Trojans in the Antipodes: The Fabrication of Epic Ancestry and Imperial Destiny in Colonial Australian Literature

Abstract

When Europeans settled on the Australian continent, Britain’s connections to the Greco-Roman classical tradition were being actively promoted as an inherent component of the empire’s cultural heritage. Since the foundation of the Australian colony of New South Wales, comparisons between the British dominion and classical antiquity were made in the hope that one day soon the history and literature of the new settlement would rival that of their cultural ancestors. Colonial Australian literature often focussed on the great potential the young civilization might enjoy. Because the geographical distance between Australia and Europe was so vast, connections to European cultural heritage were often laboriously constructed. This article focusses on the work of Michael Massey Robinson, a freed convict employed to write poetry by the New South Wales Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, from 1810. Drawing on the British legend of Brutus of Troy, recorded by the twelfth-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae, Robinson casts the British decedents of Aeneas as the founders of the Australian continent, and ancestors of the Trojan people. By emphasizing Australia’s connections to the ancient world through ancestral lineage, the great potential of the young civilization could be celebrated, and by linking Australia’s European settlement to the foundation of both Rome and Britain, colonial Australia was characterized as being at the beginning of a very long history that, based on historical precedent, would eventually result in a great and esteemed empire.