Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group

Paper Abstracts

"Perceptions of Terra Australis"

12-13 June 2009
University Club of Western Australia
A symposium jointly sponsored by the ARC Network for Early European Research
(Theme: Early European/Australasian Connections) and the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group

Public Lecture

Myra Stanbury Curator, Department of Maritime Archaeology, Western Australian Museum
Journeys of Enlightenment: Changing perceptions of Terra Australis

The European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Enlightenment had a profound effect of the aims and objectives of European exploratory voyages to Terra Australis or Terres Australes. The era affirmed the ascendancy of Europe over the rest of the world and marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of oceanic exploration. Journeys were undertaken with clearly defined political, economic and scientific goals, political powers taking a hand in the organization and financing of the expeditions. A serious voyage was no longer conceivable without a group of scholars, specialists in diverse disciplines such as astronomy, mathematics, physics, natural sciences and so on.

This talk will focus on the journeys of 18th and 19th century French explorers, adventurers and scientists who undertook the first expansive studies of flora and fauna of Terra Australis or Terres Australes, and in particular Western Australia. The journeys will be placed in the context of the Age of Enlightenment with its emphasis on the study of the natural sciences and humanism, as well as the creation of the new sciences of ecology and anthropology. It will also seek to show how the political turmoil in France from the pre-revolution, revolution, Empire and return to the Republic impacted on these expeditions and the fate of the collections they took back.

Plenary

Mercedes Maroto Camino Lancaster University
Mapping Terra Australis Incognita: The Spanish Pacific 1519-1794

The term Spanish Pacific has been mostly used to refer to the Philippines, which are often treated as an outpost of the Americas. Within such context, much interesting graphic and visual material produced during the early modern Spanish voyages to the Pacific remains unknown. Tracing these sources, this paper will expose the dependence of early modern world views on gendered conceptualisations of the land. My sources will be drawn mostly from some of the voyages described in my book, Exploring the Explorers: Spaniards in Oceania 1519-1794 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).

Departing from the genealogy of Terra Australis in early modern maps, the first section of my paper will investigate the last segment of Álvaro de Mendaña’s second voyage in 1595, following his death in the Santa Cruz archipelago. The arduous journey back to the Philippines was completed by his wife: the first-ever female admiral, Isabel Barreto, with Pedro Fernández de Quirós as pilot. Quirós was to lead the next voyage from which I will draw material for this paper, when Luis Váez de Torres discovered the insularity of New Guinea and sighted the top of Australia. In this journey to his Austrialia del Espíritu Santo (Vanuatu) in 1606, Quirós represented the Pacific as a Terrestrial Paradise, using terms which feminise the land, as well as the peoples encountered. This view, popularised by the multiple translations of one of his memorials, went on to became the hallmark of the apprehension of the Pacific for many years to come.

The last section of my paper will compare some prints and bird’s-eye views produced during sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish voyages to the Pacific. While this juxtaposition illuminates the cultural syncretism of the later images, it also demonstrates the shift from a concept of discovery that rested largely on the enactment of rituals to the enlightened belief on representation and classification of geographical and ethnographic data. Nevertheless, I will propose, both the earlier and later interpretations gendered the relative positions between the voyagers and the indigenous land peoples subject(ed) by a masculine eye/I.

Plenary

Norman Etherington University of Western Australia
Recovering the Imperial Context of the mid-Victorian Exploration of Northern Australia, 1855-57

Exploration has generally been treated as a form of curiosity-driven research. Even though the exploration of the coasts and interior of Australia was an extremely expensive business, the reasons that British and colonial governments elected to spend vast sums are relatively neglected in the national annals. Patrick White’s Voss carries the notion of discovery without gain to its logical conclusion – portraying the expedition leader as so supremely indifferent to practical considerations that he merely shrugs his shoulders when his surveying instruments are lost. This paper emphasises the economic and strategic imperatives that drove the mid-Victorian exploration of Northern Australia by recalling the imperial context of the Gregory Expedition of 1855-57 – the last major expedition funded by British taxpayers.

Plenary

Alfred Hiatt University of Leeds
Terra australis

The sixteenth century saw for the first time the articulation of a southern continent, entitled ‘Terra australis’. Land had been hypothesized in the southern hemisphere since classical antiquity, but from the 1530s it assumed a form equivalent to the old-world continents of Europe, Africa and Asia, and to the New World of the Americas. Terra australis was a paradoxical space: freely admitted by cartographers to be ‘not yet known’, ‘not fully known’, or ‘known only in a few shores’, it nevertheless inspired visual representation and fantasies of exploration and colonisation, ranging from the restrained to the lurid. This lecture explores three strands of representation on terra australis, arguing that each represents a distinctive tradition within European thought about antipodal land: the satiric, the exploratory, and the allegorical. In each case it will be suggested that sixteenth-century traditions must be understood as elaborations of the long, yet always mutating, medieval and classical traditions of lands beyond the known world. What possibilities did antipodal land hold for its medieval and early modern compilers? Drawing on a variety of sources, cartographic and literary, I will suggest that the appeal of terra australis lay in its capacity to act as both a mirror and as an outlet for political and cultural ambitions, for dreams of reform – and for mockery of self and others.

Subplenary

Noelene Bloomfield University of Western Australia
Strategies, Maladies, Trials and Triumphs in the French Quest for Terra Australis

It is only in recent years that many Australians have become aware of how close Australia was to being partly French, like Canada, with two languages and two cultures. Many people did not even recognize the hundreds of names on our coast as being French; and certainly our history books shamefully neglected these important early chapters of our nation’s history for almost two centuries.

France sent many expeditions to the Indian and Pacific Oceans in an attempt to uncover the mysteries of the legendary Terra Australis Incognita, or to search for commercial opportunities below the Equator, and made enormous contributions to scientific knowledge in many diverse fields. But numerous captains, officers, scientists and crewmembers paid the ultimate price, as many died from a variety of diseases during their voyage and never returned to France, or suffered recurring illnesses for the rest of their lives.

But how and why were the French so far away from their normal ‘stamping grounds’, in these perilous and uncharted waters? And why, after so much effort, did France eventually withdraw from our region, granting carte blanche to the British to develop this nation?

Subplenary

Margaret Sankey University of Sydney
Mapping Terra Australis in the French Seventeenth Century: the Mémoires of the Abbé Jean Paulmier

Abbé Jean Paulmier claimed to be the descendant of an inhabitant of Terra australis who had been brought to France by the French captain, Gonneville, in 1504. In his Mémoires, published in 1663, Paulmier requests Pope Alexander VII to grant a mission to the land of his ancestors in order to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. To persuade the Pope he had first of all to prove that the Terres australes did in fact exist. To do this, he summarised and analysed the writings of previous European authors who had written on Terra australis, as well as exploring a wide variety of cartographic representations. In this paper I shall examine the maps used by the Abbé and the origins of his ideas about the Great South Land, briefly evoking the repercussions of Paulmier’s ideas on future French exploration in the Southern Hemisphere.

Patrick Armstrong Edith Cowan University
Charles Darwin's appraisal of some Australian Environments

Charles Darwin visited Australia towards the end of the voyage of HMS Beagle, in late January, February and March 1836. He did not particularly like Australia (although he much preferred Tasmania to either New South Wales or King George's Sound). Nevertheless the southern continent made an impression on him, and contributed considerably to the development of his ideas. The paper will attempt to give some of the reasons for his ambivalence, and give some indication of the observations made in the Great South Land that were important, in the context of his appraisals of some of the other islands, great and small, that he visited during the voyage.

Susan Broomhall, Jacqueline Van Gent, Susie Protschky University of Western Australia
(to be read by) Susan Broomhall
Orange Cartography: Nassau Family Identity in Colonial Expansion

This paper explores how the Nassau family name came to be linked with Dutch claims over diverse geographical territories, and thus with the spatial and symbolic exercise of colonial power and authority. In the early modern period, William the Silent, head of the House of Orange-Nassau, was the acknowledged political leader of the fledging Dutch Republic, and his family one of the most prominent in the early modern Netherlands and the continental Protestant world. William spearheaded an ambitious expansion of Nassau power on two fronts. First, he guided a collection of disparate independent states in the Low Countries in their attempts to break away from Spanish overlordship and to the formation of the United Provinces. Second, he positioned his family as the titular heads of a rapidly growing overseas empire that brought unprecedented wealth and power to the Netherlands. Our paper examines how William and his successors represented themselves, both ‘at home’ in Europe and abroad on the colonial stage, as the axis of a bold venture for Nassau supremacy. We particularly focus on how cartography and naming practices reflected the negotiation of family identities within a broad public arena, and investigate how these identities were gendered.

Joseph Christensen Murdoch University
Ships as Scientific Instruments: the Development of Seaborne Scientific Investigations and its Impact upon the Progress of Geography and Natural History in North-West Australia, 1616-1858

Ships were the principal tools in the scientific discovery of the New World in the early modern period, transporting explorers to the sites of research and providing a platform for specialised investigations in geography, natural history, and other disciplines. This paper will examine the history of seaborne research on the North-West Australian coast between the early-Seventeenth and the mid-Nineteenth Centuries, focussing on developments in shipbuilding and navigational practises, and the evolution of the techniques and methods of field-work in disciplines including cartography, meteorology, oceanography, botany, zoology, and geology. The seacraft and associated technologies available to each of the Dutch, French and British expeditions of this period will be examined, and shown to bear directly upon both the aims and the achievements of early modern scientific investigations in North-West Australia.

Sophie Doughty University of Western Australia
L’héritage méconnu des explorateurs français en Australie occidentale. The Hidden Heritage of the French Explorers in Western Australia

Place names such as D’Entrecasteaux National Park, Geographe Bay, Esperance, Cape Naturaliste may seem obviously French in origin. Others, such as Point Peron, Port Bouvard or Hamelin Bay may not however, immediately conjure up such affiliations. It is not common knowledge within Australia, that Western Australia could have become a French possession, resulting in a bilingual country, much like that of French/English Canada. French expeditions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under explorers such as Baudin, Hamelin, D’Entrecasteaux, have been influential on the naming of over 200 places along the Western Australian coastline. Increased knowledge through a study such as this is important in the awareness of our origins and to make known the significant contributions these remarkable French explorers made to world knowledge of Australia and to its colonisation. Australia was so close to being colonised by the French that this part of Australia’s history needs, and deserves, to be told. The French were dominant in this region and thus, the need to provide an alternative to the British exploration and colonisation story is important. This introduces the contested heritage of Western Australia, which is a prevalent theme in this thesis study. Through background research, interviews and field investigations, this thesis endeavours to examine this French influence and how heritage of these French origins has been maintained, if at all. The study draws knowledge, in particular, from the extensive work completed by the late Professor Leslie Marchant. As curious as we are to discover our origins and make connections with our past, heritage planning seems to be increasingly at the forefront of developing for our future, thereby necessitating a study such as this.

Vivian Louis Forbes University of Western Australia
The Fourth Quadrant: Empirical Observations. Mapping the ‘Unknown Land’ before 1700

Our brief is to primarily focus on perceptions of people, place and space; however, the hard evidence for those perceptions is encoded very largely on maps. How the maps are interpreted offer endless possibilities. Classical and mediaeval geographers opined that the continental mass of the ‘known lands’ was counter-balanced by a large continent in the southern hemisphere. The ‘inhabited world’ appeared on three quadrants of the world map depicted to some degree of accuracy, albeit, misshapen through contemporary knowledge.

The antipodes, generally placed on the Fourth Quadrant, came by the end of the 1400s to be used not simply as a subject for debate, but as theory’s signature. It functioned in the dialogue as a means of illustrating the distinction between human imagination and intellect discourse. Debate about the habitation of antipodal regions was parallel to another debate about unknown land: the question of location of the earthly paradise.

In the earlier 1500s a fifth continent appeared on maps titled: Terra Australis Nondum Cognita. On the reverse of a 1593 map, cartographer Cornelius de Jode, depicted the north coast of New Guinea, with the statement: “On the south of this region is the great tract of the Austral land, which when explored may form a fifth part of the world, so wide and vast is it thought to be”.

By the 1600s, the connection between the use of maps to flaunt political delineation and their representation of unknown land was given particular clarity. The nexus between papal interest and terra incognita was grounded in biblical and patristic authority. The head of the Church was tasked with the apostolic responsibility of promoting the spread of the gospel to all people.

The maps we analyse and observe seem almost overwhelmed by the imagined excess of theory that encompasses and penetrates them and yet they are devoid of topography and toponyms. Coastlines, place names, and ethnographical sketches found their way from the emerging spaces of the Americas to the entirely unknown southern land. Cartouche was employed to make statements of political and personal interest.

This paper examines aspects of contemporary presentations and implications of the existence of the antipodes in late medieval and early modern cartography.

Jean Fornasiero & John West-Sooby University of Adelaide
Naming and Shaming: the Baudin Expedition and the Politics of Nomenclature

When the Baudin expedition set out from the Normandy port of Le Havre, on 19 October 1800, one of its principal objectives was to conduct a thorough survey of the south-west, west, north-west and north coasts of “New Holland”. While circumstances would conspire to prevent the planned charting of the Gulf of Carpentaria and adjacent sections of the northern coastline, Baudin’s hydrogaphers did succeed in producing detailed maps of other parts of the continent, and in particular of the south and west coasts, where they also made a number of important discoveries. It is no surprise to note, then, that this voyage contributed significantly to the list of French names that dot the coasts of modern Australia—names that serve as a reminder of the contribution made by a succession of French mariners to the charting of Terra Australis. In the case of the Baudin expedition, however, the process of conferring names on places visited and discovered was complicated by a variety of factors, mostly political in nature. This paper will examine the way in which the politics of nomenclature contributed to the pall of shame that came to enshroud this particular expedition, despite its many successes, on both the international and the domestic levels. More specifically, it will propose a systematic analysis of the names conferred by Baudin himself, in his journals and in his charts, with the aim of comparing and contrasting his nomenclature principles with those adopted by the men who were charged with compiling the official maps following the death of the commander—namely, his travelling companions and bitter enemies, François Péron and Louis Freycinet.

Rebecca Giggs University of Western Australia
The Mare Incognitum (Unknown Sea) in Australian Cartographic and Literary Imagination; Some Historical and Contemporary Reflections

To speak of water history in a forum where the prefix Terra looms large is not merely an exercise in shadow-play. The Australian interior as an inscrutable, preternatural space informing identity is an oft-explored area of cultural theory, but less so is the environment that starts at the edge, the seascape. This paper stands on the lip of the land to look at how and why bodies of water have been constructed to fill cartographic and imaginative blanks in Australia.

The seascape of Terra Australis is a site of complex and shifting meaning, worthy of investigation independent of a land-based history. The centripetal myth of an Inland Sea; the mare incognitum represented in the cartography of John Oxley and Thomas Maslen, which so mesmerised Charles Sturt, Thomas Mitchell and George Grey. Australia as ‘the last sea-thing dredged by Sailor Time from Space’ in Bernard O’Dowd’s poetry, a continent formed in the ocean. The shift from maps that flanked a void-space country with detailed sea-marks and bathymetric data, to modern maps that populate the land with information but leave the surrounding oceans vacant and undifferentiated. By examining how the cultural currency of seascape changed throughout the early exploration of Australia, we shed light on some more modern constructions of the ocean.

Des Gurry Independent scholar
From Botany Bay, to Risdon Cove, to King George’s Sound. Where?

King George’s Sound, the only natural harbour on the West Coast, was visited by many people – scientists, writers, politicians – even a saint. Initially French and British exploratory voyages had occurred in parallel, and early encounters with the Menang Aborigines in the South West, had been made by Francois Allouarn 1772, and Matthew Flinders 1801, among many other explorers, both French and British.

In 1826, fearing that France would claim the South West and its harbour, the Governor of New South Wales sent the Amity led by Major Edmund Lockyer with 20 of the 39th Regiment, 23 convicts, Assistant Surgeon Nind, and domestic animals. They put up the British flag on Sunday 21st January 1827.

There followed many highly educated, perceptive and intrepid explorers. Some of these were medical men, such as Dr Thomas Braidwood Wilson, a Surgeon-superintendent of convict ships, who came to Albany via shipwreck in the Torres Strait, open boat to Jakarta, Raffles Bay NT, and Swan River Colony. These men’s names now characterise the region.

Dennis Haskell University of Western Australia
From New Britannia to Kangaroo: Early Poetic Perceptions of Australia

In one of the classic poems of Australian literature A D Hope described Australia as “A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey/… the last of lands, the emptiest” and yet concluded that it held “some spirit” which was preferable to “the chatter of cultured apes” in European civilisation. Hope was writing in 1939, but in praising a raw but genuine Australia against a sophisticated but pretentious Europe he was continuing a tradition best-known through the poems of Banjo Paterson.

A distinctive Australian literary tradition is usually seen to date from the works of Paterson, Lawson, Furphy and others published in the Bulletin in the 1890s. Few modern readers realise that the first poetic depictions of Terra Australis were not like this at all, but exhibited what G A Wilkes has called “an appalling elegance”. Poets sought to celebrate Australia, “A new Britannia in another world”, or struggled to make sense of the Kangaroo as symbol of Australia, a creature of “Contradiction” like the “Sphynx or mermaid”.

This paper will discuss a selection of early poems about Terra Australis, including some Aboriginal writing, to examine the first poetic perceptions of the country and their relation to subsequent Australian literature.

Bill Leadbetter Edith Cowan University
The Roman South

The Romans lived in a lateral world. Bounded in the west by the vast Atlantic, it stretched eastwards to Persia, India and beyond to the mysterious land of the Seres. When the author of the misnamed fourth century Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium began, he set out his purpose as describing the bounds of the world and its peoples from east to west. For the author of the Expositio, neither north nor south existed to any great extent. In this, he followed hundreds of years of Roman geographical writing. While authors like Pomponius Mela, Strabo and Pliny the Elder all know something of the mysterious African south, they were more inclined to fantasize about it than describe it. Likewise for the third century AD novelist Heliodorus, Africa (or more specifically, Ethiopia) was the ideal setting for his fantasy novel, the Aethiopica. While the Romans did have some idea about sub-Saharan Africa, derived both from the active trade in wild animals and slaves, and also from some desultory exploration, the African south remained a source of both mystery and speculation to Roman geographers.

Mack McCarthy Western Australian Museum
The first female circumnavigators

In 2001 the Department of Maritime archaeology at the Western Australian Museum sought and found the wrecks of William Dampier’s command TM ship Roebuck and the French explorer Louis de Freycinet’s corvette L’Uranie at Ascension Island and in the Falkland Islands respectively. An extensive survivor’s camp was also found adjacent the French wreck. In placing these archaeological sites into a broader context, the social import of the Dampier and de Freycinet voyages in respect of their interaction with Indigenous groups while on the Western Australian coast and the special importance of Rose de Freycinet as a unique commentator were but two highlights. As the second of the world’s circumnavigatrixes, yet the first to provide details, Rose de Freycinet’s account serves to complement and in some respects to rival the better-known accounts of Dampier and the other male explorers who made their mark on the Shores of New Holland. In this presentation Rose de Freycinet’s contribution will be placed in context and it will be examined as a unique primary contribution to maritime exploration.

John Melville-Jones University of Western Australia
Concepts and Denials of the Southern Land,* in the Millennium from Herodotus to Cosmas Indicopleustes

Before Herodotus no consciousness of the possibility of a land mass to the south of ‘Libya’, which was thought to be bounded by a sea or wide river called ‘Ocean’, can be discerned in surviving Greek literature. And when the ‘Father of History’ alludes to the possibility (IV, 32-6) it is only to deny it. He was influenced by a doctrine of reciprocity or symmetry, and by denying the existence of ‘Hypernotians’ (people who dwell beyond the south wind), he disproved the existence of ‘Hyperboreans’ (people who dwell beyond the north wind). Later, however, some Greek philosophers and geographers embraced the idea of a spherical earth, and of a land on the other side of the boiling tropical seas.

Speculations of this kind were halted when Christian theology replaced ‘scientific’ investigation. Certain passages found in the sacred books could be interpreted as proving that the earth was not spherical, and that the imagined dwellers on the other side, called ‘Antipodes’ or ‘Antichthones’, could not exist.

* The Latin expressions terra australis (‘the southern land’) or terra australis nondum cognita (‘the southern land not yet known’) are not found before the 16th century.

Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown Northbridge History Project
Terra Incognita Particular

Terra Incognita is commonly thought of as having a macro scale. In this paper, the concept of Terra Incognita at a micro scale is explored, in terms of change of city lots in response to the environment. Drawing on cartographic and other sources of the city, it will map the finely-grained development of part of the city core of Perth and overlay this with the daily patterns of human traffic as they intersect with the hidden patterns of the city.

Katrina O’Loughlin University of Western Australia
‘My own slender remarks’: Mary Ann Parker’s Voyage Around the World in the Gorgon Man of War (1794)

In 1791, Mary Ann Parker joined her husband Captain John Parker on a voyage to the fledgling colony at Port Jackson. The Gorgon - under Parker’s command - accompanied the transport vessels of the Third Fleet, carrying critical supplies and manpower for the fragile community: her passengers included Philip Gidley King, the new Governor of Norfolk Island, and a fresh corps of soldiers for the convict settlement. On her return to England, the recently-widowed Parker published her small travel book by subscription, reluctantly, and ‘solely for the benefit of her little flock’. Her tentative and rather self-deprecating Voyage provided not only the first account of the colony written by a woman, but the first published impressions of Port Jackson by a private individual.

This paper explores Parker’s perceptions of the landscape and indigenous peoples of ‘Terra Australis’ in the contexts of contemporary discourses of landscape aesthetics, and heated debates about the politics of slavery and sovereignty across Europe and her colonies. I am interested in particular to explore the way Parker’s narrative reflects the role of writing and travel in articulating forms of subjectivity and self-representation for women and Britons in the late modern period. My approach deliberately recasts the travel narrative as an alternative technology of historical cartography: the Voyage constitutes a powerful form of cultural description which is oriented toward the fertile location ‘Terra Australis’, but perhaps more reliably maps late eighteenth-century British preoccupations and subjectivities.

Leigh Penman University of Melbourne
The Wicked and the Fair. Perceptions of the Batavia Shipwreck from Federation to the Bicentennial

This paper will examine the changing cultural significance of the shipwreck of the VOC ship, the Batavia on Houtmans Abrolhos in 1629. As one of the most famous and fascinating tales in Australia's short history, the Batavia wreck and its consequences have been retold numerous times, in numerous forums and formats, since the early nineteenth century.

Yet the story of the wreck has always been put to different discursive uses, reflecting contemporary circumstances and perceived cultural needs. In the 1890s, the Batavia wreck became a rallying point for nationalist sentiment in the lead up to federation. In the post war years, the search for the physical remains of the Batavia wreck was employed as something of a metaphor for the nation's attempt to find its place in the new post-war international scene. During the bicentennial years and afterward, the wreck and its aftermath became the basis for projections of a multicultural reading of Australia's past, and a potential rallying point for future efforts of indigenous reconciliation.

This paper will attempt to demonstrate the "psychohistorical" significance of the Batavia wreck in the terrae nullii of the cultural imagination, through its various iterations in books, magazines, films, poetry, opera and other media, to provide a history of the intellectual "mapping" of the nation's past.

W. A. R. (Bill) Richardson Flinders University
Jave la Grande Yet Again: its Real Identity Revealed by the Place-name Evidence

It has long been claimed that the ‘continent’ of Jave la Grande south of Indonesia on the Dieppe maps of the mid-1500s is a misplaced Portuguese map of Australia. However, the methodology employed to prove this identification is seriously flawed. Rather than regarding the identity of Jave la Grande as a hypothesis to be tested, the proponents of this popular rewriting of history accept it as true before trying to prove it. They try to force Jave la Grande into the strait-jacket of Australia’s outline. Since Jave la Grande is not Australia, they have had to concoct all sorts of ingenious, but unacceptable explanations to account for their failure to find convincing cases of correspondence between features on Jave la Grande and those in Australia. They either ignored inscriptions, or gave highly dubious or utterly false explanations for them.

This paper, relying primarily on the place-name evidence, shows that Jave la Grande is not a landmass at all, but consists of Java and Sumbawa, to which were attached two very early, differently scaled, Portuguese sketch charts of southwest Java, and southern Vietnam, together with its offshore islands. The French, not surprisingly unable to identify them from their inscriptions and outlines, tentatively sited them as part of Terra Australis Incognita.

Christopher Wortham University of Western Australia
Meanings of the South: Some Cartographic and Literary Sources

What was the significance of the South in conceptual terms for classical, medieval and early modern cartographers and writers? Was it a space for similarity to the North, for antithesis to the North, or for something between the two? Did classical and post-classical cartography cohere, or were they in conflict in finding a meaning for the South? How did literary writers in these periods imagine the South?

Old concepts are often deeply embedded in perceptions of new worlds. Is it possible that the confrontation between Francis Greenway, the great architect of early Sydney, and Commissioner John Bigge, sent by the British government to enquire into the new colony in 1819, was in part attributable to contrary understandings of what the South might mean?

Last updated 29 May 2009 13:43
Location: http://www.pmrg.arts.uwa.edu.au/page/6037
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