The landscape has been a central theme in the development of modern Australian poetry (see 2.1). Consequently, poetry has also been central to the pursuit of an authentic and appropriate way of describing or including the land in the creative output of the nation.
This discourse is involved with other, broader concerns, including the quest by many poets for a national identity, and the construction of a uniquely Australian culture.
One of the ongoing concerns of many non-Aboriginal Australian poets writing about landscape has been to incorporate their ideas about the ways in which Aboriginal communities relate to, and describe, the land.
There are many possible motives for this interest, such as genuine acknowledgement of dispossession, guilt, attachment to place and its history, search for authenticity, understanding of Aboriginal communities and cultures, or lack of understanding of the same.
There are a number of writers who have attempted to convey their sense of the Australian landscape, within a context that includes an understanding of Aboriginal communities, and of the differences in perception which can arise from cultural associations with place.
This chapter follows the development of one major and ongoing movement within Australian literature, Aboriginalism, and the rejection of that movement by two poets (Judith Wright and Lee Cataldi) in favour of a more radical approach to landscape, and to writing about the land and the people who inhabit it.
Before examining the responses of contemporary poets to landscape, it is necessary to give some consideration to the various ways in which European Australians have perceived and described the land since colonisation.
In two different senses, “Australia” existed well before Europeans discovered its existence.
As we have seen, Australia had been inhabited by its indigenous peoples for tens of thousands of years before European sailors began visiting its shores.
But there was another sense in which Australia existed in the European mind; as a myth, as Terra Australis Incognita; and as the fantastical and unknown site of an antipodean Utopia.
European writers began exploring a metaphorical Australian continent before the sailors began their journeys. For centuries, philosophers and sailors alike had theorised the existence of a southern continent. Ancient Greeks such as Anaximander of Miletus had argued (in his case, in the sixth century BC) that such a landmass must logically exist in order to balance the weight of the known continent of Europe. The wanderings of the Scandinavian sailors, and later land-based adventurers such as Marco Polo, all contributed to the European hopes of new worlds, unknown civilisations, and fabulous riches to be “discovered” over the known horizon.
By the time of the European Renaissance, advances in navigation and tremendous competition between the major powers for access to as-yet-unexplored trading possibilities beyond Europe and northern Africa, lent themselves to the hope that somewhere, on the other side of what was finally known to be a globe, was a vast and rich continent ripe for the plundering.
In 1492, a great southern continent made its first appearance on a Portuguese globe (possibly based on little more than wishful thinking, by German cartographer Martin Behaim). By 1536, though, cartographers in Dieppe were creating maps which featured a continent roughly the shape and size of what became known as Australia. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, through the golden ages of Portuguese navigation, English recklessness (of the likes of Drake and Hawkins), the Spanish and Portuguese invasions of South America, and Dutch and French expansion into Asia, the Pacific Ocean was criss-crossed by some of the great maritime explorers.
As Dutch influence in the Indonesian archipelago grew, the empire’s ships began gingerly mapping the north and northwest coast of the great continent. Some visits were accidental, such as Pieter de Nuyts’ 1627 landing on the southern coast of what is now known as the Great Australian Bight.
But the early reports were not inspiring. Jan Carstensz sailed around Arnhem Land and the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1623, and complained:
[We] have not seen one fruit-bearing tree, nor anything that man could make use of: there are no mountains or even hills, so that it can be safely concluded that the land contains no metals, nor yields any precious woods ... In our judgement this is the most arid and barren region that can be found anywhere on the earth; the inhabitants, too, are the most wretched and poorest creatures that I have ever seen in my age or time.
(Day, 1996: 17)
Such unflattering descriptions, and the shipwreck of the Batavia (and consequent mutiny and brutality amongst crew and passengers) meant that the pursuit of Dutch claims on the continent was discontinued, and it remained an uncharted and unknown territory in the European mind.
Extensive coastal exploration by Abel Tasman (in 1642) and William Dampier (in 1699) excited further interest on the part of the trading powers, but by then a fanciful idea of Australia had already taken hold of the European imagination. Even Dampier’s less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the coastal areas he surveyed could not dampen the literary industry that was developing around the hypothetical idea of an Austral Utopia.
Thomas More’s controversial work, Utopia, was a brilliant political essay about a traveller who has discovered Utopia, or “Nowhere Land”, a far-off and mythical place in which state education is provided to all (even to women!), religious freedoms are observed, and the state is organised along broad Communist lines. Published in 1516, it was an instant success and spawned many imitations, by essayists canvassing various political viewpoints, campaigners for religious tolerance, former sea-travellers wishing to claim fame (or novelists impersonating the same), and even writers of erotica. For many of them, and their readers, the idea of Utopia and the myth of the Great Southern Land became inextricably linked.
We need do little more than examine the titles of a few such works to ascertain their focus.
One of the earliest (and most salacious) was Henry Neville’s 1668 pamphlet The Isle of Pines, or, A late Discovery of a fourth Island in Terra Australis Incognita. Being A True Relation of certain English persons, who in the dayes of Queen Elizabeth, making a Voyage to the East India, were cast away, and wracked upon the Island near to the Coast of Terra Australis, Incognita, and all drowned except one Man and four Women, whereof one was a Negro. And now lately Anno Dom 1667 a Dutch Ship driven by foul weather there, by chance have found their Posterity (speaking good English) to amount to ten or twelve thousand persons as they suppose. The whole Relation follows, written, and left by the man himself a little before his death, and declared to the Dutch by his Grandchild.
Its equally racy sequel, supposedly written by one of the Dutch sailors, outlines the Scituation of the Country, the temperature of the Climate, the manners and conditions of the people that inhabit it; their Laws, Ordinances, and ceremonies, and their way of Marrying, Burying and c ...
In 1675, Denis Vairasse published his The History of the Sevarites or Severambi a nation inhabiting a part of the third continent, commonly called Terrae Australes Incognitae. With an Account of their admirable Government, Religion, Customs and Language. Written by one Captain Siden, a Worthy Person, who, together with many others, was cast upon the Coasts, and lived many Years in that Country. While essentially a political tract, the account by the fictional Siden includes descriptions of an inland city founded by Parsees, and the provision of female slaves for “association” with the shipwrecked sailors. (Fausett, 1993: 116)
A year later, Gabriel de Foigny published his La Terre Australe connue (The Southern Land Known), again the story of a lost sailor, Nicolas Sadeur, who happens to be a hermaphrodite. Sadeur finds himself cast ashore amongst the Australians, a race of well-educated hermaphrodites living extraordinarily rational and disciplined lives in a supportive environment.
The most famous of all imaginary voyages is of course Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726). Although Swift was pursuing rather different aims than some of his predecessors, he too set his fantastic Lilliput somewhere in the vicinity of the mysterious southern continent. The widespread popularity of his allegory lent itself to the increasing public curiosity about the antipodes, which continued right up to the departure in 1769 of James Cook and Joseph Banks, headed for Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, and search once again for Terra Australis.