New Cultural Landscapes: Australian Narratives in Literature and Film

Abstract

Australia. Terra Australis Incognita. Even before its oicial inding by Captain James Cook in 1770, the “land down under” already circulated in the European imagination. he giant mass of land necessary to balance a lat Earth (as antipodal to Europe) could only be home to a great many monstrous fauna and lora, as it was also the cultural counterpart to Europe. However, giant one-eyed monsters and sea serpents were not found by Captain Cook upon his arrival on Botany Bay, now part of Sydney. By declaring the land terra nullius, Cook ignored the many Aboriginal communities that had lived in Australia for over 75,000 years and such act has given way to one of the core elements in the development of Australian culture and history: the relationship between whites and Aborigines in the development of the nation.Also, the fact that the individuals transported to Australia as part of the First Fleet in 1788 were, for the most part, convicts (Australia had been established as a penal colony following the loss of the American colonies in 1776, which had been used for that purpose by the English crown) whose criminal records ranged from murder to stealing cheese. In fact, as Robert Hughes reminds us, in his thorough study he Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (1986), “[n]ever had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied” (1). he ignorance of the land combined with the sociological beliefs of Georgian England that there was a “criminal class” being established in Britain turned Australia, in Hughes’s words, into “a cloaca, invisible, its contents ilthy and unnameable” (1-2). he gathering of British rejects in a faraway place, so diferent from the landscapes of Britain and Ireland, did not mean the relationship to an idea of Britishness was simply severed. In fact, it took the irst inhabitants the best part of half a century for the acknowledgement and active development of an Australian culture that distanced itself, albeit slowly though not thoroughly, from its European origins (2). Literature has been in the core of the early Australian settlements from the beginning. In part of the introduction to the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), edited by Nicholas Jose, Elizabeth Webby reminds us that “[b]ooks arrived in Australia in January 1788 with Governor Phillip’s First Fleet, along with paper, ink, type and a printing press, though it was to be a few more years before the new British colony could boast a printer” (16). Next to the multiple travel reports that needed to be produced in order to both inform the British crown and feed the average British imagination, the irst forms of actual literature produced in Australia dealt with the longing of home, the strangeness of the landscape, its fauna and lora, the praise of the convict, and the contact (not always peaceful) with indigenous Australians. he image of Australia as a nation in which only the strong would survive (given the complete lack of material resources and the initial diiculty of establishing agriculture in the early colonies due to the harshness of the land) and, thus, where the British would have to adapt and become Australians, can be seen in one of the