Australia

Australia is a nation and a continent in the Southern Hemisphere. It features in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (most notably in the story "The Shadow Out of Time") and in the stories of other Cthulhu Mythos writers.
== In Lovecraft's Fiction ==
=== The Shadow Out of Time ===
The most notable appearance of Australia in Lovecraft's fiction is in the story "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936), in which the formerly mind-swapped Miskatonic professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee travels to the island continent looking for the remains of the prehistoric non-human city he dreams that he was held captive in. He is drawn there by a letter from Robert B. F. Mackenzie, a prominent Australian mining engineer based in Pilbarra, Western Australia,Wikipedia, "Pilbara." which tells him that ruins resembling the city in his dreams exist in the Great Sandy Desert,Wikipedia, "Great Sandy Desert." located at latitude 22° 3′ 14″ South, longitude 125° 0′ 39″ East. (Mackenzie also links the Australian ruins to an Indigenous legend "about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world"--which is a genuine Aboriginal tradition.The Austrolasian Anthropological Journal, "Australian Aborigines: A Burial Ceremony of the Waw-Wyper Tribe," J. W. Fawcett, May 31, 1897.)
These ruins turn out to be the Cyclopean remains of the archive city of the Yithians--a city that is unnamed in Lovecraft, but is identified by Lin Carter as "Pnakotus""Zoth-Ommog," Lin Carter.--source of the Pnakotic Manuscripts.
The glimpses the story provides of Australia are not enticing: "I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me," the narrator Peaslee writes, "and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields." 
"The Shadow Out of Time" also mentions, among the minds abducted to the Yithian city, "the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518."
=== The Call of Cthulhu ===
Australia appears more incidentally in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928). The chance discovery of a report in the Sydney Bulletin informs Francis Thurston about the arrival of the Vigilant in Sydney's Darling Harbour,Wikipedia, "Darling Harbour." towing the derelict steamship Alert and carrying Gustaf Johansen and his tale of an encounters with cultists and a mysterious island. The stone idol he carries baffles experts at "Sydney University, the Royal Society,Wikipedia, "Royal Society of New South Wales." and the Museum in College Street."Wikipedia, "Australian Museum." When Thurston travels to Sydney to seek more information, he sees the Alert in commercial use at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, and observes the Cthulhu figurine the Australian Museum on Hyde Park.
=== Other Mentions ===
Harry Houdini is on his way to Australia for "a tour of Australian theatres" when he stops off in Egypt in "Under the Pyramids" (1924). "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (1934) mentions Pickman Carter, a relation of Randolph Carter "who in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia." The Pabodie Expedition to Antarctica in At the Mountains of Madness (1936) stops at Hobart, Tasmania, for its final provisions.
== References ==
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Regions/Territories