Australia as the Antipodal Utopia

Daniel Hempel

Description

A discursive history of Australia’s utopian place in the Western imagination

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent has provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century. The book is underpinned by the provocative argument that due to its unique ‘antipodality’ (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, ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination and makes meaningful conceptual and analytical contributions to the fields of utopian theory, Australian studies and intellectual history.

Foreword by Bill Ashcroft; Introduction; Arcadia Australis; The Civilising Mission; Antipodal Inversion; The Antipodal Uncanny; Antipodal Monstrosity; Conclusion; Index.

Sujets

• 19th century
• Modern history
• General officer
• Literary criticism
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785271410
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
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 eu