Abstract
From the 16th century on, the great Southern continent figured in the European literary and political imagination as a field for utopian thought. While we might expect such Arcadian essays to tail off as the colonisation of Australia proceeded apace in the late 18th, early 19th centuries, such was not the case: there are many examples of utopian literature set in Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, and several examples from the 1830s , the period examined in this article. This article explores the utopian elements in the work of three near contemporaries: Edward G. Wakefield (1796-1862), Thomas J. Maslen (1787-1857) and James Vetch (1789-1869) who mapped onto Australia political and social projects that had their origin and rationale in objectives for reform in the mother country. They brought to their self-appointed task underlying assumptions and biases that reveal a range of influences, not least those of colonial expansionism, and an imperial disregard for the realities of the terrain and inhabitants of a country they had never visited. The article undertakes a close reading of the maps, systems of nomenclature and division of territory proposed by two of the three: Maslen and Vetch, and their underlying rationale and function. Both writers sought to redraw the map of Australia in order to advance projects for reform, imposing on an ‘empty land’ principles of division and sub-division claimed to be rational and scientific and yet essentially utopian.
Highlights
This article examines the close relationship between cartography, utopianism and colonial dispossession in 19th century Australia
The authors we study here believed that they had a sound, rational basis for their speculations; they drew on the full resources of the scientific, geographical and cartographical knowledge of the time to draw up their maps of Australia and their projects for reform
Vetch’s choice of names, which recognises the contributions of European explorers of different nationalities to the ‘discovery’ of Australia, implies the existence of a common, collaborative European enlightenment project to extend the boundaries of science and knowledge, a description that can be described as utopian
Summary
These three writers are of particular interest for a number of reasons: their projects were devised almost contemporaneously, in the late 1820s, when large parts of the Australian continent were still unexplored by Europeans; their maps were not presented as imaginary or fictional, they were speculative certainly, but ‘speculative geography’ was sanctioned by the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1831, as a means of exciting curiosity and stimulating inquiry, so long as the theories put forward were ‘supported by reasonable probabilities’ (Prospectus, RGS 1831: vii). In his correspondence with the Journal’s editor he describes them as ‘Ports in the Interior’ (Vetch 1838b: 1) They are lettered a, b and c, and they overlay the map in a triangular grid pattern (1838a: 165), allowing the geographer to operate a triangulation of the territory (166) with a fourfold objective: 1) to take possession of the country and acquire knowledge of its natural resources; 2) to provide a place of refuge and resupply for exploration; 3) to acquire information about the natives and control them by ‘bridling (their) numbers and power’; (166) and 4) to check the movements of Europeans (convicts, subversives, or colonial rivals). Vetch’s choice of names, which recognises the contributions of European explorers of different nationalities to the ‘discovery’ of Australia, implies the existence of a common, collaborative European enlightenment project to extend the boundaries of science and knowledge, a description that can be described as utopian
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