THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Hempel Surname or Family name:

Christoph Daniel First name: Other name/s:

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The interplay of utopia and ideology in visions of Australia Title:

Abstract 350 words maximum : Australia has a fascinating hi story of visions. As the Antipode to Europe, the conti nent provides un ique ly fe rtile 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 usua lly come with their own ideological baggage. It is thi s interplay of utopia and ideology in visions of Australia that forms the overarching theme of this thesis, the central aim of which is to determ ine the place of Australia in the utopian imagination. Trac ing 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 hi storical contexts. Offering an innovative approach to Marxist ideology-critique, th is 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 ro le of utopian thought in the literaty imagination of Australia, it also provides an origin al and insightful perspective on Australian hi story, and furthers our the oretical understanding of the complex interplay of utopia and ideology. While the central fi ndin g 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 imagination holds tremendous critical and concrete-utopian potenti al.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 And once, after a natural philosopher (physikos) lectured διαλεγόμενον άναστήσας καὶ επὶ φρέαρ about the Antipodes, Demonax made him get up, led αγαγὼν καὶ δείξας αυτω τὴν εν τω υδατι him to an artificial well, showed him his shadows on the σκιὰν ηρετο, Τοιούτους αρα τοὺς αντίποδας water and asked: “This is, presumably, what you ειναι λέγεις78 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 Regarding the fable that there are Antipodes, that homines a contraria parte terrae, ubi sol oritur, is, men on the opposite side of the earth, where quando occidit nobis, aduersa pedibus nostris the sun rises when it sets for us, men who tread in calcare uestigia: nulla ratione credendum est. the footsteps opposite to ours: there is no reason Neque hoc ulla historica cognitione didicisse se to believe that. For it is not proved whether this is adfirmant, sed quasi ratiocinando coniectant, eo based on historical knowledge, or rather inferred quod intra conuexa caeli terra suspensa sit, 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. 34

eundemque locum mundus habeat et infimum et hangs suspended within the vault of heaven, and medium; et ex hoc opinantur alteram terrae that the world has the same room on one side as partem, quae infra est, habitatione hominum on the other: but from this they conjecture that the carere non posse. Nec adtendunt, etiamsi figura other part of the earth, which is beneath, must be conglobata et rutunda mundus esse credatur siue populated. They do not take into account that, aliqua ratione monstretur, non tamen esse even if it is presumed or scientifically consequens, ut etiam ex illa parte ab aquarum demonstrated that the world is of a round and congerie nuda sit terra; deinde etiamsi nuda sit, spherical shape, the other side of the earth may be neque hoc statim necesse esse, ut homines covered by water; and even if it is bare of water, habeat. Quoniam nullo modo scriptura ista that does not necessarily mean that it is populated. mentitur, quae narratis praeteritis facit fidem eo, For Scripture, which proves the truth of its quod eius praedicta conplentur, nimisque account by the fulfilment of its prophecies, never absurdum est, ut dicatur aliquos homines ex hac lies, and it is too absurd to say that some men in illam partem, Oceani inmensitate traiecta, from this hemisphere could have traversed the nauigare ac peruenire potuisse, ut etiam illic ex wide Ocean and sailed to the other, so that even uno illo primo homine genus institueretur there the human race descended from that one first humanum.86 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. 44

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. 45

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 In conclusion, I was in the region of the mia navigazione fu una quarta parte del mondo; […] Antipodes, which according to my navigation Questa terra è molto amena; e piena d’infinite alberi belonged to the fourth part of the world; […] This verdi, e molti grandi, e mai non perdono foglia, e land is very delightful; and so full of numberless tutti anno odori soavissimi, e aromatici, e producono green trees of great size, which never shed their infinite frutte, e molti di esse buone al gusto e leaves, and have the sweetest and most aromatic salutifere al Corpo e campi producono molta erba, e fragrances, and bear numberless fruits, many of fiori, e radici molto soavi, e buone, che qualche volta which taste excellent and are beneficial to well mi maravigliavano de’soavi odore dell’erbe, e dei being, and the fields produce so many herbs and fiori, e del sapore d’esse frutte, e radici, tanto che flowers and roots, all delicious and excellent, that infra me pensavo, esser presso al Paradiso at times I wondered at the delicious fragrances of terrestre.147 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. 59

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. 62

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. 67

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. 70

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 –––

75

Her graceful ſteps deſcending preſs’d the plain, 223 And PEACE, and ART, and LABOUR, join’d her train.

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. 76

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. 77

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 From these farmed and familiar lands, could your cuiusquam nostrum nomen vel Caucasum hunc, name, or the name of anyone of us, surmount the quem cernis, transcendere potuit vel illum Gangen Caucasus, which you see here, or cross over the tranatare? Quis in reliquis orientis aut obeuntis solis Ganges there? Who, in the most distant regions of ultimis aut aquilonis austrive partibus tuum nomen the rising or setting sun, in the North or the South, audiet? quibus amputatis cernis profecto quantis in will hear your name? Leaving these aside, surley angustiis vestra se gloria dilatari velit. Ipsi autem, you can see in what a confined space your fame qui de nobis loquuntur, quam loquentur diu?231 [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 78

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. 79

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, Said Rinaldo: – Now that we’re at it, dimmi, Astaròt, un’altra cosa ancora: tell me, Astarotte, yet another thing: se questi son della stirpe d’Adamo; whether these people are of Adam’s lineage; e, perchè vane cose vi s’adora, and also, since they worship vain things, se si posson salvar qual noi possiamo. – whether they can gain salvation like we do. – 239 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. 80

Ma l’aüttor disopra ov’io mi specchio But the author of this work upon which I reflect, parmi che creda, e forse crede il vero, it seems to me believed, and he may be right about this, che, benché e’ fusse Rinaldo già vecchio, that although Rinaldo was already very old, avea l’animo ancor robusto e fero he still had a sturdy and wild spirit e quel suon d’Astarotte nello orecchio and with Astarotte’s vision in his ear come disotto in quell’altro emispero that down there in that other hemisphere erano e guerre e monarchie e regni, are wars and kingdoms and realms, e che e’ passassi alfin d’Ercule i segni.242 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. 81

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. 82

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. 83

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. 84

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. 86

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. 87

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. 88

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. 89

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. 90

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. 91

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, 282 Perhaps NEW-HOLLAND be.

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. 92

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. 93

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). 94

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. 95

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. 96

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. 97

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. 99

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 It is this thought of destruction, this ulterior d’un changement prochain et inévitable qui donne, motive (arrière-pensée) of coming, inevitable suivant nous, aux solitudes de l’Amérique un change, that gives the solitudes of America a caractère si original et une si touchante beauté. On character of so unique and touching beauty. One les voit avec un plaisir mélancolique. On se hâte en looks at them with melancholy pleasure. One quelque sorte de les admirer. L’idée de cette hurries somehow to admire them. The thought of grandeur naturelle et sauvage qui va finir se mêle this natural and wild grandeur coming to an end aux magnifiques images que la marche de la mingles with the splendid visions to which the civilisation fait naître. On se sent fier d’être homme, march of civilisation gives birth. One feels proud et l’on éprouve en même temps je ne sais quel amer of being a man, and at the same time one regret du pouvoir que Dieu vous a accordé sur la experiences I don’t know what bitter remorse at nature. L’âme est agitée par de idées, des senti-mens the power God granted you over Nature. The soul contraires; mais toutes les impressions qu’elle reçoit is stirred by conflicting thoughts and feelings; but sont grandes, et laissent une trace profonde.302 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. 101

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. 102

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. 103

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. 104

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. 105

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. 106

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. 107

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. 108

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. 109

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. 112

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. 113

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. 114

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. 115

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. 116

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. 117

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. 118

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. 119

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. 120

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. 121

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. 122

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

123

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. 125

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. 126

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. 127

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. 128

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. 129

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. 130

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. 131

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. 132

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. 133

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. 134

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.” 135

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, 136

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. 137

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. 138

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. 139

may this, thy last-born INFANT – then arise, to glad thy heart, and greet thy PARENT eyes; and AUSTRALASIA float, with flag unfurl’d, 421 a new BRITANNIA in another world!

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. 140

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. 141

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. 142

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. 143

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). 144

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. 145

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. 146

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 147

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. 148

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. 149

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. 150

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. 151

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. 152

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. 153

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. 154

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. 155

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. 156

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). 157

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. 158

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. 159

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. 160

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. 161

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. 163

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. 165

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. 166

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. 167

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. 173

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. 174

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. 175

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. 176

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. 177

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. 178

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. 179

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. 180

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. 181

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. 182

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. 183

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. 184

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. 185

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. 186

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. 187

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). 188

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. 189

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. 190

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. 191

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. 192

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. 193

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. 194

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. 195

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). 196

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.” 197

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. 198

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. 199

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. 200

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. 201

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. 202

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. 203

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. 204

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. 205

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. 206

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. 207

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. 208

[…] 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. 209

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 210

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. 211

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. 212

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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