“A Nation for a Continent”: Australian Literature and the Cartographic Imaginary of the Federation Era

Abstract

at a rally in Support oF Federation oF auStralian colonieS in Sydney suburb of Ashfield in 1897, Edmund Barton famously declared, For first time in history, we have a for a continent, and a continent for a na- tion (qtd. in Rutledge). On 1 January 1901, Barton would become first Prime Minister of Commonwealth of Australia.Barton's rhetoric, which hails new nation's unique status a country occu- pying an entire continent, is typical of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural nationalisms, which envisage an isomorphic alignment of literature, land, and nation. alignment is a process of imaginative projection involving what Homi K. Bhabha has called recurrent metaphor of landscape inscape of (143). As Wai Chee Dimock observes, This reproductive logic assumes that there is a seamless correspondence between temporal and spatial boundaries of and boundaries of all other expressive domains. And, because this causality goes all up and all down-it is also assumed that there is a literary domain lining up in just same way (2-3). But this align- ment, Dimock implies, is imagined rather than real; it is hypothesized a defin- ing feature of texts that more often than not betray anxieties and uncer- tainties about nationalist ideologies and porosity of geopolitical boundaries. In case of United States, for example, Paul Giles argues that the association of America, and by extension, subject of American literature, with current boundaries of United States is a formulation that should be seen confined to a relatively limited and specific time in history, roughly between end of American Civil War in 1865 and presidency of Jimmy Carter, which ended in 1981 (The Global Remapping 1). Giles calls this the arguing that at this time there was a desire to align idea of American literature closely with United States territory that has since been diluted by globaliza- tion. The corollary is that relation between American literature and geographi- cal projections of kind found in is not a natural and stable one, but one that is historically contingent, fluid over time, and likely to be diverse and contested at any given moment. Before, during, and after period, sense of country's identity is as uncertain its cartography (5).If it was conclusion of American Civil War that consolidated geogra- phy of nation (5)-that is to say, which began to allow disparate though powerful- ly imagined entities such North, South and, later, West, to be brought within what Benedict Anderson calls imagined community of nation-then in case of Australia, corresponding moment was debates and conventions associated with Federation from around 1888 to 1901. During Federation era, isomorphic association of literature, land, and found expression through what I will call, following Anderson, cartographic imaginary, a term that is meant to focus especially on role of maps in shaping imagined geographies, but which also includes related media such topographical engravings and photographic views. Contrary to Giles's implication of an achieved national period in American liter- ary history, however, I will argue that in Australia during Federation era, cartographic imaginary expressed an alignment of literature, land, and that was more wished for than achieved. While Federation did, to some extent, see successful projection of an imagined community, in other respects it exacer- bated issues of state competition and regional difference, and foregrounded problems of inclusion, seen most notably in state-based rivalries over location of new capital and scandalous failure to achieve agreement about a uniform railway-track gauge. …