Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity
Authors: Arthur Paul Longley 
Published: August 2008

Author's Introduction

The unexplored regions of the southern hemisphere, known as the ‘antipodes’, existed in the European imagination for at least two thousand years before Europeans set foot on antipodean lands. By that time this distant and elusive place had inspired a vast and varied mythology. Rival European nations, with different aims and agendas, each had their own specific visions of the ‘great south land’ that they sought to fulfil through exploration and conquest. Myths had a very important role to play in this. Not only did they have the effect of fuelling the desire to find the antipodes, but they also formed a strong foundation for justifying colonisation, on moral and religious grounds.

This article outlines a history of antipodean mythology, tracing its representation in European literature and cartography from the classical period to the nineteenth century. The main purpose is to make the point that long established mythologies were not simply dispelled by the scientific evidence brought back by early explorers from Australia and the Pacific islands. In fact, they created expectations that deeply influenced the way that early explorers and settlers viewed the landscapes and Indigenous inhabitants. In the case of Australia, so deeply ingrained were the myths of European arrival and settlement that they contributed significantly to its history as a colony, and continue to influence its national identity to this day.

Author Recommends:

Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

This book focuses on representations of the antipodes between 1767 and 1914 and refers to related work across a range of disciplines including history, literature, art history and anthropology. Its strength in the way it consciously brings together conflicting viewpoints and images of the region and draws upon a range of postcolonial theory to interpret these divergent perspectives. Topics include trade, missionary work, and local Indigenous practices such as tattooing and cannibalism. Running through the book is the theme that European responses to the exotic Pacific were a defence of European culture and values, necessary to its own survival in the global arena that exploration opened up.

William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The gradual process of mapping Terra Australis is traced as a pictorial history in this beautifully illustrated book. It includes Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and English images of maps as well as other drawings, accompanied by a long essay that interprets the images with reference to contemporary explorers’ accounts and popular myths. The images show how passionate an interest there was in portraying the strange and unfamiliar flora and fauna of newly discovered lands. In turn these images fed the public imagination and fuelled the appetite for further discovery.

David Fausett, Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Stereotyping (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).

Fausett discusses the many emerging stereotypes of the antipodes in the eighteenth century. This was a crucial time because for hundreds of years those in Europe had relied on scanty evidence of a south land and only hearsay and fables about its people. In the eighteenth‐century Britain and France dominated the exploration of the Pacific and both established colonies there. This led to a range of naturally very different identities to be formed around the different sorts of Indigenous societies found and also the varying climates and geography (for example, between Tahiti and the Australian landmass). The book also surveys a range of fictional literature, including ‘imaginary voyages’, which were popular in Britain and France as they told stories of wild adventures to utopian lands in the antipodes.

Bernard Smith, European vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960).

This is a classic, founding study in its field. The study focuses on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and investigates the impact of the opening up of the Pacific on European taste in art. Topics covered include the impact of the Pacific on European romanticism and the interrelationship between science and art. This leads to a discussion of how Australian colonial art emerged, influenced by an array of factors including the unique geography of Australia, the history of its colonial settlement, and the distant influences of European style and expectation.

Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004).

This book focuses on cross‐cultural encounters between Pacific islanders and European explorers and visitors. The beach is a metaphor for the physical and mental divides between different cultures. How those moments of interaction are reconciled and lead to cultural understanding or misunderstanding is the focus of the book. It is written poetically in a beautiful prose style that teaches the reader about the history of specific cultures but also invites speculation on what it may have been like to be there in that very moment of first contact.

Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York, NY: Walker, 2003).

James Cook is recognised as arguably the greatest navigator of all time. In his three major voyages to the Pacific in the late eighteenth century he did more than any other explorer to convey knowledge of the distant antipodes to European readers. He also made a significant impact on the societies he visited. This book is a recent major assessment of Cook and his achievements. It also reconstructs many of the key encounters between Cook, his crew and the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific. The book celebrates Cook's achievements but does looks further than his heroism and fame. The image of Cook that emerges is richer and more complex than in previous studies. The story of Cook sheds lights on many of the larger themes of the history of the antipodes and the transformation from myth to reality.

Online Materials:

South Seas: Voyaging and Cross‐Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800):

http://southseas.nla.gov.au

This special online project supported by the National Library of Australia is an interactive resource focused on the history of European voyaging and cross‐cultural encounters in the Pacific between 1760 and 1800. It includes a major section devoted to James Cook's first voyage of discovery of 1768–71. This section has links to high resolution historical maps and illustrations, the history of Indigenous responses, and related research articles.

Austlit: The Australian Literature Resource:

http://www.austlit.edu.au

Supported by twelve Australian universities and the National Library of Australia, The Australian Literature database Austlit is the major online resource for the study of Australia literary culture and history. It contains a variety of critical and creative works in full text and references hundreds of thousands of works relating to over 100,000 Australian authors and literary organisations.

Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand:

http://www.teara.govt.nz

This online cultural atlas is regarded as one of the leading examples of its kind. The user has access to the digitised holdings of an array of collecting institutions through a simple intuitive interface designed to be accessible and information. The brief research articles on the history of New Zealand in the Pacific have links to more detailed resources and holdings at various institutions.

Early Americas Digital Archive:

http://mith2.umd.edu/eada

Many of the images of the antipodes that were popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were based on the example of discovery and colonisation in the Americas. This archive is a searchable collection of electronic texts and links to other resources that were originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to around 1820.

What was it like to sail on an 18th‐century square‐rigger?:

http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2002/B/20026331.html

This article encourages the reader to imagine what it may have been like travelling long distances on a simple eighteenth century vessel such as the kind Cook would have used. The article refers to a re‐enactment of Cook's voyages on his ship Endeavour – this re‐enactment was recorded for a documentary series The Ship (BBC) and it involved a group of historians and other experts spending long periods of time living and operating the ship as part of its crew.

Sample Syllabus:

Week 1: Introduction and Overview – Exploration and Colonisation of the Great South Land

The myth of the antipodes – the allure of the great south land

Gaps in maps – spaces for the imagination

Reading:

Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), ch. 1.

Alan Frost, and Glyndwr Williams (eds), Terra Australis to Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993).

Weeks 2–4: Fantasies of the Antipodes

The role of imaginary voyage texts – blending reality with fantasy, pre‐programming colonisation

Myths of extreme difference

Myths of Indigenous populations’ welcoming attitude to colonial intrusion

Theories of otherness

Reading:

Paul Arthur, ‘Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity’, History Compass 5 (August 2007) DOI: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2007.00467.x, http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/section_home?section=hico‐australasia‐and‐pacific.

Robert J. C. Young, ‘Culture and the History of Difference’, in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 29–54.

Edward W. Said, ‘Introduction’ in Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), 1–28; ‘The Scope of Orientalism’, op. cit., 29–110.

David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990).

Weeks 3–5: Entering the Antipodes

Early explorers’ contradictory responses to Terra Australis Incognita

Utopias and dystopias

First contact with Indigenous people – the concept of ‘terra nullius’ framed by myths

Reading:

Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004), Prologue and ch. 1.

Extract from ‘An Account of a Round Voyage of the Endeavour in the year MDCCLXX along the East Coast of Australia’ (April 1770), in Ken Goodwin and Alan Lawson (eds), The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990), 16–17.

Extract from William Dampier, ‘A New Voyage Round the World: 1688’, in Ken Goodwin and Alan Lawson (eds), The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990), 303–5.

Arthur Kateryna, ‘Pioneering Perceptions: Australia and Canada’, in Reginald Berry and James Acheson (eds), Regionalism and National Identity: Multi‐Disciplinary Essays on Canada, Australia, and new Zealand (Christchurch: Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand, 1985).

Weeks 6–8: Images of Contemporary Australia: Enduring Myths

The myth of terra nullius and the impact on Indigenous Australia

The ‘dead heart’ of Australia as the last unfathomed antipodean space

Reading:

Ross Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1984).

Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Bill Bryson, Down Under (London: Doubleday, 2000).

Morag Fraser (ed.), Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998).

Optional:

Focus Questions:

In the traditional reading of the ‘rise of science’, developing scientific orders of knowledge effectively triumphed over mythic knowledge, by reliably and objectively describing the world ‘as it was’. The process of discovery was widely accepted as simply exposing the world to the European view. And yet, the apparently simple, causal correspondence, whereby scientific knowledge gradually supplanted mythology, was arguably far more complex. Imagining and mythologising continued, in literary fiction and cartography – as it did in many other forms of textual representation – even alongside a growing store of empirical knowledge. Why was this so? Do we have as influential myths today?

At the beginning of the early modern period, maps were unashamedly speculative. They were canvases for creative cartographers, many of whom were also painters or engravers. The less knowledge there was of the world beyond Europe's boundaries, the more scope there was for maps to be inventive, blending received knowledge with fictional projection. In time, as proto‐scientific ways of seeing and measuring the world gained popularity, cartographers’ attempts to represent the mythic imaginary alongside authenticated information were gradually superseded by the more pragmatic modern approach of exposing the remaining gaps in knowledge and filling them in as accurately as possible. How is cartography different today from the seventeenth century when the first Europeans visited the antipodes? How did explorers make maps when they could not yet measure longitude?

Seminar/Project Idea:

Not included.