carte réduite de l’Australasie”. The result is a map
of New Holland that is astonishingly precise in its rendition of the Australian west
coast, but on whose east coast we find inscribed Quirós’ “Terre du St Espirit” with its
capital city “Jerusalem la neuwe”. Notwithstanding the fact that Dutch testimonies
repeatedly belied Quirós’ vision of a tropical paradise, his dream survived and thrived
in the European imagination. As Eisler states: “La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, with its
perfect tropical climate, its abundant and splendid fruits, its docile, well-proportioned
inhabitants, would form the northeast boundary of Terra Australis in the imaginative,
optimistic geography of the age”.185 The Le Maire-Schouten expedition provides
another intriguing example of this phenomenon, for this Dutch exploration voyage
began its 1616 search for Terra Australis with a public recital of Quirós’ Eighth
Memorial – throwing, figuratively speaking, the negative reports of their countrymen
overboard.186 Unfavourable accounts of New Holland simply could not dampen the
chiliastic enthusiasm aroused by Quirós’ tropical paradise.
184 Williams, 68, 265. 185 Eisler, 142. 186 Williams, 59; for an extended discussion on Quirós’ influence on le Maire, see Ernst van den
Boogaart, “The Mythical Symmetry in God’s Creation: The Dutch and the Southern Continent 1569-1756,” in Terra Australis: The Furthest Shore, eds. William Eisler et al. (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1988), 43-50; also Douglas, 73.
63
The process through which the Quirósque vision was consistently re-inscribed into
the psyche of European explorers found its culmination in a series of chiefly British
travel anthologies in the mid-eighteenth century. In much the same way as classical
writers had employed ancient theories about climatic zones to speculate about the
Antipodes, writers in Augustan England based their hypotheses about the Great
Southland on contemporary geographical findings. Take for example the following
inscription which the English map engraver Emanuel Bowen added to the reprint of a
French chart:
It is impossible to conceive a country that promises fairer from its Scituation than this of Terra Australis; no longer incognita, as this Map demonstrates, but the Southern Continent Discovered, It lies Precisely in the richest Climates of the World. If the Islands of Sumatra, Java & Borneo, abound in Precious Stones and other valuable Commodities; and the Moluccas in Spices; New Guinea and the Regions behind it must by a parity of Reason be as plentifully endowed by Nature. If the island of Madagascar is so Noble and plentiful a Country as all the Authors speak it, and Gold, Ivory, and other Commodities are common in the Southern part of Africa, from Melinda down to the Cape of Good Hope, and so up again to C. Gonzalés; here in the same Latitudes in Carpentaria, New Holland and New Zealand; If Peru overflows with Silver, if all the Mountains of Chili are filled with Gold, and this precious Metal, & stones much more precious are ye product of Brazil, this Continent enjoys the benefit of the same poſition and therefore whoever perfectly discovers & settles it will become infalliably professed of Territories as Rich, as fruitful, & as capable of Improvement, as any that have hitherto been found out, either in the East Indies or the West.187
Parallelising the unknown Southland with already colonised regions that were known
for their commercial value, Bowen calls here upon contemporary geography in order to
substantiate the vision of a bountiful paradise Quirós had laid out in his Eighth
Memorial. The passage, too, confirms the prevalence of the trope of bounty: Bowen
describes these commodities as endowments of “Nature”, thus dismissing in advance
the possibility of indigenous productions of wealth. Similarly, John Callander’s travel
anthology Terra Australis Cognita, an essentially pirated version of Charles de Brosses’
Histoire de Navigations aux Terres Australes, relies on climatic analogies:
As to the product and commodities of this country in general, there is the
187 Qtd. in National Library of Australia, Australia in Maps: Great Maps in Australia’s History from the
National Library’s Collection (Canberra: NLA, 2008), 31; cf. with W. T. James, “Nostalgia for Paradise: Terra Australis in the Seventeenth Century,” in Australia and the European Imagination, ed. Ian Donaldson (Canberra: ANU P, 1982), 82-3; also Williams, 251-2.
64
greateſt reaſon to believe that they are extremely rich and valuable; becauſe the richeſt and fineſt countries in the known world lie all of them within the ſame latitude. Thus the land diſcovered by QUIROS makes a part of this great iſland, and forms the oppoſite coaſt to that of Carpentaria. This country the discoverer called La Auſtralia [sic!] del Eſpiritu Santo, in the latitude of 15° 40´ South; and, as he reports, it abounds with gold, ſilver, pearl, nutmegs, mace, ginger, and ſugar-canes of an extraordinary ſize.188
Finally, the “last major advocate of the Great South Land” was the Scottish geographer
Alexander Dalrymple, whose hydrographic reasoning provided a pseudo-scientific basis
for Quirós’ claim that the Southern continent would be as big as “all Europe and Aſia
the Leſs”, and eventually provided significant impetus for the Cook voyages.189
It is important to note that the travel anthologies of Campbell, Callander, Dalrymple
and others did not simply perpetuate Quirós’ vision of a bountiful pleasure garden.
Because they were set up as histories of the exploration of the South Pacific, these
anthologies conferred a certain credibility to the Quirósque vision of Austrialia del
Espíritu Santo, and established Quirós as a source whose authority invalidated the
negative reports of Dutch explorers. Moreover, their deployment of latitudinal analogies
and similar scientific-sounding methods lent an air of rationality and objectivity to what
were still largely unfounded speculations about the Antipodal continent – speculations
in which preconceived ideas about fabled lands of natural wealth and paradisal pleasure
gardens reverberated. Propelled by an almost fetish-like obsession with tropical regions
and dressed in the trappings of scientific reasoning, European preconceptions about the
Antipodes were thus focalised in the image of Quirós’ garden paradise. In contrast to
the utopic tradition of an unreachable, uncanny and monstrous no-space, the eutopic
tradition, channelled through Quirós’ chiliasm, moved the Antipodes out of the twilight
zone of fantasy into the spotlight of geopolitical reality. Becoming increasingly
persuasive, the tropicalist discourse that formed around these travel anthologies finally
took on hegemonic proportions.
188 John Callander, ed., Terra Australis Cognita: or, Voyages to the Terra Australis, or Southern
Hemisphere, during the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries… (Edinburgh, 1766), 47; cf. with Williams, 252-3; also Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 27-30.
189 Eisler, 146-50; J. M. R. Cameron, “Western Australia, 1616-1829: An Antipodean Paradise,” The Geographical Journal 140, no. 3 (Oct. 1974): 375.
65
The Cook Voyages
The voyages of Captain Cook represent an interesting point in the history of the
European imagination of Australia. In the first place, the Cook voyages, exploring much
of the South Pacific’s uncharted regions, gave the last blow to the theory that a single
monolithic continent covered most of the southern hemisphere. The veil of mystery was
now decisively lifted off the legendary Terra Australis, which subsequently
disintegrated into the geographic entities we know today, most notably the two
continents of Antarctica and Australia. It would seem, then, that Cook’s foray into what
in classical cosmology represented unattainably remote and impenetrably alien places
would constitute an inflection point at which the Antipodes were stripped of their
fantastical, be it eutopic or utopic, properties. However, as the quotations by Mary Ann
Parker and James Edward Smith at the beginning of this and the previous chapter
already indicated, preconceived notions of either a bountiful pleasure garden or a topsy-
turvy land of inversions continued to pervade European thinking about Australia even
after the continent’s European discovery.
It is all the more noteworthy that the Cook voyages did not simply do away with
previous preconceptions since they driven by a pronouncedly scientific interest in the
Australasian region. They were financially supported by the Royal Society, which had
promoted the exploration of the South Pacific to George III, a fact which manifested
itself in the scientific aspects of the official instructions which the Admiralty handed to
Captain Cook.190 In this respect, the Cook voyages were paradigmatic, as manifestly
scientific interests drove most of Australia’s early exploration and colonisation. In
particular, the upper classes of British society were fascinated by the botanical and
zoological curiosities brought home from New Holland. Sir Joseph Banks, a key figure
in the European exploration of Australia, was well aware of the strong interest of British
virtuosi and hobby naturalists in Australia’s flora and fauna when he first acted as a
patron for the Cook voyages and then, later on, supported the choice of Botany Bay as
the penal colony’s planned location.191 Hence Banks’ death in 1820 marks a shift in the
190 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Harper, 1985), 16. 191 Smith, European Vision, 159.
66
British approach to Australia, as the botanical interests of the upper-classes were
gradually eclipsed by the more practical interests of mainly lower-class migrants.192
The discourse of tropicalism that grew out of travel anthologies on the South Pacific
and clustered around Quirós’ vision of a garden paradise must have influenced the Cook
voyages in one way or another. For one thing, proponents of this discourse played a
direct role in the British government’s decision to subsidise the search for Terra
Australis. Alexander Dalrymple, for instance, was a member of the British Admiralty.
Also, we know for certain that Cook took a copy of Charles de Brosses’ History of the
Navigations to the Austral Lands, a work that profoundly shaped the tropicalist
discourse, on board of his first voyage, and it seems more than likely that the
anthologies discussed earlier also formed part of his ship’s library.193 Once we read
Cook’s journal against the backdrop of this discourse of tropicalism, certain passages
even seem to indicate a more direct influence. Most notably, Quirósque chiliasm
appears to reverberate in the euphoric naming of Botany Bay. This is what Cook reports
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 fine meadow as
was ever seen”.194 Cook’s description here strongly resembles Quirós’ Eighth
Memorial, which reports of a “ſoile that is manureable, pleaſant and very temperate”
and then immediately adds: “The Countrey aboundeth in wood”.195 In fact, Cook’s
description seems even closer to the Spanish original, where Quirós writes of a “tierra
negra y graſſa”.196
The imprint of the tropicalist anthologies upon Cook’s descriptions of Botany Bay is
cast into sharp relief in light of later reports from the same location. For instance, when
the First Fleet, following Cook’s and Banks’ recommendation of Botany Bay, arrived
on the site, the commanding Governor Arthur Phillip found Cook’s description, as
historian Paul Carter writes, “so inaccurate he had to transfer the settlement to Sydney 192 Smith, European Vision, 234. 193 Smith, European Vision, 7; also 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 P, 1982), 91-2.
194 James Cook, Journal of H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768-1771, [May 3, 1770]. MS 1, s230r, Digital Collection Manuscripts, NLA, 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 finest meadows in the world”.
195 Quir, 15. 196 Quirós, par. 5.
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Cove”.197 Criticising Banks and Cook for relating “so faithlessly […] what they saw”,
the First Fleet officer 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 find 200 acres which could be cultivated.”198 Tench’s criticism of what he
called Cook’s “fabled plains” supports the suspicion that at times, the imagination of the
famous British explorer might have been carried away by an almost Quirósque
overenthusiasm for Terra Australis, causing him to offset the vision of a bountiful
garden against the existing landscape.199 The tropicalist expectations of a body utopia,
not least promoted by the Cook voyages, continued to be disappointed by the actual
continent.
What fired the imagination of the body utopists the most was, without a doubt,
Tahiti. The small island’s symbolic significance was immense, and it cast a long
shadow over the rest of the discoveries Europeans made in the South Pacific, including
the continent of Australia. Tahiti functioned, as the travel historian Neil Rennie puts it,
as the Great Southland’s “replacement on the utopist’s map”.200 While Australia
dramatically failed to live up to the great expectations Europeans had of Terra Australis,
Tahiti offered at least a small-scale realisation of the Quirósque fantasy of a tropical
pleasure garden. To its European explorers, it was a dream come true. Mesmerised by
Tahiti, they raved about the island’s salubrious climate and its abundance of nourishing
breadfruits and milk-supplying palm trees, which, they reasoned, allowed the
inhabitants to live a life of carefree bliss, without hardship, labour or any form of
physical exertion.201 Again, the baggage of preconceptions they carried on board made
itself felt as the European explorers, invoking the entire pantheon of the eutopian
tradition, likened Tahiti to the Garden of Eden, Hesiod’s Golden Age, the Elysian 197 Paul Carter, Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Minneapolis: Minnesota
UP, 2010), 1. 198 Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales (London,
1793), 101; 29-30; cf. with Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 37-41. 199 Tench, Complete Account, 101; cf. with Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 37-8; also Isabelle Merle,
“Watkin Tench’s Fieldwork: The Journal of an ‘Ethnographer’ in Port Jackson, 1788-1791,” in Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, eds. Margaret Jolly et al. (Canberra, ANU: 2009), 204.
200 Rennie, 84. 201 Cf. with Smith, European Vision, 42-3.
68
Fields, and the Isle of Cythera. The French navigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville
finally declared it “la véritable Eutopie”.202
The classical topos of Arcadia also served as a thematic relay for the European
imagination of Tahiti.203 Joseph Banks famously wrote of Tahiti that it “was the truest
picture of an Arcadia of which we were going to be kings that the imagination can
form”.204 The parallels here with Peregrine’s self-proclaimed kingship over the
Antipodes in Brome’s play are striking, only that for Peregrine it was indeed merely
make-believe, whereas Banks’ forming “imagination” had more far-reaching and
disastrous consequences. As Tobin emphasises, Banks’ perception of Tahiti was
profoundly preconditioned:
Before Banks had laid eyes on Tahiti, he already knew what he was going to see. The image of Tahiti as a paradise – a place of leisure and natural abundance – stemmed not only from his reading of the journals of the voyage of the Dolphin, a previous British voyage to Tahiti, but also from the idea that tropical climates are naturally bountiful. This idea had been firmly planted in Banks’s mind and in the mind of nearly every eighteenth-century gentleman by the countless travel narratives and natural histories describing the tropical regions of the West Indies and by English georgic poetry, such as Thomson’s The Seasons, which was, incidentally, the only piece of literature that Banks included in the rather large library he took with him on the voyage.205
Much like its Quirósque archetype, Banks’ vision of a tropical Arcadia is also defined
by the trope of bounty. Believing himself in a Land of Cockaigne, Banks was unable to
realise that when he was marching for miles “under groves of cocoanut and breadfruit
trees, loaded with a profusion of fruit”, he was not witnessing spontaneous vegetation so
much as plantations carefully husbanded by the indigenous population.206 Banks’ vision
of a pleasure garden, as Tobin puts it, “blinded him to the reality that Tahitians labored
to produce breadfruit”.207
202 Qtd. in Rennie, 89. 203 Cf. with Walter Veit, “On the European Imagining of the Non-European World,” in Australia and the
European Imagination, ed. Ian Donaldson (Canberra: ANU P, 1982), 153. 204 Joseph Banks, Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks. During Captain Cook’s First Voyage in
HMS Endeavour in 1768-71 to Terra Del Fuego, Otahite, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch East Indies, Etc, reprint, ed. Joseph Dalton Hooker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 74; cf. with Rennie, 91.
205 Tobin, 33-4. 206 Banks, Journal, 74. 207 Tobin, 34.
69
The trope of bounty frequently served as a nodal point at which more complex
symbolic associations and textual references could intersect. Cook provides us with an
almost paradigmatic example of this when he writes of Tahiti’s fruits and vegetables
that “All theſe articles the Earth almoſt spontaniouſly produces or at leaſt they are raiſed
with very little labour. in the article of food theſe people may almoſt be said to be
exempt from the curſe of our fore fathers scarcely can it be said that they earn their
bread with the sweat of their brow, benevolent nature hath not only supply’d them with
neceſsarys but with abundance of superfluities”.208 Cook here clearly refers to the bible
passage in which God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and condemns
them to an everlasting life of hard labour.209 This means that his vision of Tahiti is not
simply filtered through the trope of bounty, but is also set in relation to the the biblical
topos of the Fall. The employment of this topos has profound consequences. Bearing in
mind that Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden because they ate of the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Cook’s construction of Tahiti as a form of Eden
implicitly attributes a prelapsarian naivety and ignorance to the Tahitians. To a certain
extent, this corresponds to what anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls “denial of
coevalness”, meaning that although the “discovered” native culture exists in and at the
same time as the explorer-colonisers, it is relegated to an atemporal plane marked as
“decadent”, “prehistoric” and “obsolete”.210 The very present struggle between
coloniser and colonised is thus temporally displaced so that the opposed cultures
become “the same societies at different stages of development”, instead of “different
societies facing each other at the same Time”.211 What is more, such recourse to the
biblical myth of the Fall situates Tahiti within Christian cosmology and evokes the
recursive narrative of Paradise-Lost-and-Regained. This narrative allows for the
conceptualisation of the European discovery of Tahiti as a rediscovery, a form of
homecoming or return to the paradise from which Europeans were excluded, and this, in
turn, provides a symbolic basis for colonial claims. What we have here, then, is not an
innocent invocation of Holy Scripture, but an ideological inscription of Tahiti within
208 James Cook, Journal of H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768-1771. MS 1, s79v-e, Digital Collection
Manuscripts, NLA, Canberra. 209 Gen. 3:17-19: “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your
life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground”
210 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 2006), 25ff; also cf. with Hawes, 196.
211 Fabian, 155.
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European discourses of domination that attempts to write out the island’s indigenous
people.
“A Gentleman’s Park”
In the context of early colonial Australia, the trope of bounty reached very similar
ideological proportions, but took on a form that was more commensurate with the
Australian environment. With the onset of British settlement, it became increasingly
apparent that Quirós’ chiliastic vision of a tropical paradise was highly deficient as a
framework for the eutopic imagination of Australia. However, the underlying idea of a
pleasure garden could, with some adjustment, still find reasonable application. First
examples of this adaptation of the eutopic notion of a pleasure garden to the Australian
context can be found in the accounts of the Cook voyages. Only two days before Cook
would enthuse about the “deep black soil” of Botany Bay, he recorded the following:
“we made an excurſion into the country which we found diverſified 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”.212 At first sight, Cook’s
description here seems rather inconspicuous and objective. In order to see more clearly
what associations were evoked by this country “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’ scientific entourage: “The country looked very
pleaſant and fertile; and the trees, quite free from underwood, appeared like plantations
in a gentleman’s park”.213 It was this idea of a “gentleman’s park” that allowed the
successful application of the eutopic template of the pleasure garden to the Australian
environment.
Parkinson’s vision of a “gentleman’s park” came to dominate the eutopic
imagination of Australia in the early-colonial period. It exerted a clearly discernible
influence over Governor Phillip and his officers. As art historian Bernard Smith writes,
212 James Cook, Journal of H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768-1771, [May 1, 1770]. MS 1, s229r, Digital
Collection Manuscripts, NLA, Canberra; cf. with Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011), 5.
213 Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in His Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour (London: 1773), 134; cf. with Gammage, 5-6.
71
the “opinion that the land in the neighbourhood of Port Jackson was in many places like
an English park, with the authority of Parkinson to back it, was expressed by several
members of the first feet”.214 So it is that the First Fleet’s second captain John Hunter
clearly echoed Cook and Parkinson: “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”.215 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”.216 The homely association with an
English gentleman’s “pleasure ground” in this description is particularly noteworthy. In
fact, many Britons travelling through early-colonial Australia reported that the beguiling
effect of the country’s park-like appearance was a feeling of being transported back to
the motherland – but this feeling was sadly deceptive, because no British homestead
awaited the traveller at the end of these open ranges. Hence Captain Foster Fayns
comments: “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
magnificent house. Many a dreary ride I have had over this magnificent, splendid
country, lying waste and idle…”217 And Henry Thomas Ebsworth likewise noted: “the
land is lightly timbered, resembling a Gentleman’s park occasionally, but the traveller is
soon obliged to lose this idea by finding no Mansion at the end of the scene: He
journeys on, as it were, from Park to Park all day”.218 For Australia’s European
colonisers, the country’s park-like appearance generated a false “prospect of home”219
that often ended in frustration and disappointment.
214 Smith, European Vision, 179. 215 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. with Smith, European Vision, 179.
216 Henry Thomas Ebsworth, Letters from New South Wales, 1826, 24. Henry Thomas Ebsworth papers. State Library of NSW, Sydney; cf. with Gammage, 15.
217 Qtd. in Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 243. 218 Ebsworth, Letters from New South Wales, 1826, 67; cf. with Gammage, 15. 219 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 243; see also Smith, European Vision, 180
72
As historian Bill Gammage points out, the common attribution of the word “park” to
Australia is somewhat surprising. While words like “bush” found frequent application
in other colonial settings (especially South Africa), 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.220 Elizabeth Macarthur appears to have noted this when she wrote: “the
greater part 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”.221 The sad irony is that the “English parks” the British colonisers encountered
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 the Australian landscape, in
which the Britons recognised and recalled their homeland, were part of the traditional
hunting ground patterns which Australia’s indigenous peoples created and maintained
through fire-stick farming. In particular the frequently mentioned lack of underwood
was the direct result of the controlled and contained fires with which Aboriginal people
shaped the landscape according to their needs. What this ultimately demonstrates is that
even though Quirós’ body utopia was transformed into a Gentleman’s pleasure ground,
the eutopic vision of Australia remained predicated on the trope of bounty: just as
Cook’s and Banks’ description of Tahiti denies Tahitians any agency in the production
of the island’s wealth, so does the British colonisers’ description of “English parks” in
Australia bluntly ignore actual relations of production. In much the same way as Banks’
Arcadia, the invocation of a gentleman’s park attempts to write out the Aboriginal
producers and owners, and inserts in their place British claims to ownership.
***
This chapter has demonstrated that the distinguishing feature of Australia’s eutopian
tradition is the conception of the continent as a body utopia, a pleasure garden in which
leisure dominates over work and natural riches are immediately available. Interestingly,
the Quirósque vision of an Edenic paradise conflicts with the Antipodal understanding
of Australia as a utopic space insofar as the garden, as an emblem of the ecumene, does
not sit easily with the conception of Australia as part of the anti-ecumene. The reason
for this is that the garden’s associations with home and familiarity, and the Edenic
220 Gammage, 15. 221 Qtd. in Smith, European Vision, 179.
73
narrative of paradise-lost-and-regained, contradicts the uncanny estrangement
associated with Antipodality. This becomes, for instance, apparent in the friction
between visions of Australia as a “gentleman’s park” and as a “Land of Contrarieties”,
which causes the schizophrenic sentiment of feeling simultaneously at home and
alienated. As later chapters will show, the settler garden, as an emblem of European
civilising forces, succeeded in mitigating this schizophrenia, replacing the Quirósque
notion of natural abundance and leisure with the Civilising Mission’s idea of legal and
emotional appropriation through land improvement and labour.222
222 For a detailed discussion of the Australian settler garden, see Katie Holmes, Susan K. Martin and
Kylie Mirmohamadi, eds., Reading the Garden. The Settlement of Australia (Melbourne, Melbourne UP: 2008).
74
CHAPTER 3 – The Civilising Mission: a Vision of Colonial
Euchronia
“Anticipation is to a young country what antiquity is to an old.” (Field, “On Reading the Controversy…”)
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, examine its quality. Wedgwood fashioned it into a
medallion called “Hope encouraging Art and Labour, under the influence of Peace, to
pursue the employments necessary to give security and happiness to an infant
settlement”. This medallion, depicting Hope personified as a female in classical dress
instructing the similarly personified figures of Peace, Art and Labour, later became the
frontispiece to Phillip’s journal, where it was accompanied by the following poem by
Erasmus Darwin:
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, “Shall bright canals, and ſolid roads expand. –– “There the proud arch, Coloſſus-like, beſtride “Yon glittering ſtreams, and bound the chaffing 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 –––
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Her graceful ſteps deſcending preſs’d the plain, And PEACE, and ART, and LABOUR, join’d her train.223
What is interesting about both poem and medallion is that they articulate a vision that
departs in one critical aspect from the visions of Australia discussed so far: while
Quirós’ chiliastic vision is situated in the here and now and the Antipodal imagination
of a topsy-turvy realm of inversion is located outside of space and time, the vision
expressed here is clearly projected into the future. In place of a utopian satire or body
utopia, we find the anticipation of a city utopia. As this chapter will show, this marks a
significant shift in the utopian imagination of Australia.
The clay Phillip sent from the colony has to be seen as highly symbolic in itself,
representing the fledgling settlement and its ability to be molded according to the
colonisers’ designs. This theme is mirrored by Darwin’s poem, where Hope’s “graceful
ſteps” leave deep imprints “preſs’d” into the unresistant, amenable plains. Although
Hope is invoked as a female figure 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. In essence, her speech maps the Civilising Mission – the
ideological narrative that rationalised the aggressive colonial expansion of the British
Empire as the benign act of bringing a (supposedly) superior civilisation to foreign
lands – onto the “wild plains” of Australia. Hope’s vision of a civilised future outlines
primarily economic aspects, such as the colony’s infrastructure of streets, canals and
bridges, and its agricultural productions and overseas exports. Bernard Smith is
therefore right when he calls her vision “essentially municipal and agricultural”.224
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 how drastically the
Civilising Mission transforms the landscape. By contrast to Peace, the female figure
who, with olive branch in hand, forms the centre of the medallion, but averts her face
disinterestedly, Hope’s vision seems more clearly mirrored by Labour, the only male
figure, who, with intriguingly coy poise, hides a sledgehammer behind his back.
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”.
223 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, 1790), xii-iii. 224 Smith, European Vision, 179.
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Fashioning herself as a divine creator whose words speak the country into existence, she
thus identifies her vision as the starting point of Australia’s history. What this means is
that her vision of a city utopia comes at the expense of the continent’s past, of any
previous form of history the land might have held. This overwriting of indigenous
histories already outlines the ideological mechanisms at work here. 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”.225
In the end, we find in both poem and medallion the paradox that the imperial vision of
the Civilising Mission is articulated through the voice of Hope.
This chapter surveys the origins and rise of the imperial vision of Australia. More
specifically, it examines the spatio-temporal framework within which Europeans
articulated their colonial fantasies of Australia as part of a universal Civilising Mission.
It begins by introducing early expansionist and evangelistic dreams about the
Antipodes, and then discusses the Austral Utopias, i.e. eighteenth-century utopian
novels that justified European expansion into Antipodal space. Next, the time-sense of
early-colonial representations of Australia is examined. Particular attention is paid to the
notion of improvement as the ideologeme through which the ideology of Empire
appropriates the utopianism of European Enlightenment. The chapter concludes by
examining the culmination of this vision in the Macquarie era.
The Antipodes: Emblem of Imperial Desire
The Antipodes continuously inspired expansionist fantasies in the European
imagination, despite (or rather precisely because of) their ancient definition as
unreachable. They represented the Non-Plus Ultra, the final frontier of geographical
exploration. The desire to explore and conquer them 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 known world during his India campaign, longed to journey even farther to
225 Robert Dixon, The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788-1860
(Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986), 16.
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reach the end of the world.226 Authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Lucan similarly
employed the Antipodes as an “emblem of imperial ambition”.227 A notable example
from Roman antiquity is Cicero’s “Somnium Scipionis”, which concludes his larger
work De Republica, a treatise discussing the best possible constitution of a
commonwealth. This work, in which Cicero praises the combination of monarchic,
aristocratic and democratic elements in the Roman constitution, was heavily inspired by
Plato’s Politeia.228 Representing influential precursors to More’s Utopia, Cicero’s work
as well as its Platonic inspiration can be classified as what Sargent terms “city utopias”,
that is, utopian blueprints for an ideal commonwealth.229
Now to the content of the “Somnium Scipionis”: the Roman general and consul
Scipio Aemilianus tells of a dream in which the ghost of his adoptive grandfather,
Scipio Africanus, takes him on a celestial journey to show him the order of the stars and
heavens. Early on Scipio the younger realises the insignificance of the ecumene, and
particularly the smallness of the Roman empire: “Iam ipsa terra ita mihi parva visa est,
ut me imperii nostri, quo quasi punctum eius attingimus, paeniteret”.230 Mocking the
ecumene as “parva quaedam insula” (“this little island”), Scipio the elder begins to
criticise his grandson’s ambitions, and points out to him how limited his sphere of
influence really is:
Ex his ipsis cultis notisque terris num aut tuum aut cuiusquam nostrum nomen vel Caucasum hunc, quem cernis, transcendere potuit vel illum Gangen tranatare? Quis in reliquis orientis aut obeuntis solis ultimis aut aquilonis austrive partibus tuum nomen audiet? quibus amputatis cernis profecto quantis in angustiis vestra se gloria dilatari velit. Ipsi autem, qui de nobis loquuntur, quam loquentur diu?231
From these farmed and familiar lands, could your name, or the name of anyone of us, surmount the Caucasus, which you see here, or cross over the Ganges there? Who, in the most distant regions of the rising or setting sun, in the North or the South, will hear your name? Leaving these aside, surley you can see in what a confined space your fame [gloria] seeks to spread. But even those who talk of us, for how long will they talk?
Pointing towards the Antipodes, he grimly states that “a quibus expectare gloriam certe
nullam potestis”.232 While Cicero’s discussion of empire and the Antipodes is firmly
226 Moretti, “The Other World,” 257; apparently the reference is to Luc. 10.1; cf. also with Alfred Hiatt,
“Petrarch’s Antipodes,” Parergon 22, no. 2 (2005): 5. 227 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 6. 228 M. C. Howatson, ed., Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), s.v.
“De republica.” 229 Sargent, “Three Faces,” 4; 10-1. 230 “Now the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was ashamed of our Empire, through which we, so
to speak, occupy only a little spot of it”; Cic. Rep. 6.16. 231 Cic. Rep. 6.22; my translation. 232 “from these you can certainly expect no fame”; Cic. Rep. 6.20
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embedded in Stoic discourses,233 he also demonstrates that the notion of a spherical
earth and the assumption of spaces beyond the ecumene dictated a wider, global
perspective. As Goldie explains, the imagination of “a world larger than [one’s] tangible
experience” posed a challenge to classical conceptions of the ecumene’s cosmological
position, and required a new, globally-oriented mode of thinking.234 Within this
emerging global perspective, the inaccessible Antipodes were a thorn in the side of
European imperialists.
As long as the Antipodes remained theoretically as well as practically unreachable,
they effectively represented an emblem of imperial overreach. A late example of this is
Brome’s play The Antipodes, where the Antipodes still signify the pathology of imperial
over-ambition. But in a process beginning in the Middle Ages, the definitional
inaccessibility of the Antipodes was progressively dismantled. One of the first serious
blows to the classical assumption of an impassable torrid zone around the equator was
delivered by the Dominican theologian Albertus Magnus towards the end of the
thirteenth century. In his Liber de natura loci, Albertus concluded that the Antipodes
were not only reachable but most likely inhabited too.235 Albertus’ revision of classical
zonal theory marks the beginnings of a shift in the cosmographic function of the
Antipodes, specifically in relation to European fantasies of expansionism. The
unprecedented growth of nautical science and the subsequent expansion of geographic
knowledge during the Age of Discovery further lifted the physical and intellectual
barriers that previously separated the Antipodes from the ecumene. Marco Polo played a
major role in this context, for his report on Java Minor, a country which he misleadingly
situated far below the equator, substantiated rumours about a passage to the southern
hemisphere and opened the way in the European imagination for future travel, trade,
and conquest in the region.236
Luigi Pulci’s fifteenth-century poem Morgante clearly registered the geopolitical and
moral implications which an accessible anti-ecumene carried for Europe. Towards the
end of Pulci’s chivalric epic we find the Antipodes engulfed in evangelistic questions.
In Canto XXV, the demon Astarotte dismisses the Pillars of Hercules, an important
233 cf. with Karma Lochrie, “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies 36, no. 3 (2006), 493-516. 234 Goldie, 36. 235 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 100. 236 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 102.
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symbol denoting the geographical and intellectual limits of antiquity, as a
miscalculation and declares that it is very well possible to sail beyond them, and thus
beyond the knowledge of classical learning. Astarotte goes on to explain that the
southern hemisphere is reachable, and that “laggiù son città, castella e imperio”.237 He
also emphasises that the inhabitants of the Antipodes worship pagan gods (“Adora il
sole e Juppiterre e Marte”).238 This proves highly consequential, because the theological
problem of Antipodal inhabitation, which church doctrine, following Augustine, had so
far simply rejected, gains an entirely new significance in light of the accessibility of
Antipodal regions. It is in this context that Rinaldo, one of the epic’s protagonists,
explicitly raises 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. –239
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 vain things, whether they can gain salvation like we do. –
Rinaldo points here to the major challenge which the existence of Antipodal populations
poses to the devout Christian, because 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.240 The devil’s reply to Rindaldo amounts almost to a formal
theological discourse: in line with Matt. 24:14, Astarotte reminds him of the universal
propagation of the Christian faith, and then incites the Paladin further by prophesying,
as Moretti describes it, the “future evangelization and redemption of the Antipodes”.241
In the last canto of Pulci’s epic it is implied that Rinaldo ultimately took up Astarotte’s
call and sailed to the Antipodes as their Christian proselytiser:
237 “Down there are cities, castles and empires”; Morgante XXV, 230.6; cf. with Moretti, “The Other
World,” 272. 238 Morgante XXV, 231.6; cf. with Moretti, “The Other World,” 272. 239 Morgante XXV, 232.1-6; my translation. 240 Moretti, “The Other World,” 272-3. 241 Moretti, “The Other World,” 273.
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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 alfin d’Ercule i segni.242
But the author of this work upon which I reflect, 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 finally travelled beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
Pulci’s Morgante evidences the new prospect created by the accessibility of Antipodal
space, in which the borders between the ecumene, increasingly viewed as the political
dominion of the Catholic church, and the anti-ecumene begin to dissolve. In this, the
epic testifies to the evangelistic impetus that proliferated in response to the vacuum
which the opening up of Antipodal space induced in the Christian mind. Notably, at the
same time as such missionary zeal was formulated in Morgante for the Antipodes, it
was put into practice by the Columbus voyages in the Americas.243 In the end, Pulci’s
epic marks the beginnings of a larger process, during which the Antipodes became
embedded in expansionary dreams about evangelisation and colonisation beyond the
ecumene, and which ultimately culminated in the imperial vision of the Civilising
Mission.244
It is in this context of the gradual emergence of early capitalism and the beginnings
of the Age of Discovery that the literary utopia finds its inaugural moment in the
publication of Thomas More’s eponymous work.245 More’s Utopia has frequently been
associated with the rise of imperialism. Ashcroft, for instance, sees it as the literary
precursor to the imperial project.246 The early-modern period produces, to borrow the
words of utopian scholar Antonis Balasopoulos, the “most explicit tropings of utopia in
expansionist terms and of expansionism in utopian ones”.247 What we find here, then, is
a very tightly knit interrelation between utopia and the ideology of European
imperialism.
242 Morgante XXVIII, 233; my translation. 243 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 173; on the Antipodes and Columbus, see also Moretti, “The Other World,”
275-82. 244 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.
245 Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 2. 246 Ashcroft, “Critical Utopias,” 413. 247 Antonis Balasopoulos, “Unwordly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian
Expansionism,” Utopian Studies 15, no. 2 (2004): 4.
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Terra Australis and the Austral Utopias
The appeal the Antipodes held for the imperial mind found further expression in the
cartographic representations of Terra Australis. As mentioned before, semi-factual and
mythologically-enhanced topographies of works such as The Travels of Sir John
Mandeville or Marco Polo’s travel narratives were (sometimes accidentally)
incorporated into representations of the Antipodal continent, resulting in a “mosaic
image of Terra Australis”.248 Early-modern cartographers constructed Terra Australis as
an alluring and exotic wish-landscape, the ultimate object of desire of European
expansionist and mercantilist fantasies. Importantly, the slippage of toponyms from
already discovered regions such as the Americas to the undiscovered regions of Terra
Australis created the impression that the naming process of the unknown continent had
already begun.249 Since the classical definition of the Antipodes as inaccessible was
becoming less and less dogmatic, the mythical continent’s status as “terra incognita”
began to shift towards “terra nondum cognita” (“land not yet known”). This provisional
status underscored the inexorable advance of European expansion and marked Terra
Australis as the “‘not yet’ of European colonization”.250 Early-modern cartography
further emphasised the temporal profile of the Antipodes as the future horizon for the
Civilising Mission.
Suspended between mythological fantasy and empirical evidence, Terra Australis
provided fertile ground for the imperial imagination to luxuriate in. 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”.251 The strong attraction exerted
by the not-yet-discovered continent spawned a rich array of utopian imaginings from all
over Europe. Most of these works can be grouped together as “Austral Utopias”, and
although they vary slightly in terms of subject matter, they are remarkably consistent in
their form, couching fantasies of survival, exploration and conquest in the narrative
framework of the imaginary voyage.252 Exploiting the epistemological uncertainty that
defined Terra Australis at the time, the Austral utopias frequently passed themselves off 248 Eisler, 37. 249 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 209. 250 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 215; 217. 251 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 187. 252 Fausett’s Writing the New World and his Images of the Antipodes, as well as Arthur’s Virtual
Voyages cover the genre of Austral utopias in more detail.
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as factual accounts, and some achieved such a level of verisimilitude that they were
accepted as credible reports.253 This represents the single biggest difference between the
Austral utopias and the Antipodean Menippea, as the latter explicitly foregrounds its
utopic extraterritoriality. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the vast
majority of Austral utopias were penned by the French. For French utopists, Jean
Garagnon argues, Terra Australis provided a projection space on which societal
blueprints could be drawn up that, presenting “revolutionary alternatives” and
“reformist improvements”, express a desire to change the contemporaneous social
reality of France.254 Some of these French Austral utopias can, accordingly, be viewed
as harbingers of the French Revolution, and since they utilise the ambiguous space of
Terra Australis for critical reflections on their own society, show some qualities of the
critical utopia.
However, as David Fausett argues, around the middle of the eighteenth century the
utopian mentality underwent a significant change as earlier “reformist utopias” were
gradually replaced by fantasies with much stronger focus on mercantile and colonial
interests.255 This applies particularly to British Austral utopias, which led Garagnon to
conclude that while for the French Australia was primarily “a medium through which
French problems could be thought out”, for Britons it was much more a colonial
enterprise, “a place for settlement”.256 A notable example of this is Robert Paltock’s
Peter Wilkins (1750), a highly popular adventure romance with erotic undertones, in
which a castaway Englishman discovers an isolated Antipodean society. By virtue of his
superior European technology, Peter Wilkins soon acquires a position of power over the
Antipodeans. The text indulges in the colonial fantasy that the colonised naturally
acknowledge and appreciate the superiority of the coloniser. As Christian Marouby
explains: “On the purely fictive level of a kind of wish fulfillment, this ‘natural
movement’ performs a crucial function: that of justifying European rule. If the natives
themselves recognize the superiority and natural authority of their 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
253 Dunmore, 11. 254 Garagnon, 95; 101. 255 Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, 44; 53. 256 Garagnon, 102.
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their superior.”257 As such, Peter Wilkins acts out, as Paul Arthur puts it, “scenes that
symbolise Europe taking colonial control over the Antipodes”.258 Anticipating the
narrative of the Civilising Mission, Peter Wilkins stages the fantasy of a “benign
colonisation”, in which indigenous peoples welcome the colonial presence of a
European power.259 In its eroticisation of the act of colonisation, Paltock’s novel has an
influential precursor in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pine (1667/8), in which an
Englishman, stranded with four women, sets off to populate an uninhabited island near
Terra Australis.260
Contrary to Garagnon’s argument, French Austral utopias frequently explored very
similar themes. Take for example Nicolas Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s La Découverte
Australe par un Homme-volant (1781), a novel which 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 found a colony in the “Austral lands”, where they encounter a multitude of
“homme-bêtes” (“bestial men”), hybrid creatures that are half human, half animal. They
eventually decide to capture a male and female of each of these humanoid species, so
that they could be “studied and educated as humans”.261 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:
“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”.262 However, as Giulia Pacini convincingly argues, Rétif’s La Découverte
Austral promotes the idea of a benign Civilising Mission against the historical
background of France’s colonial aspirations, and the need for cheap labour in the French
colonies.263 Colonial utopias such as Réfif’s may oppose more violent forms of imperial
257 Christian Marouby, “Utopian Colonialism,” North-Dakota Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1988): 149. 258 Arthur, 191; for further discussion of Peter Wilkins, see Fausett, Images of the Antipodes, 72ff. 259 Arthur, 75; 76. 260 Hiatt, “Terra Australis,” 13; on The Isle of Pine, see also Rennie, 66ff; James, 77ff; and Williams,
72ff. 261 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.
262 “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 America”; 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. with Pacini, 172.
263 Pacini, 171.
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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 justifiable, 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 Narrative of the Civilising Mission
With the onset of British colonisation, the temporal profile 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 presents us with 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 offsets the
fledgling settlement against the nature that surrounds it. This tension between settlement
and environment is probably responsible for the painting’s intriguing sense of
movement and activity, because in contrast to the superficial 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
Ashcroft puts it, looking “through an opening in the bush towards a town arranged in
the orderly ranks of a military parade, we see the civilizing effect of colonialism creates
order out of chaos, produces urban settlement in the wilderness”.264 What we have here
is a picture of imperial progress, a static representation of the expansion of European
society under the guise of the Civilising Mission.
264 Bill Ashcroft, “Reading Post-Colonial Australia,” in Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, ed.
Nathanael O’Reilly (Amherst, NY: Cambria P, 2010), 21.
85
This notion of “the civilizing effect of colonialism” is deeply ingrained in early
colonial representations of Australia. It particularly manifests itself in their temporal
organisation. Governor Phillip’s description of the very first moments of colonisation in
Australia, the landing of the First Fleet, provide another good example of this. Phillip
can hardly conceal his delight at the view of his party progressively clearing the first
tracts of land and erecting the first 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 fixing 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, flowers, flowering ſhrubs, or underwood, ſcattered and intermingled in the moſt promiſcuous manner, are the firſt objects that present themſelves; afterwards, the irregular placing of the firſt 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 effect, 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.265
Revolving around the idea of “order emerging inexorably out of chaos”,266 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 here events that take place, so to speak, right in front of him, but
their significance 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.
Carter labels this type of narrative “imperial history”, in opposition to his own
project of “spatial 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 265 Arthur Phillip, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, 3rd ed. (London, 1790), 144-5. 266 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 305.
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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 effect: by its nature, such a logic demonstrates the emergence of order from
chaos”.267 Carter is right to emphasise the legitimating function of this narrative, yet he
seems to neglect one important fact, and that is 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 “magnifiques images que la marche de la civilisation fait naître”.268
Accordingly, it is the vision of a “civilised” future that informs the perception of the
present in this narrative. Tocqueville, although writing at a later time and about a
different environment, instantiates this phenomenon brilliantly, describing how these
“fugitives images de civilisation” come to represent “faits aussi certains que s’ils étaient
accomplis”.269 The effect, then, is that “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”.270 Instead of a remembered past, the imperial narrative invokes an
imaginary future to legitimise the present. As such, it celebrates a colonial eutopia that
does not yet exist, a colonial eutopia that remains contingent upon the hypothetical
triumph of the Civilising Mission. This longing for a better future is not only brought
about by the crude circumstances of early settlement, it is, moreover, topical; as Andrew
Milner remarks: “From the Enlightenment on, notions of historical progress
increasingly tended to substitute the idea of a better (future) time, literally euchronia, for
that of a better place”271 – hence the narrative of the Civilising Mission is not historical
in a backward-looking sense, but is, rather, anticipatory. For this reason, the vision
behind the Civilising Mission is best described as euchronic. This differentiates it
clearly from the visions of Australia discussed so far, in particular from the utopic
vision of Antipodal anti-space, and the eutopic one of an immediately available pleasure
garden.
267 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, xvi. 268 “splendid visions to which the march of civilisation gives birth”; Alexis de Tocqueville, “Quinze
Jours au Désert: Souvenirs d’un Voyage en Amerique,” Revue Des Deux Mondes, December 1, 1860, 604.
269 “facts as certain as if they were made”; Tocqueville, “Quinze Jours au Désert,” 605; 603. 270 “the imagination, rather than trying to return to the past, on the contrary sprang forward, and was lost
in a boundless future”; Tocqueville, “Quinze Jours au Désert,” 603. 271 Andrew Milner, “Meditations on the Impossible,” Arena 25/26 (2006): 7-8.
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Although the vision of the Civilising Mission is, first and foremost, euchronic
because of its presumption of a future state of “civilisation”, it frequently attempts to
embed this colonial future in the colonisers’ past by means of quotations and allusions
to European culture, especially classical mythology and literature. Traces of this epic
legacy are evident in most of the early colonial writings. Reference to ancient Greek and
Roman literature allowed the British colonisers to fashion themselves according to
classical role models, and to bestow an epic quality upon their mission to civilise. It
enabled them to accommodate the colonisation of Australia within the larger horizon of
European history, and to draw historical parallels between the establishment of the Port
Jackson settlement and the great empires of antiquity, thereby conferring literary
authority to their civilising project. Watkin Tench, for example, describes the moment
when the First Fleet reached Botany Bay on the 19 January 1788 as follows: “Ithaca
itſelf was ſcarcely more longed for by Ulyſſes, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who
had traverſed ſo many thouſand miles to take poſſeſſion of it”.272 Underscoring their own
readiness and enthusiasm, Tench here likens himself and his party to the hero of the
foundational epic of European literature, Homer’s Odyssey – but since Odysseus
returned to Ithaca as its legitimate ruler, Tench moreover uses this classical allusion to
lend an air of legitimation to his party’s civilising campaign. This ideologeme of
“homecoming”, which justifies colonial expansion in mythic terms, was also witnessed
as part of the Quirósque vision of a eutopic paradise.
A no less epic mode of envisioning the British colonial project is evident in Phillip’s
initial wish to give the ancient poetic name for England, Albion, to the new
settlement.273 What becomes apparent in this naming proposal is not only the idea that
the infant colony carries on the mother country’s name, but also the grand scale of
Phillip’s plans. Tench reports that Phillip, in an almost Quirósque burst of over-
enthusiasm, envisioned that the crude encampment at Port Jackson would soon mature
into an imposing metropolis deserving to be Great Britain’s namesake:
But as theſe habitations were intended by Governor Phillip, to anſwer only the exigency of the moment, the plan of a town was drawn, and the ground on which it is hereafter to ſtand ſurveyed, and marked out. To proceed on a narrow, confined ſcale, in a country of the extenſive limits we poſſeſs, would be unpardonable: extent of empire demands grandeur of deſign. That this
272 Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (London, 1789), 45. 273 Deidre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005), 141.
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has been our view will be readily believed, when I tell the reader, that the principal ſtreet in our projected city will be, when completed, agreeable to the plan laid down, two hundred feet in breadth, and all the reſt of a correſponding proportion. How far this will be accompanied with adequate diſpatch is another queſtion, as the incredulous among us are ſometimes hardy enough to declare, that ten times our ſtrength would not be able to finiſh it in as many years.274
Although the last remark strikes more sceptical notes, Tench nevertheless seems to
believe with Phillip that the spatial magnitude of Australia called for visionary
magnitude on their part. Just like in his description of the First Fleet’s landing, Phillip’s
grand “deſign” far overreaches the present. Notably, he attempts to link the new colony
tightly to the imperial motherland, but while he grounds his vision of “New Albion”
deeply within European mythology, he firmly maintains its euchronic orientation
towards the future. Phillip’s focus on infrastructure establishes his vision as a city
utopia, in line with Erasmus Darwin’s poem and Watling’s painting. What all these
works illustrate is how the coloniser’s present is, by way of the Civilising Mission’s
euchronic vision, constructed as the past of an anticipated future of economic structure
and regularity.
The Ideologeme of Improvement
In the light 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 benefit upon the world”.275
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 British settlement at Port Jackson. In his comprehensive study The
Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, historian John Gascoigne
demonstrates the great extent to which the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment
formed “a central core of the mental world”276 of Australia’s colonisers. The “twin
274 Tench, Narrative, 103-4. 275 Qtd. in John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002), 7. 276 Gascoigne, 6.
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ideologies of English Enlightenment and empire”,277 Gascoigne argues, were highly
compatible, with the former giving theoretical legitimation to the latter. Within our
conceptual framework this means that the Enlightenment has to be understood as part of
the utopian façade that curtained and buttressed imperialism at the time. Particularly the
vision of a civilised, well-organised city utopia lent direction and moral legitimacy to
the imperial project. As 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-
justification.”278 As Robert Dixon has shown in The Course of Empire, Enlightenment
discourses about societal evolution played a particularly important role in organising the
colonisers’ euchronic vision. Especially influential was the proposition of Scottish
Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith that societies develop from a state of hunter-
gatherers, to the pastoral, then the agricultural, and finally the commercial stage,
because this anticipatory histoire raisonnée allowed the British colonisers to rationalise
their expropriation and transformation of Aboriginal land as “improvement” – that is, as
part of the universal progress of mankind.279
It is precisely in the concept of improvement that the discourses of Enlightenment
and Empire converge. Improvement places imperial ideology squarely within the
utopianism of the Enlightenment movement, allowing one discourse to effectively slide
under another. Interestingly, this is already foreshadowed in the original Utopia: the
legislation of Thomas More’s ideal commonwealth explicitly authorises aggressive
expansion in cases where land can be improved because its inhabitants leave it “idle and
waste”.280 In the Australian context, the notion of improvement primarily conflates
societal development with agricultural growth, which means that the colonisers’
transformation of the land was also construed as a form of moral improvement.
Interestingly, in the public discourse of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
Britain the vision of a better life in the colonies was closely associated with the
conceived opinion that the British motherland was in decline. Joseph Banks, for
277 Nicole Graham, Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law (New York: Routledge, 2011), 90. 278 Ashcroft, “Critical Utopias,” 413. 279 Dixon, Course of Empire, 1-2. 280 The passage in question is “Quod ſi forte per totam inſulam plus æquo moles intumuerit, tum ex
qualibet urbe deſcriptis ciuibus in continente proximo, ubicũque indigenis agri multum ſupereſt & cultu uacat, coloniam ſuis ipſorum legibus propagant, aſcitis una terræ indigenis, ſi cõuiuere ſecum uelint.” See Thomas More, De optimo reip. statu, deque noua insula Vtopia… (Basel, 1518), 87; cf. with Ashcroft, “Critical Utopias,” 414-5; and Balasopoulos, 5.
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example, who in his role as principal advisor to the House of Commons suggested
Botany Bay as a suitable site for the future penal settlement, voiced his concerns about
the state of Great Britain in a letter to Governor Hunter, dated 1797:
How matters are different, 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.281
Similar sentiments, most likely aroused by the French Revolution and the ensuing
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that took heavy tolls on Britain’s political and
economic stability, also reverberate in William Lisle Bowles’ lengthy poem The Spirit
of Discovery by Sea (1804). Bowles – an eminent poet at the time who had the
admiration of Romantics such as Coleridge and Southey, but was later reduced to
ridicule by Lord Byron – also sounded the death knell for Great Britain:
281 Joseph Banks to Governor Hunter, March 30, 1797. Sir Joseph Banks Papers, sec. 7, ser. 38, frame
CY 3005 / 169 and CY 3005 / 170, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
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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.282
A dystopian perception of the state of Europe, it seems, generated and nourished a
euchronic vision of Australia. This reveals an intriguing facet of the interplay of
colonial utopianism and imperial ideology: notions of what political scientist Barbara
Goodwin calls “cyclical revival” plus the perception of a Europe beset by “progressive
decadence” instate the colonial utopia as a critical alternative to European reality.283
This gives us a valuable insight into the imperial mindset at work here, specifically
the time-sense of this form of utopianism. Prima facie the reliance of the Civilising
Mission on Enlightenment discourses suggests that it conforms with what Mannheim
labels as the “normative-liberal” or “liberal-humanitarian” mentality, which is
characterised by “experiencing historical time as unilinear progress and evolution”.284
Closely affiliated with modern capitalism, this mentality defers the realisation of its
utopia into the future, but “sees it as arising out of the process of becoming in the here
and now”.285 We saw Darwin, Phillip and Watling illustrate this. It needs to be
emphasised that this euchronic perspective per se is 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.”286 Precisely in focussing on active engagement in the process
of creating utopia, the euchronic perspective has strong emancipatory potential. By
contrast, for example, the eutopic imagination of an immediately accessible body utopia
verges on what Ricœur calls a “logic of all or nothing which ignores the labor of time”,
and which readily deteriorates into escapism and the “eclipse of praxis”.287
However, the emancipatory potential of the euchronic vision of Australia is severely
undermined because it also exhibits certain traits of the conservative mentality. This 282 William Lisle Bowles, The Spirit of Discovery. A Descriptive and Historical Poem, in five Books.
With Notes, 2nd ed. (London, 1809), 111-2; cf. with Dixon, Course of Empire, 3; and Smith, European Vision, 114.
283 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), 22-3.
284 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 200. 285 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 203. 286 Bloch and Adorno, 3. 287 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 26.
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may appear paradoxical, specifically since Mannheim underscores 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 reflections and illuminations of the historical process which come from a
progressive impulse.” But as Mannheim then elaborates, once the conservative status
quo is challenged by external forces – and Banks and Bowles indicate that this is the
case in early nineteenth-century Britain – then the conservative mentality produces its
own “counter-utopia which serves as a means of self-orientation and defence”.288 The
imperial mindset we are dealing with here ironically derives this counter-utopia from
the very utopia that challenges it, i.e. the “liberal-humanitarian” utopia of the
Enlightenment. Structured around ideas of progressive decadence and cyclical revival,
the Enlightenment euchronia is grafted onto a conservative mentality, so that the rise of
the colonies is understood as the conservation of the old order. This explains the
intensely heightened sense of time and space displayed in the euchronic vision of
Australia, because the colonial present is simultaneously the colonisers’ past, and the
colonial future their present. As a result, Banks, Bowles and their contemporaries did by
no means view Australia as a form of independent successor, but as a continuation of
Great Britain. As Banks prophesies, it will be England that survives in New South
Wales – not one of its colonial offshoots turned independent. In this sense, Phillip’s
euchronic vision of “New Albion” represents not an alternative to eurocentric
imperialism, but precisely a continuation of it.
This conservative appropriation of the euchronic perspective relies strongly on an
understanding of improvement that presupposes the existence of a terra nullius: in order
to successfully appropriate Enlightenment utopianism, the narrative of the Civilising
Mission rested on the assumption that before the arrival of the Europeans the Australian
landscape was in a “state of nature”, that is, a chaotic, uncultivated wilderness.
Contrasting the “ſavage coast” with the “civilized people” that were to colonise it,
Phillip therefore takes some pains to highlight 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 officer, David Collins,
places similar emphasis on the primitive and uncultivated condition of the land, and its
transformation at the hands of the Britons:
288 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 206.
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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 different 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.289
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. We noticed the same tension
in Watling’s painting: homing in on the rigorous arrangement of the settlement and its
thriving plantations, his painting foregrounds the colonisers’ efforts 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. As with
Phillip’s “ſavage coast”, we witness here how Aboriginal people are fused with the
Australian landscape into one indistinguishable cipher of “savagery” that awaits the
moral and economic improvement of its “civilisers”. In the end, improvement is equated
with the industry of the “civilized people”, and it is in this form that it propels the
narrative of the Civilising Mission from its starting point of a wild “ſavage coast”
towards its euchronic horizon.
Macquarie’s Vision
The Civilising Mission’s ideological appropriation of Enlightenment discourses
reached a high point during the Macquarie administration. In fact, Governor Lachlan
Macquarie could be seen as something of a champion of the Civilising Mission, for
unlike his gubernatorial predecessors, particularly the scandalously overthrown William
Bligh, Macquarie devoted himself with unprecedented zeal and sincerity to the
development of the small penal outpost: in his vision, the advancement of the colony
could only be achieved through, as historian John Hirst writes, “the appurtenances of
civilisation, which were churches, schools, hospitals, and barracks”.290 Dixon likewise
289 David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1 (London, 1798), 6; cf.
with Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 43-4. 290 John Hirst, “Macquarie, Lachlan,” in Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds. Graeme Davison
et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001).
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speaks of a renaissance of neo-classical culture under the auspices of Governor
Macquarie.291
A good impression of Macquarie’s vision can be gathered from the topographical
pictures of the period, foremost Major James Taylor’s tripartite work Panoramic Views
of Port Jackson (1821).292 Commissioned by the Governor, the three panels of the
painting present Sydney as a city utopia methodically subdivided by right-angled streets
and fences into parallelograms that criss-cross from the fore- to the middleground.
Cornered by square buildings, this honeycombed layout is interspersed with flowering
shrubs and dotted with groups of people to create the impression of an orderly, but also
flourishing and bustling town. Interestingly, the depiction of the scene carefully
dissolves any social tensions, having the colony’s indigenous, civil, military and convict
population harmoniously inhabit the same space. In this respect, the oversized group of
Aboriginal men clad in classical-looking tunics in the centre panel are particularly
noteworthy. Windmills, signifying agricultural success, preside over Macquarie’s
Sydney. Reading the painting from left to right, its euchronic gesture becomes clear:
with busy quarry workers on the left and the impressive Augustan architecture of the
centre, it indicates the direction in which the settlement will expand further, leaving the
naked Aboriginals and open plains of the right panel as place holders for the
settlement’s future progress.
The writings of the pardoned convict Michael Massey Robinson, who is generally
regarded as Governor Macquarie’s poet laureate, provide a textual counterpart to
Taylor’s Views.293 In his 1811 birthday ode for George III, for instance, Robinson
presents the process of the British discovery and colonisation of Australia in the benign
light of the Enlightenment:
But when BRITANNIA’s Sons came forth, to brave The dreary Perils of the length’ning Wave; When her bold Barks, with swelling Sails unfurled, Trac’d these rude Coasts, and hail’d a new-found World. Soon as their Footsteps press’d the yielding sand, A sun more genial brighten’d on the Land:
291 Dixon, Course of Empire, 25. 292 See the chapter on colonial topographical painting in Dixon, Course of Empire, 47-78. 293 Vivian Smith, “Australian colonial poetry, 1788–1888. Claiming the future, restoring the past,”
Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009) 74; see also Dixon, Course of Empire, 25.
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Commerce and Arts enriched the social Soil, Burst through the gloom and bade all Nature smile!294
In equal parts epic and euchronic, Robinson’s ode blends the economic vocabulary of
Empire with the moral lexicon of the Enlightenment, so that in the “enrichment” of the
“social Soil” the commercial aspect of the imperial project is weaved neatly into the
humanitarian hopes of the Enlightenment utopia. It is interesting, however, that
Robinson gives a particularly nationalistic twist to the Civilising Mission. For
Robinson, there is no doubt that the Port Jackson settlement would present a “lasting
monument to BRITAIN’s Praise”, since it is “our ALBION, whose imperial Shield / Still
waves triumphant in the tented Field!”.295 In the words of Bernard Smith, Robinson
construes the colonisation of Australia as “human progress under the aegis of an
enlightened Britain”.296 The tension between the universalism of Enlightenment
utopianism and the British-centred discourse of Empire manifests itself here: for one
thing, the colonisation of Australia is acclaimed as a milestone in the universal progress
of mankind; or as Dixon describes it, “the glory of Australia lies not in that which is
unique, that which is indigenous, but in that which derives from its participation in the
universal laws of human history”.297 But at the same time, Robinson makes sure to
underline that the colonisation of Australia is a British enterprise, and that its success
adds to the name and fame of the British nation. This affirms that in spite of the
Civilising Mission’s ostensible subscription to the universal utopianism of the
Enlightenment, it does not present an alternative to the British-centred world view of
Empire, but an ideological continuation of it.
Robinson’s ode stipulates that in Australia, “THIS drear Expanse of Land, / NO TRAIT
appear’d of Culture’s fost’ring Hand”, and thus presupposes, similar to Phillip’s “ſavage
coast” or the wild margin in Watling’s painting, the continent to be an uncultivated
wasteland.298 His poem continues by juxtaposing this blank state with the euchronic
vision of the Civilising Mission, spelling out in detail what the enrichment of
Australia’s “social Soil” entails. Robinson thus lays out a landscape that, showcasing
294 Michael [Massey] Robinson, “ODE FOR the KING’s BIRTH-DAY,” The Sydney Gazette and New
South Wales Advertiser, June 8, 1811, 2; cf. with Smith, European Vision, 224, and Dixon, Course of Empire, 41-2.
295 Robinson, “ODE FOR the KING,” 2. 296 Smith, European Vision, 224. 297 Dixon, Course of Empire, 3. 298 Robinson, 2.
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Macquarie’s achievements as governor, emphasises the progress and growth of the
fledgling colony’s economy:
Now, mark, where o’er the populated Plain Blythe Labour moves, and calls her sturdy Train Whilst, nurs’d by clement Skies, and genail [sic] Gales, Harvests cloathe the fruitful Vales. O’er the green Upland see new Hamlets spread, The frugal Garden, and the “straw-built Shed;” The Cot, where Peace a smiling Aspect wears, And the charm’d Husbandman forgets his Cares. See, opening Towns with rival Skill display The Structure bold—the Mart, and busy Quay; Streets ably form’d by persevering Toil, And Roads the Trav’ller’s wearied Course beguile:—299
As in Erasmus Darwin’s commemorative poem, of whose infrastructural vision
Robinson’s ode is strongly reminiscent, we find the Enlightenment concept of
improvement reduced here to the colonisers’ “persevering Toil”. This reduction turns it
into the functional ideologeme that undermines the concrete-utopian aspects of
Enlightenment utopianism, translating its forward-looking perspective into a
conservative regressivism.
***
This chapter showed that the early colonial representations of Australia are
predicated on a narrative that is distinctly euchronic in its temporal organisation. As a
result, the colonisers’ present is construed as the past of an anticipated future of colonial
glory. This time-sense sets the Civilising Mission apart from previous visions. Firstly,
the euchronic vision of the Civilising Mission contrasts with the eutopic vision of a
Quirósque paradise, specifically in terms of spatio-temporal organisation: the Quirósque
vision nostalgically remembers a bygone stage of history, its colonial present is the
return of a pre-civilised, paradisal past that is paradoxically situated in the immediate
here and now, while the Civilising Mission imagines a civilised future and informs the
present retrospectively from this anticipated viewpoint. Moreover, as Robinson’s image
of the “frugal Garden” above indicates, both visions are incompatible in terms of their
key ideologemes: the Quirósque vision relies on the trope of bounty, and centres on
images of spontaneous growth and natural overabundance, while the agens movens of
299 Robinson, 2.
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the Civilising Mission is the ideologeme of improvement, which allows the refashioning
of Enlightenment utopianism into a conservative mentality that seeks to recreate the
imperial homeland in the colony. These ideologemes are incompatible insofar as the
idea of natural bounty threatens to render European agriculture and technology, and thus
the Civilising Mission’s principal means of improvement, irrelevant. That is to say, the
Quirósque vision of a bountiful paradise, in which natural riches are immediately
available without the requirement of labour or sophisticated technology, severely
undermines the Civilising Mission’s celebration of agricultural and municipal
development. This is also reflected in the fact that the Civilising Mission manifests itself
primarily as a city utopia, while the Quirósque vision is fixated on the body utopia of a
paradisal garden.
Secondly, the Civilising Mission also conflicts with the utopic vision of Antipodean
anti-space. At the end of the imperial vision’s projected civilising process, Australia is
moulded into a replica of the imperial homeland. This means essentially a
transformation of the anti-ecumene into the ecumene, or in other words, of the foreign,
strange and uncanny world of Australia into the known and familiar world of Europe.
As such, the Civilising Mission countervails the estrangement felt by the European
subject in the Antipodal environment of Australia. However, regarding the differences
between the utopic and euchronic vision, it needs to be emphasised that the Civilising
Mission, in contrast to the merely negative critique articulated by the utopic vision of
Antipodean anti-space, does not simply criticise the present, but presents a future
alternative to it. In the end, this is perhaps the reason why euchronia is more compelling
than utopian satire, but also why it may be much more effective ideologically.
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CHAPTER 4 – Colonial Melancholy and the Imperial
Picturesque
“melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin” (Günter Grass, Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, 341)
“The Land / untamable must be made desolate” (Mudie, “The Australian Dream”, 78)
In a remarkably large number of instances, the Australian environment invoked
feelings of melancholy in its European colonisers. The convict artist Thomas Watling
was perhaps the most outspoken exponent of this. In his Letters from an Exile at
Botany-Bay (1794), Watling openly talks about his “deſpondent ſtate of mind”, stating
that “Melancholy’s ſombre ſhadow” was “louring over my ſoul”. He further writes that
when “this gloom frowns dreadful over the viſta of my being, I but too much indulge the
dreary proſpect”.300 Bernard Smith speaks in this context of a “homesickness induced
[by] a melancholy that coloured […] the country”. He locates the reasons for the
colonisers’ melancholy “partly in the material circumstances of the observers;
surrounded by the poverty, hunger and loneliness of the first critical years of settlement,
all of which produced an overpowering longing to return home among all members of
the settlement, convicts and officials alike, and partly in the visual monotony of the
Cumberland Plain in its virgin state”.301 According to this, the melancholic sensibility of
the colonisers was a dialectical product of their psychological constitution on one hand,
and of the actual appearance of the country on the other. Paradoxically, melancholy
therefore affected the perception of the Australian landscape as much as it was a product
of it.
It is important to take note of the polysemous vocabulary Watling uses to describe
his melancholy, because both, “vista of being” and “dreary prospect”, have to be
understood in a spatial sense as much as in a temporal one. Both relate to the painter’s
spatio-temporal position, and that includes not only the view of the landscape
immediately in front of him, but also his expectations of this view, in other words, his 300 Thomas Watling, Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay, to his Aunt in Dumfries… (Penrith, 1794), 1-2;
cf. with McLean, 26; Smith, European Vision, 182. 301 Smith, European Vision, 181.
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anticipations of the colony’s future. At this point, let me refer again to Alexis de
Tocqueville and the insightful observations he made in a situation of roughly similar
circumstances, albeit about a different environment and at a later time. When
Tocqueville visited the western frontier of North America, he also noted a certain
feeling of melancholy. He wrote:
C’est cette idée de destruction, cette arrière-pensée d’un changement prochain et inévitable qui donne, suivant nous, aux solitudes de l’Amérique un caractère si original et une si touchante beauté. On les voit avec un plaisir mélancolique. On se hâte en quelque sorte de les admirer. L’idée de cette grandeur naturelle et sauvage qui va finir se mêle aux magnifiques images que la marche de la civilisation fait naître. On se sent fier d’être homme, et l’on éprouve en même temps je ne sais quel amer regret du pouvoir que Dieu vous a accordé sur la nature. L’âme est agitée par de idées, des senti-mens contraires; mais toutes les impressions qu’elle reçoit sont grandes, et laissent une trace profonde.302
It is this thought of destruction, this ulterior motive (arrière-pensée) of coming, inevitable change, that gives the solitudes of America a character of so unique and touching beauty. One looks at them with melancholy pleasure. One hurries somehow to admire them. The thought of this natural and wild grandeur coming to an end mingles with the splendid visions to which the march of civilisation gives birth. One feels proud of being a man, and at the same time one experiences I don’t know what bitter remorse at the power God granted you over Nature. The soul is stirred by conflicting thoughts and feelings; but every impression received is exalted, and leaves a deep mark.303
What we can gather from this passage is that Tocqueville’s “plaisir mélancolique” is
intimately connected to a particular “arrière-pensée”: it is the hidden, ulterior motive of
a “coming, inevitable change” – by which, it seems safe to say, he means nothing else
but the success of the Civilising Mission – that prospectively steeps the landscape with
melancholy. For Tocqueville the space in front of him is temporally predetermined.
Like a watermark, he sees the euchronia of the Civilising Mission shining through the
wilderness right in front of him. As his painting A Direct North General View of Sydney
Cove demonstrates, Watling had a very similar perception of the Australian
environment. This is all the more striking bearing in mind that Tocqueville, representing
something of a prototype of the modern eco-tourist, was free to come and go as he
pleased, while Watling served a transportation sentence of fourteen years for currency
forging, and therefore could not but “too much indulge the dreary prospect”.
This chapter discusses the representational and ideological issues underpinning the
melancholy sentiment that accompanied the early stages of colonisation in Australia. It
explores the complex interconnections between melancholy, colonialism and utopia,
especially in relation to the aesthetic of the picturesque. It begins by reflecting on the
302 Tocqueville, “Quinze Jours au Désert,” 604. 303 My translation; cf. with Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de
Tocqueville: Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph, 2 vols. (London, 1861); also cf. with McLean, 23-4.
100
origins of the associative relation of melancholy, utopia and colonialism in European
thought, and moves on to examine its significance in early-colonial perceptions of
Australia. After a short survey of the aesthetic of the picturesque, the chapter then
argues that the picturesque in its imperial form responds to colonial melancholy,
negotiating between the euchronic expectations of the Civilising Mission and the
perceived unimprovability of the continent and its inhabitants. This is demonstrated in
the discussion of Thomas Watling’s and Barron Field’s reflections on the (reputed)
unpicturesqueness of the Australian landscape.
Melancholy, Colonialism and Utopia
Melancholy, colonialism, and utopia actually form a dense thematic nexus in
European thought. As McLean points out: “melancholy was a meta-trope of
colonialism: melancholy was the diagnosis, colonialism the medicine, Utopia the body
redeemed”.304 In a tradition stretching from classical antiquity to the Renaissance,
melancholy represented one of the four temperaments or “humours” in Hippocratic
medicine, and was believed to be caused by an excess of black bile. Its symbolic
significance appears to have changed with the arrival of the Age of Discovery. A key
text in this respect is Robert Burton’s colossal The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), an
all-encompassing work of encyclopaedic breath, which in a highly complex layering of
satire, irony and serious scholarly dissertation discusses with exceptional erudition
melancholy in every conceivable form, diagnosing it as the malady of the age. Since a
mutually reinforcing relation was traditionally presumed to exist between the social
complex of idleness, vagrancy and crime on one hand, and the psychological one of
melancholy on the other, Burton argues along with Plato that the melancholic surplus of
the population, “like ſo many Ulcers and Boiles”, has to be “purged” from the “body
politic”.305 To relieve society of these melancholics, Burton suggests colonialism as a
cure: “When a countrey is over-ſtored with people, as a paſture is oft over-laid with
cattle, they had wont in former times to disburden themſelves, by ſending out
colonies”.306 In an ironic turn that carries some melancholy sarcasm itself, Burton
304 McLean, 22. 305 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is, with all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes,
Prognostickes & severall Cures of it… (Oxford, 1638), 57; cf. with McLean, 14-5; 21-2. 306 Burton, 57.
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believes that since it is “a thing ſo difficult, impoſſible, and farre beyond Hercules
labours to be performed” to “correct theſe ſpendthrifts and prodigall ſons, enforce idle
perſons to worke, drive drunkards off the alehouſe, [and] repreſſe theeves”, relief can
only be found in “an Vtopia of mine owne”.307 As to the site of this Utopia, Burton
writes, “if you will needs urge me to it, I am not fully reſolved, it may be in Terra
Auſtralis Incognita, there is roome enough (for of my knowledge neither that hungry
Spaniard, nor Mercurius Britannicus, have yet diſcovered half of it)”.308 What Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy thus testifies to is that at the beginning of the early modern
period, the issues of melancholy, colonialism, and utopia interlock into a discursive unit.
We have already encountered another example of this in Brome’s play The
Antipodes. Here it is the main character Peregrine who, refusing to fulfil his marital and
familial duties and instead idly indulging his Mandevillian fantasies, suffers from
“melancholly”. As discussed in chapter 1, his “humour” is finally cured when Peregrine,
by way of the utopia of Anti-London, is made to act out his proto-imperialist sentiments
in his self-declaration as the king of the Antipodes. In this Brome follows in the
dramaturgic footsteps of his mentor, the playwright Ben Jonson. As McInnis states,
Brome is clearly indebted to Jonson’s humoural comedies, foremost Every Man Out of
His Humour (1599), which in place of conventional plot closures has its ill-humoured
characters cured of their “humoral excess[es]” through a process of “ironically apposite
humiliation”.309 A similar “Jonsonian psychology” clearly underpins Brome’s play,
where Peregrine is humiliated out of his melancholy when, invariably thwarted in his
attempts at reforming his topsy-turvy kingdom, his dreams of colonial conquest and
imperial expansion eventually turn sour. Like Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,
Brome’s play thus further compounds the nexus of melancholy, imperial expansion, and
utopia, specifically in relation to the Antipodes.
Melancholy also featured centre stage in the early phases of the European
exploration of Australia. This period was overwhelmingly dominated by the Dutch, who
inherited the mythological lens of the South Pacific’s Iberian explorers, which was
characterised by the hope of find legendary countries of great wealth. The name of the
Solomon Islands, an archipelago off the coast of New Guinea, is a paradigmatic
307 Burton, 60. 308 Burton, 60. 309 McInnis, 447-8.
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example for this, reflecting the hope of the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña to
have found the biblical Ophir, the mystical source of King Solomon’s gold. Next to
Ophir, such fabled lands as Ptolemy’s Cattigara, Eratosthenes’ golden and silver lands
of Kryse and Argyre, and the biblical Tharshish spurred the European desire for foreign
riches.310 The expectations of the Great Southland were especially gilded by the legends
of Marco Polo’s golden kingdom of Beach, which was believed to lie on the west coast
of Terra Australis.311 So it is that when in 1619 the Dutch navigator Frederik de
Houtman sighted the Australian west coast, he was convinced he “suddenly came across
the Southland of Beach”.312 Similarly, the European discoverer of Tasmania, Antonio
van Diemen, was instructed to carefully examine “Southland of Beach”, since “there are
good reasons to suppose that it contains many excellent and fertile regions”.313 As
mentioned before, Dutch explorers were much inspirited by Quirós’ reports of a
paradisal pleasure garden. Since the more tropical regions of the South Pacific
(particularly Melanesia and the Malay Archipelago) often represented the first
destination of these navigators before they ventured further south, their expectations of
the unknown Southland were set rather high.
Unsurprisingly, the Great Southland could not live up to the Dutch’s unrealistic
expectations of a veritable body utopia. Australia’s first European explorers responded
by bluntly voicing their disappointment in condemnatory reports, declaring Australia a
barren and desolate land inhabited by hostile natives. Jan Carstensz, for example,
described Australia as “an arid and poor tract without any fruit tree or anything useful to
man; it is low and monotonous without mountain or hill, wooded in some places with
bush and little oily trees; there is little fresh water and what there is can only be
collected from pits specially dug”.314 Similarly, Van Diemen reported that the Antipodal
continent provided “nothing profitable, only poor, naked people walking along the
beaches; without rice or many fruits, very poor and bad-tempered people in many
places”.315 Willem de Vlamingh likewise recorded that he had “found little beyond an
310 Cameron, 376. 311 Due to corruption in the transmission process, Polo’s legendary kingdoms were variously spelt
“Veach”, “Reach”, “Lucach”, “Lucac”, and “Locac”. They most likely referred to Cambodia and the Khmer Empire. Cf. with Cameron, 376; Williams, 11; National Library of Australia, Mapping of Our World, 90.
312 Qtd. in Woods, 45. 313 Qtd. in Cameron, 377. 314 Qtd. in Eisler, 75. 315 Qtd. in Günter Schilder, “From Secret to Common Knowledge: The Dutch Discoveries,” in Studies
From Terra Australis to Australia, eds. John Hardy et al. (Canberra: Highland, 1989), 81.
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arid, barren and wild land”.316 The historian Günter Schilder sums up the Dutch
accounts as follows: “Where there is explicit comment, almost all the extant records
refer to sterile strips of rocky or sandy coast, without water, sometimes without
vegetation. Similarly, the accounts speak of wild and savage native inhabitants,
rendered conspicuous by their nakedness, their incomprehensible language, and their
lack of interest in things European”.317 This led Edward Gibbon Wakefield to conclude
that “All the early explorers of Australasia were of the melancholy class. They told of
nothing but horrors – horrid winds, horrid currents, horrid deserts, and more horrid
savages.”318
One can, of course, invoke material factors to give reasons for the melancholic
reactions of the Dutch explorers. In the first place, their negative assessment of
Australia can be explained by geography, for the majority of Dutch explorers visited the
primarily barren grasslands of Australia’s west and north-west coast. Secondly, since
the Dutch voyages were commercial missions at heart, they differed significantly from
later British expeditions. Unlike the Cook voyages, which were supported by the British
Royal Society, Dutch expeditions were not sponsored by a non-commercial
organisation. The geography, flora, fauna and people of Australia were of interest to the
Dutch largely insofar as they provided trading opportunities.319 Jan Pieterszoon Coen,
the first governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, specified that the sailors
should determine “what minerals such as gold, silver, tin, iron, lead, and copper, what
precious stones, pearls, vegetables, animals and fruits, these lands yield and
produce”.320 These instructions, echoing Quirós’ list of colonial desiderata, are directly
referred to when Carstensz writes of Australia’s indigenous people: “they have no
knowledge at all of gold, silver, tin, lead and copper; even nutmeg, cloves and paper
which had been shown to them several times on the voyage made no impression on
them”.321 The Dutch viewed Australia primarily through the prism of their commercial
policy, which, as Cameron explains, was based on trade in “low-bulk, high-value
commodities such as spices and precious minerals”, and on “the exploitation of native
316 Qtd. in Cameron, 373. 317 Schilder, 83. 318 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney: The Principle Town of Australasia (London,
1829), 121-2. 319 Eisler, 103. 320 Qtd. in Cameron, 377. 321 Qtd. in Eisler, 75.
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peoples by treaty with chieftains rather than on colonization and conquest”.322 Hence
one can argue that since New Holland seemed destitute of anything that would appeal to
the Dutch East India Company, it provided no incentive for further exploration, and the
Dutch melancholily turned their back on it.323
But I think that the Dutch explorers’ melancholy also suggests a more general
psychological mechanism of the utopian imagination. It corresponds at least partially to
what Bloch describes with his allegory of the Egyptian Helen: as legend has it,
Menelaus, attempting to return home from the Trojan battlefields with his reconquered
wife, sought navigational advice in Egypt when he suddenly encountered another Helen,
“not the beautiful, all too notorious one whom he has left behind on the ship, but a
different one, and yet the same. And she claims to be his wife – the other one left behind
on the ship is nobody, means nothing, a phantom, a delusion, put into Paris’ arms at the
time by Hera (the protectress of marriage) to fool the Greeks. Ten years of war have
been waged for the sake of this phantom […] But meanwhile she, Helen, the only real
one, carried across the sea by Hermes, has been living here in [Egypt].”324 Bloch draws
on this narrative to explain the paradoxical impossibility of utopian fulfilment. He
argues that fulfilment cannot satisfy the utopian dream that precedes it, because the
utopian dream is infinitely enhanced by the very process of anticipating and hoping for
eventual fulfilment. This is why the Egyptian Helen “does not have the utopian glamour
of the Trojan one in her favour, she did not go along with the longing of the voyage, the
adventures of the campaign, the wishful image of conquest; consequently the Egyptian
reality as such appears to be of lesser dimensions”.325 The result is that even a fulfilment
which is as perfect as humanly possible “still equally brings a melancholy of fulfilment
along with it”.326 To a certain extent, this also applies to the Dutch explorers: utopian
longing had exalted their image of Terra Australis to such a degree that reality could
never possibly live up to it. Once they encountered the actual continent, they could
leave with nothing but the melancholy of fulfilment.
322 Cameron, 378. 323 Schilder, 83-4. 324 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:184. Bloch is quoting Hugo von Hofmannsthal here. Cf. with Jameson,
Archaeologies, 84. 325 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:186. 326 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:193.
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The Unpicturesqueness of Australia
The Dutch explorers, it seems, were of the “melancholy class” because their experiences
of Terra Australis disagreed sharply with their Quirósque expectations of a bountiful
paradise. While Quirós’ dream of a body utopia also reverberated in the visions of
Australia’s British colonisers, their approach was much more governed by the
imperatives of the Civilising Mission. But since melancholy reached near-epidemic
proportions in the early days of the British settlements, it appears that the euchronic
perspective of the Civilising Mission entrenched the thematic nexus of melancholy,
colonialism and utopia even further. Melancholy, it seems, arose specifically when the
Enlightenment ideals professed by the Civilising Mission as its central tenets were in
danger of being undermined. Foremost, the British colonisers’ self-understanding as
benevolent agents of a universal civilising process were seriously undercut by the fact
that the first Australian settlements were founded as penal colonies. The stain of
convictism threatened to degrade the Australian settlements to a disposal site for
society’s outcasts, reducing the visionary advocates of the Enlightenment to jail
wardens. Besides concerns regarding the social make-up of the colonies, the distance of
Australia to the homeland and the exceptional character of its flora and fauna proved
further challenges to the colonisers’ euchronic vision, especially regarding their notion
of land improvement. As the following will show, these melancholy-inducing anxieties
surfaced most prominently in the economic valorisation of land through the aesthetic of
the picturesque.
In the context of Australia, the picturesque represents a highly contested aesthetic.
Baron Field famously declared that Australia is a land “where Nature is prosaic, /
Unpicturesque, unmusical, and where / Nature reflecting Art is not yet born”.327 While
Field’s condemnation of Australia as unpicturesque may suggest that he deems
picturesque aesthetic to be hopelessly inadequate as a means of depicting and
understanding the Australian landscape, I would like to argue that on a deeper,
collective level his comments reflect, in fact, an acute anxiety directly related to the
euchronic narrative of Civilising Mission. As such, they signify less the weary
resignation and spiteful disapproval of a conservative aestheticist faced with an
327 Barron Field, Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales… (London, 1825), 496.
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environment that disappoints his acquired European taste, than they betoken a
considerable degree of imperial agency.
Even though Field and Watling are commonly cited as the strongest proponents of
the notion that Australia is quintessentially unpicturesque,328 I would like to take an
even earlier remark by Watkin Tench as the starting point of the discussion. Similar to
the accounts of the First Fleet’s disembarkation given by Governor Phillip and David
Collins (which were discussed in the previous chapter), Tench also underscores in his
description of the same event the emergence of order out of chaos. But unlike his
military superiors, Tench’s description displays a more reflective attitude, and,
significant for our present concern, involves the aesthetic of the picturesque:
The landing of a part of the marines and convicts took place the next day, and on the following, the remainder was diſembarked. Buſineſs now ſat on every brow, and the ſcene, to an indifferent ſpectator at leiſure to contemplate it, would have been highly pictureſque and amuſing. In one place, a party cutting down the woods; a ſecond, ſetting up a blackſmith’s forge, a third, dragging along a load of ſtones or proviſions; here an officer pitching his marquee, with a detachment of troops parading on one ſide of him, and a cook’s fire blazing up on the other. Through the unwearied diligence of thoſe at the head of the different departments, regularity was, however, ſoon introduced, and, as far as the unſettled ſtate of matters would allow, confuſion gave place to ſyſtem.329
At first sight Tench’s description may seem just another retelling of the same episode
we already saw explicated in Phillip’s and Collin’s accounts, and which can be
identified as the prelude to the imperial vision. But while the passage quoted here
certainly ties neatly into the same foundation narrative, it provides us with an insight
denied by the descriptions of Tench’s superiors, because Tench acknowledges that the
scene of disembarkation “would have been highly picturesque” to “an indifferent
spectator”. The use of the conditional perfect is of critical importance here, for what
Tench thereby indicates is that he himself was not in a position to contemplate the scene
in this way, precisely for the reason that he was involved in the various activities
described. One could speculate whether Collins or (more likely) Phillip would have
been “at leisure to contemplate” how the First Fleet disembarked and began with the
first steps of colonisation – but this would be beside the point, which is that the
328 See e.g. Smith, European Vision, 238-9. 329 Tench, Narrative, 60.
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perspective of the “contemplative” spectator is hypothetical.330 As Tench concedes, it is
only from this imaginary, utopic viewpoint that the present events of disembarkation
could be perceived as picturesque, and even then only retrospectively. What Tench’s
remarks on this very first act of settlement indicate is that in the context of early
colonial Australia, the aesthetic of the picturesque has a peculiarly spatio-temporal
dimension to it. Moreover, since it relies on the anticipation of an “indifferent spectator
at leisure”, and relates to the civilising “business” of the colonisers and “the wild
appearance” of the “savage coast”, the picturesque appears to be inescapably entangled
with the Civilising Mission.
The Aesthetic of the Picturesque
Before we can explore this nexus further, some historical and theoretical background
to the aesthetic of the picturesque needs to be provided. In the first place, it is important
to note that the picturesque, irrespective of later academic theorisations, was a
widespread and immensely popular, but largely undefined aesthetic category in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century. The picturesque was applied in a diversity of
domains, such as landscape painting, gardening, and travel journalism. One of its
foremost cultural champions, Uvedale Price, remarked: “There are few words whose
meaning has been less accurately determined than that of the word picturesque”.331
Reaching its apex in the 1790s, the “cult of the picturesque” had entered conversational
language and popular culture, yet it encompassed such a broad range of practices that
the word picturesque seemed “so ill-defined as to be virtually meaningless”.332
Importantly, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the discourse of the
picturesque was not supported by a consistent theoretical foundation since the earliest
aesthetic treatises on the subject were only just being produced. It is problematic,
therefore, to speak of the picturesque as an aesthetic coherent throughout all of its
different forms of uses.333 Nevertheless, within the context of early-colonial Australia it
seems that we can attribute a specific cultural function to the picturesque. 330 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, xv. 331 Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful…
(London, 1794), 34. 332 Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (London:
Thames, 1987), 57; 84; Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 1.
333 Copley and Garside, 2-3; also 5.
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At its core, the picturesque represents a descriptive but also inherently evaluative
category of landscape aesthetics. Despite its complexity, it seems safe to say that some
common denominators of its aesthetic language are: irregularity, roughness and
contrast.334 In an attempt to describe how to produce a picturesque effect, William
Gilpin, one of the major theorisers of the picturesque, instructs to “Turn the lawn into a
piece of broken ground: plant rugged oaks inſtead of flowering ſhrubs: break the edges
of a walk: give it the rudeneſs of a road: mark it with wheel-tracks; and ſcatter around a
few ſtones, and bruſhwood; in a word, inſtead of making the whole ſmooth, make it
rough; and you make it also pictureſque”.335 While Gilpin attributes the picturesqueness
of a landscape to the contrast of rough and smooth spaces, he also emphasises that the
picturesque involves artistic intervention. The picturesque, consequently, functioned not
only as a category to describe landscape scenery (either in reality or in its pictorial
representation), but also as a prescriptive category that dictated what an ideal landscape
should look like. As a result, the aesthetic of the picturesque is concerned with
perception as much as production.
Gilpin and other theorists of the picturesque persistently emphasise the aesthetic’s
concern with nature in its raw, unspoiled state. But what should be kept in mind is that
the pristine landscape they are referring to represents for the most part nothing else but
the pre-enclosure landscapes of Great Britain. The notion, however, that Britain’s rural
areas before the widespread implementation of the Enclosure Acts in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries were pristine or more “natural” is ill-conceived. In fact, neither
the pre-enclosure landscape of Great Britain nor the pre-invasion landscape of Australia
were “natural” in the sense of being unspoilt by human interference, because the latter
was defined by indigenous fire-stick farming practices just as much as the former by
European agriculture.
However, what the picturesque’s obsession with unspoiled nature highlights is the
aesthetic’s relation to the impacts of industrialism and the Agrarian Revolution upon the
natural environment and social structure of rural Britain. Widespread enclosure of
common lands and technological innovations dramatically changed the English
countryside in the late eighteenth century. With its rejection of industrial and urban
334 Bermingham, 63-5; also Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 62-3. 335 William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching
Landscape… (London, 1792), 8.
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scenes, the picturesque addressed this socio-environmental shift. As art historian Ann
Bermingham explains: “Coming at the height of the agricultural transformation of the
countryside, the picturesque was suited to express the complexity of the historical
moment. In its celebration of the irregular, preenclosed landscape, the picturesque
harkened back nostalgically to an old order of rural paternalism. In its portrayal of
dilapidation and ruin, the picturesque sentimentalized the loss of this old order”.336
Accordingly, since the irregular and rough landscape invoked by the picturesque
symbolically stands for feudal Britain, the picturesque expresses a nostalgic yearning
for this lost societal economy. Bermingham describes this “socioaesthetic character of
the picturesque” as follows:
Although the picturesque celebrated the old order – by depicting a pastoral, preenclosed landscape – some of its features – the class snobbery, the distancing of the spectator from the picturesque object, and the aestheticization of rural poverty – suggest that at a deeper level the picturesque endorsed the results of agricultural industrialization. […] Moreover, the picturesque, like the political debates of the period about the problem of rural poverty, mystified the agency of social change so that fate, and not the economic decisions of the landowning classes, seemed responsible. In this respect, the picturesque represented an attempt to wipe out the fact of enclosure and to minimize its consequences.337
The fact that the development of modern land use practices provides the specific socio-
historic background of the picturesque is critical to understanding the aesthetic’s
cultural significance and its ideological functioning as an endorsement of land enclosure
and private property laws.338
The Imperial Picturesque
In its application to European landscapes, the picturesque evoked a nostalgia for
feudal times. However, its application to Australian landscapes could not capitalise on a
similar historical sentimentality, especially since the eutopic as well as euchronic
conception of Australia denied the continent a form of history, relegating the “savage
coast” to an ahistoric temporal plane. Consequently, the picturesque’s reference to an
agricultural and social landscape that was rapidly disappearing in Great Britain must
336 Bermingham, 70. 337 Bermingham, 75. 338 Graham, 85-6.
110
have had a different meaning in the colonial context of Australia. While the picturesque
in its original setting exhibits a backward-looking, to a certain extent elegiac
disposition, it develops a different spatio-temporal logic in its imperial form of
expression. The following comments made by travel author William Howitt during his
tour through the Yarra Valley and surroundings provide great insight into this: Howitt
consistently highlights the picturesque aspects of the scenery, stressing how much the
Victorian landscape reminds him of a “gentleman’s park”. Inevitably, he thus projects
the traditional social landscape of Great Britain onto Australia: “Winding amid this
scenery, and the solemn woods hanging on picturesque slopes along its course, it was
fine enough for an English nobleman to be proud of in such a park”.339 Yet while in the
British context such a picturesque landscape would mean the celebration of pre-
enclosure landscape and its social structure, the reverse seems to be the case in
Australia:
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 finished appointments, rolling downward to the road. But a moment’s reflection reminds you that all is solitary wilderness; that there is no road in reality; and that such houses and carriages lie, perhaps, hundred 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.340
What can be drawn from this is that the imperial form of the picturesque does not so
much express a nostalgia for a lost past as it expresses a longing for an anticipated
future. This imperial logic of the picturesque is characterised by a heightened,
teleological sense of time and space. Its reading of the colonial landscape for signs of
cultivation indexes a certain futurity, a civilised future to come. In its colonial context,
the picturesque, contracting and telescoping time, produces a pictorial representation of
the euchronic narrative of Empire. The point to be taken from this is that the imperial
picturesque represents not merely an uninspired attempt at shoehorning an exotic
environment into a conventional model of European aesthetics; instead, it is intricately
intertwined with the colonisers’ vision of the future and their very self-conception as
benign agents of the Civilising Mission.
339 William Howitt, Land, Labor and Gold: or, Two Years in Victoria…, vol. 1 (Boston, 1855), 79. 340 Howitt, 82; cf. with Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 243-4.
111
Howitt’s remark furthermore reveals the profound anxieties that lie at the core of the
imperial picturesque. The key words to be noted here are “waste wood” and “unfenced
[…] stations”, both of which show deep connections to the cultural nexus that is
symptomatically embodied by the picturesque. Let us start with “waste wood”. As will
become apparent shortly, waste wood or wasteland is associated with a conceptual chain
that links it with the centrepiece of imperial ideology, the legal fantasy of terra nullius,
via Lockean conceptions of private property. First of all, Howitt’s mentioning of
wasteland is directly linked to the ideologeme of land improvement, which (as
discussed in the previous chapter) 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 represents, moreover, 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”.341 As mentioned before, the “gentleman’s park” Howitt is
describing was not in a “state of nature”, but represented the type of hunting ground
produced by indigenous fire-stick farming. Wasteland thus becomes a site of
dispossession: by displacing the indigenous labour that produced these “gentleman’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”.342
Connecting the Enlightenment notion of improvement to a Lockean conception of
property, wasteland played a central role in supporting the euchronic vision of the
Civilising Mission. But the status of wasteland was ambivalent, and could cut both
ways. Not only did it represent a visual legitimation of imperial ideology, but as an
341 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government… (London, 1690), II. 5. 27., pp. 25-64. 342 Graham, 95.
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emblem of the progress of the Civilising Mission, it was, more importantly, a constant
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”.343 Locke’s comment on the enclosure of private
property leads to the next key word from Howitt’s comment: his reference to “wholly
unfenced sheep and cattle-stations” reveals his concerns about the fact that the colonial
estates he visited were not marked off from the surrounding wastelands through
enclosures – which, following Locke’s definition, threatened their status as private
properties. This tension also defined the picturesque in its original European setting:
picturesque landscape denoted the transitional stage in which common lands were
enclosed into private properties. But in the Australian context, this tension was
exacerbated because the creation of private property ultimately represented the aim of
the colonising project, and thus the foundation of the colonisers’ self-conception as
benign agents of the Civilising Mission. The ambiguity between improved and
unimproved land therefore put immediate pressure on the British empire’s vision of a
benign Civilising Mission.
Thomas Watling and the Unimprovability of the Landscape
What Howitt’s comments demonstrate is that the imperial picturesque emerges on
the faultline between the colonisers’ euchronic visions and their frustration with the
unimproved state of the Australian landscape. As such, the picturesque appears to
encapsulate the thematic nexus of melancholy, colonialism and utopia. This becomes
particularly evident in the contention that Australia’s wilderness is monotonous and
gives rise to melancholy, which features so frequently among early European responses
to the Australian landscape. These dismissive comments about the monotony of
Australian scenery are all the more interesting in light of the fact that the sites in
question attracted praise from the European colonisers. Watkin Tench, for example,
who was perhaps the most astute observer of the First Fleet, wrote: “The general face of
343 Locke, II. 5. 32, p. 250.
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the country is certainly pleaſing, being diverſified with gentle aſcents, and little winding
vallies, covered for the moſt part with large ſpreading trees, which afford a ſucceſſion of
leaves in all ſeaſons. In thoſe places where trees are ſcarce, a variety of flowering ſhrubs
abound, moſt of them entirely new to an European, and ſurpaſſing in beauty, fragrance,
and number, all I ever ſaw in an uncultivated ſtate”.344
Tench’s last reference to “an uncultivated state” is particularly telling given that
Australia’s colonisers usually described only those landscapes as picturesque in which
unimproved “wilderness” alternated with stretches of what represented, or appeared to
represent, improved land. William Charles Wentworth, for instance, admits that it is the
artificial intervention of the British colonisers that dispersed melancholy and determined
the “picturesque and grand” character of the area around Port Jackson: “If you
afterwards suddenly face about to the westward, you see before you one vast forest,
uninterrupted except by the cultivated openings which have been made by the axe on
the summits of some of the loftiest hills, and which tend considerably to diminish those
melancholy sensations its gloomy monotony would otherwise inspire”.345 For the most
part, the “cultivated openings” that interrupted the “gloomy” melancholy of the
Australian wilderness were sites improved by the Europeans themselves, but in some
cases, such as the frequently encountered landscapes that reminded Europeans of
“gentleman’s parks”, it referred to the traditional hunting ground patterns which
indigenous people created and maintained through fire-stick farming.346 What should
become apparent from this is that the supposed monotony of the Australian wilderness,
and the melancholy it invoked, were intricately linked to the improvement of land, and
therefore to the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission. In contrast to the
“melancholy of fulfilment” evoked by the Quirósque body utopia, the imperial
euchronia seems to produce a “melancholy of unfulfilment”.
It is frequently argued that the colonisers’ dissatisfaction with Australian landscape
stemmed from the fact that the “non-descript” flora and fauna of Australia resisted
European aesthetics. Ross Gibson, for instance, suggests that Thomas Watling
experienced something close to an aesthetic crisis because “the imported European
system of meaning” failed to “render New South Wales meaningful to [a] European
344 Tench, Narrative, 70. 345 William Charles Wentworth, A Statistical Account of the British Settlements in Australasia… vol. 1
(London, 1824), 53-4. 346 For an in-depth discussion on this topic, see Gammage.
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audience”.347 Watling’s remark that in Australia, the “landſcape painter, may in vain
ſeek here for that beauty which ariſes from happy-oppoſed off-ſcapes” would seem to
substantiate this.348 But given the fact that Watling nonetheless succeeded to produce
picturesque works (e.g. his painting View of Sydney Cove), it appears that his frustration
with the Australian environment was less an aesthetic one, especially in the sense that
his aesthetic vocabulary failed to assign meaning to the continent’s “austral
normlessness”.349 Watling, in fact, seems to be keenly aware of the picturesque
potential of Australia. Take for instance the following passage, in which he
acknowledges the wealth of picturesque material New South Wales placed at his
disposal: “I however confeſs, that were I to ſelect and combine, I might avoid that
ſameneſs, and find engaging employment. Trees wreathing their old fantaſtic roots on
high; diſſimilar in tint and foliage; cumbent, upright, fallen, or ſhattered by lightning,
may be found at every ſtep; whilſt ſympathetic glooms of twilight glimmering groves,
and wildeſt nature lulled in ſound repoſe, might much ſnspire the ſoul — all this I
confeſs”.350 But as he admits, this potential can only be realised if the monotonous
“sameness” of Australia has been replaced by “happy-opposed off-scapes” – in other
words, if unimproved landscape has been interspersed with stretches of cultivated land.
In this, the picturesque practice of composing a landscape by combining different
objects and views mirrors the colonial “improvement” of the actual landscape through
European agriculture.
Thinking along these lines we realise that Watling’s frustration with New South
Wales was not based on aesthetic short-comings so much as economic ones. This can be
seen in the following passage, dated 13 December 1791, in which he decries not the
aesthetic appearance of the country, but its resistance to the colonisers’ first agricultural
efforts:
The climate is an extremely ſultry one, eſpecially in ſummer; and yet paradoxical as it may appear, it is in no wiſe propitious for tropical vegetation. A few European culinary vegetables grow, but never arrive to their priſtine maturity, and when re-tranſplanted dwindle unto nothing. — The face of the country is deceitful; having every appearance of fertility; and yet productive of no one article in itſelf fit for the ſupport of mankind.
347 Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), 41; 35. 348 Watling, 9. 349 Gibson, South, 23. 350 Watling, 9.
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The flattering appearance of nature may be offered as the beſt apology for thoſe miſtaken eulogiums [sic] laviſhed by a late eminent circumnavigator upon this place. Perhaps nothing can ſurpaſs the circumambient windings, and romantic banks of a narrow arm of the ſea that leads from this to Parramatta, another ſettlement about fourteen miles off. The Poet may there deſcry numberleſs beauties; nor can there be fitter haunts for his imagination. The elyſian ſcenery of a Telemachus;— the secret receſſes for a Thomſon’s musidora;— arcadian ſhades, or claſſic bowers, preſent themſelves at every winding to the raviſhed eye. — Overhead the moſt groteſque foliage yields a ſhade, where cooling zephyrs breathe every perfume. Mangrove avenues, and pictureſque rocks, entwined with non-deſcript flowers:— In ſhort, were the benefits in the leaſt equal to the ſpecious external, this country need hardly give place to any other on earth.351
It needs to be emphasised that Watling’s description of Australian foliage as
“grotesque” is not necessarily meant as a negative comment.352 As the OED confirms,
in the second half of the eighteenth century “grotesque” was still used to refer to
“picturesquely irregular” landscapes; and the context here makes it much more plausible
to read grotesque as meaning “in the style of a ‘grotto’”, that is “a cave or cavern, esp.
one which is picturesque”, instead of its contemporary meaning of being
“[c]haracterized by distortion or unnatural combinations”. The passage demonstrates
that Watling was less concerned about New South Wales’ aesthetic qualities – which he
actually found quite pleasing at times – than about the precarious and dismal situation
of the fledgling settlement. Watling’s description does not reflect an aesthetic
dissatisfaction, but gives an insight into the existential angst which characterised the
first years of the Port Jackson settlement.353
This existential angst is hardly surprising given the fact that the first years of the
settlement were marked by famine and hardship. Australia’s European colonisers had to
learn the hard way that the Australian environment, its soil quality, rainfall and seasonal
patterns, differed drastically from the arable and well-watered lands of Great Britain, so
that the early agrarian history of New South Wales was characterised by painful trial
and error, and a re-education of the Europeans’ agricultural knowledge was necessary
before their utopian expectations could be met.354 Commenting on the original plan that
the penal colony should become self-sufficient in about two years, Phillip wrote: “No
351 Watling, 7-8. 352 Cf. with Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 51. 353 Cf. with McLean, 26. 354 Gascoigne, 71.
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country offers less assistance to the first settlers than this does, nor do I think that any
country could be more disadvantageously placed with respect to support from the
mother country, on which for a few years we must entirely depend”.355 Similarly, the
First Fleet’s Surgeon-General John White complained in a letter dated 17 April 1790
about the “the ingratitude and extreme poverty of the ſoil and country at large”, and
dismissed Australia as “a country and place ſo forbidden and ſo hateful, as only to merit
execrations and curſes”.356 The frustration of the colonisers arises from the fact that the
“flattering appearance” of Australian nature obscures the “extreme poverty of the soil”.
As becomes evident in Watling’s paintings and writings, the picturesque marks
precisely this rupture between the country’s outward appearance and its anticipated
economic outcome. This is also demonstrated in the observations James Tuckey made
on the infant state of future Melbourne: “The face of the country bordering on [Port
Phillip] is beautifully picturesque, swelling into gentle elevations of the brighest [sic]
verdure, and dotted with trees, as if planted by the hand of taste, while the ground is
covered with a profusion of flowers of every colour; in short, the external appearance of
the country flattered us into the most delusive dreams of fruitfulness and plenty”.357 The
vision of a Quirósque body utopia and the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission
are both simultaneously frustrated here.
Accordingly, the melancholy disposition of the British colonisers was less the result
of an aesthetic crisis, but derived rather from the frustrating experience that the aesthetic
value of Australia could not be translated into economic benefit. As Watling’s View of
Sydney Cove makes clear, the aesthetic of the picturesque could very plausibly render
the Australian environment meaningful to the Europeans, reconciling the colonisers’
dreamscape with the actual landscape of New South Wales. As Carter argues: “To paint
a colonial landscape of smiling fields, of hazed hill heads and glinting brooks was not to
represent the lie of the land but to articulate the logic of a cultural dream and its spatial
mise-en-scene”.358 Yet the problem was precisely this euchronic overdetermination of
Australia, because it highlighted the rift between the colonisers’ expectations and the
economic precariousness of their situation. Early-colonial melancholy was the product 355 Qtd. in A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great
Britain and Ireland to Australia and other parts of the British Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1977), 60.
356 [John] White, Letter dated April 17, 1790, The Scots Magazine, January 1791, 39. 357 James Hingston Tuckey, An Account of a Voyage to Establish a Colony at Port Philip in Bass’s
Strait… (London, 1805), 157-58. 358 Qtd. in McLean, 158.
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of this clash of the euchronic vision of the Civilising Mission with New South Wales’
uncompliant physical reality and the harsh material situation of early settlement. What
should be extrapolated from Watling’s predicament, then, is this: behind the aesthetic of
the picturesque lurks the anxiety about potential collapse, in the face of an environment
unyielding to European attempts of improvement, of the colonisers’ euchronic dream
and, in consequence, of their ideological self-conception as Enlightened members of the
Civilising Mission. Both utopia and ideology are simultaneously undermined by reality
here.
Barron Field and the Unpicturesqueness of Australia
Barron Field represents perhaps the strongest proponent of the idea that the
Australian landscape is quintessentially unpicturesque. A key text in this regard are the
botanical musings at the beginning of his Journal of an Excursion across the Blue
Mountains, in which Field openly discusses the question whether the
“unpicturesqueness” of Australian vegetation is due to the “monotony of their leaf”.359
He comes to the conclusion that the lack of seasons and deciduous trees in Australia
poses a fundamental problem for its artistic significance:
Be this as it may, no tree, to my taste, can be beautiful that is not deciduous. What can a painter do with one cold olive-green? There is a dry harshness about the perennial leaf, that does not savour of humanity in my eyes. There is no flesh and blood in it: it is not of us, and is nothing to us. Dryden says of the laurel,
From winter winds it suffers no decay; For ever fresh and fair, and every month is May.
Now it may be the fault of the cold climate in which I was bred, but this is just what I complain of in an evergreen. “For ever fresh” is a contradiction in terms; what is “for ever fair” is never fair; and without January, in my mind, there can be no May. All the dearest allegories of human life are bound up in the infant and slender green of spring, the dark redundancy of summer, and the sere and yellow leaf of autumn. These are as essential to the poet as emblems, as they are to the painter as picturesque objects; and the common consent and immemorial custom of European poetry have made the change of seasons, and its effect upon vegetation, a part, as it were, of our very nature. I can therefore hold no fellowship with Australian
359 Field, 434.
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foliage, but will cleave to the British oak through all the bareness of winter.360
Field’s botanical comments here need to be interpreted in the broader context in which
they appear. First of all it is significant that Field’s remarks on the “unpicturesqueness”
of Australia occur at the very beginning of his travel journal, when his party had not yet
left the Cumberland plains, because once they cross the Blue Mountains and arrive at
the Bathurst plains, Field suddenly begins to talk of “delightful botanical and
picturesque” sights. The prospect of the country beyond the Blue Mountains arouses
such enthusiasm in him that he breaks into an almost Quirósque enthusiasm, declaring:
“This is truly a land flowing with milk and honey”.361 Describing the “winding banks of
the Macquarie”, Field writes:
I could hardly believe I was travelling in New Holland this day; so different – so English – is the character of the scenery – downs, meadows and streams in the flat – no side scenes of eucalyptus […] You may see as far as the eye can reach. Stockmen, cattle and sheep occasionally form your horizon, as in Old Holland – a Paul Potter or Cuyp effect rare in New Holland. […] The smoke of the little village of Bathurst is seen for miles off, which that of no other town in Australia is. These things may seem trifling to an English reader; but by an American or Australian, accustomed to travel through the eternal valley of the shadow of monotonous woods, the charm of emerging into any thing like European scenery will be duly appreciated.362
It is worth mentioning that Field here shifts into the next utopian paradigm, grafting
pastoral notions onto the aesthetic of the picturesque. What is more, he draws
immediate comparisons between Australia and Britain, and so appears to collapse the
binary of ecumene and anti-ecumene. But the key point to note is that Field admits that
it is the presence of improved land that breaks the unpicturesqueness of “monotonous
woods”. Just like Watling, his understanding of the picturesque is firmly underpinned
by an economic valorisation of the landscape.
Field’s dissatisfaction with Australian nature and his condemnation of it as
unpicturesque has to be understood as his subjective reaction to the local geography of
the Cumberland plains and the Port Jackson area. His celebration of the Bathurst district
testifies to the importance the crossing of the Blue Mountains had for the early
360 Field, 423-4. 361 Field, 445. 362 Field, 443.
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settlement. Field’s Journal reflects the marked contrast between, as Bernard Smith
describes it, the arid “brushlands of the Cumberland Plain and the barren ridges of the
Blue Mountains” on one hand, and the “grassy, almost treeless plains of the Bathurst
district” on the other.363 The opening of the Bathurst plains to the colonisers
tremendously affected their perception of Australia. For one thing, the country beyond
the Blue Mountains provided far more profitable opportunities for agricultural
industries.364 For another, the expansion of the British settlement past the Blue
Mountains finally broke the fetters that constrained the colony’s growth to the Sydney
basin; as Dixon puts it, “the rising empire [was] no longer circumscribed by natural
boundaries”.365 The opening of the Bathurst plains led to a new economic as well as
aesthetic prospect, and finally provided the moving frontier along which the euchronic
narrative of Civilising Mission could unfold. In this sense, Field’s comments about
“unpicturesqueness” mark those moments in which the presence of unimprovable
landscape problematises his self-conception as a member of the British Civilising
Mission. As Ashcroft writes, what Field objected to was land that “would not accede to
the expectations of British sensibilities, that is, it looked nothing like England. […]
Unless the place was fenced, farmed and domesticated, there was nothing to prevent the
sense of dissonance and displacement.”366
Field’s botanical comments on the “unpicturesqueness” of Australia also reflect
another deeply ingrained anxiety about the colony’s future. As I would like to suggest,
there is more to Field’s insistence on the significance of seasonal change than just
abstract poetic reasoning. Instead, his botanical musings have to be read as an allegory –
an allegory in which Field tries to come to terms with the second fundamental threat to
the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission: the fact that the British settlement,
which was supposed to bring civilisation to the “savage shores” of Australia, was a
penal colony. This becomes more tangible in the following passage, which follows
immediately after Field’s thoughts on Australian evergreens:
New Holland (says Sir James Smith) seems no very beautiful or picturesque country, such as is likely to form, or to inspire, a poet. Indeed the dregs of the community, which we have poured upon its shores, must probably
363 Smith, European Vision, 242. 364 Noel G. Butlin, Forming a Colonial Economy: Australia 1810-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1994), 206. 365 Dixon, Course of Empire, 123. 366 Ashcroft, “Introduction,” 218.
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subside and purge themselves, before any thing like a poet, or a disinterested lover of nature, can arise from so foul a source. There seems, however, to be no transition of seasons in the climate itself, to excite hope, or to expand the heart and fancy.
Field is quoting here directly from the entry on botany in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The point I want to draw attention to is how in this passage topics as disparate as botany
and penal transportation are yoked together so as to form an almost coherent subject
matter. There is a famous precedent to this odd coupling: Francis Bacon’s “Of
Plantations” (1625). As an aside, it is worth noting that Bacon, author of the literary
utopia Nova Atlantis, further corroborates the early-modern conjunction of colonialism
and utopia. In “Of Plantations”, an essay on colonisation, Bacon equates not only the act
of planting with settling, but also substitutes plants with settlers. Take for instance the
following line: “I like a Plantation in a Pure Soile; that is, where People are not
Displanted, to the end, to Plant in Others”.367 In Bacon’s use of language the semantic
fields of vegetation and colonisation are unified.
Bacon also directly comments on the use of convicts for colonisation. And it is
precisely the following passage, in which he condemns penal transportation as an
inappropriate means of “planting” a new colony, that Field quotes towards the end of
his Journal:
It is a Shamefull and Unblessed Thing, to take the Scumme of People, and Wicked Condemned Men, to be the People with whom you Plant: And not only so, but it spoileth the Plantation; For they will ever live like Rogues, and not fall to worke, but be Lazie, and doe Mischiefe, and spend Victuals, and be quickly weary, and then Certifie over to their country, to the Discredit of the Plantation.368
Field believes together with Bacon that “Convict transportation is but a bad system of
colonization”.369 In his Journal Field makes a strong plea for new emigration policies:
“If government will encourage a better system of colonization, New Holland will soon
be a happy and thriving province”.370 But he also is aware of the fact that “better means
of reformation”371 are necessary to advance the rehabilitation of the existing convict
population. How important the question of convict rehabilitation was can be gathered 367 Francis Bacon, “Of Plantations. 1625”, The English Literatures of America: 1500-1800, eds. Myra
Jehlen et al. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 97. 368 Bacon, 97; see Field, 457-8. 369 Field, 457. 370 Field, 458. 371 Field, 458.
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from the following comment made by David Collins on the convicts of the First Fleet:
“That theſe did not bring with them ‘Minds not to be changed by time or place,’ was
fervently to have been wiſhed; and if it were poſſible, that on taking poſſeſſion of Nature,
as we had thus done, in her ſimpleſt, pureſt garb, we might not ſully that purity by the
introduction of vice, profaneneſs, and immorality”.372 What Collins’ remark makes clear
is that the moral rehabilitation of the convicts, forming the conceptual flipside of the
coin of improvement, is intricately entangled with the agricultural reorganisation of the
land. Within the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission, agricultural and moral
improvement of Australia go hand in hand. As the following comment by Reverend
Sydney Smith indicates, the melancholy-inducing monotony of Australia’s nature was
mirrored by the monotony of the “depraved” nature of the penal colony’s main
inhabitants: “The hiſtory of the colony is at preſent, however, in its leaſt interesting ſtate,
on account of depraved inhabitants, whoſe crimes and irregularities give a monotony to
the narrative, which it cannot loſe, till the reſpectable part of the community come to
bear a greater proportion to the criminal”.373 In this way, the question of convict
rehabilitation strikes directly at the foundation of the imperial vision for the colony.
Field seems to be keenly aware of the challenge the convict question poses to the
euchronic vision of the colony’s “civilised” future. Blending moral improvement with
agricultural labour, he sees the answer in the pastoral potential of the open and grassy
plains of the Bathurst district: “The evils and expense of the transportation-system
would certainly be lessened, by placing the convicts more in the service of farming and
grazing settlers, out of the reach of the temptations and evil communications of great
towns, the establishment of which was too much the policy of the late governor. The
solitary life of the shepherd, or a stock-man, would gradually soften the heart of the
most hardened convict”.374 Turning against Governor Macquarie, the champion of the
municipal vision, Field’s suggests that solitary pastoral work could “subside and purge”
the “foul source” on which the Australian colonies were founded. In this, Field already
points towards the utopian paradigm that would eventually resolve the anxieties over
Australia’s unimprovability, and which will be the central concern of the next chapter.
372 Collins, 5; cf. with Dixon, Course of Empire, 20. 373 [Sydney Smith], review of Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, by David Collins,
Edinburgh Review, April 1803, 33. 374 Field, 458.
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Summing up the discussion so far, we have seen that Bacon’s discourse on
colonisation and its blending of botanical and colonial vocabulary forms a major
background to Field’s Journal, and that the Journal puts the issue of convictism at the
centre of its political agenda. This casts fresh light on the botanical musings at the
beginning of the Journal, particularly since they, too, lead up to the convict question.
Given this broader context, Field’s comments about the “change of seasons, and its
effect upon vegetation” can reasonably be understood as an allegorical expression of the
problem of convict rehabilitation. Against the background of penal transportation and
colonialism, the meaning of seasonal change as “the dearest allegories of human life”
then takes on new significance: if the change of seasons emblematically stands for the
biological, and more importantly, the moral development of the colony, then the
evergreen perennial represents stagnation in this process. It is in this sense, as an
allegory for moral stagnation, that the perennial vegetation of Australia reflects on a
symbolic plane the colonisers’ fear that the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission
is ultimately doomed to failure because of its tainted beginnings as a penal colony.
***
As Watling and Field have demonstrated, a dissatisfaction with the
“unpicturesqueness” of Australia manifested itself most forcefully when the unyielding
Australian environment belied the colonisers’ euchronic expectations of a prosperous
colony. Contradicting the utopian fantasies of both the Quirósque body utopia and the
euchronia of the Civilising Mission, the felt unimprovability of the country gave rise to
sentiments of melancholy. Particularly the discussion of Field’s Journal showed that the
picturesque not only masks the colonisers’ frustration over the difficulties to “improve”
the Australian landscape, but that it also addresses, in an allegorical mode, the
colonisers’ anxieties about the convict population’s moral improvement. As such, the
picturesque marks the pressure points of the euchronic narrative of the Civilising
Mission, specifically those critical moments in which the ideologeme of improvement,
symbolically linking the discourses of Empire and Enlightenment, was in danger of not
being supportable any more. This blunt negation of the Civilising Mission meant that its
mapping onto reality was denied: facing an unyielding physical environment and the
harsh material situation of the distant colony, the colonisers saw their vision of a
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colonial euchronia severely undermined, which inhibited it to function as an ideological
fantasy structuring social reality. Without a functioning ideology, nothing less than the
colonisers’ self-conception as benign agents of the Civilising Mission was at stake,
leaving the Europeans exposed to feelings of estrangement and Unheimlichkeit in the
Antipodal environment.
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CHAPTER 5 – The Dickensian Pastoral: Arcadian Visions of
Australia
It was only after 1820 that the colonisation of Australia began in earnest. The first
step was Governor Macquarie’s relaxing of the restrictions on settlement beyond the
Sydney basin, followed by the official approval to the pastoral use of inland plains
given by the Secretary of the State for the Colonies.375 With lusher regions such as the
Hunter Valley becoming available, the colonial frontier was rapidly expanding, leading
to a veritable “squatting rush” as settlers spread out far and wide over the country.376 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.377 This geographic expansion had
two interrelated effects: in the first place, it significantly stimulated the colonial
economy. In the decades after 1820 the production of wool was exploding, 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.378 But with its population
spreading out more widely and its economy growing quickly, Australia was now facing
a labour shortage.
This new socio-economic outlook induced a shift in the European representations of
Australia. It demanded a much more elaborate vision of the future than the rather basic
vision of a city utopia, which we saw articulated by Governor Macquarie and his
predecessors. The following literary anecdote or vignette from the Victorian weekly
Household Words demonstrates this paradigm shift remarkably well. Describing his
arrival at Port Jackson, the narrator of the vignette at first focuses, much like early-
colonial visionaries, on the infrastructure of Sydney: he is amazed by the fleet of cargo
and commercial vessels in the port (“Every moment we passed some tall merchantship
375 Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (Freemantle, WA:
Freemantle P, 2007), 39. 376 Geoffrey Bolton, “The Spread of Colonization,” in Studies from Terra Australis to Australia, eds.
John Hardy et al. (Canberra: Highland, 1989), 189; Smith, European Vision, 234; Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 11.
377 Jane Lennon and Michael Pearson, Pastoral Australia: Fortunes, Failures & Hard Yakka. A Historical Overview 1788-1967 (Melbourne: CSIRO, 2010), 31.
378 Lennon and Pearson, 31; Bernard Attard, “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction,” EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples. Economic History Association, 2008.
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at anchor”) and the streets of the city, on which residential buildings stood next to “lofty
plate-glass fronted shop[s] in true Regent Street style”.379 But while he was “strolling in
the outskirts of the town”, the narrator suddenly witnesses this:
above a cloud of dust, I saw approaching a huge lumbering mass, like a moving haystack, swaying from side to side, and I heard the creaking of wheels in the distance, and a volley of strange oaths accompanied the sharp cracking of a whip; presently the horns of a pair of monstrous bullocks appeared, straining solemnly at their yokes; then another and another followed, until I counted five pair of elephantine beasts, drawing a rude cart, composed of two high wheels and a platform without sides, upon which was packed and piled bales of wool full fourteen feet in height. Close to the near wheel stalked the driver, a tall, broad-shouldered, sunburnt, care-worn man, with long shaggy hair falling from beneath a sugar-loaf shaped grass hat, and a month’s beard on his dusty chin; dressed in half-boots, coarse, short, fustian trousers, a red silk handkerchief round his waist, and a dark blue cotton shirt, with the sleeves rolled right up to the shoulders of his brown-red, brawny, hairy arms. In his hands he carried a whip, at least twenty feet long, with the thong of which, with perfect ease, he every now and then laid into his leaders, accompanying each stroke with a tremendous oath.
A little mean looking man, shabbily dressed in something of the same costume, trotted humbly along on the off-side. Three huge ferocious dogs were chained under the axle of the dray. This was a load of the golden fleece of Australia, and its guardians the bullock driver and bullock watchman.380
Here we have the stockman – the figurative personnel, so to speak, of the new
representational paradigm, and soon the archetype of Australian masculinity – marching
into what used to be the crowning achievement of early-colonial visions, the colonial
city. Importantly, it is the figure of the hardy pastoralist that carries the “golden fleece”,
the colony’s primary source of wealth and hence its symbol of success.
But the vignette does not end here. What follows next rounds off its socio-economic
vision: “The dust, the creaking of the wheels, and the ejaculation of the driver had
scarcely melted away, when up dashed a party of horsemen splendidly mounted and
sunburnt, but less coarse and worn in features than the bullock driver, with long beards
and moustaches and long flowing hair”.381 This is the arrival of the colony’s new
masters: “These were a party of gentlemen squatters coming down after a year or two in
379 Samuel Sidney, “Land Ho! – Port Jackson,” Household Words, December 14, 1850, 276. 380 Sidney, “Land Ho!”, 276. 381 Sidney, “Land Ho!”, 276.
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the bush, to transact business and refresh in the great city of Australia.”382 The sturdy
pastoral labourer is juxtaposed against these flourishing gentleman squatters. In this, the
vignette not only captures the social dynamic that was beginning to define the
Australian colonies at the time, but also responds to contemporary notions of
“Colonials”. In their movement from the colony’s rural frontier to its urban centre, the
party of pastoralists with their impressive livestock overrides the early-colonial vision
of a city utopia, foregrounding instead the complex relationship that lies at the heart of
pastoral literature, and which still largely defines Australian culture to this day: the
tension between city and country. What the little vignette from Household Words thus
demonstrates is the transition from the municipal vision that characterised early-colonial
representations, to the pastoral one that defined later ones. This transformation of the
earlier paradigm, in which rural wealth comes to dominate the city, directly reflects the
movement of the European settlers away from the coastal towns towards the plains of
Australia’s unsettled interior.
An even fuller impression of the rich utopian vision conjured up by the emotional
valence of pastoral imagery may be gained from the short story “Pictures of Life in
Australia”, likewise published in Household Words. This 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, a veritable cornucopia testifying to
the productivity of the place:
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 those closed flowers 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
382 Sidney, “Land Ho!”, 277.
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expense such rural beauties, such little paradises, and domestic comforts can be formed and kept up in that country.383
Needless to say, the bee emblematically represents the settlers themselves, a perfect
symbol for the agricultural “improvement” of Australia. A first ideological aspect of
pastoral imagery becomes discernible here, for the cottage, highlighted by its semblance
to a greenhouse, continues to perpetuate the euchronic narrative of the Civilising
Mission, with its emphasis on land improvement and the civilising effect of European
agriculture. The significance of rose-trees and creepers for the Civilising Mission may
be gathered from the following quotation, also taken from a contribution to Household
Words: “Among other diversions, I have been employing myself in making a flower-
garden, for … I think their contemplation, and … cultivation, has a humanising, or …
civilising effect on the mind, such as I can assure you we require in the Bush.”384 An
excellent pictorial illustration of this would be the impressive garden in John Glover’s
famous painting A View of the Artist’s House and Garden (1835). Settler garden
imagery readily latches onto the euchronic vision of Empire. Interestingly, however,
they also harken back to the Quirósque dream of a pleasure garden. Indeed, what these
depictions of a “sylvan cottage” articulate is a vision that is similar but crucially distinct
from the Quirósque body utopia: it is the dream of Arcadia, of an idyllic life of rural
simplicity and pastoral abundance. Notably, this Arcadian vision pays more attention to
the Eurocentric imagery of the country cottage and garden than to the specificities of its
Australian backdrop.
Earlier in the same story from Household Words, 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”,385 she fleshes out the text’s Arcadian vision by
underscoring the 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
383 Caroline Chisholm and R. H. Horne, “Pictures of Life in Australia,” Household Words, June 22,
1850, 309-10. 384 Qtd. in Patrick Brantlinger, “Black Swans; or, Botany Bay Eclogues,” in Rule of Darkness: British
Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, by Patrick Brantlinger (New York: Cornell UP, 1988), 126; see also John S. Ryan, “Charles Dickens and the Making of Images for Australia’s Folklore,” Australian Folklore 7 (1992): 34.
385 Chisholm and Horne, 308.
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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 flourish in their own native land, ingrafted and revived in a foreign distant shore, that even the most fastidious and refined could not but feel at such a moment a peculiar zest in joining a family so innocently happy and guileless as this, surrounded as they were by abundance of all the essential necessaries of life. Not a shade of care clouded the party, as they sat down with thankfulness to partake of those things with which God had blessed their labour.386
This passage’s description of a “primitive people” with “simple manners” who are
“cheerful” and “guileless” perfectly encapsulates the Arcadian ideal of rural simplicity
and bliss, and as such 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 cast to her vision of Arcadia.
Putting emphasis on the fact that the settler family has been “engrafted and revived
in a foreign shore”, the narrator 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 the
emigration of poor British families and, in particular, of 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.387 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 fit habitation for man”.388 What becomes apparent here is that
Chisholm’s Arcadianism is clearly directed at potential migrants from the lower classes.
It is the people “unable to flourish 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
386 Chisholm and Horne, 208. 387 The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, eds. William H. Wilde et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1994), s. v. “Chisholm, Caroline.” 388 Chisholm and Horne, 310.
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sheep, and six hundred head of cattle, forty pigs, and a bit of money in the bank, too”.389
As Chisholm’s short story indicates, the pastoral representation of Australia, pivoting
around the Arcadian dream of idyllic innocence and rustic sufficiency, is intricately
linked to working-class emigration.
This chapter canvasses the emergence of the Arcadian vision of Australia. More
specifically, it discusses how the pastoral paradigm, representing Australia as a
working-man’s paradise, became hegemonic. The chapter begins by looking at Thomas
Mitchell’s use the pastoral paradigm in his invocation of Australia Felix, and then
provides some background information to pastoral aesthetics and the term Arcadia.
Next it shows how the Arcadian vision of Australia, carrying along on a wave of wide-
spread nostalgia for a life in rural simplicity that reflected the complex socio-economic
situation of the mid-nineteenth century, basically represented a form of working-class
emigration propaganda. In the case of E. G. Wakefield, this led to the imagination of
Australia as a second-class Ersatz England. Finally, the chapter discusses how the
Arcadian vision of Australia found its dominant form of expression in what I call the
Dickensian Pastoral.
Picturesque Pastoral: Mitchell’s Australia Felix
Sir Thomas Mitchell’s journals provide valuable insights into the development of the
Arcadian vision of Australia. Mitchell, again and again praising the “open and extensive
pastoral regions” he was encountering, came to call Australia a “land of picturesque
beauty and pastoral abundance”.390 What this indicates is that at the base of Mitchell’s
vision, it still was the framework of the picturesque that ordered the landscape in
accordance with the principles of contrast and irregularity into waste- and improved
land, and in this way established, as Janowitz puts it, “a mode of linkage back to
Britain”.391 But grafted onto this framework was the emotionally much more evocative
imagery of pastoral literature. Mitchell’s mastering of this coupling of picturesque
aesthetic with pastoral imagery culminated in his description of Australia Felix, the
389 Chisholm and Horne, 309. 390 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. 391 Anne Janowitz, “The Chartist Picturesque,“ in The Politics of the Picturesque, Literature, Landscape
and Aesthetics since 1770, eds. Stephen Copley et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 278.
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Arcadian paradise that, concluding his journey, waits at the end of his “epics of the
picturesque”.392 Take for example the following short passage, in which pastoral
sentiment, picturesque organisation of space, and euchronic indexing of futurity are all
compressed into a small word picture: “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 flowery plains and green hills, fanned by the breezes of early spring, I
named this region Australia Felix”.393
Another good example of this paradigm shift is Mitchell’s drawing of Martin’s
Range, which has been reproduced as an engraving in one of his journals.394 In the
manner of the picturesque, this picture of a landscape in Queensland uses light, tonality
and natural objects to clearly define fore-, middle- and background. But unlike other
early-colonial examples, it does not envision a city utopia, and is completely devoid of
the signs of municipal development (such as buildings, roads and other forms of
infrastructure). Instead, Mitchell’s picture features a few cows grazing peacefully in the
middleground, and a male figure reclining leisurely against a rock in the foreground, in
the manner typical of a shepherd in pastoral painting.395 The depicted cattle was not an
imaginary addition to the scene, for Mitchell actually took cattle onto this expedition,
and the shepherd figure probably represents a member of Mitchell’s party. But even so,
it seems reasonable to argue that Mitchell’s drawing does not simply capture a moment
of rest during his exploration of Queensland, but that it just as much beckons towards an
Arcadian future. In any event, what Mitchell’s journals indicate is the transformation of
the Civilising Mission according to the conventions of the pastoral: around the 1820s,
the Arcadian utopia of rural simplicity and bliss takes over as the dominant
representational strategy, as Australia’s settlers, beguiled by Mitchell’s panegyric of
Australia Felix, spread from the coastal settlements over the inland plains.
The rise of the pastoral as the leading utopian paradigm provided a comprehensive
solution to the representational problems of Australia’s colonisation. Crucially, the
aesthetic of the pastoral was able to dispel imperial melancholy, because it alleviated the 392 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 122. 393 Thomas Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with Descriptions of the
recently explored Region of Australia Felix… (London: 1839), 2:333; see also Dixon, Course of Empire, 117.
394 Mitchell, Tropical Australia, 225 (pl. 5). 395 Ryan, Cartographic Eye, 68.
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anxieties over Australia’s unimprovability. Pastoralism, first of all, promised a highly
lucrative form of land use, and this prospect of pastoral wealth dispelled the anxieties
over the difficulties of generating economic value from the Australian landscape. But
pastoralism represented not simply an efficient means of land improvement and wealth
creation, it also addressed the felt moral unimprovability of the Antipodal colony: as the
following comment indicates, Mitchell understood Arcadian simplicity as much as a
moral vision for Australia’s future society as an economic one: “A number of
respectable colonists are domiciled on the surrounding plains, and the society of their
hospitable circle presents a very pleasing picture of pastoral happiness and
independence”.396
Since pastoralism effectively meant the displacement of the convict population to the
inland frontier, it offered an effective solution to the convict problem – all the more so
since rural labour was thought to be beneficial in terms of convict rehabilitation. Take
for instance the colonial entrepreneur John Macarthur, a self-made man who arrived in
the colony indebted, but managed to accumulate wealth of at least £20,000 by 1801
through the breeding of merino sheep.397 He believed that the seclusion of the Bush and
the hardship of rural, specifically pastoral, work would effect the moral rehabilitation of
convicts, and even ease the plight of modern civilisation in general:
I am confirmed 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 chiefly spent in solitude – they have much time for reflection 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.398
The royal commissioner John Thomas Bigge envisioned Australia similarly: in line with
the intrinsic binary of pastoral literature, he viewed the inland as a wholesome and
pristine environment, which he offset against the unhealthy, corrupted colonial cities
that only produced poverty and crime. While cities, as Hoorn sums up Bigge’s view,
“presented temptations that encouraged criminal behaviour”, Australia’s pastoral inland
“represented a recuperative space for people from the city where they might rest and
396 Mitchell, Three Expeditions, 1:162. 397 Hoorn, 47. 398 Qtd. in Hoorn, 53; cf. with Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 227.
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restore themselves”.399 Re-establishing in this way improvement as an ideologically
meaningful concept in both economic and moral terms, the pastoral restored the
symbolic integrity of the Civilising Mission.
Pastoral and Arcadia
Before proceeding to discuss the emergence of the Arcadian vision of Australia, it
seems necessary to outline some key characteristics of pastoral literature. Broadly
speaking, the term “pastoral” refers to a mode of representing a countryside that stages a
certain ethos of rural life and compares it, more or less directly, to urban life.400 The
term encompasses different fields of arts, such as painting and music, and has a
particularly long and rich tradition in literature, stretching back to the classical period.
As a literary genre, pastoral began in the form of poetry, but branched out to dramatic as
well as narrative forms, leading eventually to such diverse works as Shakespeare’s
pastoral comedy As You Like It or Sidney’s pastoral romance Arcadia.401
Despite this variety, a specific set of recurring motifs and structures underpins the
remarkable versatility of the pastoral. Foremost is its exclusive preoccupation with a
simplified and idealised lifestyle of shepherds or other agricultural workers, a fact
which has led Leo Marx to coin the polemic formula: “no shepherd, no pastoral.”402
However, concerning the degree to which agricultural labour is actually depicted, the
pastoral paradigm is already bifurcated in its classical roots. While labour is present in
the genre’s first cornerstone, the Theocritean Idylls,403 its second cornerstone, the
Virgilian Eclogues, engendered the fantasy that a shepherd’s life is mainly dominated
by leisure.404 Virgil, moving the topic of agriculture from his Eclogues to his Georgics,
installed, in fact, the Epicurean ideal of otium (a peaceful state of leisure) as the central
ethos of the pastoral, and established negotium (employment or business) as the
distinctive feature of georgic representations.405 To avoid confusion, let me briefly
clarify my terminology at this point: while I use “pastoral” as the overall umbrella term, 399 Hoorn, 53. 400 Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London, New York: Routledge, 1999), 2; 4. 401 Gifford, 1. 402 Qtd. in Gifford, 1. 403 Gifford, 16. 404 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. 405 Williamson, 569.
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I am following Hoorn in calling those pastoral representations that focus on labour
“georgic”.406 The binary of otium / negotium is of importance insofar as a pastoral
vision emphasising leisure connects more with Quirós’ vision of a body utopia, while a
focus on labour ties directly into the Civilising Mission’s tenets of improvement and
process.
Following the integral figure of the herdsman, the second defining trait of the
pastoral is its spatio-temporal location. In this regard, the pastoral paradigm was again
strongly shaped by Virgil: locating his Eclogues in the mountainous region of Arcadia,
which from then on constituted the archetype of an imaginary place of rural peace and
simplicity, Virgil established the distancing device that crucially defines the genre’s
chronotopic organisation. In effect, Virgil inaugurated the utopian space of Arcadia as
the location of the pastoral. Arcadia clearly displays the double-edged nature intrinsic to
utopia. At its best, it may serve as a vehicle for social comment: Arcadia has to be
understood as an urban construction of idyllic rural life in which an aesthetic
juxtaposition of city and country, of rural simplicity and urban corruption, seems to be
practically always present. Thus by retreating to Arcadia the pastoral text, at least
implicitly but more often explicitly, criticises the society from which it retreats.
Arcadia, accordingly, evinces utopia’s positive, constructive tendency towards
criticising social reality. But at the same time it also strongly exhibits what Ricœur calls
utopia’s “pathological” side,407 because the pastoral’s practice of seeking refuge in the
romanticised, if not imaginary, “locus amœnus” of Arcadia readily degenerates into
unproductive escapism. Bloch pinpoints as one of the key factors that inhibits the
concrete-utopian functioning of Arcadia its representation as a readily accessible or
attainable dreamland, by contrast to temporally deferred or spatially detached utopias.408
This is exacerbated by the frequent association of Arcadia with a lost Golden Age of
rural innocence, unspoiled by forms of alienation – in particular those forms which
characterised mid-nineteenth-century Britain, viz. displacement, industrialisation and
urbanisation – because this yearning for a lost past makes Arcadia susceptible to the
typical pitfalls of nostalgic utopias. In particular the backward-looking perspective of
such nostalgia may undermine Arcadia’s critique of the present, and thus its implicit
406 Hoorn, 11. 407 Ricœur, “Ideology and Utopia.” 408 Ernst Bloch, “Arkadien und Utopien,” in Europäische Bukolik und Georgik, ed. Klaus Garber
(Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 1976), 4-5.
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appeal to the future. However, as Bloch emphasises, if the Arcadian dream of a blissful
life in rural simplicity can overcome this backward-looking nostalgia, it may form a
significant counterweight or even supplement to utopias that are too calculating and
detached from the natural world.409
Arcadian Australia: A Working-man’s paradise
Importantly, the Arcadian vision of Australia was able to symbolically coordinate the
Empire’s political situation in the early nineteenth century. It functioned as the symbolic
linchpin of a complex socio-economic network, linking the colony’s pastoral boom and
the labour shortage that accompanied it with the increasing urbanisation,
industrialisation, rural unemployment and feelings of overpopulation in Great Britain.
As Lansbury remarks, “Caroline Chisholm’s 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”.410 While the labour shortage spurred by
the squatting rush in Australia pulled immigrants towards the continent’s shores,
economical shifts in Europe also precipitated emigration from the mother country.
Notably, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain faced a series of interrelated
social issues. The advance of mechanisation and the division of labour that was brought
about by industrialisation confronted the working classes, most acutely in rural areas,
with an unemployment crisis. This led to the impression that unemployed rural
labourers were swamping the cities. In his pseudo-scientific analysis of the situation,
Thomas Malthus predicted that this overpopulation would ultimately be checked by
famine, because, as he claimed, the geometrical growth of a population inevitably
exceeds the only arithmetically-growing means of subsistence – which led him to
propose emigration as a feasible palliative to overpopulation.411 It is against this
background of industrialisation, urbanisation, and Malthusian conceptions of population
growth, that Australia, in its rendition as an Arcadian utopia, came to be understood as a
means of relieving Britain not only of its unwanted criminal, but also its surplus
working-class population. 409 Bloch, “Arkadien und Utopien,” 6. 410 Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English
Literature (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1970), 64-5. 411 Brantlinger, 113-4; also The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2009), s. v. “Malthus, Thomas.”
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Regarding the question of how this pastoral mode of representing Australia became
hegemonic, it is worth pointing out that a core group of people can be identified as the
main architects of the Arcadian vision. As we will see shortly, it is Charles Dickens in
particular who stands out as the one individual with sufficient cultural capital to actively
shape the discursive construction of Australia.412 I would like to start, however, with
three less influential authors, for the simple reason that their poems appeared at the
onset of the pastoral boom in Australia. The first poem is by the native-born Australian
William Charles Wentworth. In a way, it is only fitting that Wentworth was among the
first to clearly articulate an Arcadian vision of Australia, since he also formed part of
the 1813 expedition across the Blue Mountains, that is, the crucial event that
precipitated the colony’s spread over the inland plains, and thus launched large-scale
pastoralism in New South Wales.
The text in question is Wentworth’s lengthy poem “Australasia”. Interestingly, the
poem was an unsuccessful entry for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal in 1823, a poetry
competition at Cambridge University whose topic for that year was “Australasia”.
Although it is more epic than pastoral in its form, Wentworth’s “Australasia” does
contain significant elements of the latter genre. For example, it begins with a lyrical
lamentation, in which Wentworth nostalgically recalls his birth country. 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 first 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 plains413
412 On Dickens’ influence on the Australian imaginary see: Ryan, “Charles Dickens”; also Coral
Lansbury, “Terra Australis Dickensia,” MLA 1, no. 2 (Summer, 1971): 12-21. 413 W. C. Wentworth, “Australasia,” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, March 25,
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Wentworth’s vision here is interesting for two reasons: firstly, it places the focus on
Australia’s “inmost plains” instead of Sydney’s municipal progress, so leaves behind
the city utopia for the new frontier. Secondly, it introduces a particular form of ethos as
the social code that underpins the Arcadian vision. Emphasising the link between rural
labour and Arcadian contentment, this ethos centres on “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 skilled British labourer can find bliss in rural simplicity. In its
insistence on the colonisers’ agricultural progress, Wentworth’s vision carries on the
focus on land improvement, which we identified earlier as the driving ideologeme of the
Civilising Mission. As such, Wentworth’s poem “Australasia” testifies to the continuity
of the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission, showing how seamlessly it can be
integrated into the Arcadian vision.
Representing Australia as a land of promise in which the hard-working common man
can find a healthy life in rural simplicity, Arcadianism provides a vision of the
Australian colonies that is much more comprehensive than previous ones. A further
expression of this can be found in the second poem I would like to mention: this is the
Briton Thomas K. Hervey’s Australia (1824), which was an entry for the same
competition as Wentworth’s. As Vivian Smith asserts, there is no evidence that Hervey
ever set foot in Australia, instead his poem seems to draw on the increasing amount of
information on the Australian colonies that became available at the time.414 Hervey’s
poem is remarkable insofar as his Arcadian vision is even more pronounced than
Wentworth’s:
I see bright meadows, decked in livelier green, The yellow corn-field, and the blossomed bean: A hundred flocks 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! […] The vision leads me on by many a stream; And spreading cities crowd upon my dream, Where turrets darkly frown, and lofty spires Point to the stars and sparkle in their fires!
1824, 4.
414 Smith, “Australian Colonial Poetry,” 75.
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Here Sydney gazes, from the mountain side, Narcissus-like, upon the glassy tide!415
Notably, Hervey’s luscious, late-aestival imagery recalls the Quirósque vision of a
bountiful pleasure garden. By the same token, the georgic theme that runs through these
lines (the “busy sound” of industry and toil) is leavened by lighter notes of laughter and
singing. While remaining closely aligned with the Civilising Mission, the ethos Hervey
outlines here evokes the Arcadian ideal of contentment and pleasure. As such, Hervey’s
poem demonstrates how the Arcadian vision allowed to reconcile the future-oriented
Civilising Mission with Quirós’ chiliastic paradise: translating the Quirósque body
utopia into pastoral terms and transposing it into the foreseeable future, the
chronotopological organisation of Arcadia is modified in such a way that it coincides
with the euchronia of the Civilising Mission. The result is the vision of a soon-to-be
pastoral Arcadia, which is dialectically poised between envisioning Australia as a pre-
industrial, untainted utopia and the drive to “civilise” the land. 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”.
Hervey’s poem avails itself of the pastoral’s typical juxtaposition of city and country.
Urban space clearly carries a negative connotation: Sydney, gazing “Narcissus-like”,
encroaches upon rural space with its intimidating buildings. In striking contrast to the
early-colonial vision of a city utopia, with its focus on infrastructure and municipal
development, Hervey’s poem concentrates on the conception of Australia as a pre-
industrial, rural utopia. In this, it responds to the emotional disturbances caused by
industrialisation and urbanisation: in nineteenth-century Britain, nostalgic longings for a
self-sufficient lifestyle in a verdant landscape were provoked by the drastic
transformation and depopulation of the English countryside and the unhealthy
conditions of sprawling and congested cities.416 As White states: “The industrial
revolution was still, for many, a traumatic shock. The visions of rural innocence in
Australia appealed to a deep-seated emotional resentment against industrialisation. […]
the supporters of emigration saw Australia becoming the sort of society they imagined
England to have been in the past, before it disappeared under the grime of the industrial
415 Thomas K. Hervey, Australia: With other Poems, 2nd ed. (London, 1825), 36-7. 416 Gibson, Diminshing Paradise, 178.
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revolution”.417 By projecting pastoral imagery onto Australia, Hervey’s poem taps into
this growing nostalgia for an apparently lost Arcadian England. To a certain extent, this
reveals the concrete-utopian, emancipatory force of this form of utopianism, for Arcadia
presents a social and environmental alternative to urbanised and industrialised life that
still rings true today. But by the same token, Hervey’s poem also demonstrates the
ideological entanglement of the Arcadian vision of Australia, specifically its
commitment to the ideologeme of land improvement.
Coming back to the first poem, it is particularly interesting how Wentworth’s
“Australasia” is positioned in respect to patriotism. Much like the birthday odes of
Michael Massey Robinson (discussed in chapter 3), Wentworth’s “Australasia” strongly
affirms that the Civilising Mission in Australia was conducted for the glory and benefit
of the British race, and thus adopts the paradoxical standpoint characteristic of
imperialism, in which the universal utopianism of the Enlightenment is severely
undermined by racial preconceptions. In comparison to Robinson, the writings of the
native-born Wentworth are even more perplexing. As a historical figure, Wentworth
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”, he was, moreover, closely
involved in the successful 1852 bid for self-government for New South Wales.418 It is
unsurprising, therefore, that his poem “Australasia” – a panegyric addressed to the “land
of my birth!” – has been applauded as “one of the first outbursts in Australian literature
of nationalistic pride”.419 Yet Wentworth’s sense of belonging appears deeply
conflicted. While he shows unprecedented pride in his birthplace, he also asserts, with a
different sense of patriotism, the importance of advancing British civilisation.420 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;
417 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 (Sydney, London, Boston:
Allen & Unwin, 1981), 33-4. 418 The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, s.v. “Wentworth, William Charles.” 419 The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, s.v. “Wentworth, William Charles.” 420 Smith, “Australian Colonial Poetry,” 74.
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may this, thy last-born INFANT – then arise, to glad thy heart, and greet thy PARENT eyes; and AUSTRALASIA float, with flag unfurl’d, a new BRITANNIA in another world!421
Wentworth pursues here the common theme of the rise and fall of empires, which we
saw characterise imperial utopianism. Reminiscent of Governor Phillip’s “New
Albion”, Wentworth’s “New Britannia” does not replace but continue the Empire. With
regard to identity, especially a national form of identity, Wentworth’s Arcadian vision
of Australia seems not yet developed enough to foster and sustain a national counter-
utopia.
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 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 plains422
At first sight it may seem that Wentworth sides with the working-class emigrants he
envisions would bring his Arcadian utopia to fruition. But it should not be overlooked
that he was, in effect, actively lobbying for the large-scale pastoralists that emerged at
the 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 flowing thither from all parts of the
world.”423 To this end, Wentworth was, besides making direct requests to the
government, appealing to the public through his poetic and non-fictional writings, thus
advocating the emigration of Britain’s labouring classes so as to furnish the rapidly
growing pastoral industry in Australia with the required work force.424 As such,
Wentworth’s Arcadian vision provides us with the first instance of what may justly be
421 Wentworth, “Australasia,” 4. 422 Wentworth, “Australasia,” 4. 423 Qtd. in Hoorn, 55. 424 Hoorn, 45; also 55.
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called a form of emigration propaganda. Projecting pastoral imagery onto Australia, this
propaganda drew on frontier romance and the notion that the colonial landscape was
untainted and inherently healthy to attract working-class migrants. Finally, what we can
see emerging here is the utopianism of settler colonialism.
The propagandistic dimension of the Arcadian vision becomes even more evident in
our third poem, “Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales” by the
Scottish poet Thomas Campbell. The poem’s inspiration was a scene of people
emigrating to Australia. While Campbell explores in it 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”.425 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”426 – become self-sufficient
yeoman farmers in Australia, living a modest but comfortable life. As the following
lines demonstrate, Campbell, like Hervey, lightens a largely georgic work ethic with
pastoral notions of leisure:
There, marking o’er his farm’s expanding ring New fleeces 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 fig-tree’s breath prevails; Survey with pride beyond a monarch’s spoil His honest arm’s own subjugated soil427
The last line in particular illustrates how effortlessly the Arcadian work ethic, especially
in its georgic formulation of honest and hard agricultural labour, ties into the
ideologeme of land improvement and, ultimately, its narratological refurbishment in the
form of the legal fantasy of terra nullius: working the land becomes the basis of a claim
to it. Much like Wentworth, Campbell continues to trace the euchronic narrative of the
Civilising Mission through his Arcadian vision of Australia. Ultimately, what can be 425 Olga Sudlenkova, “Fair Australasia: A Poet’s Farewell to Emigrants,” in Missions of
Interdependence: A Literary Directory, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 273. 426 Thomas Campbell, “Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales,” in The Poetical
Works of Thomas Campbell, vol. 2 (London, 1837), 243. 427 Campbell, 244.
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extrapolated from Campbell’s poem – more so than Wentworth’s but just as much as
Hervey’s with its generic landscape – is that the Arcadian vision of Australia outlines a
sort of second-class, Ersatz England, set aside for Britain’s surplus working population.
In sum, what these three poems testify to is the emergence of a new, distinctly
Arcadian mode of representing Australia. Imperial ideology and its Civilising Mission
readily slotted into this vision, especially since the georgic work ethic on which the
Arcadian utopia hinges readily connects, and even confers a sentimental value on, the
ideologeme of land improvement. While some of its aspects, such as rural self-
sufficiency and contentment, may touch upon concrete-utopian sentiments, the Arcadian
vision simultaneously breaks the ground for the legal fantasy of terra nullius. Moreover,
on a more practical level this vision neatly links the demand for labour in the Australian
colonies with the oversupply of workers in Britain. Finally, these three texts
demonstrate that the Arcadian vision of Australia represents, in effect, a form of
working-class emigration propaganda.
Wakefieldian Arcadianism
At first, the emergence of this Arcadian vision stood in stark contrast to the
prevailing public opinion on Australia in Great Britain. During the first half of the
nineteenth century, Botany Bay, metonymically representing the entire continent, was
proverbial not only for transportation to the penal colonies, but moreover for the moral
condition of its dubious inhabitants. Barron Field, for instance, had to endure the
perpetual gibes of his intellectual friends in the home country, teasing him about his
appointment as judge of the civil Supreme Court in the “land of thieves”: “Well, and
how does the land of thieves use you?” Field was asked by 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?”428 For Lamb, even the
428 Qtd. in Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 11.
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kangaroo was 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”.429 The
following excerpt from the 1838 Molesworth Report, described by Leon Litvack as a
“sensationalised catalogue of antipodean horrors”, probably provides an accurate
reflection of the contemporary image of Australia: “the community was composed of
the very dregs of society; of men proved by experience to be unfit 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.”430 In
Great Britain, the dystopian conception of a “land of thieves” still dominated the public
discourse on Australia until the middle of the century.
A key event in the rise of the Arcadian vision over the dystopian notion of Australia
as a prison continent was the appearance of a series of anonymous letters in the
Morning Chronicle, starting on 21 August 1829.431 The author of these letters professes
himself to be a young settler with expert knowledge of the Australian colonies, and aims
to propose nothing less than a better and more comprehensive system of colonising
Australia. He begins by relating how he ventured to the colony 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 to improve it using convict labour were in vain. “I did not,” the letter’s author
confesses, “intend to become a Farmer.”432 He soon realised that his grandiose plan to
become a landed magnate in Australia was ill-conceived: “My mansion, park, preserves,
and tenants, were all a dream.”433 The problem, as he conceives it, was not his own
ambition, but the deplorable lack of competent labour. The shortage of skilled workers
in the Australian colony was so severe that it threatened to upend the social order. In a
short anecdote about his runaway servant, the author expresses his indignation about
429 Charles Lamb, The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb, ed. Percy Fitzgerald, vol. 3 (New
York: Cosimo, 2008), 305; also Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 16. 430 Qtd. in Leon Litvack, “Dickens, Australia and Magwitch Part I: The Colonial Context,” The
Dickensian 95 (Spring 1999): 29. 431 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 48. 432 Wakefield, 8. 433 Wakefield, 8.
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this impossible situation, not without also betraying a more general anxiety about its
future implications:
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.434
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 should any labourer drudge for a master, when they could acquire land for next to
nothing, and be their own masters?435 As a solution to this consequential disproportion
between available territory and labour force, the author proposes what is now known as
the “sufficient price theory”: crown land should be fixed at a sufficiently high price so
as to discourage labourers from acquiring land. Ultimately, the “sufficient price theory”
was supposed to prevent, as Lansbury puts it rather bluntly, “convicts and the like from
buying large estates and aping their betters”.436
The author of this provocative Letter from Sydney was the British politician Edward
Gibbon Wakefield. Later on Wakefield would become a central figure in the history of
British colonialism, and his recommendations for reform would exert significant
influence over much of the colonisation of South Australia and New Zealand.437
However, at the time when he was writing the Letter, Wakefield himself was
imprisoned in Newgate for abducting the heiress Ellen Turner – which adds a fine touch
of irony to his description of the prison continent Australia, a country he had not set foot
in and which he knew only from studying the accounts of Wentworth and Cunningham.
434 Wakefield, 12-3. 435 Wakefield, 156-7. 436 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 50; see also Wakefield, 169ff. 437 Biographic information on Wakefield is taken from David J. Moss, “Wakefield, Edward Gibbon
(1796-1862),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).
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Wakefield’s vision of Australia is, therefore, entirely fictional, which reveals him as an
armchair traveller who, just as in pre-colonial times, continues to travel to Australia
only by means of the imagination. As Matthew Graves and Elizabeth Rechniewski point
out, while Wakefield’s writing carries on to explore the continent only imaginatively, it
simultaneously lays bare the callous indifference of British politicians to the actual
reality of the country they were having colonised.438 Graves and Rechniewski
furthermore raise the interesting point that Wakefield’s Letter
conveys a vision of Australia that is much older than the 19th century. It harks back to representations of the continent as rich in resources, clement and productive that characterised the fictional accounts of the Great Southern continent to be found in 16-17th century works […] Though Wakefield had read very widely books, journals and newspaper reports of the colony, and, as certain of the letters reveal, has a disenchanted view of the colonists themselves, his portrait of the colony and its potential plays on themes of plenty, even excess. […] Exceeding even the rose-tinged accounts of Wentworth and Cunningham, Wakefield conjures up for the reader a veritable El Dorado439
Indeed, the passage from the Letter Graves and Rechniewski subsequently quote bears a
striking resemblance to the catalogue of colonial desiderata with which Quirós evoked
his fantastical body utopia of Austrialia del Espíritu Santo.440 The point to be made here
is twofold: on the one hand, Wakefield’s Letter carries on the imaginary approach of
fantasising Australia, of safely imagining it from a distance. By the same token, his text
makes strong pretensions to journalistic realism and seeks to sustain the fiction that it
represents a factual account of a Sydney resident.441 The attraction the Letter held as a
convincing piece of emigration literature is probably due to both its claim to veracity
and its imaginative richness.
The imaginative effort of Wakefield’s Letter, however, is not directed towards
developing further the pastoral imagery that became increasingly associated with
Australia, but towards envisioning the colony’s ideal social structure. That is to say, the
Letter principally outlines a social vision, and this social vision concerns itself with
optimising the emigration to and colonisation of Australia. Wakefield wanted nothing
less but to turn Botany Bay into “an earthly paradise”, and to this end he found it
438 Matthew Graves and Elizabeth Rechniewski, “Essays for an Empty Land: Australia as Political
Utopia,” in Cultures for the Commonwealth 17 (2011), 38. 439 Graves and Rechniewski, 39-40. 440 The passage in question is Wakefield, 3-4; cf. Graves and Rechniewski, 40. 441 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 63; also Graves and Rechniewski, 38.
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necessary that a “desirable proportion” was maintained “between the demand and
supply of labour” – which he believed his “sufficient price theory” would make
possible.442 The utopian aspirations of the Wakefield system should now become
obvious. As Catherine Hall points out: “In his unfettered imagination Australia became
a new and better England, a construct of desire.”443 Notably, Wakefield’s vision of a
New Britannia in the Antipodes is undergirded by pronounced social inequality: the
Wakefield system, openly indebted to Malthusianism and Adam Smith’s economic
theory, aimed at establishing a proportion of landed capitalists to labourers that would
replicate the traditional class structure of Great Britain444 – that is, a class structure that
even in the European homeland was progressively vanishing. As Gibson describes it,
Wakefield’s “sufficient price theory” was ultimately designed to set up a modern form
of serfdom that would keep emigrant workers in their place: “they were to be employed
by moneyed landowners whose superiority was seemingly evident in the fact that they
had sufficient income to purchase crown land at arbitrarily inflated prices”.445
Unsurprisingly, for his colonisation scheme Wakefield has been condemned by Karl
Marx as a capitalist apologist.446
In essence, then, Wakefield’s Letter from Sydney details the construction of a two-
class society in Australia. It advocates the entrenchment and maintenance of class
differences by inhibiting upward social mobility and by strengthening the unequal
distribution of capital. Given its focus on establishing a rural working class and
developing large-scale agriculture, the Letter blends smoothly into previous Arcadian
visions of Australia, strengthening particularly the association of Arcadia with the
Civilising Mission and land improvement. In this respect, Wakefield seems to spell out
what the native-born Wentworth actually had in mind, since Wentworth was likewise
not interested in facilitating social mobility, but dreamt of creating an hereditary
aristocracy based on, as Lansbury puts it, “a rigid caste structure in which ownership of
land confirmed perpetual privilege”.447 A very particular form of nostalgia appears to
underpin this Wakefieldian Arcadianism: it is the vision an Ersatz England in the
442 Wakefield, 37-8. 443 Catherine Hall, “Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies,” in The Expansion
of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, ed. Bill Schwarz (London: Routledge, 1996), 133. 444 Helen Doyle, “Wakefield System,” in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds. Graeme
Davison et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). 445 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 60. 446 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 61; for the passage in question, see Das Kapital, cpt. 33. 447 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 53.
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Antipodes, an Australia that reproduces the bygone and heavily idealised social
structure of feudal Britain. Modelling the anti-ecumene after the ecumene, Wakefield’s
Arcadian vision thus effectively overwrites Australia’s Antipodal Unheimlichkeit. It
furthermore strikes a paradoxical balance between the forwarding-looking anticipation
of a colonial euchronia on one hand, and the backward-looking yearning for a lost past
on the other, which we saw characterise the Quirósque vision of a pleasure garden as
well as the aesthetic of the picturesque. But the most intriguing point about Wakefield’s
vision is that it avails itself of the concrete-utopian dream of a working-class Arcadia, in
which every hard-working man can make a decent living, yet this quasi-socialist utopia
in the end is nothing but a smokescreen facilitating the generation of its direct opposite,
the recreation of England’s feudal economy under a different sky. Structured around a
working-class utopia that ultimately serves the preservation of the old order,
Wakefieldian Arcadianism is another interesting example of a conservative mentality in
which utopia and ideology are inextricably entangled.
As a concluding remark it should be noted that Wakefield’s vision of a “new and
better England” was in no way restricted to the Australian colonies. Although his Letter
may be based on the more factual accounts of Wentworth and others, the fact remains
that it represents a fabulation that is not specifically related, and therefore not
exclusively attached to the Australian context. Although his fictional text explicitly
takes Australia as the setting for his social vision, and furthermore addresses some
specifically Australian issues such as convict labour, it nevertheless outlines a more
general system of colonisation. Hence it could readily be transplanted into different
colonial locations. Wakefieldian colonies were, for example, also established in New
Zealand, and much of the Arcadian imagery that defined mid-nineteenth-century
representations of Australia also defined the contemporary image of New Zealand.
Sargent quotes for instance the following description by an early settler of New
Zealand’s South Island:
When Christchurch has grown to a pretty town, when the young oak of England stands by the side of the giant trees indigenous to New Zealand, when the avenues to houses are lined by the graceful and beautiful shrubs, when the green grass of England is sprouting in her meadows, fenced by hawthorn hedges, when daisies and butter-cups flower over the land, when the timid hare springs across the field, and the coveys of partridges break
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from cover, and the sun of heaven shines brightly through the pure atmosphere, tempered by breezes from the Pacific and the Alpine shore, then there will be but one thing wanting to make New Zealand the Eden of the world – the charm of age, the vestiges of the past, the spot endeared by old associations and traditions.448
All in all, this passage conveys the same utopian vision of an Ersatz England in New
Zealand as the Arcadian depictions of Australia. It exhibits the same disregard for the
actual conditions and requirements of the colonial environment, displays the same
preoccupation with picturesque forms of enclosure (hawthorn hedges), evokes a very
similar pastoral kind of scenery, and, last but not least, is equally obsessed with notions
of antiquity. The only piece missing in this passage to round off its Arcadian vision is
the presence of a pastoral figure. The conclusion to be drawn here, then, is that the
Arcadian emigration discourse is, by all means, not endemic to Australia. Instead,
Arcadia appears to represent the generic utopia in which much of mid-nineteenth-
century imperial ideology found a form of expression.
Samuel Sidney and the Dickensian Pastoral
It was not without criticism that the Wakefield system found application in the
settlement of South Australia. A prominent figure in the public debate over Wakefield’s
colonisation scheme was the English journalist Samuel Sidney. Sidney, apparently
collaborating with his brother John who had first-hand experience of the Australian
colonies, openly attacked what he saw as the “Cardinal Errors of the Wakefield
System”, at first in the short opinion piece A Voice from the Far Interior of Australia,
which he later expanded into Sidney’s Australian Hand-book. The Hand-book was
remarkably successful: only two years after its first publication, it was already in its
ninth edition and had sold more than 7,000 copies.449 Next to a critique of the current
system of colonisation in Australia, it provided a rather detailed guide for potential
migrants, replete with practical information such as the costs and provisions necessary
for the passage from England to Australia, detailed accounts of bush wages, and a price
list for “What a complete Sheep Station should contain”. Just like Wakefield, Samuel
448 Qtd. in Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopianism and the Creation of New Zealand National Identity,”
Utopian Studies 12, no. 1 (2001): 4. 449 Samuel Sidney, Sidney’s Australian Hand-book: How to Settle and Succeed in Australia: Comprising
every information for intending emigrants. By a Bushman, 9th ed. (London, 1849), 3.
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Sidney had no first-hand knowledge of Australia. But the colonial experience of his
brother, and Samuel Sidney’s own considerable expertise in animal husbandry and other
agricultural matters, gave the book a certain practicality.450 The Hand-book, therefore,
is not as imaginative in nature as Wakefield’s Letter, but rather built on a small body of
empirical knowledge. In any event, the book won Sidney the reputation of something of
an authority on emigration and settler life in Australia. For this reason, Charles Dickens
called him an “Australian writer”.451
Sidney’s aversion to the Wakefield system becomes immediately apparent from the
preface of the Hand-book’s first edition: “Australia can never be colonized on a national
scale, until the impolitic and unjust regulations founded on Mr. Wakefield’s theory are
completely reformed.”452 He continues by stating the following as “the principal
objects” of his Hand-book: “to enable my labouring fellow-countrymen to exchange
their state as ill-paid, ill-fed workmen in England, Scotland and Ireland for that of
comfortable free-holders in Australia”.453 Sidney, accordingly, draws on the nostalgic
conception of Australia as a pre-industrial, pastoral utopia, in which the displaced
working population of Great Britain could live a modest but self-sufficient life in
Arcadian simplicity. Next to Wakefield’s “sufficient price theory” he also held
Australia’s established squattocracy responsible for turning “Australia into England’s
poorhouse” by effectively preventing the formation of a class of successful small-scale
farmers:
The truth is, that these great squatters are desirous of excluding all rivalry in the shape of small, independent farmers. They do not want respectable yeomanry or peasantry, they want pauper servants, to be sent out of the country at the expense of the Home government, to become their dependent serfs. They desire to maintain, 1st, a class of great stockholders; secondly, a class of mere hinds, at low wages; and to exclude as much as possible an independent rural middle class.454
The Hand-book concludes its discussion of such “Selfish Monopolies” with an appeal to
the “Working men!” not to trust Wakefieldian emigration societies – which used
450 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 63; in 1874, for example, Samuel Sidney published an influential
monograph on horses; see Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 60-1. 451 Kim Torney, “Samuel, Sidney,” in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds. Graeme
Davison et al. (Oxford, Oxford UP: 2001). 452 Qtd. in Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 62; see also Sidney, Australian Hand-book, 3. 453 Qtd. in Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 62. 454 Sidney, Australian Hand-book, 112.
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revenue from land sales to fund the immigration of poor labourers – until they openly
support “the small farm system”.455
As laudable as Sidney’s efforts may seem from a social perspective, the economic
model he suggests was unsuitable for the Australian environment. In spite of significant
advances in agriculture, the type of small-scale farming that underpinned Sidney’s
Arcadian vision of a self-sufficient yeomanry remained largely unfeasible in Australia.
As R. M. Crawford writes:
Both soil and climate were adverse to the small settler. True peasant farming is scarcely possible in Australia, and commercial farming required either larger holdings than the usual grants to emancipists and small settlers, or preliminary works of development which could come only late in the history of the colonies.456
Paradoxically, Sidney seemed to be, at least partially, aware of the difficulty of securing
a livelihood from small-scale farming in Australia. He freely admits that “New South
Wales, I may say Australia, is essentially a pastoral country”, and that “Men of large
capital are the best wool-growers, but men of small capital are the best bush farmers”457
– yet he fails to draw the logical conclusion from this, namely that his vision of an
Arcadian Australia, peopled by an independent English yeomanry, had an essential
flaw: the difficulty of small-acre farming meant that his dream of rural self-sufficiency
was, especially for the underprivileged people he had in mind, unachievable. Since
large-scale pastoralism was booming, a moneyless working-class migrant from Great
Britain was much more likely to become a station hand for the “squatter kings” of
Australia than a self-employed smallholder.458 Ironically, therefore, Sidney’s advocacy
of working-class emigration was entrenching rather than challenging Wakefieldian
Arcadanism and its “Selfish Monopolies”.
In terms of aesthetics and narrative, Sidney’s Arcadian vision for Australia finds a
more compelling rendering in the works that follow his Hand-book. A first idea of this
455 Sidney, Australian Hand-book, 116; see also Doyle, “Wakefield system.” 456 Qtd. in Lansbury, 159. 457 Sidney, Australian Hand-book, 103. 458 Admittedly, I am simplifying Australia’s socio-economic development here, particularly because I
am bracketing out the complex diversification 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. with 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 Hoorn, 11.
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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 offset 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 rears a race of industrious children may sit under the shadow of his own vine and his own fig-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 flocks, amid the humming of bees which know no winter.459
What is fascinating about this passage is that Sidney overwrites here the previously
common idea of Australia as a prison continent with the notion of Australia as a land of
plenty, “an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined”. This country is a veritable
workingman’s paradise, in which “every striving man” who is hard-working and
industrious can find himself a “home of peace and independence”. The ideal of Arcadia
– peace and independence in rural simplicity – thus awaits whoever is willing to submit
to the georgic work ethic of honest and hard labour. Reminiscent of Campbell’s and
Hervey’s poems, Sidney effectively hollows out the Arcadian utopia with georgic
imagery that is directly aligned with the Civilising Mission.
Sidney’s version of the Arcadian dream found its most appealing form in his
contribution to Charles Dickens’ popular weekly Household Words. 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 Arcadian dream.460 The
literary format of Dickens’ journal allowed Sidney to move away from the practical
focus of his previous writings, and to clad his vision in more engaging narratives and
imagery. Most frequently, the short stories and vignettes he contributed to Household
Words variegate the From-Rags-to-Riches trajectory. “An Australian Ploughman’s
459 Samuel Sidney, Three Colonies of Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia; their
Pastures, Copper, Mines, & Gold Fields (London, 1853), 11. 460 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 93; also Margaret Mendelawitz, “Introduction,” in Charles Dickens’
Australia. Selected Essays from Household Words 1850-1859, ed. Margaret Mendelawitz (Sydney: Sydney UP, 2011), xvii.
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Story”, for instance, tells the heart-rending story of Jem Carden, an honest working man
who got transported for rebelling against the new “threshing-machines that were […]
throwing a good many poor people out of work”.461 In the character of Jem Carden, the
contemporary notion of technology’s wholesale displacement of rural populations
becomes personified. Carden finds a refuge from the industrial dystopia of Britain in the
Arcadia of Australia, where he soon prospers by virtue of his hard-working attitude, and
becomes a successful smallholder. Reunited with his wife, he lives happily ever after,
but not without passing on advice to his poverty-stricken brethren back in the home
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. […]”462
Such stories effectively operate as what 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”.463 Jem Carden, a victim of industrialisation, has been transformed from an
insurgent rebelling against the injustices reigning in his home country to a subservient
labourer in the colony, furthering the imperial cause. The problems of modernity thus
have been displaced by a Golden Arcadian Age in a faraway country. The story also
renews the utopian qualities of the Antipodes: as the Antipodal flip-side of Europe,
Australia transforms the grim underbelly of Britain’s society – crime and poverty –
turning vice into virtue. As Lansbury so fittingly puts it, what Sidney was offering to his
readers was “the beguiling appeal of a fairy-tale expressed in the most businesslike
terms”.464
Regarding its cultural impact, this working-class fairy-tale with commercial appeal
took on an entirely new dimension through its association with the cultural juggernaut
of the time, Charles Dickens. The profound effect Dickens’ work had on the self-
461 Samuel Sidney, “An Australian Ploughman’s Story,” Household Words, April 6, 1850, 41. 462 Samuel Sidney, “An Australian Ploughman’s Story,” 43. 463 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 141. 464 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 77.
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conception of Victorian Britain should not be underestimated. Beginning with Dickens’
earliest publications, his work played an active role in shaping British national identity,
particularly since Dickens consistently produced literary models that delineated specific
forms of Englishness. Lansbury therefore holds that Dickens, having replaced the recent
historical past for many Englishmen with his idealised construct of a “Pickwickian
England”, had changed the mythical self-conception of the nation.465 In a similar way,
Household Words was the mouthpiece of a specifically Dickensian worldview: in its
depiction of Great Britain, the Empire, and the rest of the world, the journal refracted
everything through the singularly Dickensian lens of Englishness – regardless of how
internally inconsistent this lens actually was.466 Although the journal’s individual
articles were written by an illustrious list of authors (including, for example, Wilkie
Collins, Charles Reade and Edward Bulwer-Lytton), Dickens, the journal’s
“conductor”, meticulously edited the contributions to ensure stylistic unity.467 Dickens’
micromanagement of each of the contributions, and the fact that they ultimately
appeared anonymously with only Dickens’ name on the front page, finally meant that
Samuel Sidney’s vision of an Arcadian Australia was broadcast to the general public in
the unanimous voice of Charles Dickens.468
In true Dickensian style, many of the Australian stories in Household Words relate
the social hardships faced by Britain’s labouring poor through sometimes quirky, but
always likeable characters. The unshakeable belief that the displaced British labourer
could, if he only put in the proper dedication, become a self-sufficient smallholder in
Australia and lead a modest but dignified life, formed the basis of the Arcadian utopia
Sidney and Dickens constructed for Australia. Not unlike Wakefield, this utopia still
maintained class-based limitations to social mobility, as the “plain Yeoman style of life”
is favourably contrasted to the act of “turning ‘gentleman’, after the vulgar colonial
fashion”.469 In fact, From-Rags-to-Riches trajectories are frequently counterpointed by
the negative example of the colonial gentleman. Take for instance the following
anecdote, narrated by the self-made farmer Father Gabriel:
465 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 69; 158. 466 For a comprehensive discussion of Dickens’ 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).
467 Mendelawitz, xiv. 468 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 70. 469 Samuel Sidney, “Father Gabriel; Or, the Fortunes of a Farmer,” Household Words, October 12, 1850,
67.
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Squire Brand’s son came to me with a letter of introduction; he had 5000l., would not wait to learn any thing, bought sheep the Sydney bank had a mortgage on – a regular bad lot; then left all to his overseer while he was dancing at the governor’s balls, playing the fashionable, and made a complete failure; he went home. And you see, sir, the long and short of it is, that for a man that can work himself, this is a famous country, and likewise money is to be made by carefully laying out money in stock and waiting for the increase; but as a general rule the money made by gentlemen who have not much capital, and have not been accustomed to soil their hands, is by saving, living being cheap and neither shop nor fashions in the Bush to tempt into spending money idly.470
This passage again shows the importance of work ethic and financial prudence for the
Arcadian utopia Australia was supposed to be. Paradoxically, in sharp contrast to the
actual experiences on the Victorian gold fields at the time, this utopia is not defined by
readily accessible and excessive riches, but instead depends on thriftiness and
perseverance. It is strength of character that grants entrance into this Arcadia. A slightly
different rendition of the trope of the failed gentleman farmer can be found in Sidney’s
“Christmas Day in the Bush”, which tells the story of two hard-pressed gentleman
squatters who, with no provisions left, invite themselves to the generous Devonshire
man’s Christmas feast. The scene of their arrival at the latter’s station puts Sidney’s
vision on display:
“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.”471
Again, in Australia, the Antipodal flipside of Europe, Christmas is turned inside out.
Transformed into a verdant and sunny celebration of summer, Christmas ushers in a
number of Antipodal inversions: while in “old England” large families spell poverty, in
Australia they mean wealth. And in what amounts almost to a role and power reversal
470 Samuel Sidney, “Father Gabriel’s Story,” Household Words, October 19, 1850, 90. 471 Samuel Sidney, “Christmas Day in the Bush,” Household Words, December 21, 1850, 309.
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of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, it is now the previously needy and poor who give
handouts to the originally better-off. Sustaining the vision of Australia as an Arcadian
“land of plenty”, Dickensian Pastorals such as this continued to (paraphrasing Jameson
again) strategically arouse fantasy content within carefully constructed containment
structures, gratifying concrete-utopian desires only to lay them to rest again.472
***
To conclude, the pastoral boom of the 1830s “squatting rush” and the labour shortage
that accompanied it were paralleled by the development of a specifically pastoral
Arcadianism that crystallised most clearly and vividly in a form of literature best
described as emigration propaganda. Although Wentworth, Wakefield and in particular
Sidney can be named as key figures in the formation of the Arcadian vision of
Australia, it was by virtue of Dickens’ editorial advocacy that this vision found
widespread appeal. It downplayed, if not outright suppressed, the actual environmental
circumstances and social organisation of the Australian colonies. Through the use of
emotionally potent pastoral images such as the harvest home and the country
homestead, Australia was envisioned as a form of Ersatz England that recreated an
idealised rural past for which an industrialised and urban Britain was hankering. The
colonies were represented as an Arcadian realm in which the dream of a yeoman’s
modest but blissful independence could come true, in spite of the fact that this vision
was largely divorced from reality. This Arcadian vision was predicated on a georgic
work ethic underpinned by perseverance and industry, which blended emigration into
the ideologeme of land improvement. Associating the From-Rags-to-Riches trajectory
with the Antipodal inversion of Vice-to-Virtue, it furthermore provided a narrative
solution to the issue of convictism. In the end, the Dickensian Pastoral 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.
472 Cf. with Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 141.
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CHAPTER 6 – The National Vision and the Utopia of the
Bush
“For Great Australia is not yet: She waits (Where o’er the Bush prophetic auras play)…”
–– O’Dowd’s The Bush
The end of the nineteenth century is generally regarded as a highly formative period
in Australian history. In particular the 1890s have gained extensive scholarly attention
as the decade in which a self-consciously national vision of Australia found a strong and
clear articulation. Leading up to Australia’s federation, the 1890s were characterised by
a rather paradoxical situation: in the first place, they experienced a global financial
crisis and one of Australia’s severest droughts. The decade saw the culmination of a
subprime mortgage crisis and the closure of the Federal and several private banks.473
Although Australia’s pastoral industry, which had experienced its most prosperous
period a decade earlier, was still going strong in the 1890s, it now started to show signs
of steady decline.474 This meant that the nineties marked the end of the period of
unprecedented economic growth that had begun in the 1830s with large-scale
pastoralism, and was then accelerated by the 1850 gold rushes. The 1890s,
consequently, were a time of economic depression and rising unemployment.475 But
they also were a time of widespread panglossian utopianism: in anticipation of the
imminent turn of the century, the decade was rich in communitarian experiments and
boasted a proliferation of utopian thought, especially millenarian dreams of federation
and republicanism.476 Most notably, William Lane projected his utopian vision of a
New Australia outside of Antipodal space and sought to establish a co-operative
473 Verity Burgmann and David Milner, “Future without Financial Crises: Utopian Literature in the
1890s and 1930s,” Continuum 23, no. 6 (2009): 839-40. 474 Murray and Chesters, 5; Hoorn, 180-1. 475 Patrick Morgan, “The Paradox of Australian Nationalism,” in Quadrant Twenty-Five Years, eds.
Peter Coleman et al. (St. Lucia: Queensland UP, 1982), 207-17. 476 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; Burgmann and Milner; 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): 47-6.
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socialist settlement in Paraguay, which, however, disintegrated quickly into hostile
factions.477 The period’s literature was also remarkably rich in literary utopias.478
Among other significant political events, the nineties saw several major strikes for
better working conditions, and the formation of the Australian Labor Party. In general it
can be said that in the 1890s, the effects of Australia’s remarkable economic
development, foremost the diversification of the colonial economy and a threefold
increase in population, were finally felt as a social one, with a previously absent middle
class beginning to establish itself. As a result, the 1890s must be understood as a period
of intensified class conflict. It was against this socio-economic background that the
national vision of Australia emerged.
One of the most important scholarly discussions of the national vision of the 1890s is
Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958). Ward argues, not without controversy,479
that at the end of the nineteenth century a self-contained ethos formed among the
pastoral labourers in Australia’s inland, which, disproportionate to their numerical as
well as economic strength, influenced Australia’s “national mystique”. This national
ethos takes on its most tangible shape in what came to be understood as the image of the
“typical Australian”: the Noble Bushman. The following is Ward’s by now classic
description of this national type:
According to the myth the “typical Australian” is a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance of affectation in others. He is a great improviser, ever willing “to have a go” at anything, but
477 Bruce Scates’ A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism, and the First Republic (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997) provides further discussions of communitarian experiments, such as the socialist settlements at Kardella and Murtho.
478 Among others, David Andrade’s The Melbourne Riots and How Harry Holdfast and His Friends Emancipated the Workers (1892); William Lane’s The Workingman's Paradise (1892); Samuel A. Rosa’s The Coming Terror (1894); and Horace Tucker’s The New Arcadia (1894); another noteworthy example is Catherine Helen Spence’s Handfasted, which (although not published until 1984) thematises issues of gender and women’s rights. All of these literary utopias instantiate fascinating individual positions of the period’s utopianism, however, since we are analysing the period with an eye for broader discursive similarities in terms of the interplay of utopia and ideology, painful omissions have to be made here.
479 Ward’s thesis was criticised and extended, to name only a few, by Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788-1975 (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1976), and Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Camberwell, VIC and New York: Penguin, 1975); also, and of particular relevance to this thesis, by Coral Lansbury in Arcady in Australia. See further John Docker, The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991); Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), esp. xvff; John Carroll, ed. Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1992); Richard Nile, ed. The Australian Legend and Its Discontents (Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 2000); and, for a more recent perspective, the special issue of the Journal of Australian Colonial History 10, no. 2 (2008).
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willing too to be content with a task done in a way that is “near enough”. Though capable of great exertion in an emergency, he normally feels no impulse to work hard without good cause. He swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily and often, and drinks deeply on occasion. Though he is “the world’s best confidence man”, he is usually taciturn rather than talkative, one who endures stoically rather than one who acts busily. He is a “hard case”, sceptical about the value of religion and of intellectual and cultural pursuits generally. He believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but, at least in principle, probably a good deal better, and so he is a great “knocker” of eminent people unless, as in the case of his sporting heroes, they are distinguished by physical prowess. He is a fiercely independent person who hates officiousness and authority, especially when these qualities are embodied in military officers and policemen. Yet he is very hospitable and, above all, will stick to his mates through thick and thin, even if he thinks they may be in the wrong. No epithet in his vocabulary is more completely damning than “scab”, unless it be “pimp” used in its peculiarly Australasian slang meaning of “informer”. He tends to be a rolling stone, highly suspect if he should chance to gather much moss.480
In short: the Noble Bushman stood for self-reliance paired with the collectivism and
group solidarity of mateship, and a pronounced egalitarianism that expressed itself in
enmity towards authority. The outlawed bushranger as a symbol of resistance was an
extension specifically of this anti-authoritarianism. As Ward’s description further
suggests, the Bushman is associated with a language that is unaffected and plain, and in
which Australian vernacular becomes one with working-class diction.
This chapter explores the emergence of Australia’s national vision. More
specifically, it focuses on the utopia of the Bush and the Noble Bushman. It begins by
reflecting critically on Ward’s thesis about the Bush ethos and then examines the
utopian dimension of the Bush and Bushman. Next it shows that while the utopia of the
Bush should have replaced earlier British visions, it continues to use the nostalgically
evocative imagery of the Dickensian Pastoral, and thus ultimately represents an (albeit
substantially modified) extension of the Arcadian vision of Australia. This is illustrated
by the work of Arthur Streeton. The chapter concludes by outlining key reasons why at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the national vision of the Bush lost most of its
utopian spirit.
480 Ward, 1-2.
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The Utopia of the Bush: Critique of the Australian Legend
Ward’s thesis of The Australian Legend has elicited a number of critical objections.
One main contention is that Ward may have put too much emphasis on the 1890s. His
fixation on this decade fails to take into account events that are of historical significance
for the development of Australia’s national self-conception, for example the 1854
Eureka Stockade, which remains symbolically important to more revolutionary
interpretations of the national mystique. Furthermore, as Vance Palmer remarks,
Australian literature and hence the development of an Australian self-consciousness
blossomed much more profusely in the early twentieth century, as the novels of Joseph
Furphy, Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson, and the poetry of Chris Brennan,
Bernard O’Dowd and Hugh McCrae document.481 It is therefore questionable whether
the 1890s should be singled out as the most formative period of Australia’s national
vision. What is more, it could be argued that Ward’s discussion of the 1890s represents
a romanticisation of this decade from the perspective of the revived national
consciousness of the 1950s, rendering his thesis more indicative of the national self-
conception of post-war Australia than its pre-Federation origins. Along these lines
Angela Woollacott contends that Ward’s Noble Bushman actually expresses ideals of
masculinity that were forged during the World Wars, rather than the the late nineteenth
century.482 While these criticisms are significant in themselves, I agree with historian
Alan Atkinson, who maintains that the 1890s were highly influential, because in this
decade Australia’s “collective self-understanding was refashioned at a new and more
elevated level”.483
A further charge against Ward’s theory of the Bush ethos is that he pays little
attention to the fact that the artists and writers most involved in the apotheosis of the
Noble Bushman belonged predominantly to the middle-class intelligentsia of Australia’s
metropolises. As Carter argues, the “nationalist myth of the bush” represents a fantasy
of the urban class, an expression of their own “anti-urban nostalgia”.484 Richard White
likewise argues that for “the city-dweller” the Bush “simply provided a frame on which
to hang a set of preconceptions” – preconceptions which were shaped by the bohemian 481 Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Yarra, VIC: Curry O’Neil, 1983), 3-5. 482 Angela Woollacott, “Russel Ward, Frontier Violence and Australian Historiography,” Journal of
Australian Colonial History 10, no. 2 (2008): 23-36. 483 Alan Atkinson, “Russel Ward: Settlement and Apotheosis,” Journal of Australian Colonial History
10, no. 2 (2008): 94. 484 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 282-3.
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values of Australia’s new urban middle class.485 In a similar vein, critics such as Ian
Burn have suggested that the Heidelberg School, an Australian school of painting that
played a central role in the development of the national vision, was not so much
depicting the current socio-economic reality of bush life, but rather mythologising a
rural past that had already disappeared, or never existed in the first place.486 Against
such criticism Hoorn forcefully argues that the genesis of the Noble Bushman lay not in
“the minds of the city artist”, but in the bush itself, and that the artists of the Heidelberg
School were more or less painting in the “realist” mode.487
While Hoorn may be overstating the case, she has a point cautioning against simply
dismissing the national vision of the Bush as a nostalgic fantasy of the city-dweller that
has no basis in reality. After all, it is one of the strengths of Ward’s thesis that he
grounds it in the actual socio-economic forces that shaped labour relations in Australia’s
interior. As Ward argues, the Bush ethos was a reflection of the unique social dynamic
of the inland population at the time: in the late nineteenth century, Australia’s remote
inland exhibited a rigid two-class society of pastoral employers (the squattocracy), and
pastoral employees, who, especially for the first half of the century, were almost entirely
males of (mostly Irish) convict background. Curiously enough, this two-class structure
comes surprisingly close to realising Wakefield’s nostalgic vision of a revival of feudal
Britain in Australia. But owing to the labour shortage that followed the pastoral boom,
the quasi-nomadic bush proletariat enjoyed relative economic security. This resulted in
the Dickensian dream of a working man’s paradise finding at least partial fulfilment,
since the unique labour market of the bush allowed the labouring class to wield
comparatively strong bargaining power with respect to their working conditions. In the
context of Australia’s convict history, it can reasonably be argued that this promoted
independence and solidarity as key values among pastoral labourers. As Ward points
out: “A condition of affairs in which jobs are more plentiful than men to do them
always tends to evoke an attitude of ‘manly independence’ or, according to the point of
view, insubordinate insolence in working people”.488 What becomes apparent here is
that while the Bush ethos may be the product of the imagination of Australia’s urban
485 White, Inventing Australia, 85; 97; 99. 486 Ian Burns, “Beating About the Bush: The Landscapes of the Heidelberg School,” in Australian Art
and Architecture: Essays Presented to Bernard Smith, eds. Anthony Bradley et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), 85; cf. with Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 282-3.
487 Hoorn, 164-5; 135. 488 Ward, 34.
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middle-class, it nonetheless relates to the actual socio-economic characteristics of
Australia’s pastoral inland.
The important issue, therefore, is not that the Noble Bushman did not exist, but that
he was larger than life. In fact, the point to be taken from the criticism outlined above is
the utopian quality of the Bush: if we accept the contention that the Bush is less a real-
life locale than a metropolitan fantasy, then its utopic spatiality (what Ricœur describes
as the extra-territoriality of utopia) becomes evident. What better example to illustrate
this than Banjo Paterson’s well-known “Clancy of the Overflow”, a ballad based on the
apparently true story of a small legal matter Paterson was handling, which involved him
requesting an unpaid debt from a bush worker named Clancy. In want of a better
address, Paterson sent the collection letter to “Clancy of the Overflow”. The return reply
reading “Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are” sets
off the poem’s reverie about life in the Bush.489 Notably, since Paterson’s lyrical
persona declares that it is in “my wild erratic fancy” that “visions come to me of
Clancy”, the daydream that unfolds next of the Arcadian “pleasures that the townsfolk
never know” is clearly marked as imaginary. It is the fantasy of a dissatisfied urbanite
who, “sitting in my dingy little office”, offsets his vision of the Bush against the social
reality of the “dusty, dirty city”. In this context, Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra fittingly
speak of “the unreal world of The Overflow”, stating that the Bush “is (from the
suburban perspective) not-here, the negation of suburban existence”.490 But neither is
the Bush the bush, just like Clancy, the Noble Bushman, is nowhere to be found. The
Bush is extra-territorial, it is a utopic backdrop. This becomes perhaps most
comprehensible in the elusive image of the Outback: as Lawson writes: “You could go
to the brink of eternity as far as Australia is concerned and yet meet an animated
mummy of a swagman who will talk of going ‘out back’”.491 The Outback is,
inapprehensibly, always further “out back”. The utopia of the Bush furnishes in this way
the unattainable, remote horizon against which a utopian critique of urban reality can be
formulated.
489 Andrew Barton Paterson, “Clancy of the Overflow,” in The Man From Snowy River and Other
Verses (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1917). 490 Hodge and Mishra, 147-8. 491 Henry Lawson, “In a Dry Season,” in The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, ed. John Barnes
(Melbourne: Penguin, 2009), 39.
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In the end, Clancy’s debt remains outstanding, but it is precisely in this indebtedness
to reality that the utopian potential of the Noble Bushman lies. He thus presents us with
what Bloch would call an unsatisfied hope-content. So instead of recognising in the
Noble Bushman an accurate, sociological type that is representative of Australia at
large, he may more profitably be thought of as the kind of utopian archetype which
Bloch says encapsulates “something still not-worked-through”.492 This is all the more so
since the Noble Bushman was, even among Australia’s pastoral inland workers, more
utopian than real. The Bushman’s concrete-utopian dimension, consisting of his
characteristics that transcend the socio-historical reality of the 1890s, becomes apparent
when we realise that he embodies the radical political ideas of the time, especially
Chartism, trade unionism, the eight hour working day, and universal manhood suffrage.
Take for instance the following description of a pastoral inland worker by Francis
Adams, in which the Bushman represents not merely a sociological type, but a role
model and ideal:
The shearer of to-day is a man who arrives on a horse, leading another, and with his bank-book in his pocket.... His visits to the township are with a view of entering his cheque to his account, or of forwarding it by post office order to his “old woman” at the homestead hundreds of miles away. He is a member of a union with offices at the central bush townships, and his political views are of the most decisive and “advanced” order.493
In an atmosphere fraught with millenarian expectation, and inspired by the ideas of
Marx’ vision of a united proletariat, Henry George’s Single Tax theory, and Bellamy’s
utopian novel Looking Backward (to name only a few), the Noble Bushman came to
personify much of the utopianism of the time.494 As such, he was an embodiment of
what Bloch describes as the Novum, the type of “unbecome […] goal-content” that is
“concerned with the foremost segment of history”.495
One of the most obvious utopian aspects of the Noble Bushman is his association
with the fight for labour rights and unionism. To some degree, this was grounded in
historical reality: while the pastoral industry was still booming in the 1880s, the bush
unionists were able to secure significant concessions from the pastoralists; but when
492 Ernst Bloch, “The Conscious and Known Activity within the Not-Yet-Conscious, the Utopian
Function,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, by Ernst Bloch. Trans. Jack Zipes et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988), 121.
493 Qtd. in Hoorn 178-9; see also Ward, 191; Palmer, 35. 494 Palmer, 65; 62-3; also Ward, 212. 495 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:202; 1:200.
162
wool prices began to fall in the 1890s, the squatters started to construe unionised labour
as a “formidable rebel army”.496 This came to a head in the 1891 Shearer’s Strike,
which almost amounted to a small civil war as the Queensland shearers were protesting
for maintaining the conditions of their union contract.497 The Bushman thus came to
represent a potentially revolutionary working-class force. This theme was picked up by
David Andrade’s The Melbourne Riots and How Harry Holdfast and His Friends
Emancipated the Workers (1892), a utopian novel that describes how in the face of
inhumane industrialism, a band of mates establishes a co-operative, socialist community
that sets off 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.”498 In the utopian iconography
that developed around the revolutionary figure of the Bushman, the principle of
solidarity found a specifically Australian form of expression. As W. G. Spence, the first
president of the Shearers’ Union, emphasises, it was mateship that formed the bedrock
of bush unionism: “Unionism came to the Australian bushman as a religion. It came
bringing salvation from years of tyranny. It had in it that feeling of mateship which he
understood already”.499 The utopian values and ideals which the Noble Bushman
personified were brought to a focus in the concept of mateship. Outshining its real-life
inspiration, mateship stands as the utopian backbone that supports the Noble Bushman’s
upright gait. Finally, the crucial point about the Noble Bushman is not whether he
corresponds fully or partially to any sociological type or historical person, but the larger
utopian vision for which he stands.
What remains unsettled, however, is the question of why and how the utopia of the
Bush came to dominate the national self-conception of Australians. The increasing need
for a national form of self-identification may be offered as one explanation for why the
Noble Bushman was accepted as an accurate representation of the nation at large:
496 Palmer, 62 497 Palmer, 127-8; for the influential role of Queensland’s pastoral workers on the “national mystique”,
see: Lyndon Megarrity, “The Queensland Legend,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 10, no. 2 (2008): 123-38.
498 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): 15-7; and Burgmann and Milner, 843-4.
499 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 171.
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towards the end of the nineteenth century, Australia’s political and cultural ties with
Great Britain were changing, and at the same time, the colony’s demographics became
increasingly characterised by native-born Anglo-Saxons who felt no longer simply
British. The Noble Bushman was able to bridge the gap between increasing national
self-consciousness and decreasing imperial attachment. He provided a national form of
identity that could rival the one stemming from overseas. But if the main function of the
Noble Bushman was to provide an alternative figure of identification that could offset
the national vision against the externally-imposed imperial one, then his apotheosis to
the national type inevitably resulted in a false consciousness, because, as Hodge and
Mishra rightly proclaim, “The Australian legend was never the Australian reality”.500
That is to say, the Bush legend dramatically misrepresents Australian society, because
today as well as then it pertains only loosely to a minuscule fraction of Australia’s
predominantly urban population. The Bush ethos was and is a reality-transcending
utopia. But as Ward emphasises, it had (and arguably still has) “a disproportionate
influence on that of the whole nation”.501 This leaves the majority of Australians, as
Hodge and Mishra remark, with “the paradox that they are not ‘typical Australians’ at
all.”502 Nonetheless, nineteenth-century writers such as Francis Adams were convinced
that “the bush is the heart of the country, the real Australian Australia, and it is with the
Bushman that the final fate of the nation and race will lie”.503
It becomes apparent here that the Bush ethos also performs what Ricœur describes as
the integrative, identity-constituting function of ideology.504 Working within Max
Weber’s motivational framework, Ricœur identifies it as the first objective of ideology
to close what he calls the “credibility gap” in a given social structure.505 Ricœur
explains that ideology has to “bridge the tension that characterizes the legitimation
process” in order to summon “not only our physical submission but also our consent
and cooperation”.506 This tension, he points out, “occurs because while the citizenry’s
belief and the authority’s claim should correspond at the same level, the equivalence of
belief with claim is never totally actual but rather always more or less a cultural
500 Hodge and Mishra, 163. 501 Ward, 238; also v. 502 Hodge and Mishra, xv. 503 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 196. 504 Ricœur, Lectures, 251-2. 505 Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 22. 506 Ricoeur, Lectures, 13.
164
fabrication.”507 And the “cultural fabrication” which bridges this tension or “credibility
gap” coincides with a “surplus” that is “common to all structures of power”.508 If we
translate Ricœur’s Weberian language into our conceptual framework, we see that the
surplus Ricœur refers to corresponds essentially to what Bloch calls the utopian surplus.
What follows from this is that ideology’s claim to legitimacy is supported and validated
by the utopian surplus. In the specific case at hand, this means that it is the utopian
archetype of the Noble Bushman that allows for ideological closure of the national
vision, turning it, in effect, into a false consciousness.
As a last remark, it is worth noting that the national vision of the Bush found a
powerful cultural outlet in the Bulletin. Outspokenly republican, the Bulletin exerted a
decisive influence over the national self-understanding of Australia in the 1890s. As the
“Bushman’s Bible”, it was addressed to the shearer and sundowner, but found wide
readership in general. Particularly the smart editorship of J. F. Archibald and A. G.
Stephens helped to promote the journal to national fame. As Palmer claims, it was
Archibald’s Bulletin that acted as “the chief instrument for expressing and defining the
national being”.509 In a sense, the Bulletin can be seen as a successor to Household
Words, because just like Dickens’ journal it acted as a relay station through which the
utopian discourse of the Bush was bundled into an almost uniform vision. The Bulletin
gave its own formulation of the Australian Dream by revising the national view of the
convict system and promoting Australian literature. Crucially, it championed the
utopian archetype of the Noble Bushman as a constitutive element of Australia’s
national identity. The Bulletin thus responded to the need for a national form of identity,
and actively assisted in the apotheosis of the Noble Bushman to the “national type”.
Ideological Legacies of the Dickensian Pastoral
While Ward is right in associating the Bush ethos with the concrete labour relations
of Australia’s pastoral inland, his thesis has to be criticised insofar as the image of the
Bushman itself was not an ex negativo creation from within this particular socio-
economic milieu. Admittedly, it has some roots in the oral traditions of convict
507 Ricoeur, Lectures, 13. 508 Ricoeur, Lectures, 14. 509 Palmer, 79.
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Australia, and it certainly reached its fullest articulation in the mature literature of the
1890s. But I would like to follow Lansbury in her criticism of Ward that the image of
the Noble Bushman can already be found in the Arcadian writings of British authors of
the 1850s, who had only limited knowledge of the Australian colonies. Therefore,
Ward’s claim that the “birthplace of the ‘noble bushman’” is to be found in the national
visions of the late nineteenth century has to be problematised. As Lansbury argues, the
“egalitarian, Arcadian expression of Australia was composed not in the nineties in the
bush of Australia, but in England during the fifties by Sidney, Dickens and Lytton”.510
It is, consequently, the Dickensian Pastoral that lies at the root of the national utopia of
the Bush. Take for instance the following sketch by Samuel Sidney. Doesn’t it convey
very much the same image as Ward’s description of the “typical Australian”?
The Australian stockman, though of rude appearance and coarse manners, “full of strange oaths and bearded like a pard,” has the germ of many sterling virtues, which only need cultivation to ripen into all that we most admire in our old Saxon yeomanry. He is hospitable as the Indian or Highlander of romance; frugal and industrious, courageous and untiring, jealous of his master’s right and name, and needs but opportunity and example to cast aside the barbarous skin he wears.511
Just like Ward, Sidney emphasises in this passage the rough-and-readyness of the
Australian Bushman. Sidney’s typical Australian is an outstanding worker, unaffected
and rustic in his manners, with an aversion to authority. Probably consciously punning
on the word “sterling”, Sidney underlines here not only the “excellent” quality of the
Australian colonial as a worker, but also alludes to the “sterling” character of British-
born people in opposition to the inferior class of “currency lads and lasses” – an
appellation for native-born Anglo-Australians because of the promissory notes they
used. One point that becomes apparent here is the deeply racial dimension of Sidney’s
sketch; he wants to draw attention to the “old Saxon yeomanry” stock from which the
Australian colonial derives: although some of the Bushman’s qualities may be hidden
behind his rough-and-readyness, only a little cultivation is needed to bring out the
sterling features of the original race. The Dickensian Pastoral, it seems, exhibits an
ambivalent relationship with the image of the Noble Bushman, because while it
celebrates the physical qualities of the colonial offspring, it simultaneously laments its
510 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 2. 511 Sidney, Australian Hand-book, 32.
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cultural shortcomings. As will become evident later, this racial dimension of the
imperial vision was carried over into the national vision as an ideological legacy.
The Noble Bushman of the 1890s was, accordingly, anticipated in Sidney’s
Household Words stories. For instance, what the critic Vance Palmer described in his
seminal The Legend of the Nineties (1954) as the typical Australian’s “stringybark and
greenhide” attitude – that is, the enthusiasm to “have a go” at anything, combined with a
certain form of manly self-reliance and resourceful inventiveness – finds a plausible
prototype in Sidney’s character of Jem Carden, the ploughman who “could do as much
with a saw, an auger, an axe, and an adze as a European workman with a complete chest
of tools.”512 Most of Sidney’s Australian frontier romances feature colonial men who
are, as Ward’s description of the typical Australian has it, “rough and ready”, and show
“great exertions in an emergency”. However, since most of these adventurers could
readily be transplanted to other frontier outposts of the British Empire, it appears that
some aspects of the Bush utopia are more generic than specific, and derive from ideas
with no inevitable connection to the Australian environment. The notion of the “Coming
Man”, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon transformed by colonial experience, was a
commonplace of nineteenth-century imperial rhetoric.513 But Sidney’s stories contain
locally-specific and even iconically Australian images, too, such as romantic bivouac
scenes in the Bush, complete with boiling billy, smoking pipe, billabong and fresh-
baked damper – only the drowning swagman is missing.514 Literary critic Leon Litvack
even suggests that the centrepiece of the Bush utopia, the idea of mateship, is
foreshadowed in Sidney’s convict character “Bald-faced Dick” and his “bush
honour”.515 The conclusion to be drawn here, then, is that much of the “Australian
Legend” has been inherited from 1850s emigration literature, and that the national
utopia of the Bush represents, in its thematic matter and form, an extension of the
Dickensian Pastoral.
512 Sidney, “An Australian Ploughman’s Story,” 39. 513 For a detailed discussion of the colonial adventure novel and notions of the “Coming Man”, see
Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure. Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); also White, Inventing Australia, 83-5.
514 See e.g. Sidney’s “An Australian Ploughman’s Story,” 39: “we camped down near a waterhole, lighted a fire on some hollow fallen gum-tree, hobbled out our horses on the pasture near, put the quart pots to boil, the damper (flour cake) in the ashes to bake, and smoked our pipes until all was ready; then rolling up each in his blanket, slept soundly on the bare ground.”
515 Litvack, 41.
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This means that Australia’s national vision continued to carry most of the ideological
baggage of earlier visions. A first insight into the complicated relationship between
national and imperial vision can be gathered from Henry Kendall’s 1889 “The Far
Future”, a poem which confusingly attempts to package a national vision in the very
language of empire:
Australia, advancing with rapid winged stride, Shall plant among nations her banners in pride, The yoke of dependence aside she will cast, And build on the ruins and wrecks of the Past. Her flag on the tempest will wave to proclaim ’Mong kingdoms and empires her national name; The Future shall see it asleep or unfurl’d, The shelter of Freedom and boast of the world. Australia, advancing like day on the sky, Has glimmer’d thro’ darkness, will blazon on high, A Gem in its glitter has yet to be seen, When Progress shall place her where England has been; When bursting those limits above she will soar, Outstretching all rivals who’ve mounted before, And, resting, will blaze with her glories unfurl’d, The empire of empires and boast of the world.516
Kendall’s poem attempts to establish the foundation of an Australian nation as its poetic
theme. But as its focus on development (“Progress shall place her where England has
been”) and territorial expansion (“Outstretching all rivals”) makes clear, the poem
couches this vision of national independence in the imperialist jargon of the Civilising
Mission. So it is that while Kendall’s “The Far Future” displays a strong national
sentiment, the poem cannot abstain from simultaneously expressing a certain loyalty to
the imperial homeland. In a footnote to the poem, Kendall even excuses his strong
“native-born” nationalism, hoping that it “will not be considered disloyal” since he
believes it is “but reasonable to imagine that Australia will in the far future become an
independent nation”. Although Kendall’s poem expresses, accordingly, a deeply utopian
longing for a different social reality and a profound interest in concrete-utopian
categories such as freedom, it is in the end characterised by a nationalism that is almost
meek in its attachment to imperialism. The irony, therefore, is that the national vision,
as Ashcroft remarks, “cannot escape the vision of the future bequeathed to it by the
516 Henry Kendall, “The Far Future,” in The Poems of Henry Kendall (Sydney and Adelaide: Angus and
Robertson, 1920).
168
imperial project.”517 The utopia of the Bush remains engulfed in the ideology it attempts
to oppose.
Imperialism often resurfaces most concretely and forcefully in texts that deploy
Australian idiom and national imagery to glorify the utopia of the Bush and the Noble
Bushman. Rolf Boldrewood, the famous rhapsodist of bushranging, represents a striking
example of this, for his writings frequently evince the particular form of racial thinking
that characterises British imperialism. In a piece on the developing “Australian type”,
Boldrewood initially stresses the Anglo-Saxon qualities of Australians by claiming that
“Australian-born persons, with trifling exceptions, are very like everybody else, born of
British blood, anywhere”.518 But he then goes on to argue that it is the harsh condition
of Australia’s inland that makes the Bushman superior to his European progenitors:
On the great interior plateaus, the pure, dry atmosphere, which invigorates the invalid, rears up uninjured the hardy broods of the farmer, the stockrider, and the shepherd. Stalwart men and wholesome, stirring lasses do they make. […] The ordinary bush-labourer, reared on a farm or a station, is generally a tall, rather graceful personage. […] He will generally do manual labour after a fashion and at a pace that would astonish a Kent or Sussex yokel.519
This exemplifies the “Anglo-Machismo”520 that dominated the self-conception of
Anglo-Saxon Australians at the end of the nineteenth century. Deriving from the racist
hypocrisy of the Civilising Mission, Anglo-Machismo represents perhaps the principal
ideological bequest of British imperialism to Australia’s national vision. In the passage
above Boldrewood not only instantiates this chauvinistic belief in racial superiority, he
moreover demonstrates the paradoxical character of Australian Anglo-Machismo: while
subscribing to the idea of racial superiority, Boldrewood simultaneously tries to
undermine British authority by posing the Australian Bushman as the “better Briton”.
This schizoid position between asserting and denying British identity is also reflected in
Captain Starlight, the Byronic hero of Boldrewood’s classic Robbery Under Arms, who
is torn between the aristocratic ideal of the British gentleman and the egalitarian
anarchism of the colonial outlaw.
517 Ashcroft, “Horizon of the Future,” 17. 518 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 140. 519 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 140-1. 520 I have borrowed this term from Hoorn, 257.
169
The ideology of Anglo-Machismo reaches deep into the utopian core of the Noble
Bushman. As a result, the utopian vision of egalitarian solidarity and unionism
associated with the Bushman was strictly confined to males of Anglo-Saxon origin. In
stark contrast to its positive, concrete-utopian contents (specifically the radical political
ideals of Chartism and republicanism), the vision of the 1890s was permeated by racist
and sexist beliefs. Particularly the concept of mateship marks the fault-lines where the
utopia of collectivism and group solidarity falls victim to the ideological grip of racism
and sexism: in theory, unionism was supposed to be a universal brotherhood of
labouring people, but its exclusiveness became too often painfully clear when the
egalitarian solidarity of mateship stopped at race. For example, the president of the
Shearers’ Union W. G. Spence limited mateship to the “actions of one ‘white man’ to
another”.521 In many cases it was precisely the people excluded from mateship and
unionism that provided the foil against which the pastoral labourer could be fashioned
as the manly, independent protester that represented the “typical Australian”. Take for
instance the following quatrain from Banjo Paterson’s “Bushman’s Song”:
“I asked a cove for shearin’ once along the Marthaguy: “We shear non-union here,” says he. “I call it scab,” says I. I looked along the shearin’ floor before I turned to go – There were eight or ten dashed Chinamen a-shearing’ in a row.”522
Unsurprisingly, the Bulletin, as the strongest cultural outlet of the national vision,
was deeply affected by the ideological weight of Anglo-Machismo. There is an
interesting parallel between Household Words and the Bulletin in that what Dickens’
journal represented for the late imperial vision, namely the mouthpiece of the vision of
Australia as an Arcadian utopia for working-class emigrants, the Bulletin represented
for the national vision. Given its pivotal cultural role, the Bulletin provides many
remarkable examples of how the utopian content and ideological underbelly of the
Dickensian Pastoral was transferred onto the utopia of the Bush. Its editor A. G.
Stephens, for example, expounds a vision for a future Australian commonwealth
strongly reminiscent of the “Arcadian incantations”523 of Sidney and Wakefield, in
which “independent homesteads” in the country provide an alternative to unhealthy
urbanisation. Stephens furthermore underscores the idea of Australia as a working
521 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 171. 522 Andrew Barton Paterson, “A Bushman’s Song,” in The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses
(Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1917). 523 Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 162.
170
man’s paradise, likewise reminiscent of the emigration literature of the 1850s, yet he
refashions it in a more radical form. “Good government”, Stephens writes, “can do
much to level the disparity of classes. It cannot make all men equal, but it can give to all
equal opportunities as far as the sphere of government extends. The Commonwealth can
tax the rich for the benefit of the poor, and ensure to some extent a re-distribution of
wealth at each generation. It can place education within the reach of all, capital within
the reach of the industrious – always with the aim of making as many of its citizens as
possible their own employers, independent of wages”.524 While Stephens’ vision of a
working-class Arcadia may touch upon concrete-utopian sentiments, foremost the ideas
of economic independence and egalitarianism, it is nonetheless corrupted by Anglo-
Machismo, because despite pretensions to universality, there is no doubt what Stephens
means by “all men”: “Nothing at all”, he urges, “should be permitted to interfere with
the vital and permanent necessity of preserving Australia for white Australians”.525
Stephens, in fact, seems obsessed with the “purification of the national blood”.526 He
was by far not an isolated case, as racial discrimination took place on a wholesale basis
in the Bulletin. After all, the journal’s 1893 manifesto proclaims: “Australia for the
Australians – The cheap Chinaman, the cheap nigger, and the cheap European pauper to
be absolutely excluded”.527
Arthur Streeton’s Arcadian Australia
We already pointed to the curious fact that to a limited extent, the emigration
propaganda of the 1850s foreshadowed certain features of Australia’s social reality in
the 1890s. Specifically Wakefield’s nostalgic vision of a quasi-feudal utopia found
realisation in the rigid two-class structure of labourers and squatters in Australia’s
pastoral inland. Owing to the shortage of labour, some parts of the vision of a working
man’s paradise also rang true. Yet the central idea of the Dickensian Pastoral (i.e. its
dream of an independent yeomanry based on small-scale farming) remained unfulfilled.
But even so, the national vision of the Bush continues to rely on the nostalgically
evocative imagery of the pastoral (e.g. the harvest home and the country homestead). It
524 Qtd. in Turner, 248. 525 Qtd. in Turner, 248. 526 Qtd. in Turner, 248. 527 Qtd. in Ward, 224-5.
171
is, consequently, characterised by a paradoxical tension, for while the Bush ethos is
supposed to countervail the externally-imposed vision of Empire, the national vision
remains within the Arcadian framework of the Dickensian Pastoral. The major problem
with this imperial legacy was that the national vision, and specifically the ideal of the
Noble Bushman, consequently carried on the ideological baggage of the imperial vision.
The work of Arthur Streeton provides an illuminating example of how the imperial
vision of a pastoral Arcadia was retained but also translated into a form more
compatible with the Australian landscape and the sentiments of Australian nationalism.
Most of Streeton’s paintings could serve as 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, effecting
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 figure gazing forlornly into the more satiated colours of the
background. Notably, while the painting is not without nostalgic tones, it is devoid of
the anxieties of imperial melancholy; there is no more need for enclosures, and the
settler’s hut on the mid right is placed almost confidently into the lone Australian
environment.
It would seem that Streeton’s Golden Summer could readily be understood as
documenting the realisation of the imperial utopia: a pastoral Arcadia. However, since
Australia’s pastoral industry had already outlived its most prosperous days a decade
earlier, critics such as Ursula Hoff 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.”528 What this means is that the landscape of Golden Summer with its
celebration of an Arcadian Australia was not so much capturing the present than
nostalgically remembering pastoralism’s bygone Golden Age. What is more, while the
painting evokes an Arcadian landscape spreading seemingly boundlessly in all
directions, it actually depicts an area located just on the suburban outskirts of
Melbourne – a city, it is worth noting, which for a brief period at the time was the
528 Ursula Hoff, “Reflections on the Heidelberg School, 1885-1900,” Meanjin 10, no. 2 (Winter 1951),
132; cf. with Hoorn, 168.
172
second largest metropolis in the British Empire.529 The point to be made here, then, is
that the landscape of Golden Summer is, like the Bush legend itself, larger than life.
Hence its Arcadian vision should be understood as utopic rather than realistic: what
comes into view is a matured form of the Dickensian Pastoral that articulates a critique
of the present from the extra-territorial vantage point of Arcadia. More specifically, the
painting’s staging of a retreat to a Golden Age of unalienated, rural bliss throws into
relief the dystopian aspects of Modernity that already troubled British migrants in the
1850s, but which by the 1890s were even further exacerbated: it is a critique of
sprawling urbanisation, increasing technological commodification and emotional
impoverishment. The utopian potential of the Dickensian Pastoral, it seems, reaches its
full potential in Streeton’s idyllic landscapes. They depict the idyll of Arcadia, a rural
haven from the plights of industrialised and urbanised life. In this spirit, Streeton’s
contemporary J. S. MacDonald said about his paintings:
To me they point the way to which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks 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 sufficiently well, we have Streeton’s pictures to stress the miraculousness of it.530
Although Streeton’s work was not immediately successful, it was only a matter of
decades before he was idolised as a national painter. Frederick McCubbin, for instance,
his fellow member of the Heidelberg School, praised him for capturing the national
essence of Australia. Although McCubbin commented specifically on the painting The
Purple Noon’s Transparent Might (1896), his remarks could 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 flecked 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 529 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 (Singapore: World Scientific, 2014), 2:262.
530 Qtd. in Hoorn, 241-2.
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almost take this picture as a National Symbol”.531 Fellow artist and critic Lionel
Lindsay went so far as to call Golden Summer “historically the most important
landscape in Australia”.532 Perhaps unlike any other artist, Streeton succeeded in
translating the imperial vision of an Arcadian Australia into a coherent national utopia.
This manifests itself most clearly in what Bernard Smith calls the “visual integrity”
of Streeton’s landscapes.533 Streeton’s utopic Arcadia is a site spatially as well as
temporally removed from the corrupted sphere of Modernity, escaping rational
fragmentation, urban displacement and social alienation, and offering instead the
wholesomeness and bliss of rural simplicity. As Hoorn puts it: “In front of Streeton’s
pastoral paintings, the viewer would find the spirit of Australia, a psychic wholeness
and sense of being at home”.534 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”.535 Streeton’s
creation of a 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 fleece”,536 because unlike in the early-
colonial period, proprietorship was presupposed and the question of ownership therefore
precipitately settled. What is more, the subversive dimension of paintings such as
Golden Summer (i.e. their implicit critique of modern industrialisation and urbanisation)
is considerably diminished by their backward-looking orientation, which, rather than
critically appealing to the future, remembers nostalgically an idealised and irreversibly
lost past. The critical potential of Arcadia here succumbs to the ideological weight of
nostalgia.
531 Qtd. in McLean, 52. 532 Lionel Lindsay, “Golden Summer,” Evening News, November 28, 1923, 1. 533 Bernard Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1979), 146. 534 Hoorn, 243. 535 McLean, 55. 536 McLean, 79-80.
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Early Twentieth-Century Pastoraphilia
By the turn of the century, the national vision of the Bush had become hegemonic. In
spite of the fact that the great majority of Australia’s population was concentrated in a
handful of large cities, living a predominantly suburban life, the utopia of the Bush and
its ethos were increasingly accepted as a valid representation of the nation at large. In
the years leading up to World Wars, the vision of the nineties was believed to have
come true. Professor Meredith Atkinson, for instance, thought that Australia was well
on her way “to become an ideal Commonwealth”:
In her social legislation, in its high ideal of general welfare, in her universal franchise, higher wages, better living and working conditions, and above all in the widespread spirit of freedom and personal independence, Australia is no mere improved copy of older countries. She has developed a nationalism which is more than ordinary patriotism. It is rooted in a passionate belief that Australian civilisation is profoundly different from that of the old world537
But as T. I. Moore argues, with nationalism growing inexorably stronger, the rebellious
ebullience of the 1890s abated, and the utopian vision became stale, so that the
“industrialized welfare state” that took its place was “a workable but pedestrian and
limited version of the limitless Utopia”.538 The perceived notion that the radical agenda
embodied by the Noble Bushman was already checked off explains Hoorn’s observation
that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the utopian iconography revolving around
the celebration of pastoral labour and the bush proletariat (best illustrated by Tom
Roberts) was abandoned.539 Shorn off his anticipatory content, the Bushman was no
longer a utopian ideal to aspire to, but rather a nostalgically remembered founding
father that could readily be summoned to ratify nationalist agendas. A key work in this
respect is James Collier’s The Pastoral Age in Australasia (1911). Inspired by the
Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer, the book reads like a scholarly exercise in Social
Darwinism, for Collier argues in evolutionist terms that the pastoral age in Australia
“has left or is leaving an indelible impress on the character of the people. It bred in them
a spirit of rude independence that permeates the Australian of all classes and
professions, so as to make him resist dictation and resent even being ‘spoken to.’ It bred
537 Meredith Atkinson, ed. Australia: Economic and Political Studies (Sydney: Macmillian, 1920), 1. 538 Tom Inglis Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature (Sydney: Angus, 1971), 286. 539 Hoorn, 195-6.
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the simplicity of life where the multitude of ranks in the ‘Byzantine hierarchy’ of
Europe has completely disappeared”.540
The anticipatory dimension of the Noble Bushman is lost on Collier. Short-circuiting
the Bushman’s utopian gesture towards the future, Collier repositions him as the
forefather of Anglo-Australian society, assuming that the unfulfilled hope-content
which the Bushman encapsulates has already become reality. Collier’s use of the Noble
Bushman is almost regressive, in the sense that he nostalgically reflects upon this
utopian archetype as something foregone, if not bygone, instead of something that is
anticipatory, outlining the potentialities of the present. As Bloch comments, this is a
consistent danger of utopian archetypes, because once “held back in regression”, they
“transform utopia into a backward-looking, reactionary, ultimately even diluvial one.
They are then more dangerous than the usual smoke-screen of ideology; for while the
latter merely diverts attention from recognition of the present and its real driving force,
the archetype, spell-binding backwards and held in a backward spell, additionally
prevents openness to the future.”541 Instead of the “militant optimism” of the 1890s, the
vision behind the utopia of the Bush deteriorates into a form of “contemplative
quietism”, which ultimately “disguises the future as past”.542 Once mistaken as a
historical figure, the Noble Bushman provides the symbolic linchpin that effects
ideological closure, turning the utopia of the Bush into a compensating nationalist
ideology.
After reducing the Noble Bushman to an ideological strawman, the national vision
began to develop an almost fetish-like admiration of the landscape itself. As Hoorn
comments on the paintings of this period: “While the land seems to belong to nobody
and to everybody in a natural commonwealth for all to enjoy, these paintings were in
fact robust celebrations of the white ruling class ownership of the land. In a departure
from earlier painterly conventions, the landscape became mannered and now possessed
an uncanny spiritual quality conveyed through grand passages and atmospheric
hues”.543 This, Hoorn argues, led to the emergence of a nationalist cult, which she calls
“Pastoraphilia”: “So strong was the new focus on the landscape and on the spiritual
values associated with it that it became a cult. Characterised by an obsessive interest in
540 James Collier, The Pastoral Age in Australasia (London: Whitecombe, 1911), 268. 541 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:162. 542 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:198. 543 Hoorn, 232.
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pastoralism and the landscape, and a belief that the nation’s identity was entirely located
in the bush, this cult, which I will call “pastoraphilia”, transformed landscape painting
in the years between the two world wars. Its members believed that Australians had
escaped modernity through generating a new pastoral culture while earlier ‘pastoral’
nations were fading, overtaken by the process of industrialisation.”544
The irony of this belief becomes apparent when we juxtapose the development of the
cult of Pastoraphilia with the growth of the manufacturing sector in the twentieth-
century. Perhaps precisely because of the predominance of Pastoraphilic thought,
manufacturing has largely been overlooked in assessments of the Australian Legend. As
W. A. Sinclair points out, manufacturing “took over from primary industry as the basis
for the continuance of economic growth when the limitations on the availability of
productive land became more apparent from about the 1920s”.545 In the years between
Federation and the First World War, the growth of manufacturing outpaced the
economy as a whole.546 So it was that the rise of heavy industry, signalled for instance
by the establishment of the BHP steel-making plant at Newcastle, was paralleled by the
marked decline of pastoralism’s contribution to the GDP.547 Paradoxically, therefore, at
the same time as the vision of an Arcadian Australia à la Streeton was increasingly
accepted as national truth, the pastoral nation of Australia actually became more and
more industrialised. This was accompanied by a policy of protectionism that sheltered
Australian industries from the global market: to ensure the advantage of local
manufacturers in the domestic market, the protectionist governments of Edmund Barton
and Alfred Deakin erected economic barriers against overseas competition, such as for
example the Commonwealth tariff.548 Additionally, a xenophobic ideology of
isolationism, which basically represented an excessive form of Anglo-Machismo and
found its clearest expression in the White Australia policy, went along with this
economic protectionism. Stripped of its anticipatory dimension, the Bush was no longer
a utopian counterspace that constructively shaped reality, but an escapistic refuge in
which fantasies of pre-industrial isolation, contrary to reality, could be played out.
544 Hoorn, 195-6. 545 W. A. Sinclair, “Manufacturing,” in Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds. Graeme Davison
et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). 546 Attard. 547 From 1880 to 1940 the pastoral industry’s contribution to the GDP declined from 16 to less than 10
percent, while manufacturing rose to almost 20 percent; see Murray and Chester, 5-7; also Sinclair. 548 Murray and Chester, 6; also Sinclair.
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CHAPTER 7 – Purgatorial Visions of Australia
“Death is about the only cheerful thing in the bush.” (Henry Lawson, “In a Dry Season”, 38)
The national vision that matured in the 1890s was deeply bifurcated in its roots.
What the previous chapter did not reveal is that the elaboration of the Dickensian
Pastoral into the utopia of the Bush was contrasted by a much more dystopian
conception of Australia’s hinterland as a ruthless and hostile place of suffering. One of
the clearest and most direct examples of this can be found in Frederick McCubbin’s
painting Down on his Luck (1889), in which McCubbin elegises the hardships of
pioneer life. The painting concentrates on the human figure in the foreground,
supposedly an unfortunate gold digger who, in a penseroso pose strongly reminiscent of
Albrecht Dürer’s “Job Castigated by his Wife” or “Melencolia I”, stares glumly into the
small fire in front of him, contemplating his losses. The painting is executed in a muted,
subdued palette that accentuates the gloomy stillness and calmness of the scene, and its
even and pallid plane of light is disturbed only by the pale sky glimpsing through the
gum trees in the background. McCubbin thus introduces a dark note of melancholy into
the landscape of the Bush which, as Bernard Smith has pointed out, contrasts sharply
with the “sun-drenched optimism and gaiety of spirit” that characterises the work of his
fellow members of the Heidelberg School.549 The difference of McCubbin’s vision of
the Bush becomes most apparent in comparison to Arthur Streeton and his golden-and-
blue “poems of light and heat”.
But as McCubbin’s desperate digger already indicates, not only the utopia of the
Bush is turned upside down, also the Noble Bushman finds himself transformed. If one
accepts Banjo Paterson as something of a champion of the eutopian vision of the Bush,
then Henry Lawson would certainly qualify as his antithesis. Lawson, for example,
describes the Bush thus: “The country looks as though a great ash-heap had been spread
out there, and mulga scrub and firewood planted – and neglected. The country looks just
as bad for a hundred miles around Hungerford, and beyond that it gets worse – a
blasted, barren wilderness that doesn’t even howl. If it howled it would be a relief”.550
549 Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, 1788-1960 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963), 86. 550 Henry Lawson, “Hungerford,” in The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, ed. John Barnes
(Melbourne: Penguin, 2009), 46.
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This dystopian conception of the Bush also inflects the national type, turning the Noble
Bushman into a battler at the brink of desperation. Take for instance the following
remark made by Lawson’s character Mitchell, the swagman famous for his “laconic
yarns”:551
Look at that boot! If we were down among the settled districts we’d be called tramps and beggars; and what’s the difference? I’ve been a fool, I know, but I’ve paid for it; and now there’s nothing for it but to tramp, tramp, tramp for your tucker, and keep tramping till you get old and careless and dirty, and older, and more careless and dirtier, and you get used to the dust and sand, and heat, and flies, and mosquitoes, just as a bullock does, and lose ambition and hope, and get contented with this animal life, like a dog, and till your swag seems part of yourself, and you’d be lost and uneasy and light-shouldered without it, and you don’t care a damn if you’ll ever get work again, or live like a Christian; and you go on like this till the spirit of a bullock takes the place of the heart of a man. Who cares? If we hadn’t found the track yesterday we might have lain and rotted in that lignum, and no one been any the wiser – or sorrier – who knows? Somebody might have found us in the end, but it mightn’t have been worth his while to go out of his way and report us. Damn the world, say I!552
However, in spite of the gloom and destitution, the works of Lawson and McCubbin do
not seem devoid of hope. Instead, it seems as if in their very hopelessness they contain
glimmers of hope. What both artists have in common is a conception of Australia in
which the country’s dystopian landscape itself furnishes a means of expiation. This is
the purgatorial vision of Australia.
This chapter surveys the purgatorial vision of Australia. It begins by discussing early
European understandings of the Antipodes as a form of Purgatory, and then focuses on
Romantic conceptions of penal transportation, specifically in Robert Southey’s Botany
Bay Eclogues. Next it demonstrates how the European experience of placelessness and
displacement in Australia’s inland provided thematic and narratological structures for
the conception of Australia as Purgatory. The chapter then concentrates on Henry
Lawson’s classic short story “The Drover’s Wife”, arguing that Lawson’s dystopic
Bush is a purgatorial site counterpointed by moments of what Bloch calls anticipatory
illumination or Vorschein. It concludes with a discussion of the ideological underbelly
of the purgatorial vision, highlighting how the conceptualisation of Australia as
551 Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, s.v. “Mitchell, Jack.” 552 Henry Lawson, “‘Some Day’,” in The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, ed. John Barnes
(Melbourne: Penguin, 2009), 64-5.
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Purgatory functions as a strategy of victimisation that facilitates the displacement of
colonial violence against indigenous people.
Purgatorial Antipodes
The dystopian conception of Australia as a form of Purgatory reaches back to an age-
old tradition in European thought. In this tradition, the opposite side of the world was
imagined as the underworld, the realm of the dead. Its mythopoetic line can be traced
back as far Virgil, who in his Georgics describes the underside of the earth as the nether
world, in which the Styx flows through the realm of shadows.553 In an attempt to
consolidate this poetic description with other classical authorities, Virgil’s fourth-
century commentator Servius related the passage to the principle of metempsychosis
(i.e. the transmigration of souls). Servius thus reinterpreted the Antipodes as a world in
which the souls of the dead of the northern hemisphere, purified by their crossing
through the torrid zone around the equator, become reincarnated.554 In the end, Servius’
commentary on Virgil lay the foundation for the notion that the Antipodes are a dark
and infernal “place of purgation, the destiny of souls after death”.555
Imbued with these associations, the space of the Antipodes was readily utilisable for
Dante in his La Divina Commedia. Notably, Dante gave another twist to the Virgilian
understanding of the Antipodes as the world of the dead. This becomes apparent in the
location of Mount Purgatorio, which Dante positioned on the side of the earth opposite
to Jerusalem. In using this geographical position Dante coupled Christian cosmology,
which (as mentioned in chapter 2) situated the earthly paradise in the region antipodal to
Jerusalem, with the conception of the Antipodes as a place of purgation.556 In Dante’s
Divine Comedy, the domains of heaven and hell overlap in Antipodal space, where they
form Mount Purgatorio with its seven terraces of Purgatory, surmounted by the Garden
of Eden on top. Suspending the Antipodes between utopia and dystopia, Dante
accordingly renders Antipodal space as both heavenly and infernal.557 This conception
was taken up, among others, by Milton, and from there extends into modern
553 Verg. G. 1.242-3; cf. with Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 24. 554 Moretti, “The Other World,” 256; cf. with Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 41. 555 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 42. 556 Goldie, 61; cf. with Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 6. 557 Hiatt, “Petrarch’s Antipodes,” 15.
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understandings of Australia.558 Curiously enough, Dante’s placement of Purgatory in
the Antipodes uncannily foreshadows the British establishment of a penal colony in
Australia, and the perceptions of Australia as a “world of the damned”; as Laura Joseph
puts it: “the penal colonies of Australia were a case of hell made real. Following the
transportation of Britons to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
the choice of the antipodean location [as] a repository for England’s criminals was, in
part, a manifestation of the belief in a space below where sinners were punished. This
improbable, brutal penal endeavour was indebted to an imaginative tradition that
associated the antipodes with an infernal space of despair and punishment, where the
perverse, aberrant and deviant were sent.”559
Robert Southey: Romantic Conceptions of Penal Transportation
In complex ways, the notion of Australia as a form of Purgatory connected to the
euchronia of the Civilising Mission. An intriguing example of this can be found in
Robert Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues (1797).560 Since Southey wrote this group of
poems just as Britain embarked upon its new penal project of transporting convicted
criminals to the Antipodes, he must have been keenly aware of the complex associations
evoked by its title: the eclogue, as the traditional poetic form of pastoral poetry,
contrasts strikingly with the name of Botany Bay, which despite its invocation of a
tropical paradise full of exotic plants stood proverbially for crime and moral
degradation. The title sets the agenda for Southey’s poetic experiment, in which he
represents criminals and the penal mechanism of transportation in the pastoral mode. In
contrast to the political conservatism which Southey would later embrace in his career
as poet laureate, the eclogues, voicing the lamentation of convicts over their banishment
and the unfortunate events that led to their transportation, take their origin from an early
phase in Southey’s literary development, during which he was very much caught up in
the political energies that emanated from the French Revolution.561
558 Cf. with Arthur, 19. 559 Joseph, 88; see also Moretti, “The Other World,” 282, nt. 86. 560 Robert Southey, “Botany Bay Eclogues,” Poems (1797; repr., Oxford: Woodstock, 1989), 77-104;
reference hereafter is to number and line. 561 David M. Craig, Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy (Suffolk: Boydell, 2007), 14f; also Jean
Raimond, “Southey’s Early Writings and the Revolution,” The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 188.
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It is worth noting that the conceptualisation of the convicts’ crime as a lapse into a
state of sin is a recurring motif in Southey’s Eclogues. One convict, for instance,
confesses: “I have sinn’d against mankind”;562 and another cries out: “’Twas ere I
turn’d […] a sinner!”.563 By presenting his convicts as sinners Southey transposes legal
concepts into a spiritual register, and thus translates crime and punishment into vice and
its means of atonement (i.e. repentance). Transportation thus becomes a moment of
moral transformation as it enables the convicts to find redemption. Importantly, this
reformative process is closely associated with the Australian environment, whose
harshness and untamed condition is consistently emphasised throughout the poems:
“savage lands”, “rude climes, the realm of nature”, “scorching Sun”, “the thorny mazes
of this wood”, and so on.564 As one convict points out, it is exactly the hardship suffered
from this environment that appears to effect the convicts’ redemption: “On these wild
shores, Repentance’ saviour hand / Shall probe my secret soul, shall cleanse its wounds
–– / And fit the faithful Penitent for Heav’n”.565 Likewise, another convict declares that
transportation has given him a “sober’d sense”, and that the harshness of the Australian
climate will prevent him from regressing: “In these extremest climes can Want no more
/ Urge to the deeds of darkness, and at length / Here shall I rest”.566 Exposure to the
“wild shores” of Australia, it seems, represents the driving force behind the convicts’
spiritual, and subsequently also criminal, rehabilitation. Southey thus envisions
Australia as a peculiar type of reformative site.
The poems’ invocation of “savage lands” and “wild shores” is clearly reminiscent of
the language used by Governor Phillip and his First Fleet officers. As discussed in
chapter 3, the underlying assumption here that pre-colonial Australia was in a state of
nature forms the departure point of the euchronic narrative of the Civilising Mission,
and points towards the ideological notion of land improvement. What is more,
Southey’s Eclogues propagate a georgic work ethic as the means of redeeming the
convicts’ criminal past: as one convict points out: “It is but to work and we must be
supported”; another proudly proclaims that “day by day / I earn in honesty my frugal
food”; and yet another describes how “by toil / [I] Force from the stubborn earth my
sustenance, / And quick-ear’d guilt will never start alarm’d / Amid the well-earn’d 562 Southey, “Botany Bay Eclogues,” no. 4, l. 67. 563 Southey, “Botany Bay Eclogues,” no. 2, l. 25. 564 Southey, “Botany Bay Eclogues,” no. 1, l. 52, 74-75; no. 2, l. 1; no. 4, l. 3; cf. with Brantlinger, 110. 565 Southey, “Botany Bay Eclogues,” no. 1, l. 89-91. 566 Southey, “Botany Bay Eclogues,” no. 4, l. 69-71.
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meal”.567 Southey’s vision of Australia as a form of Purgatory centres on this image of
the convict toiling in Australia’s harsh environment for atonement. It becomes apparent
here how intricately this purgatorial vision is linked to notions of land improvement and
the Civilising Mission. Likewise, Southey’s contemporary William Lisle Bowles, who
speakes of “NEW-HOLLAND’s eastern shores, where now the sons / Of distant Britain,
from her lap cast out, / Water the ground with tears of penitence”,568 also envisions a
purgatorial Australia by associatively linking penal transportation, georgic work ethic
and the ideologeme of land improvement. Interestingly, Southey’s close friend Samuel
Taylor Coleridge strongly disapproved of the idea that penal transportation could be a
rehabilitative enterprise:
War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thouſands out of employ; men cannot ſtarve: they muſt either pick their countrymen’s Pockets – or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures, becauſe they are Jacobins. If they chuſe the latter, the chances are that their own lives are ſacrificed: if the former, they are hung or tranſported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehenſive Views of Miniſters, who having ſtarved the wretch into Vice ſend him to the barren ſhores of new Holland to be ſtarved back again into Virtue. It muſt ſurely charm the eye of humanity to behold Men reclaimed from ſtealing by being baniſhed to a Coaſt, where there is nothing to ſteal, and helpleſs Women, who had been “Bold from deſpair and proſtitute for Bread,” find motives to Reformation in the ſources of their Depravity, refined by Ignorance, and famine-bitten into Chaſtity.569
What Coleridge’s critical assessment of penal transportation makes clear is that Southey
exploits the poetic framework of the pastoral to gloss over the harsh realities of this
penal mechanism, masking an enforced labour punishment as a spiritual reformation
process. It finally remains unclear whether Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues are
overtaken by Romantic notions of seclusion in a wild landscape, or already foreshadow
the political conservatism he adopted later in his life.
The fact that the purgatorial vision of Australia hides an imperial underbelly is
unsurprising considering that this dystopian conception of the Bush, just as the utopian
one, were crucially influenced by the British emigration literature of the 1850s. Edward
567 Southey, “Botany Bay Eclogues,” no. 3, l.4.; no. 1, l. 82-83; no. 4, l. 77-80. 568 Bowles, The Spirit of Discovery, 195-6; cf. with Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 9. 569 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum: Or Addresses to the People (Oxford, 1795), 57-
59.
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Bulwer-Lytton provides a striking example of this, particularly in his novel The
Caxtons, in which he turns the Australian colonies into a place where impoverished
Britons of the upper classes can redeem themselves, both financially as well as socially.
However, instead of “turning gentleman” again, what was required of Bulwer-Lytton’s
fallen aristocrats was to blend into the harsh environment of the Bush and to turn
properly “colonial”. This is best exemplified in the figure of Guy Bolding, a British
spendthrift ne’er-do-well who, after his five-year exile in the Australian Bush, is
reintroduced to the reader as follows: “Now, out from those woods, over those green
rolling plains, harum-scarum, helter-skelter, long hair flying wild, and all bearded, as a
Turk or pard, comes a rider you recognise”.570 Here comes Guy Bolding, whom the
Bush has transformed into an embodiment of the colonial spirit of Arcadia, of industry
and prudence coupled with freedom and adventure, boasting of “health which an
antediluvian might have envied” and of nerves “seasoned with horse-breaking, cattle-
driving” and “fighting with wild blacks”.571 The character of Bolding, evoking
associations with Tom Robert’s 1891 painting A break away!, represents another
example of how 1850s emigration literature anticipated the national vision of the Noble
Bushman. As Brantlinger comments, there are numerous characters in Victorian fiction
who, after the model of Guy Bolding, experience “secular rebirths in the Bush”.572 The
idea, accordingly, that the Australian Bush offered a “second chance” to the “fallen”
Englishman was already prevalent in the Arcadian vision of the 1850s. In this, the
Arcadian vision contained its own idea of a purgatorial Australia.
The Horizonal Sublime
But the purgatorial vision of Australia is also rooted in non-fictional literature. As
Ross Gibson has comprehensively argued, the conception of Australia as Purgatory
found one of its strongest expression in the journals of Australia’s inland explorers.573
In general, the European exploration of Australia was characterised by a colourful
“overoptimism” about what the continent’s inland might hold:574 Charles Sturt and
570 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Caxtons: A Family Picture, vol. 3 (Edinburgh and London, 1849), 192;
see also: Brantlinger, 121-4; Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, 88-9. 571 Bulwer-Lytton, 191. 572 Brantlinger, 123. 573 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 7. 574 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 107.
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Edward John Eyre, for example, were searching for an inland sea, while Sir Thomas
Mitchell sought to find the great Kindur, a fabled river that supposedly traversed
Australia’s interior.575 While the myth of the Kindur lost itself in the sand, Mitchell
found Australia Felix instead. As discussed, he masterfully achieved a coupling of
picturesque aesthetic with pastoral imagery; but it was also in contrast to the dystopian
appearance of much of Australia’s inland that his utopia of Australia Felix stood out so
distinctly: “I named this region Australia Felix,” Mitchell wrote, “the better to
distinguish it from the parched deserts of the interior country, where we had wandered
so unprofitably, and so long”.576 In Mitchell’s epics of exploration, Australia Felix
represents the utopian reward for undergoing the purgatorial experience of Australia’s
“parched deserts”.
It is, however, not in the journals of Mitchell, the master of the imperial picturesque,
that the purgatorial conception of Australia finds its dominant aesthetics, but in the
journals of other, less picturesque explorers. William Dampier, the first Englishman to
set foot on Australian soil, may act as a figurehead of this dystopian discourse.
Confirming the Dutch’s unfavourable reports of the Australian continent to his British
readership, he wrote: “The Land is of a dry ſandy Soil, deſtitute of Water”.577
Infamously, Dampier also declared Australia’s indigenous people to be “the miſerableſt
People in the World”.578 In the main, Dampier paints a picture of Australia as an
uninviting, excessively flyblown wasteland: “the Flies […] being ſo troubleſome here,
that no fanning will keep them from coming to ones Face; and without aſſiſtance of both
Hands to keep them off, they will creep into ones Noſtrils; and Mouth too, if the Lips
are not ſhut very cloſe”.579 In this he agrees with the sailor Francois Pelsaert, who
commented that “There were also such multitudes of flies that one could not keep them
out of one’s mouth and eyes”.580 Dampier thus established the image of Australia as an
arid, flyblown, and commercially essentially useless country, a dystopia that contrasted
sharply with the Quirósque vision of a body utopia.
575 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 103, 109; 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).
576 Mitchell, Three Expeditions, 2:333; cf. with Dixon, Course of Empire, 117. 577 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World…, vol. 1 (London, 1699), 463. 578 Dampier, 464. 579 Dampier, 464. 580 Qtd. in Jan Bassett, ed., Great Southern Landings: An Anthology of Antipodean Travel (Melbourne:
Oxford UP, 1995), 30.
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This became even more pronounced once the boundless deserts of Australia’s inland
came into view. The heart of Australia, it turned out, was an empty desert. The
confrontation with the seemingly infinite space of the interior’s barren plains and salt
deserts aroused a feeling of awe and terror in European explorers – an experience Carter
has fittingly described as “spatial nausea”.581 As Ashcroft explains, the terror evoked by
the lack of any topographical relief in Australia’s inland expressed itself as the
“horizonal sublime”.582 While it is amply documented in the journals of Edward Eyre,
Ludwig Leichhardt and Charles Sturt, the horizonal sublime is probably best
exemplified by paintings (e.g. E. C. Frome’s First View of Salt or G. F. Angas’ Emus in
a Plain): here the “psychic line” of the Australian horizon reveals the absolute
placelessness and displacement of the coloniser and foregrounds his vulnerable position
outside the limits of civilisation.583 In the form of empty excessive space, the horizonal
sublime continues not only the early-modern notion that Terra Australis was nothing but
a flyblown wasteland, but also the classical and medieval tradition of conceptualising
the Antipodes as the “land of the damned”. What is more, instead of filtering the
Australian landscape through a eutopic prism, the horizonal sublime exposes the
disparity between environmental reality and the imagination of Australia as a pastoral
eutopia. It thus exposes parts of the false consciousness produced by Arcadian
projections, be it the Dickensian Pastoral or national Pastoraphilia. Highlighting the
differences between Australia and Europe, such purgatorial visions reconnect to the
Antipodal conception of Australia as the anti-ecumene, and dramatise feelings of
estrangement.
Finding their expectations constantly thwarted, the exploration of Australia’s interior
turned into a frustrating enterprise for European adventurers. As Robert Sellick
explains, since the arid inland failed to provide the material riches the explorers were
sent out for, their exploration journey could no longer be fashioned in the traditional
format and style of a great discovery; in many cases these journeys did not even lead to
scientific discoveries, so that in order to display some sort of achievement they needed
to be remodelled as a “contest between explorer and land”.584 The journeys
subsequently became less an exploration of the external world, than an internal one of 581 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 147; see also Hoorn, 130. 582 Bill Ashcroft, “The Horizonal Sublime,” Antipodes 19, no. 2 (2005), 144. 583 Ashcroft, “Horizonal Sublime,” 144. 584 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 P, 1982), 181.
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the self, an inner struggle of volition and persistence.585 As Gibson argues, the
exploration journeys of Leichhardt and Eyre, but most paradigmatically Sturt – who
stands out as the pioneering “surveyor of the ‘country of the mind’” – were no longer
material endeavours, but demonstrations of the awe-inspiring and mysterious force of
Australia’s inland.586 In terms of wish-fulfilment, this demonstrates an interesting
transformation: with the expected body utopia vanishing like a mirage, the utopian
desire driving the explorer forward appears to be re-channelled into a utopia of the
mind.
From a textual perspective, this meant that the travelogues of the European explorers
took on a different narrative form. Since their explorations of Australia’s interior
involved the basic thematic moments of the Exodus myth (e.g. the search for a promised
land; the wanderings of a party lost in the desert), they could readily be modelled upon
this biblical narrative.587 Furthermore, the travel accounts of Australia’s inland
explorers frequently feature moments of reverie or transcendental meditation akin to the
“mystic revelations in the wilderness” that traditionally characterise biographies of
saints.588 Such borrowing of motives and narrative structures from religious literature
bestowed a certain spiritual potency upon the explorer’s experience of Australia’s
inland.589 It produced the theme of spiritual revelation in the Outback, and resulted in
the narrative of the European combating the land in a trial of physical, intellectual and
occasionally even moral stamina. All this provided critical impulses for the dystopian
conception of Australia as Purgatory.
Henry Lawson: Utopian Vorschein in “The Drover’s Wife”
It may initially appear counter-intuitive, but the vision of Australia as Purgatory also
entailed a strong concrete-utopian aspect. Let us turn to Henry Lawson’s classic short
story “The Drover’s Wife” to exemplify this utopian dimension. At first sight, Lawson’s
“The Drover’s Wife” appears an odd choice: after all, the short story gives a rather
585 Sellick, 179; 181. 586 Note how this idea continues to resound in works of twentieth-century Australian artists and writers
such as Sidney Nolan and Patrick White; see Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 127; and Hodge and Mishra, 151.
587 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 103-4. 588 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 85. 589 Gibson, Diminishing Paradise, 103-4.
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depressing snapshot of the isolated and impoverished life of a woman in the bush, who,
with her husband away “drovin’”, is left to raise four small children by herself whilst
battling through the hardships of pioneer life. In harsh, unforgiving colours Lawson
sketches settler life in Australia’s remote interior as marked by immense physical
hardship and enduring emotional isolation. Hence it may seem much more reasonable to
describe his text as dystopian. I would like to argue, however, that it is precisely in the
text’s construction of the Australian Bush as a dystopian, in certain aspects purgatorial,
site that Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” produces an anticipatory illumination of a
genuinely better life. This utopian dimension of Lawson’s text becomes more apparent
when we look at the way in which the text explores the life of its protagonist.
Characteristically minimalist in terms of plot,590 Lawson’s story is a reflection upon the
life of the Drover’s Wife – who in a later work is identified as a certain Mrs Spicer591 –
that unfolds around the episodic event of a poisonous snake intruding into her
ramshackle hut.
Deprived of the pleasures of civilisation, human life in the story is reduced to the
bare forms of existence. It is this reduction that presents a particularly Lawsonian brand
of existentialism: in her combat against elemental forces such as droughts and bush
fires, Mrs Spicer is consistently confronted with death and her own mortality. In this
way she is made aware of the contingent nature of her existence, or, to borrow a
Heideggerian term, of her own thrownness592 into life. But even though Mrs Spicer’s
life is characterised by unusual extremes, her experience of her own existential
contingency is not atypical or idiosyncratic. Instead, her suffering gains a universal
dimension once we realise that the extreme conditions of her life radically strip away
everything superfluous and artificial, and in this reveal not just the core of her existence,
but of existence in general. Her uncommon subjection to nature and its elemental forces
brings into view what is most common about her. That is, Mrs Spicer experiences, to an
excessive degree, the vulnerability and helplessness in the face of death that
590 See A. A. Phillips, “The Craftsmanship of Lawson,” in The Australian Tradition. Studies in a
Colonial Culture, 2nd rev. ed. (Melbourne: Cheshire-Landsdowne, 1966); also John Barnes, “Introduction,” in The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories by Henry Lawson, ed. John Barnes (Melbourne: Penguin, 2009), 4.
591 See Henry Lawson, “Water Them Geraniums,” in The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, ed. John Barnes (Melbourne: Penguin, 2009), 159; for the sake of simplicity, I refer to the Drover’s Wife as Mrs Spicer. Note, however, that I do not want to imply that both characters are necessarily identical.
592 Common translation of Heidegger’s term “Geworfenheit”, which describes the existential fact that one is irrevocably thrown into the world; see Daniel Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
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characterises, indeed, constitutes, human existence. What our reading suggests up to this
point, then, is that Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” presents us with an existentialist
dystopia in which death seems to be the only release.
But Lawson’s dystopian story is counterpointed by moments in which a concrete-
utopian promise glimmers through the text. This takes place on two diegetic levels. First
of all in a very broad sense, because Lawson’s text generates a utopian perspective by
virtue of the affective response it invokes in the reader: witnessing and vicariously
experiencing the disturbing moments of Lawsonian existentialism, the reader is
provoked into utopian thinking. As Ashcroft writes, “The very exposure of the suffering
of the world is the anticipatory illumination of a better world”.593 Additonally, the text’s
utopian dimension also finds concrete expression within the textual world of the
characters, specifically in those moments in which Mrs Spicer’s experience of weakness
and exposure prompt visions of better ways of being. Take for instance the following
moment in the story:
The thunderstorm comes on, and the wind, rushing through the cracks in the slab wall, threatens to blow out her candle. She places it on a sheltered part of the dresser and fixes up a newspaper to protect it. At every flash of lightning, the cracks between the slabs gleam like polished silver. The thunder rolls, and the rain comes down in torrents.594
The elemental force of the thunderstorm here dramatises the fragile existence of Mrs
Spicer and her young children. While the natural light of the thunderstorm flashes
through the slabs, outshining the sad artificial glow of her candle, Mrs Spicer
experiences her own helplessness in the face of nature. What is more, the lightning
shining through “the cracks between the slabs” literally highlights the hut’s
defectiveness and, revealing the absence of basic standards of civilisation, makes Mrs
Spicer brutally aware of the deficiencies of pioneer life. This moment, in which the need
for shelter and protection makes itself felt, expresses a certain lack. And it is precisely
this lack that holds a certain utopian promise, because it plainly betokens, in the form of
an empty placeholder, what is not there. This lack, and more specifically the need it
signifies, gestures beyond Mrs Spicer’s precarious situation towards a different, a better
form of existence. This is what Bloch refers to when he speaks of the “incentive toward
593 Ashcroft, “Horizon of the Future,” 16. 594 Henry Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife,” in The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, ed. John Barnes
(Melbourne: Penguin, 2009), 21.
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utopia” encapsulated in the sentence “Something’s missing”.595 As Tom Moylan
explains, “Bloch locates the positive drive toward the future in the negative, in the
radical insufficiency of the present”.596 What gleams “like polished silver” through the
gaps in the hut’s walls is, therefore, the anticipatory illumination of a better life. It is a
textual moment of Vorschein.
Vorschein or Vor-Schein, variously translated as anticipatory illumination, pre-
appearance or pre-semblance, is the central aesthetic category of Bloch’s philosophy.597
It refers to the aesthetic phenomenon in which a utopian idea or desire (in Bloch’s
sense: an unsatisfied hope-content, a possibility with which the world is still pregnant)
is prefigured in such a way that it makes a perceptible appearance. Vorschein is,
however, not simply deceptive or delusional. Bloch expands on this in relation to the
“the aesthetic question of truth”: “aesthetic appearance is not only mere appearance, but
a meaning […] of material that has been driven further […] This pre-appearance
becomes attainable precisely because art drives its material to an end, in characters,
situations, plots, landscapes, and brings them to a stated resolution in suffering,
happiness and meaning. […] Thus art is non-illusion, since it works along a line of
extension from the Become, in its formed, more commensurate expression.”598 The
truth of art, the truth of Vorschein, is a processual truth, a truth in-becoming, not a fixed
facticity. Accordingly, the aesthetic truth of suffering in Lawson’s “The Drover’s
Wife”, that is, its expression of lack, exhausts itself not in representation, but reaches
above and beyond what it represents by aesthetically previewing objective possibilities
of and for the future.
The unexpected collapse of Mrs Spicer’s heap of firewood gives rise to a similar
moment of Vorschein. When she realises that the wood-heap, for which she had paid a
“stray blackfellow”, is hollow, Lawson’s protagonist is moved to a rare display of
emotions:
She is hurt now, and tears spring to her eyes as she sits down again by the table. She takes up a handkerchief to wipe the tears away, but pokes her
595 Bloch takes this sentence from Brecht’s opera Mahagonny; see Bloch and Adorno, 15; for the utopian
dimension of lack, see also Gert Ueding, “Literatur ist Utopie,” in Literatur ist Utopie, ed. Gert Ueding (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978), 7; and Ashcroft, “Horizon of the Future,” 14.
596 Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 22. 597 Cf. with Werner Jung, “Vor-Schein,” in Bloch-Wörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst
Blochs, eds. Beat Dietschy et al. (München: de Gruyter, 2012), 668-9. 598 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:214-6. Note the complex connection here between illusion or appearance
(German: Schein) and anticipatory pre-apperance (Vor-Schein); cf. with Zipes, xxxiv-vi.
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eyes with her bare fingers instead. The handkerchief is full of holes, and she finds that she has put her thumb through one, and her forefinger through another.
This makes her laugh, to the surprise of the dog. She has a keen, very keen, sense of the ridiculous; and some time or other she will amuse bushmen with the story.599
Mrs Spicer, deprived even of so small a solace as wiping away her tears, is forcefully
reminded of the cruelties and privations of her life. There is an interesting parallel here
between the handkerchief and the hut, in that both these man-made objects, which we
should interpret as emblems of civilisation, are insufficient and full of gaps. The gaps in
her handkerchief cannot dry her tears, just like the cracks between the slabs of her hut
cannot keep the thunderstorm out, but it is precisely through those gaps that Mrs Spicer
sees the misery of her existence. These gaps become expressions of a lack that is much
more profound: they betoken the experience that something is missing, and it is by
virtue of this experience of lack that something else comes to light, that the anticipatory
illumination of a better life shines through them. Finally, the same anticipatory
illumination is reflected in her son’s final words, “Mother, I won’t never go drovin’”, as
it gestures towards a different, perhaps better future in the Bush.
Generalising somewhat, it seems reasonable to describe this appearance of Vorschein
in moments of complete despair as a significant feature of Lawson’s writing, especially
in his early work. Such instances of Vorschein glimmering through the dystopia of the
Bush are perfect examples of what Brian Matthews calls those “powerful Lawsonian
moments which, in context, transform simple surface realism into intimations about the
mysteries, the desperations and the tragedies of ordinary and anonymous lives”.600
Lawson’s stories, it seems, are most hopeful when they are most desperate.601
Reminiscent of the hagiographic moments of reverie in the wilderness that punctuate
the narratives of Australia’s inland explorers, these instances of utopian anticipation
suspend the dystopian vision of the Bush by placing it within a framework of hope.
Counterpointed by moments of Vorschein, Lawson’s Bush is, therefore, not just a
hellish dystopia, but has to be viewed as a purgatorial site, too: as a site in which
suffering promises utopia.
599 Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife,” 25. 600 Brian Matthews, “Henry Lawson,” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre
of Biography, 1986). 601 For a different view of Lawson, see Patrick Morgan, “The Camaraderie of Not Caring: Misreading
Henry Lawson,” Quadrant (November 2007): 60-4.
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Interpreting Lawson is always problematic because of the pivotal nation-building
position he has been accredited with in the history of Australian literature. There is a
danger of sentimentalising him, of reading his stories and poems as simple eulogies of
settler hardship and perseverance. To a certain extent, Lawson’s deployment of the
Noble Bushman and other generic images of pioneer life in the Bush explains why a
nationalist legend could form around the author and his work. In Lawson studies the
assumption prevails that the quality of Lawson’s later writing significantly deteriorated,
and that the conception of Lawson as a nationalist mouthpiece is primarily grounded in
this later work; Morgan, for example, claims that “It was this later and lesser Lawson
who became the subject of the legend”.602 After the turn of the nineteenth century,
Lawson apparently began to soften his anticipatory dystopianism, and, turning the
purgatorial Outback into a “consoling dreamworld of the bush”,603 championed a much
more affirmative view of settler society. According to Morgan, this later, more
consoling and sentimentalising take on frontier life was read back into Lawson’s earlier
stories:
As a result Australians for many decades misread the early stories in such a way that the stark horror was evaded. “The Union Buries Its Dead” was seen as a celebration of bush and union solidarity, and the anthology piece “The Drover’s Wife” was read as praise of the heroic efforts of the outback wife.604
Lawson, in fact, invites a plurality of interpretations. As the contemporary poet John
Kinsella has fittingly pointed out: “There are many Lawsons – from left-wing to right-
wing, from feminist-sympathetic to misogynist, from racist to someone who believed in
a humanity without race or creed”.605 I should emphasise that the Lawson I focus on
here is one that has a pronounced love-hate relationship with a place he calls the “Out
Back Hell”.606 I agree with Barnes and Morgan that “The Drover’s Wife” should not be
read as a sentimental story glorifying settler achievement. It may seem that particularly
the story’s “concluding tableau of mother and child”,607 highly evocative as it is of
602 Morgan, “Camaraderie of Not Caring,” 63. 603 Barnes, 14. 604 Morgan, “Camaraderie of Not Caring,” 63. 605 John Kinsella, Introduction to The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, by Henry Lawson, ed. John
Barnes (Melbourne: Penguin, 2009), xiv. 606 Qtd. in Barnes, 11; also Kinsella xi. 607 Barnes, 9.
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Madonna with the infant Jesus, lends itself to a sentimentalising reading, but Barnes is
right in pointing out that such a one-dimensional interpretation is disturbed by
concurrent descriptions such as “her worn-out breasts” and “the sickly daylight”. In the
end, what Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” perfectly demonstrates is the slippery slope
that the conjunction of utopia and ideology necessarily entails: while the story’s
purgatorial vision is rich in moments of anticipatory illumination that offset the dystopia
of the Bush against the hopeful wish for a better future, it is always in danger of
backsliding into affirming settler ideology.
While we thus have to be aware of the ideological dimension of Lawson’s work, it
should also be pointed out that his writing in many points explicitly evades the
ideological pitfalls of nationalist Pastoraphilia. In the first place, his stories explicitly
shun the images of rural bliss that characterise Arcadianism, and as such escape the
Dickensian Pastoral’s ideological entanglement with imperialism, specifically in
relation to the ideologeme of land improvement. In fact, as his poem “The City
Bushman” makes clear, Lawson was certainly not an uncritical subscriber to the
national vision of the 1890s:
Though the bush has been romantic and it’s nice to sing about, There’s a lot of patriotism that the land could do without – Sort of BRITISH WORKMAN nonsense that shall perish in the scorn Of the drover who is driven and the shearer who is shorn, Of the struggling western farmers who have little time for rest, And are ruined on selections in the sheep-infested West; Droving songs are very pretty, but they merit little thanks From the people of a country in possession of the Banks.608
Yet this being said, Lawson unfortunately did not escape the racism that the national
vision inherited from British imperialism. Despite the anticipatory illumination invoked
in its moments of existential despair, “The Drover’s Wife” nevertheless suffers from the
fact that, as Kinsella describes it, the “subtextual crisis of the story is one of belonging
and identity”.609 Since the issues of belonging and identity are intricately connected to
problems of settler colonialism, Lawson’s purgatorial vision of Australia is also caught
up in the ideological displacement of colonial violence.
608 Henry Lawson, “The City Bushman,” in In The Days When The World Was Wide (Sydney: Angus
and Robertson, 1900). 609 Kinsella, xiii.
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White Suffering
We have seen that the vision of Australia as a purgatorial site is deeply ambivalent:
on the one hand, its dystopian conception of the Australian landscape seems to suggest a
certain unimprovability that threatens to refute the euchronia of the Civilising Mission.
On the other, precisely the invocation of hardship and suffering in a hostile environment
seems to readily connect with imperial ideology. To explain this nexus further, let me
refer to Ann Curthoys’ illuminating discussion of the Australian Legend. Curthoys
emphasises the importance of Judeo-Christian610 themes such as exile and penitence for
the national vision of Australia. Crucially, she draws attention to the victimising
rhetoric that underpins the Exodus myth in particular:
The biblical narrative of Exodus rests on a rhetoric of victimisation. A persecuted past is invoked to legitimate present policy. Conquest is justified by the injustices of the past and a new society and people is created through the displacement and destruction of another people, the Canaanites. Several scholars have noted the way the story of Exodus is reworked to provide the foundations for both American and Israeli national historical narratives. The pilgrims left Britain for America, a new promised land reserved by God for his new chosen people, liberating themselves from the tyranny of the British Pharoah.611
Contrasting the foundational mythology of Australia and America, Curthoys argues that
Australian mythology operates in an almost opposite manner, because instead of
providing a narrative of liberation from the British oppressor, it poses Britain as the
promised land, from which the convicts, a “sinful fallen people”, were expelled to live a
“life of toil and sweat” in the infernal desert of Australia.612 Drawing on anthropological
research, Curthoys points out that “white suffering”, the suffering of Anglo-Saxon
pioneers, functions as a symbolic form of redemption that establishes rights of land
ownership. As agents of land improvement, the pioneers’ blood and sweat become their
symbolic justification for a claim to the land. In line with Peter Otto, Curthoys finally
holds that the “narrative of the horror in the desert” is far from innocent, but is, in effect,
a way of displacing the conflict between settler society and traditional owners of the
land; it rearticulates colonial violence into the “more acceptable narrative of a direct
610 It shoud be remarked, however, that Curthoys’ term “Judeo-Christian” appears to be an anachronistic
construction. 611 Ann Curthoys, “Mythologies,” in The Australian Legend and Its Discontents, ed. Richard Nile
(Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 2000), 16-7. 612 Qtd. in Curthoys, 19.
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conflict between the settler and the land itself.”613 Since the repressed struggle of
indigenous people therefore resurfaces only in symbolical form as the contest against
the land itself, it is neither consciously recognised nor acknowledged as a significant
part of pioneer history.
To a certain extent, such a repression of colonial violence can be found in Banjo
Paterson’s “Song of the Future”. Explicitly evoking the Exodus myth, the poem
describes Australia’s pioneering settlers as “Israelites with staff in hand” who are
restlessly searching for a promised land.614 Revolving around this mythological core,
the poem pays tribute to the “hardy pioneers” who, in their “westward march”, settled
the land beyond the Blue Mountains. Owing to the strikingly martial and triumphalist
undertone of phrases such as “westward march”, the poem calls up images of imperial
expansion and conquest, and thus displays an epic quality uncharacteristic of Paterson’s
poetry. While presenting the settlement of Australia as a story of colonial success, the
poem makes telling displacements. In particular the struggle between the advancing
settlers and Australia’s indigenous people is obscured: Paterson’s poetic persona
declares that in Australia “we have no songs of strife, / Of bloodshed reddening the
land”; the “westward march” was a battle “where none withstood; / In sooth there was
not much of blood”. In place of colonial violence, there is only the “bushman’s quiet
life”, the mute contest between settlers and a “strange capricious land”, in which the
“hardy pioneers” stoically battle “parching sod[s]” and “raging floods”. Aboriginal
people only feature indirectly when the poem praises it as a miracle that Australia, the
land that “yesterday was all unknown”, and where only the “wild man’s boomerang was
thrown”, is now the site of “great busy cities”. As Ashcroft points out: “This egregious
claim to a lack of history, excluding indigenous societies from History, is too obvious
for comment, but as was Paterson’s custom the Bush is seen to be the source of a certain
colonial and national promise”.615 Precisely this national promise shines through the
“achievements grand / Within the bushman’s quiet life”: it is the suffering of the
pioneer in the dystopia of the Bush that points to a better future, the utopian promise of
nationhood. Thus while Paterson’s poem continues to perpetuate basic ideas of
imperialism through the image of the white settler suffering in dystopia, the same image
613 Curthoys, 29. 614 Banjo Paterson, “Song of the Future,” in Rio Grande’s Last Race and Other Verses (Melbourne:
Angus and Robertson, 1902); also see Ashcroft, “Horizon of the Future,” 18. 615 Ashcroft, “Horizon of the Future,” 18.
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simultaneously serves as a foil for national identity construction, precisely against the
form of identity associated with imperial ideology and the Dickensian Pastoral.
Paterson’s utopianism, in fact, is much more complex than at first appears. It may
seem a fair generalisation to claim that in comparison to Lawson, Paterson champions a
more eutopian vision of the Bush that emphasises the pleasant, picturesque aspects of
pioneer life. But besides such romanticisations of country life as in “Clancy of the
Overflow” – which, as discussed in the previous chapter, features its own concrete-
utopian contents, Paterson’s poetry also features some moments akin to those described
earlier as Lawsonian existentialism, in which the dystopia of the Bush provides deeper
insights into human existence. Take for instance the following stanzas from Paterson’s
“A Mountain Station”:
I’ve tried to make expenses meet, But wasted all my labours, The sheep the dingoes didn’t eat Were stolen by the neighbours. They stole my pears – my native pears – Those thrice-convicted felons, And ravished from me unawares My crop of paddy-melons.
And sometimes under sunny skies, Without an explanation, The Murrumbidgee used to rise And overflow the station. But this was caused (as now I know) When summer sunshine glowing Had melted all Kiandra’s snow And set the river going.
[…]
So after that I’ll give it best; No more with Fate I’ll battle. I’ll let the river take the rest, For those were all my cattle. I close my brief narration, And advertise it in my verse – “For Sale! A Mountain Station.”616
616 Andrew Barton Paterson, “A Mountain Station,” in The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses
(Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1917).
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Similar to Mrs Spicer, Paterson’s poetic persona here experiences helplessness in the
face of natural forces and, realising the vanity of its own actions, ultimately gives in to
fate. Again it is the dystopia of the Bush that thwarts the Civilising Mission and belies
the imperial ideologeme of land improvement. Paradoxically, a sense of national pride
seems to arise precisely from this failure. But what is even more striking about this
poem is its tension between content and form: in stark contrast to its upbeat metre, the
poem narrates a dramatic story of failure and despair. Perhaps this is what Lawson
means when he, in a poem addressed to Paterson, refers to the “bitter feeling in the
jingling of our rhymes”,617 and perhaps this is also where Paterson’s poetry voices its
own peculiar form of anticipatory illumination: in the resistance of the poetic form to
the content, the poem seems to transcend the despair that it describes. It seems as if the
poem’s dystopian vision of the Bush as unyielding and relentless is ultimately offset by
a utopian note that persists in the background. A very similar “bitter feeling” runs
through Paterson’s iconic “Waltzing Matilda”, where the swagman’s final suicide is not
only intricately connected to the ideal of the Noble Bushman and its associations with
anti-authoritarianism and the nationalist ideology of Anglo-Machismo, but where his
lack of a dancing partner hints at a much broader vacuum that invites hopeful
imagination.
617 Lawson, “The City Bushman.”
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EPILOGUE – Modernism and Beyond
“Where is Australia, singer, do you know? […] She is a Temple that we are to build:
For her the ages have been long preparing: She is a prophecy to be fulfilled!”
(O’Dowd, The Bush 66-9)
In the twentieth century, visions of Australia certainly became much more
diversified. But for the most part, it seems that their concrete-utopian impulse was not
rejuvenated and that they remained deeply implicated in the racialised imperial ideology
of previous centuries. This is particularly true for Australian art and literature before the
World Wars. As Andrew Milner explains, “within the pre-war moral and aesthetic
economy of Australia, the Greater British Imperial culture remained hegemonic, both
normatively and institutionally”.618 A first watershed moment appears to be the Battle
of Singapore, which made the Australian public painfully aware of the discrepancies
between national and imperial interests, and led to a rethinking of traditional loyalties.
The century did see the publication of numerous literary utopias, such as M. Barnard
Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947) or Nevile Shute’s On the Beach (1957),
which envisioned a socialist and a capitalist future respectively; but for the most part
such personal visions were were markedly constricted in their imagination. Generally
speaking, it was not before the 1970s that traces of a genuinely new vision began to
appear. This epilogue casts a wide net across the twentieth and twenty-first century in
order to briefly survey the contemporary situation. Such a discussion can only be broad
and incomplete, but serves the purpose of overviewing the current directions which the
interplay of utopia and ideology is taking. Special attention is paid to the post-colonial
vision in Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance. The epilogue finishes by drawing a
general conclusion from the main findings of this thesis about the place of Australia in
the utopian imagination.
618 Andrew Milner, “Postmodernism and Popular Culture,” Meanjin 49, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 39-40.
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Modernism: Waning of the Utopian Impulse
Perhaps one of the most typical examples of the prewar vision is Bernard O’Dowd’s
lengthy poem “The Bush” (1912). Described as expressing an “apocalyptic sense of
nationhood”619 and a “nationalist-radical sentiment”,620 the poem attempts, in the
hermetic and overly erudite style of Modernist poetry, to articulate a prophetic vision of
the nation’s future, but much like similar attempts from the preceding century, fails to
overcome imperial heritage and Eurocentric logic. So it is that in the concluding stanzas
of the poem, O’Dowd heralds Australia as the one true “Eutopia”, while grounding his
vision ever more deeply in “the history of Old World utopianism”:621
She is a prophecy to be fulfilled! All that we love in olden lands and lore Was signal of her coming long ago! Bacon foresaw her, Campanella, More, And Plato’s eyes were with her star aglow! Who toiled for Truth, whate’er their countries were, Who fought for Liberty, they yearned for her!622
Over-freighted with abstract utopian reasoning, O’Dowd’s poem does not engage
directly with social reality, and for this reason fails to express a concrete-utopian
sentiment. While it does display a certain chiliastic spirit, the poem turns, as Mannheim
would describe it, “inward”, that is to say, it “no longer dares to venture forth into the
world, and loses its contact with worldly happenings.”623 In this respect, O’Dowd can
be seen as representative: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the vision of the
nation appears to have lost its cutting edge, especially in comparison with the
agitational Chartist thought that underpinned the Bush ethos of the 1890s. O’Dowd’s
contemporary Christopher Brennan, who was profoundly influenced by European
Symbolists such as Mallarmé, likewise envisioned an Australian utopia that was
reached solely “through the psyche, and has nothing to do with society, politics, or
reformist schemes”.624 Regarding the development of Australian utopianism, the most
interesting specimen from this period is probably Joseph Furphy’s anti-utopian novel
619 Frank Bongiorno, “O’Dowd, Bernard Patrick,” in Oxford Companion to Australian History (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2001). 620 The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, s.v. “Bush, The.” 621 Horst Priessnitz, “Dreams of Austerica: A Perliminary Comparison of the Australian and the
American Dream,” Westerly 39, no. 3 (1994): 51. 622 Bernard O’Dowd, The Bush (Melbourne: Lothian, 1912), 66-7. 623 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 213. 624 Ikin, 264.
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Such is Life (1903) – which, however, had its major breakthrough only after the First
World War.625 Although the works of authors such as Furphy, the late Lawson, Brennan
and Henry Handel Richardson show remarkable diversity, they all exhibit, as G. A.
Wilkes comments, “the passing of the utopian vision”, and “its replacement by other
values and preoccupations”.626
Nevertheless, the utopian discourse of the Bush was given a new lease of life in the
following decades. Paradoxically, it was transplanted from the colonial frontier to the
European trenches of the First World War. The Digger, the quintessential Australian
soldier, took over from the Noble Bushman as the utopian role model for the “national
type”. This can be seen, for instance, in the following description of the Australian war
correspondent Charles Bean, in which the qualities of solidarity, anti-authoritarianism
and resourcefulness (which we first saw invoked to describe the Australian Colonial,
and then the Noble Bushman) now characterise the Australian Solider: “In the world
wars, along with many faults, the ordinary Australian has shown also many qualities of
peculiar value – devoted loyalty to a mate, stubborn comradeship that always stood by
the ‘underdog’, frankness and freshness of outlook unafraid of authority, restless
curiosity, resourcefulness in every difficulty, great endurance, capacity for cool
judgement but also for intense effort in a crisis.”627 At the same time, the Bush,
specifically in its purgatorial understanding as a site in which bloodshed and suffering
bestow legitimacy, was replaced by European battlegrounds, most significantly
Gallipoli. It was Europe now, Australia’s Antipodes, that provided the utopic and
purgatorial space on which the Australian nation symbolically represented itself. Bush
ethos thus became the “Anzac spirit”.
In a way, the creation of the Anzac legend signals the end of a long appropriation
process of the subversive content of Australian utopianism by ideological forces. Even
though the national vision of the 1890s was already deeply entangled in the ideological
dynamics of imperialism, it nonetheless featured the progressive and emancipatory
promises of what can roughly be subsumed under the rubric of radical Chartism. But in
the figure of the Australian Soldier the concrete-utopian impulses behind this Chartism 625 On the anti-utopian dimension of this novel, see Ikin, 261-2; also G. A. Wilkes, “The Passing of the
Utopian Vision?,” in The Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn: Literary Evidence for Australian Cultural Development, by G. A. Wilkes (Melbourne: Arnold, 1981), 81-6; cf. with The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, s.v. “Such is Life.”
626 Wilkes, 79. 627 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 316.
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have been sublimated into a much more abstract form, with no immediate relation to
social reality. What is more, the Digger’s functioning towards social cohesion becomes
clear in his delineation of a national identity, and in this testifies to his ideological
significance. As such, the Anzac legend largely operates as what Jameson describes as 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”;628 as a form of self-contained wish-fulfilment, the
utopic, anti-Antipodal space of Gallipoli allows the acting out of fantasies of heroic
solidarity and anti-authoritarian rebelliousness, only to channel them into a sense of
cohesive national identity that mollifies the subversive impulses that underlie precisely
these qualities. In the years following the World Wars, this development was mirrored
by the emergence of what was called “the Australian Way of Life”, a vision in which
the Bush ethos was basically commodified into a form commensurate with modern
consumerism.629 Henrietta Drake-Brockman might have had this in mind when she
commented: “Is it possible that Australians never truthfully saw this country as the El
Dorado and Utopia which the brilliant eager poets of the Nineties presented as the
Australian ideal? […] Was it – more heresy! – no Utopia we desired, but merely a high
standard of Australian living – a material paradise for ourselves and our children, and
the devil take the rest of humanity?”630
Even the utopianism of more radical minds became derivative. In their comparison of
literary utopias of the 1890s and 1930s, Verity Burgmann and David Milner found that
although both periods were characterised by similar economic pressures, Australian
utopists of the 1930s were markedly constricted in their imagination by the influences
of Soviet socialism. They comment that:
The utopian literature of the 1930s is diminished by its fascination with an alleged model of perfection in the real world. Sparse in quantity and Spartan in its imaginative reach, progress is imitation of the Soviet Union. […] By this decade, within the sub-culture that dreamed of alternatives to capitalism, radical notions other than the sterile repetitions of Stalinism were a largely spent force. […] Far richer are the writings of those who
628 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 141. 629 Cf. with White, Inventing Australia, 160ff. 630 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 309.
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dreamed of ideal futures during the 1890s, a decade undergoing similar economic distress.631
A good example of this is Ralph Gibson’s Socialist Melbourne (1938), a utopian novel
formally consistent with official Soviet ideas of class struggle and historical progress.632
Interestingly, the novel pays tribute to the concrete-utopian impulse behind the Bush
ethos, viewing mateship in particular as a precursor to socialism: “Socialism has its
roots in Australia’s past. The idea of working together, instead of grabbing from each
other, the idea of mateship, goes back in our history. We know the spirit of mutual help
born of the early pioneering days in the bush, so finely depicted by Henry Lawson in his
day. We know the growing comradeship among the early wage-earners in town and
country that flowered in the great Australian trade union movement. Socialism is that
same Australian spirit of mateship applied to the planning of our economic life.”633
What becomes apparent here is that Gibson attempts to further develop the utopian
impulses behind the Bush ethos, but ultimately collapses them into a symbol for Soviet
ideology. He thus fails to answer Drake-Brockman’s call for a refurbishment of
mateship: “Can a new and more intelligently matured ideal of mateship – one
sufficiently vital to arrest the attention of the world – be expected to arise from the
impetus at present at work within Australia?”634
The era that followed the wars displays an increasingly acute sense of identity crisis.
As mentioned before, historical events such as the Battle of Singapore, but also the
global revolt against European imperialism by African and Asian peoples, and
Australia’s fast-paced internationalisation and modernisation significantly altered the
nation’s view of itself, leading historian Neville Meaney to conclude that by the 1950s,
“Australia’s White British self-definition began to lose its virtue”.635 But with no
counter-utopia on the horizon, the Anglo-machismic Anzac legend remained largely in
place. Donald Horne, who famously defined Australia as “a lucky country run mainly
by second-rate people who share its luck”, pronounced: “There is a commendable
emptiness in Australians about their place in the world, the need for a new rhetoric, a
631 Burgmann and Milner, 852. 632 Burgmann and Milner, 851-2. 633 Ralph Gibson, Socialist Melbourne (Melbourne: International Bookshop, 1951), 41-2. 634 Qtd. in Turner, The Australian Dream, 311-2. 635 Neville Meaney, “‘In History’s Page’: Identity and Myth,” in Australia’s Empire, ed. Deryck M.
Schreuder et al. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 383.
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new approach, as if Australia were beginning again”.636 This “Great Australian
Emptiness” led to an unprecedented upsurge of art and literature in Australia, giving rise
to international giants as, for instance, Patrick White and Sidney Nolan. Australian art
now became too multifaceted and complex to be sketched in a few words, but it is
perhaps not overly reductive to say that in the meantime, Australian nationalism and its
imperial underpinnings were coming under increased scrutiny. In this context, Judith
Wright appears as a cultural paragon when she, highlighting the difficulties of
articulating a new vision of Australia, reflected on the “impossible task to write a
national anthem in the twentieth century when we are starting to believe that
nationalism has its limitations”.637 Importantly, Wright emphasised the incompleteness
of this process of self-reflection: “We have not yet, perhaps, reached that point of
equilibrium at which we can feel that this country is truly ours by right of understanding
and acceptance, and from which we can begin to grow again.”638
Post-Modernism: A New Hope?
The 1970s saw the first inklings of a new vision of Australia. As Stephen Alomes
writes, this was a “time of hope”, associated in particular with the Whitlam government
and its exploration of new directions in politics, economy and culture.639 Although
many of its initiatives and reforms were reversed by succeeding administrations, it can
be said that the short-lived Whitlam government reoriented the nation’s reigning ideas
by withdrawing troops from Vietnam, improving diplomatic relationships with Asia
(most notably China), ending military conscription, creating universal healthcare, and
abolishing university fees. Here an alternative to the Anglo-Machismo of European
imperialism finally presented itself, especially since the Whitlam vision shifted the
focus from racialised ideals of Australia’s Britishness towards multiculturalism.640
However, since in many aspects the implementation of this new vision failed or was
eventually overturned, it largely remained a reality-transcending utopia. What is more,
the vision of multiculturalism is consistently in danger of degenerating into a form of
636 Qtd. in Meaney, 383-4. 637 Judith Wright, “Verses are Hopelessly Bad,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 4, 1973, 3. 638 Judith Wright, “Australia’s Double Aspect,” Literary Criterion 6, no. 3 (1964): 7-8. 639 Stephen Alomes, “Visions and Periods: ‘1890s’, ‘1940s’, ‘1970s’,” Journal of Australian Studies 20
(1987): 9-10. 640 Alomes, 9-10.
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political doublespeak that legitimises the status quo before it has actually effected any
real social change. As White comments, “By the early 1970s, Australia was being
promoted as a pluralistic, tolerant, multi-cultural society, although it did not reflect any
real improvement in the position of Aborigines and migrants, most of whom remained
on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.”641
The last half of the twentieth century also saw the rise of post-modernism on a global
scale. It is important to note that with its categorical distrust of truth or meaning, and its
sometimes apocalyptic pronunciation of the “end of history”, post-modern philosophy
poses fundamental problems for the utopian imagination, specifically in its opposition
to the idea of progress and the anticipation of fulfilment or completeness. The French
post-structuralist Jean-Luc Nancy, for instance, in his critical dismissal of utopia in
post-modern times, writes:
This is why today, at our historical moment, utopia reaches a sort of extremity: we live in an age that was represented, in various ways, as the possible, or, rather, probable age of a fulfilled utopia (that of machines and/or that of fraternity, that of knowledge and/or that of the complete production of the human). As opposed to this representation, our age appears to itself as that of a derailing, which opens the path to the implosion of the world, or at least as the trigger for a mutation beyond which it would no longer be plausible to think in terms of history and/or of utopia, just as it would no longer be possible to return to myth642
For literary utopia in particular, but also for the utopian consciousness in general, Jean-
François Lyotard’s proclamation that the post-modern age is defined by its incredulity
towards Grand Narratives (such as, for example, the narrative of revolution) is highly
problematic. It severely undermines the type of narratological integrity that represents
not only a traditional part of utopian aesthetics, but is, more importantly, vital to
utopia’s anticipatory and transformative functioning, specifically in the form of what
Bloch metaphorically calls Fahrplan (roughly translated as “timetable”). As utopian
scholar Ruth Levitas remarks: “Lyotard’s challenge to ‘grand narratives’ does not augur
well for projecting into the future wholesale schemes of social transformation”.643 Of
course, all this has to be understood as the post-structuralist attempt at circumventing
oppressive, all-structuring ideologies. But at the same time it may amount to a denial of 641 White, Inventing Australia, 169. 642 Nancy, 5. 643 Ruth Levitas, “For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society,” Critical
Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3, no. 2-3 (2000): 34; cf. with Milner, “Postmodernism,” 35.
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visionary foresight and anticipation in favour of relativistic inertia. Hence one could
argue that as an unfortunate result, post-modernism has jettisoned utopia’s
emancipatory power, and ended up as its own form of conservative ideology, stuck in
the status quo without a vision of the future or any effectual means of escape. Following
this line of thought, it would seem that in the twenty-first century, post-structuralism has
manœuvred the utopian imagination into a cul-de-sac.
This political and theoretical erosion of the utopian imagination is of particular
significance for the post-colonial struggle in Australia. Before concluding, I would like
to exemplify this by looking at a contemporary example: Kim Scott’s That Deadman
Dance (2010). This work has all the historical trappings of a colonial contact novel, but
to be precise it is a creative re-imagining of what historian Neville Green has
contentiously called the “friendly frontier”:644 the novel is inspired by the history of
early contact in Scott’s West-Australian hometown of Albany, which is known for
cooperation and peaceful relationships between Aboriginal and European people that
endured for a comparatively long period of time. In many ways, as literary critic Tony
Hughes-d’Aeth puts it, “Scott’s novel tries to answer the question of why this was so,
believing that in amongst this situation are the lost ingredients of equitable coexistence,
since buried by the bulldozer of settler colonialism”.645 The focus of the novel lies on
these few peaceable decades, which Scott retells by weaving together the perspectives
of Aboriginals and settlers into a complex tapestry of voices. He does so without
shifting into a simple binary opposition of coloniser vs colonised, but instead gives his
characters – some inspired by British officials, others modelled on Scott’s own Noongar
ancestors – their own personal motivations. On a figurative level, the idea of the
“friendly frontier” finds embodiment in the central character Bobby Wabalanginy, an
Aboriginal orphan at home in both societies, whose Noongar name means “all of us
playing together”. Scenically, peaceful coexistence is best represented in the novel’s
depictions of coast-based whaling: it is here that the utopia of the friendly frontier
comes to the fore as people of all backgrounds gather together to work collaboratively,
acknowledging the contributions of Aboriginals and settlers alike. Geordie Chaine, the
British settler whose entrepreneurial spirit renders him among the novel’s most 644 Neville Green, “King George Sound: The Friendly Frontier,” in Archaeology at ANZAAS, ed. Moya
Smith (Perth: Western Australian Museum, 1983), 68-74. 645 Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, “For a long time nothing happened: Settler colonialism, deferred action and the
scene of colonization in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance,” Commonwealth Literature 51.1 (2016): 26.
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ambivalent characters, spells out the advantages of whaling over agriculture: “Whaling
was better than attempting to work this land with its topsy-turvy seasons and poor soil,
and there’d be trouble with the natives, farming. […] Whaling was better than arguing
with everyone in King George Town, Chaine moaned. And it was easy enough enticing
young blackfellas to help.”646 A good example of this vision can be found in the
following episode:
There was a cook with them only a short time. First time Wooral and Bobby came for their food, the cook said it wasn’t his job to serve Niggers. Kongk Chaine was there and Jak Tar, too, and they rounded on him like sheep dogs. Said we are one here, we judge people on what they do, not their skin. This is not your home. Chaine sent the man away soon [sic] as he found someone who could take his place.
The business of a white man thinking he was too good for a Noongar was not in Bobby’s song, but instead the men onboard ship, black and white and a Chinaman, too, if we want to keep saying people are this or that, and Yankees and convicts and froggies and soldiers… They all joined voices with Bobby as the melody grabbed them, held them, hauled them along behind.647
The image of this heterogeneous group of people, all in the same boat, joining in
Bobby’s song as they collaborate on an endeavour that relies equally on Aboriginal and
Western technology, knowledge and prowess, perfectly encapsulates the vision behind
the friendly frontier. But in the novel, as in reality, this peaceful coexistence comes to a
sudden stop once the whale population is depleted.
As Hughes-d’Aeth has pointed out, it is one of the most intriguing features of Scott’s
novel that it does not hypostatise an imagined pre-colonial past, but instead plunges the
reader into the tensional complexity of the West Australian contact situation.648 As
such, That Deadman Dance concentrates more on the potentialities of this fickle
moment of contact and its unrealised possibilities, than on the tragic trajectory of
colonial change that ensues afterwards. In this context it is important to keep in mind
that the novel’s rendition of the friendly frontier is largely imaginary, for this means that
instead of producing a “traditional ‘things fall apart’ narrative”, the novel tells what one
reviewer called a “story of what-might-have-but-could-not-have-been”.649 As Hughes-
646 Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance (Sydney: Picador, 2010), 273. 647 Scott, 317. 648 Hughes-d’Aeth, 26. 649 Hughes-d’Aeth, 26; Richard Carr, “A story of what-might-but-could-not-have-been,” review of That
Deadman Dance, by Kim Scott, Antipodes 25, no. 2 (Dec 2011): 212-213.
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d’Aeth puts it, “Scott’s entire novel takes place in the historical subjunctive”.650
Precisely this subjunctive exploration of history’s possibilities constitutes what
Australianist Philip Mead calls “Scott’s chronotope of West Australian frontier
contact”: “[Scott] imagines the (ultimately unknowable) moments of history, not as
constituting some kind of facsimile of the historical past, when Aboriginality was
presumed to be authentic, but as a question: How are the potentialities of history present
in that first contact? Has the history of these moments actually been fulfilled or
concluded? Can moments in history that appear to be concluded, past, in fact start up
again?”651 Scott accordingly anchors his vision of coexistence not in the future or
present, but in the past. As such, his vision differs markedly from the utopic, eutopic or
euchronic visions discussed previously.
Although That Deadman Dance is far from producing a Lyotardian Grand Narrative,
it is nevertheless re-telling history. One could even argue that it expresses a desire to
rewind history to a point where a different future was still possible. This seems to
suggest that in place of Nancy’s “return to myth”, we encounter a “myth of return” in
Scott’s novel. As Ashcroft cautions, the myth of return can be seriously detrimental to
the post-colonial project, for the backward-looking perspective of this type of longing
“can paralyse transformative action with an arcadian nostalgia”.652 At its worst, this
may deteriorate into an escapistic “fantasy of unhappening”.653 But Scott’s novel, it
should be noted, does not stage such a myth of return, precisely for the reason that it is
articulated in the historical subjunctive: persistently reminding the reader of what could
have been but, as we know, never came to be, Scott’s imagination of the friendly
frontier relentlessly foregrounds the lost opportunities of Australia’s history, and in so
doing formulates a critique of the colonial past that strongly gestures towards the
present. As Scott himself puts it: “I’m interested in finding empowering ways of
carrying the past into the present, in ways that are not only reactive and reductionist”.654
This mode of re-imagining historical events to carry critical import for the present
corresponds to what Ashcroft calls (borrowing the term from Martinican poet Édouard
Glissant) “a prophetic vision of the past”. As a result, Scott’s prophetic vision of the 650 Hughes-d’Aeth, 26. 651 Philip Mead, “Connectivity, Community and the Question of Literary Universality: Reading Kim
Scott’s Chronotope and John Kinsella’s Commedia,” in Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, eds. Peter Kirkpatrick et al. (Sydney: Sydney UP, 2012): 150-1.
652 Ashcroft, “Critical Utopia,” 422. 653 Ashcroft, “Critical Utopia,” 422; 427. 654 Scott, app. p. 3.
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friendly frontier has to be understood as a critical strategy intended not only to contest
colonial history, but more importantly, to challenge the present.
Notably, Scott’s novel renders problematic the idea that Aboriginal subjects were
simply powerless and inert in the face of encroaching colonialism. His novel offers a
diverse range of indigenous characters, whose engagement in the colonising process is
complex, multifaceted and in constant flux. As Scott underscores in a note to the book,
he wanted to show how much the Noongar people of Western Australia “appreciated
reciprocity and the nuances of cross-cultural exchange”.655 That Deadman Dance boasts
of examples of Aboriginal people not simply succumbing to the invading culture, but
rather appropriating it, transforming and integrating it into their own cosmology. This
could not be better exemplified than by the eponymous dance, which refers to a
historical incident in which a military drill performed by a British exploration crew at
King George Sound was appropriated and transformed by its Aboriginal audience into a
Noongar dance. This historical dance becomes the powerful and polysemous metaphor
underpinning Scott’s novel, where the indigenous appropriation of a Western display of
power signifies resistance and cultural persistence as much as cross-cultural curiosity
and adaptation. As Mead rightly remarks, the novel is “a meditation on the past”, but
“not as an archaeological layer of a national present”, because in spite of the book’s
“generic appearance of a historical novel of frontier contact”, it actually contests the
ideological master discourse of History.656 The novel owes much of its visionary,
utopian energy to this exposition of the past as a dynamic, transforming cultural reality.
The post-colonial utopian mentality exhibited in That Deadman Dance displays an
intriguing time-sense. As Mannheim emphasised, time-sense is “always a reliable
symptom of the structure of a mentality”.657 Scott’s utopia of the friendly frontier
exhibits a preoccupation with the past which Mannheim would regard as indicative of
the “conservative mode of experiencing time”.658 The crucial difference is that the
conservative mentality invokes the past to corroborate its legitimation of the present,
whereas Scott re-imagines history to challenge the status quo. As such, it would seem
that he displays the form of “militant optimism” of which Bloch says that “even when it
concerns itself with the past”, it is still “concerned with the foremost segment of history,
655 Scott, 398. 656 Mead, 147. 657 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 202. 658 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 211.
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[…] namely with the still undischarged future in the past”.659 The fact, however,
remains that Scott’s prophetic vision of the friendly frontier merely retraces one of
history’s lost opportunities for peaceful coexistence, and while in doing so articulates a
post-colonial critique of the present, nonetheless falls short of developing a fully-
fledged vision of a better future. That is to say, its imagination of possibilities for
peaceful coexistence in the past does not suffice to envision a better alternative to the
present, let alone how the present can be transformed. Instead, Scott’s utopia stops at
the level of negative critique. In this, it instantiates Jameson’s claim that “utopia is
somehow negative”, because to a certain extent, the function of Scott’s prophetic vision
of the past “lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating
our utter incapacity to imagine such a future – our imprisonment in a non-utopian
present without historicity or futurity – so as to reveal the ideological closure of the
system in which we are somehow trapped and confined”.660 So while Scott’s novel asks
all the right questions, formally as well as thematically and structurally, it does not
provide an answer, but rather renders visible the limitations of the utopian imagination
in the twenty-first century.
659 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:200. 660 Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 46.
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Conclusion
“our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future, but to complete the thought of the past.” (Letter from
Marx to Arnold Ruge, 1843)
Scott’s prophetic vision of the past demonstrates that even Australia’s colonial
history can hold immense critical and subversive potential when approached from a
utopian perspective. The post-colonial vision thus turns history itself, the oppressive
master discourse of national and imperial ideology, into a critical utopia. This is a
crucial achievement for the utopian imagination of Australia, but before this can
become apparent, it has to be situated in the larger historical investigation of this thesis.
At this point, therefore, let us briefly recapitulate our main findings. First of all, we saw
that a very similar critical potential lies in the utopic nowhereness of Antipodality: as
chapter 1 has shown, the conception of Antipodal space as somehow reflecting Europe,
but also as unreachable, fictional, and inhabited by monsters, ultimately meant that the
Antipodes represented a utopic space that produces alienating familiarity. It was
demonstrated that Antipodality, in its carnivalesque duplication of Europe, unfolds into
a satirical critique of European societies that persistently prevents ideological closure,
challenging in particular the ideologies of European expansionism and imperialism.
This subversive nowhereness primarily characterised Australia’s pre-discovery avatars,
but it is important to note that Australia’s place in the utopian imagination is still, at
least to a certain degree, defined by Antipodality. In fact, much of the critical potential
of Antipodal nowhereness (specifically the defamiliarising Unheimlichkeit and the
analytical inversion of Europe associated with Antipodality) is encapsulated in the
contemporary denomination of Australia as “Down Under”. Because of this Antipodal
relationship with the northern hemisphere, Australia continues to hold the utopic
potential to simultaneously reflect and criticise Western imperialism.
However, our discussion has also indicated that the utopic vision articulated through
Antipodal nowhereness may – very much like the prophetic vision of the past – fall
short of developing a concrete-utopian impulse. The reason for this is that both the
prophetic vision of the past and the Antipodal vision of utopic nowhereness fail to
provide constructive content. By contrast, we saw that the Arcadian vision and the
utopia of the Bush feature such generative subject matter in the form of unsatisfied
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hope-contents. As chapter 5 has shown, the Dickensian Pastoral’s vision of an Arcadian
life in rural simplicity and bliss offers a critical alternative to the unsustainable excesses
and emotional poverty of modernity – a vision that is all the more pertinent in the
contemporary era of late capitalism. That is to say, the images of the country homestead
and the harvest home contain undischarged hope-contents that are of continuing
relevance for today. Chapter 7 showed that even the purgatorial vision of Australia is
shot through with moments of concrete-utopian Vorschein. Most importantly, as chapter
6 has made clear, in their association with radical politics, the utopia of the Bush and
the utopian archetype of the Noble Bushman continue to encapsulate what Bloch would
label unbecome goal-contents. Specifically in the form of such ideals as egalitarianism,
anti-authoritarianism and social solidarity, the utopia of the Bush articulates a vision
that provides not only a critical foil to the present, but more importantly, a concrete-
utopian alternative. It is precisely this affirmative, constructive content which the utopic
vision of Antipodality and the prophetic vision of the past are lacking.
But this thesis has also found that ultimately, the concrete-utopian impulse of the
Arcadian vision as well as the utopia of the Bush is hampered by their susceptibility to
nostalgia. The backward-looking perspective of nostalgia causes these visions to
deteriorate into what Ricœur calls the escapistic pathology of utopia, and what Bloch
describes as “contemplative quietism” that “disguises the future as past”.661 It is the
regressive misappropriation of the still unsatisfied hope-contents of these visions that
curbs their anticipatory gesture, so that Arcadianism and the Noble Bushman end up
signifying a concluded, distant past that has lost its import for the present or future.
What is missing, therefore, in the Arcadian vision and the utopia of the Bush is a clearly
stated time signature that could prevent their concrete-utopian impulse from being
reduced to a conservative ideology.
Our discussion of the Civilising Mission and the Quirósque body utopia revealed that
both these visions exhibit exactly the kind of chronological commitment that is missing
from the Arcadian vision and the utopia of the Bush. As chapter 3 has demonstrated, the
Civilising Mission draws from a distinctly euchronic time-sense, in which the present is
construed as the past of an anticipated colonial euchronia, a glorious future of economic
prosperity and civil order. For the Civilising Mission, the significance of the present lies
entirely in its relation to the future, so that the present becomes essential in the 661 Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:198.
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transformative process of bringing utopia into existence. It is because of this focus on
active engagement in the course of history that the euchronic perspective carries strong
emancipatory potential. This is even more pronounced in Captain Quirós’ vision of
Austrialia del Espíritu Santo: as chapter 2 has shown, the defining feature of the
Quirósque vision was the conception of Australia as a bounteous body utopia, a
pleasure garden in which leisure dominates over work and natural riches are
immediately available. Precisely this immediacy, the obsessive preoccupation with the
“here and now on the spatial and temporal stage”,662 characterises what Mannheim calls
the time-sense of the chiliastic mentality. In order to avoid nostalgia’s debilitating
orientation backwards, the unsatisfied hope-contents of the Arcadian vision and the
utopia of the Bush require the goal-oriented, forward-looking perspective of the
Civilising Mission, or the active, transformative urgency of Quirósque chiliasm.
However, one of the major findings of this thesis was that the emancipatory drive
behind both the Quirósque body utopia and the Civilising Mission is weighed down
considerably by the close association of these visions with the ideology of imperialism.
This becomes particularly manifest in their heavy reliance on specific ideologemes. It
was found that the Civilising Mission depends greatly on the ambivalent notion of
improvement, an ideologeme through which what Mannheim would label the
“normative-liberal” or “liberal-humanitarian” mentality of Enlightenment utopianism is
transposed into the ideological register of imperialism. Likewise, it was found that the
Quirósque vision relies strongly on the trope of bounty, an ideologeme which unhinges
the connection between agricultural wealth and its creation by native people by
replacing indigenous labour with notions of natural abundance. As a result, both visions
carry a substantial ideological underbelly, which impoverishes, if not completely
undermines, their emancipatory drive, and in its stead furnishes the ideological
groundwork for conceptions of Australia as terra nullius.
This leads us back to the prophetic vision of the past and the Antipodal vision of
utopic nowhereness, because it is their critical explorations of imperialism that enables
the utopian imagination of Australia to step out of this particular ideological shadow.
Now that the present summary has come full circle, it becomes apparent that the central
finding of this thesis is that none of the visions of Australia has succeeded in completely
salvaging utopia from ideology’s oppressive hold: where utopia is not incriminated by 662 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 193.
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ideology to form what Jameson calls a compensatory structure, utopia’s critique of the
status quo falls flat because it lacks the constructive vision of a concrete-utopian
alternative. But I think that this conclusion has also made clear that Australia’s place in
the utopian imagination holds tremendous critical and concrete-utopian potential: as the
utopic place Down Under, Australia stands in a particularly subversive relationship to
hegemonic forces. However, one would have to muster all the positive forces of
Australia’s utopian imaginary – that is, the unfulfilled hope-contents of Arcadianism
and the utopia of the Bush, the emancipatory time signature of the Civilising Mission
and the Quirosque body utopia, the subversive nowhereness of Antipodality plus the
prophetic vision of Australia’s imperial past – to escape the tenacious grip of ideology.
Finally, it remains to be hoped for that a vision will emerge out of Australia’s utopian
potential that overcomes the ideological heritage of imperialism, while at the same time
not succumbing to the anti-utopian inertia of postmodern thought.
213
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