Australia as the Antipodal Utopia: European Imaginations From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

By Daniel Hempel and Bill Ashcroft

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. Australia as the Antipodal Utopia evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period. It argues that because of its antipodal relationship with Europe, Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, Australia as the Antipodal Utopia provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785271410

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Australia as the Antipodal Utopia

Australia as the Antipodal Utopia

European Imaginations from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

Daniel Hempel

With a Foreword by Bill Ashcroft

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Daniel Hempel 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949661

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-139-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-139-3 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Bill Ashcroft

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Arcadia Australis

2. The Civilising Mission

3. Antipodal Inversion

4. The Antipodal Uncanny

5. Antipodal Monstrosity

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

Bill Ashcroft

The interest in utopianism grew rapidly throughout the twentieth century and accelerated after the establishment of the Utopian Studies Society in 1989. Recognition of the importance of utopianism to the insurgent spirit of independence movements in the European colonies has only recently begun to develop. Throughout the British Empire the form of utopian thinking that emerged in colonial and postcolonial writing in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean was driven by the prospect of independence. This utopian spirit continued after such national liberation was achieved. But of the various forms of invasion that characterised British imperialism the one that proceeded in the Antipodes was a distinct example of the belief that a eutopia could be established on the far side of the world. The myth of Australia as a land of promise and the subsequent flood of settlers to the colony gave Antipodal colonialism a distinctive character.

This was a paradoxical consequence of the utopian spirit that drove imperialism itself. In his magisterial The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch observes that all ideology has a utopian element. In imperial thinking, as in all ideology, the belief in a ‘better’ world, however fanciful, can only be maintained by being at some level authentic. Clearly all empires display their utopian element when they manage to convince themselves that their overthrow of nations, their control of international policy and their securing of markets are conducted for the benefit of humanity. Imperialism is a classic demonstration of the realisation of a utopian dream, the legislation of which ensures its degeneration into dystopian reality. The paradox of utopia then is not limited to the contradictions of the clash between regulation and freedom that first emerges in Thomas More’s Utopia; it also stands as a feature of what is in Bloch’s mind a fundamental contradiction of the relationship between ideology and utopia. Thus the impetus to expand throughout the world, an impetus that had a formative impact on Australia, is characterised by the apparently contradictory impulses of exploitation and a civilising mission.

Within a century after the publication of More’s Utopia the utopian genre had taken permanent root. Utopia emerged at a transitional period in European history, a period in which Utopia was coexistent with Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in 1513, and Luther’s ‘Ninety-Five Theses’, proclaimed in 1517. This was a pivotal period for European imperialism, which we might see as the expansionist arm of Modernity itself. The classical utopias that emerged in the century after More’s book were largely motivated by a sense of Christian morality, although all pursued the ideal of an equally shared material world: Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), Johann Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) were all examples of this early-modern idealism that drew directly on More’s example.

However the more subtle and long-lasting effect of utopian thought was its gradual impact on what might be called the ‘pre-literature’ of empire. Long before Britain even thought about an empire the dynamics of the civilising mission, what today might be called ‘developmentalism’, were in evidence. More’s Utopia, in fact, presents the colonial process in microcosm: King Utopus conquers the land; its name is changed; the indigenous inhabitants are ‘civilised’; what was previously ‘wasteland’ becomes cultivated; and the land is physically reconstructed. In this respect we could say that Utopia anticipated quite directly the imperial ideology that drove England’s expansion. The search for utopia was extended in the eighteenth century by the literary imagination of various kinds of colonial utopias in isolated regions of Africa, the Caribbean, South America or the Pacific, with a blithe disregard for the possible feelings of the inhabitants. In time, imperial expansion itself was driven by the utopian drive to populate the world with the British race and to civilise the invaded inhabitants.

From classical times the region of the world that generated an intense, almost mystical attraction to the utopian spirit was the Antipodes. One of the major ways in which utopian vision was generated in British thought was through the idea of the Europeanisation of the Southern Hemisphere. For example, Rev. Sydney Smith writes: ‘To introduce a European population, and consequently the arts and civilisation of Europe, into such an untrodden country as New Holland, is to confer a lasting and important benefit upon the world.’¹ Geographically the Antipodal point (from the Greek ‘anti’ – opposed; and ‘pous’ – foot) of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth’s surface that is diametrically opposite to it. But to the European imagination such absolute geographical otherness meant that this was a region of both ominous threat and boundless possibility. It was a region of monsters, where you sailed off the edge of the earth, a region of the unknown. Indeed for St Augustine the idea of human habitation and even land itself on the other side of the globe was highly dubious. The Antipodes share with Africa an existence that first took shape in the imagination of Europe. Where Africa was the primitive ‘Heart of Darkness’ in contrast to the light of European civilisation, the Antipodes, the geographical Other of Europe, too absent even for primitivism, also signified the Antipodean Other of civilisation itself. In Mercator’s projection map, Australasia was named Terra Australis Incognita – it was unknown and possibly unknowable. So the Antipodes represented nothing less than an absence in the European imagination. The dystopian aspect of this otherness was exacerbated by the development of convict transportation to the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. This was augmented in nineteenth-century novels of Trollope and Dickens, which saw Australia as the farthest place of escape for social failures. But gradually the regard people had of Australia as a prison transformed itself into the idea of the new colony as a place of boundless possibilities, above all, through the availability of free or at least cheap land. The utopian vision of early European explorers came to be endorsed in the hopeful journeys of British migrants.

In settler colonies such as Australia settlers saw themselves escaping the rigid class structures and economic inequality of Britain and the colony offering a new start to free settlers. If this start was not always as completely utopian as some texts hoped, it was an improvement for most settlers. But the settler colonies, or ‘dominions’, were as different from each other as they were from colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Australia, in particular, carried the burden of convict transportation, and as the great southern continent was depicted as both utopia and dystopia well before European arrival. Nevertheless, settler colonies demonstrated more purely utopian writing than any other colonised country. The reasons for this are fairly clear: settlers who moved by choice were always propelled by the promise of a new start, and often the ownership of land; European settlers drew inspiration from the Western tradition of utopian thought; the white population quickly overwhelmed the indigenous owners, who, if they had no agriculture, were considered to be on a level with the fauna. Needless to say, settler utopianism generated dystopian ruin in the displaced indigenous populations, and the consequences of attempting to relocate England in the colonies soon revealed to settlers themselves that utopia, if it were at all possible, would have to be constructed in a different way.

This groundbreaking volume goes further into the origins, prehistory and realisation of Australian utopianism than any before it. Indeed it stands alone in its examination of the utopian spirit – both eutopian and dystopian – that underpinned white settlement in Australia. Meticulously researched, and finely argued, it examines the presence of the Antipodes in the European mind from Arcadian to the monstrous, examining the drive of the civilising mission and the lingering perception of the Antipodes, and Australia in particular as an upside-down world. It demonstrates how the utopian vision resulted in deeply contradictory consequences: the combination of a new and comparatively egalitarian society and the genocidal consequences of indigenous dispossession. This book goes a very long way towards establishing the utopian spirit as a central factor, not only in its settlement but also in its deep political and cultural ambivalence.

¹ Qtd in John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 7.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Bill Ashcroft. You have been a wonderful supervisor and supported this work critically and generously from the very beginning.

Thank you also to the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), whose Ailsa McPherson Fellowship allowed me to mature my dissertation into the present work.

And a big thank you to my colleagues at the PVC(E) at UNSW.

Finally, heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Amy. You have been a most supportive, critical and, at times, painstakingly precise reader of my work.

INTRODUCTION

In her famous essay ‘Australia’s Double Aspect’, Judith Wright wrote:

Australia has from the beginning of its short history meant something more to its new inhabitants than mere environment and mere land to be occupied, ploughed and brought into subjection. It has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality; first, and persistently, the reality of exile; second, though perhaps we now tend to forget this, the reality of newness and freedom. ¹

What Wright seems to argue is that in the idea of Australia, two competing and ostensibly antagonistic visions of the continent come together to form a precarious unity. Wright’s double aspect is readily translated into a dystopian vision of exile on one hand, and a utopian one of ‘newness and freedom’ on the other. However, a first inconsistency in this double aspect becomes apparent when Wright explains that Australia, as a land of exile, ‘could scarcely have been more alien to all European ideas either of natural beauty or of physical amenity with its unknown plants and animals, its odd reversals of all that British invaders knew and understood of their own country’.² One might wonder here how dystopian this vision of exile really is, because after all isn’t this newness and freedom from European ideas liberating, and therefore in a sense utopian too? In other words, just how dystopian the ‘reality of exile’ is depends to a large extent on what one is exiled from. The two experiences of Australia, it seems, aren’t as distinct from each other as a neat dichotomy of utopia and dystopia suggests.

Australia’s ‘odd reversals’ certainly challenged the imagination of Europeans in a very special way. The continent at the other end of the world was and continues to be a symbol for absolute distance and otherness, and as such provides a uniquely fertile setting for imagining places and societies radically different from, but sometimes also uncannily similar to, Europe. This is the story that this book attempts to tell: about the unique place which Australia holds in the European imagination. It is a story which stretches back to European antiquity, and which is marked by visions of Arcadian lands of pleasure but also of terrifying monsters. It is a story in which dreams and nightmares cut across, complement and contradict one another in visions of an Antipodal utopia.

Scope and Structure

It needs to be stated from the outset that the ambitious goal of this book has inevitably meant that its research focus has had to be narrowed to a manageable body of texts, with painful omissions made. It makes no pretence to encyclopaedic coverage as the topic was approached with an eye to broader discursive similarities, which have necessarily been delineated at the expense of individual differences. The guiding principle in selection of material was identifying the larger thematic patterns which circumscribe Australia’s role as an Antipodal utopia within the discursive network of the European imagination. While this approach has yielded a reasonably coherent set of heuristic arguments about, for example, the civilising mission or the Antipodal uncanny, it also has produced a necessarily incomplete picture of the numerous visions of Australia. As a second caveat it needs to be remarked that the book attempts to incorporate as many different perspectives as possible, but its exploration of Australia’s place in the European imagination is unavoidably Eurocentric. The issue of Aboriginal displacement certainly forms a recurrent and important part of the book’s investigation of utopia’s relationship with imperial ideology, but questions about indigenous utopianism and the intriguing interconnections between Aboriginality and Antipodality remain largely unanswered. I sincerely hope though that someone with the necessary expertise will expand my line of inquiry in this direction.

The historical scope of this book may be surprising, especially when approached with a conventional understanding of Australia’s ‘short history’, that is, its history of European occupation. But as Wright points out, Australia ‘has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality’, and the history of this inner reality reaches far beyond the two hundred and something years of Anglo-Australian history. It goes without saying that Australia has a rich indigenous history that stretches back millennia. But what is often overlooked is the curious fact that the continent already loomed large in the European imagination long before any European set foot on its shore. Europeans did not reach Australia before the seventeenth century, but over the span of almost two millennia the continent had an ‘inner reality’ in the European imagination, where it was prefigured by imaginary and often mythical avatars such as Terra Australis, Magellanica or the Great Southland. All these pre-discovery avatars were ultimately rooted in geographic speculation about the Antipodes, the hypothetical continent which Ancient Europeans posited as the cosmological counterpart to Europe. This is not to suggest that the European history of Australia reaches as deep as its Aboriginal counterpart; rather, and this is a central argument, the book aims to demonstrate how far back the imperial desire to explore and conquer this Antipodal utopia reaches.

Another important point to emphasise is that in this book, the Antipodal relationship between Australia and Europe is not primarily understood as a geographical one, at least not in the precise sense of the term. After all, Europe’s exact antipode lies somewhere south-east of New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean. As will be discussed at some length, the Antipodes arose out of mathematical and geographical discourses, but they also, more consequentially, played an important role in European cosmography. Cosmography is understood here not in a mystical or esoteric sense (even though this does factor in at times), but more concretely as a symbolic mapping of the world which allows for the articulation of certain value judgements based on perceived geographical relations. In other words, it is a way of understanding the universe and one’s place in it, which in the case of the Antipodes was motivated by a pronouncedly Eurocentric desire for an Antipodal counterpart. To emphasise this conception of Antipodality as a symbolic rather than a precise geographic relationship, the term and its derivatives are capitalised in this book. It is also with a broader cosmographic understanding of Antipodality in mind that different utopian visions of the same space (e.g. the Antipodes, Terra Australis Incognita, New Holland, etc.) can be linked together as sequential historical avatars that represent essentially the same discursive complex. A critical omission needs to be highlighted here: Antipodality, of course, also affects the modern geographical entities of New Zealand and Antarctica. While Australia’s Antipodal sisters would certainly provide additional insight into the phenomenon of Antipodality, they have been neglected here, primarily for practical reasons since their inclusion would require work that is beyond the scope of this book, but also for theoretical ones because as far as I can see, Australia stands undisputed as the Antipodal heir in the European imagination. However, critical interventions are welcome here.

In terms of structure, the book is divided into five chapters, each of which takes the question of an Antipodal utopia in a different thematic direction. The first chapter introduces a particular instance of a group of ostensibly eutopian visions of Antipodal space, that is, visions that imagine