Worlding the South : Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies
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2 Southern doubles: antipodean life as a comparative exercise Sarah Comyn In the prologue to a series of squibs titled ‘Australian Doubles’ in 1856, Melbourne Punch describes the ‘startling’ discovery ‘that the physical equi- poise which exists between the two hemispheres of the world extends to the moral and mental qualities of the inhabitants’ such that ‘every man in the Northern hemisphere has his double in the Southern’.1 Beginning with ‘The History of Victoria’ by a ‘Thomas B. Camawley’ (clearly parodying Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England [1848]), the series of ‘Australian Doubles’ articles features satirical accounts of the colony of Victoria’s history that lampoon both the imitative qualities of colonial writers and the works of popular authors and poets such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, R. H. Horne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Alfred Tennyson among others.2 Melbourne Punch’s parody of the tendency of colonial Australian authors to model themselves on their northern counterparts enacts what Paul Giles describes in Antipodean America (2013) as ‘a heightened version of comparative consciousness’, one that defines ‘the antipodean imagina- tion’ as a state in which the ‘phenomenological selfhood of any given cul- ture is refracted through alternative perspectives’.3 Invoking both Terra Australis (the southern continent) and its geographic northern antipode through its reference to hemispheric ‘equipoise’, the ‘Australian Doubles’ series imagines antipodean duplicates that simultaneously reproduce and upset, mirror and refract, the ‘original’ northern writer, artist, politician, and/or artefact.4 Melbourne Punch’s ‘comparative consciousness’ forms the starting point of this chapter’s analysis of the implications the ‘antipodean imagination’ and its southern ‘doubles’ had for how the southern hemisphere was imag- ined, conceived, mocked, and celebrated by the poetry, fiction, parodies, let- ters, and illustrated articles published by Australian newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth century. While Giles uses the perspective offered by a ‘comparative consciousness’ to frame his analysis of how Amer- ican literature adopts and adapts an ‘antipodean aspect’ from Australasia, this chapter will instead focus its attention on how this ‘antipodean aspect’ Sarah Comyn - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 07:23:19AM via free access Southern doubles 59 animated discussions concerning the social, political, and economic forma- tions of the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century.5 Examining news- paper representations of settler colonial life in Australia, it reveals the surprising and imaginative ways that settlers both identified with and rejected the antipodean mythologies of the southern hemisphere. With a focus on the three decades following the discovery of gold in Australia (1851), the pass- ing of the Australian Constitutions Act (1850), and the achievement of responsible government (1855–56), the chapter’s analysis of newspaper accounts will also demonstrate how these depictions mobilised the trope of antipodal inversion to portray a growing economic and colonial indepen- dence that provided a means of addressing the north and destabilising Euro- centric hierarchies.6 Imagined cartographies and geographies of the Antipodes The imaginative pull of a ‘south’ in opposition to a European ‘north’ is not unique to the nineteenth century. William Eisler traces the ‘invention of the concept of a southern continent’ to Pythagoras; and numerous medieval maps abound with images of this continent that both await its discovery and reject its existence as a possibility.7 In his examination of the cosmographies, cartographies, and geographies – both ‘real and imagined’ – that defined the ‘search for the southern continent’ by Europeans in the early modern period, Avan Judd Stallard demonstrates the explorative and creative appeal of the imagined south. A place of legend and mythography, the ‘imagined geogra- phy’ of this southern region nonetheless contained the reifying power of ‘verisimilitude’: ‘the way these entities appear real; the way an imagined geography is drawn or described to approximate reality, with all the hall- marks of a place that is known or knowable’. The ‘more verisimilitude’, argues Stallard, ‘the more potent its legend’ and ‘the more fervent[ly]’ people ‘promote its existence’.8 Arguably one of the most potent and indeterminate of the European leg- ends surrounding the south is that of the Antipodes, whose mythological inhabitants could have feet that face in the opposite direction. The Antipo- des could also be an upturned world with inhabitants walking upside down so that ‘their opposite feet will touch the bottoms of our feet in a bodily and uncanny fashion’, generating, according to Alfred Hiatt, a process of self- reflection.9 Hiatt identifies the ‘ancient antipodal trope of the world turned upside down’ as a stimulus for the philosophising that accompanied imag- inings of Terra Australis, such that the Antipodes becomes ‘a place of reflec- tion, isolation and self-discovery, a blank space, and so a mirror for humanity’.10 If the existence of Terra Australis was necessary to ‘balance the Sarah Comyn - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 07:23:19AM via free access 60 World/Globe weight of land in the northern hemisphere’ – a product, Hiatt argues, ‘not simply of speculation but of calculation’ – the idea of the Antipodes as a world upside down, back to front, or topsy-turvy could provide its own balancing force of inversion.11 This antipodean force of opposition is always, however, suggestively unstable, with the meaning and region of the Antipo- des ambiguous, indeterminate, ‘fantastical’, and ‘changeable’.12 A ‘trigger for self-examination’, the topsy-turvyness of the Antipodes and its inversive potential could manifest itself cartographically, corporeally, and/or meta- phorically.13 Examining representations of life in the southern hemisphere in colonial Australian newspapers demonstrates how the cartographic inver- sion of the Antipodes moves from the map and is, in turn, remapped on to the routines and domesticities as well as the culture and politics of settler life, through the portrayal of corporeal (‘touching our feet in a bodily and uncanny fashion’) and metaphorical inversions. Such inversions involve a way of living and forming identities in negatives rather than positives, but these negatives are themselves increasingly transformed into the positives of colonial political assertiveness and increasing economic independence in the wake of the Australian gold rushes. Antipodean corporeality Although the region signified by the Antipodes remained necessarily ambig- uous throughout the history of the concept, Matthew Boyd Goldie notes that by the eighteenth century ‘the idea of the antipodes comes to designate an area in Oceania’, and by the twentieth century the Antipodes is frequently, though not always, aligned with Australia and New Zealand, sometimes together, occasionally apart.14 This association of Australia with the Antipo- des would prove captivating for those portraying Australia in the nineteenth century, both from outside and within the Australian colonies. As Bernard Smith has famously argued, ‘the antipodes are not a place, but a relationship … a spatial and cultural relationship between north and south’, and specifically for the purposes of this chapter, between colonial Australia and Britain.15 Smith’s ‘antipodean point of view’, like Giles’ ‘comparative consciousness’, emphasises the relational nature of the antipodean perspective which calls upon its opposite even as it rejects it as myth.16 In considering what she describes as the ‘embodiments of Australia in world literature’, Vilashini Cooppan lingers on the figure of the ‘antipodean foot’ (which she terms a ‘species of continental fetishism’) best represented in the Osma Beatus map of 1086 (Figure 2.1), where the mythological figure of a Skiapod shields itself from the red-hot southern sun.17 ‘A proxy substi- tute’ for the southern continent, the antipodean foot evokes a corporeal Sarah Comyn - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 07:23:19AM via free access Southern doubles 61 Figure 2.1 Beato de Liebana Burgo de Osma, 1086 inversion that promotes ‘displacement and disavowal’: ‘the order of the aus- tral map’ is ‘that it confirms disbelief in the southern continent even as it directs its gaze toward it’.18 Contemplating the corporeality of antipodality, Goldie similarly argues that the concept of the Antipodes can be embodied and performed. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term ‘beside’, Goldie considers how the encounters between ‘British and Pacific cultures’ in the nineteenth century can perform a ‘wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, dif- ferentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations’.19 Goldie’s sense of the antipodean ‘beside’ shares an epistemological space with Stallard’s ‘verisimilitude’, alongside what Goldie terms the ‘continuum of disorientation’ created by those in the north who attempt to ‘address the south’.20 This ‘disorientation’ provides an opportunity, however, for the south to instead reorient antipo- dean inversions, which in turn can be used to discredit the north’s precon- ceptions of the south as ‘topsy-turvy’. The ‘antipodean figures of Australasia have often involved’, Giles