IN 1839 NEW SOUTH WALES surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell looked out over the lush plains of western Victoria and named this region Australia Felix, the better to distinguish it from the parched deserts of the interior country where we had wandered so unprofitably and so long. Australia Felix, that is, fortunate or happy Australia, has persisted as a kind of dream ever since, no matter how harsh the land may be or how unfortunate the events that have taken place within it. The idea resurfaces in Donald Horne’s 1964 book The Lucky Country; few remember the second part of the first sentence of the last chapter of Horne’s book: Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck. He meant the phrase ironically – Australia was resource rich but people poor – but that is not how it is generally understood today. It’s not uncommon for Australians to assert that theirs is the best country in the world and some will say that without ever having been anywhere else.
There is a similar tradition in New Zealand, which poet Thomas Bracken – who also wrote the words of the national anthem, ‘God Defend New Zealand’ – called God’s Own Country. The phrase was picked up by Richard John Seddon, prime minister from 1893 to 1906, who used it as a mantra throughout his long political career. Seddon in 1906 telegrammed the Victorian premier Thomas Bent from Sydney that he was just leaving for God’s own country. He died the next day on the ship Oswestry Grange, en route to New Zealand. Godzone is now more likely to be used as ironically as the lucky country was meant to be; but that does not mean that the example it represents is somehow superannuated.
For the ideal of an earthly paradise persists in antipodean consciousness. We are bequeathed a double vision, in which our place and other place, ecumene and heterotopia, are simultaneously present. This double vision is redoubled when we consider that antipodean societies are irretrievably mixed, that they contain two consciousnesses, European and Indigenous, everywhere contiguous but nowhere truly congruent: we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not super-imposable. Paradise, then, has to negotiate not simply a European past but also a past that is non-European, that persists in spite of, or in contradiction to, European assumptions of hegemony. Migration, increasingly from Asia, will only complicate this drive towards unattainable perfection.
Paradise Garden is a vast mural by Sidney Nolan that consists of 1320 floral images in multi-coloured crayon and fabric dyes. A book accompanied it; its theme was exile because of human frailty and self-absorption. The word paradise comes from Persian and does mean an enclosed or walled garden or perhaps something larger like a royal hunting park. There is a similar, cognate term in Sanskrit, paradēsha meaning foreign country or supreme country. Because of its association with the biblical Garden of Eden, paradise inevitably brings with it a sense of exile and loss. McCahon was always painting towards a Promised Land, never actually arriving there. It could be seen flashing and gleaming behind the dark horizon line like the light of the orichalcum on the adamantine walls of Atlantis. It was paradise too that Gilgamesh set out into the east to find nearly five millennia ago. The jewelled garden stood on the shores of the Ocean of Death and so he went on to discover the impossibility of immortality.
Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel, wrote Ezra Pound in Canto 83, in contradistinction to Baudelaire’s paradis artificiels; though some of Pound’s evocations do resemble the garden of jewels Gilgamesh found. Later he would write: Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise. A section of Fiona Hall’s 2008 survey exhibition Force Field was called Paradisus terrestris; it is made up of a series of intricately shaped sardine cans in which specific plants ‘grow’ out of overwhelmingly genital bits of human bodies. Poet Alan Brunton towards the end of his life was fond of quoting a remark of Jean-Luc Godard, who was himself quoting German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter: Memory is the only paradise we can’t be evicted from. Not artificial then but not actual either: a function of mind perhaps.
All settler societies are arks that voyage both away from and towards this equivocal destination. The country of origin is always likely to be imagined as a paradise lost; the new land will seem, but will not be, perfectible in ways that were impossible in the old world. Perhaps the finely developed sense of irony evinced by antipodean peoples arises here, in a visceral awareness of the gap between what could be and what is. Nevertheless these arks may contain all humanity: it used to be said at the Redfern Mail Exchange in Sydney’s Strawberry Hills that a representative of every nationality on earth, even an Eskimo, had at one time or other worked there.
Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century all times are contemporaneous in a way that was impossible when there were still undiscovered lands beyond the horizon. Now we know the dimensions of the world, by some strange alchemy our entire history on the planet collapses into the present moment – even those bits that have been forgotten, even the irretrievable mysteries of erased peoples and cultures: the past in fact has no other existence outside of memory. Furthermore we make our future out of those aspects of the past that can be re-imagined or re-created or re-membered in the present and thus every attempt at writing a history is also and inevitably the projection of a future.
The Land of Gold, the Great South Land, the Antipodes, whatever it may be called, was a mythical construct that can still be made real, not in geographical terms, not as a stone garden and probably not as a political or social entity either; rather it is a provocation towards futures that will partake of those aspects that energised the quest: wonder, courage, a wild surmise; an abiding sense that inside any ordinary moment something extraordinary is waiting to be revealed; most of all perhaps a love, not of novelty so much as the generative principle itself, that with which we make worlds that can then go on to be discovered by others. Because we are now living in a place that was imagined before it became real, that is also the way we may be able to realise a future: it too can be a zone of the marvellous.
NOTES ON SOURCES
INTRODUCTION
The epigraph is the opening line of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem ‘Zone’ and translates: You are tired at last of this old world. Charles Darwin’s remark about the fanciful nature of the antipodes is from The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’ (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1983). The red hardcover copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories fell to pieces long before it disappeared but that process was, to a curious child, inadvertently instructive of bookbinding techniques. I don’t remember which versions of the Greek myths we had; these days I use the old-fashioned H. A. Guerber’s The Myths of Greece and Rome (Geo. Harrap & Co., 1907) in concert with the exasperating Robert Graves’ two-volume The Greek Myths (Penguin, 1955). Mary Renault’s The King Must Die came out in 1958, The Bull From the Sea in 1962. Michel Foucault’s essay ‘Des Espace Autres’ can be found online at: www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. The Borges fragment is drawn from memory but may perhaps be found in the great labyrinth of The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–86 edited by Eliot Weinberger and published by Penguin in 2000.
I. ANCIENT VOICES
There are many versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, all different. I first read a reputed whole in a translation by Maureen Gallery Kovacs, available online here: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/gilgamesh.htm. Penguin published a prose translation by N. K. Sanders in 1960, which remains readable. The Penguin Classics edition of 1999, also called The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated and introduced by Andrew George, is scholarly yet accessible and I have quoted from that. Gilgamesh (Vintage Books, 1985), translated by John Gardner and John Maier with the assistance of Richard A. Henshaw, is more complete, since it includes the twelfth tablet, dealing with the underworld, that most other editions omit. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch (Henry Holt & Co., 2006) is a fascinating account of the history, both ancient and modern, of the text. I also read and very much enjoyed Geoffrey Bibby’s classic Looking for Dilmun (Collins,
1970).
Plato’s Timaeus and Critias in the Penguin Classic edition (1971) are translated with an introduction and an appendix on Atlantis by Desmond Lee. It is in the Phaedra that Socrates denounces the coming ascendancy of written language. An article by William Harris on Euhemerism may be found here: http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/GreekMyth/Preface.html.
My copy of The Histories of Herodotus, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, in which the Phoenician voyaging traditions are recounted, was published by Penguin in 1954. For more on Hanno see: www.livius.org/ha-hd/hanno/hanno03.html. Hippalus’ innovation is discussed in Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times by George Fadlo Hourani, published in a revised and expanded edition introduced by John Carswell by Princeton University Press in 1995. For more on Eudoxus, Hippalus and The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea see Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India by Federico De Romanis and André Tchernia (Manohar, 1997). An incomplete English translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia can be accessed here: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Periods/Roman/_Texts/Ptolemy/home.html.
II. MOUNT PURGATORY
I’ve quoted in the first instance from Lawrence Binyon’s translation of the Divine Comedy (Viking/Penguin, 1967) but the passage beginning O brothers … I found in Charles Olson’s Call me Ishmael (Cape, 1967); its ultimate origin is John Carlyle’s translation. Olson’s study, first published in 1947, has some interesting correspondences (I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now …) with Foucault’s much shorter piece on heterotopias. Islam and the Divine Comedy by Miguel Asin, written originally in Spanish, was translated and abridged by Harold Sunderland with an introduction by the Duke of Berwick and Alba (Murray, 1926) and is the source for quotations in the text.
The Devil’s Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe by James Chambers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979) is a succinct and elegant account of a complex subject. The Travels of Marco Polo edited with an introduction by Manuel Komroff (W. W. Norton & Co., 1953), and based upon the Marsden and Yule translations, is the one I use; in its introduction is the story of Marco Polo’s reinvention as a carnival character. Did Marco Polo Go To China? by Frances Wood was published by Secker & Warburg in 1995. For those who are interested, there is a refutation of it here: http://rspas.anu.edu.au/eah/Marcopolo.html.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, translated and with an introduction by C.W.R.D. Moseley was first published in 1983 by Penguin and republished with revisions to the introduction, the notes and the bibliography in 2005. Josephine Bennett’s The Rediscovery of John Mandeville was Modern Language Association of America Monograph Series 19, first issued in 1954. Bruce Chatwin’s remark about In Patagonia is in Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography Bruce Chatwin (Vintage, 2000). His statement about fiction/non-fiction comes from Brian Matthews’ Manning Clark: A Life (Allen & Unwin, 2008).
III. JEWELLED SANDS
Richard Hall’s excellent Empires of the Monsoon was published by HarperCollins in 1996. The copy of Tomé Pires’ Suma Oriental I read was the somewhat cluttered two-volume hardback edition, edited and introduced by Armando Cortesão, that the Hakluyt Society put out in 1944 and that includes Rodrigues’ rutter with its extraordinary fold-out maps of the way to the Spice Islands; but it was a library copy and so I had to give it back. The same is true of the edition of Mendes Pinto’s extravagant account I read, but that was a very different sort of book: The Travels of Mendes Pinto by Fernão Mendes Pinto, translated and edited by Rebecca D. Catz and luxuriously produced by the University of Chicago Press in 1989. Catz includes a long introductory essay that discusses the question of the accuracy of Mendes Pinto’s reports. I also looked into Maurice Collis, The Grand Peregrination: Life and Adventures of F. M. Pinto (Carcanet, 1990).
Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Navigation by Antonio Pigafetta, translated and edited R. A. Skelton (Yale University Press, 1969), beautifully illustrated with paintings made on, or of, the expedition, is a true wonder book. A more recent version, The First Voyage Around the World (1519–1522), based on the 1999 critical edition by Antonio Canova, has been edited by Theodore J. Cachey Jr and published by the University of Toronto Press (2007). A popular account of the epochal voyage is Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen (Harper, 2004).
Many years ago now I read the poet Bermúdez’ account of Quirós’ first voyage into the Pacific but for this chapter I have relied on material from The Spanish Lake (Australian National University Press, 1979), the first volume of O. H. K. Spate’s majestic trilogy, The Pacific since Magellan. The other volumes are Monopolists and Freebooters (ANU Press, 1983) and Paradise Found and Lost (ANU Press/Pergamon Press, 1988). Luther Blisset, quoted on the Europe of the early sixteenth century, is not the soccer player but a Milan-based collective that published, in 2000, a novel called Q (English translation from Arrow Books, 2004).
IV. UTOPIAN PROJECTIONS
The Oxford World Classics edition Three Early Modern Utopias (OUP, 1999) includes More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis along with Henry Neville’s lesser-known The Isle of Pines. The indefatigable Peter Ackroyd has written The Life of Thomas More (Vintage, 1999) and there is a good biography of Francis Bacon, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561–1626, by Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart (Phoenix, 1999).
For Abel Tasman, I used Andrew Sharp’s The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman (Clarendon, 1968), which includes the wound healer Henrik Haelbos’ rambunctious account of the voyage. Grahame Anderson’s The Merchant of the Zeehaen: Isaac Gilsemans and the Voyages of Abel Tasman (Te Papa Press, 2001) is an interesting, if eccentric and somewhat tendentious attempt at a revisionist view of Tasman and his voyages. John Mitchell, author with his wife, Hilary, of two volumes called Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka: A History of Māori of Marlborough and Nelson (Huia Publishers, 2004 and 2007), told me that Tasman carried a map which gave the Bay of the Portuguese as an early name for the part of the west coast of New Zealand that extends from Cape Egmont south to Terawhiti.
It is difficult to find a satisfactory modern edition of the works of William Dampier; most recent republications are abridgements of one kind or another. Online is perhaps the best place to go. An e-text of A New Voyage Around the World can be found here: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500461h.html; A Voyage to New Holland etc. in the Year 1699 here: www.gutenberg.org/etext/15675; A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland here: www.gutenberg.org/etext/15685; and his Voyages and Descriptions here: www.canadiana.org/ECO/mtq?doc=34673. A Cruising Voyage Round the World: The Adventures of an English Privateer by Woodes Rogers, number 89 (n.d.) in their series of Adventure & Exploration, is available from the Narrative Press in Crabtree, Oregon.
Of the two Dampier biographies I read, I preferred A Pirate of Exquisite Mind (the phrase is Coleridge’s) by Diana and Michael Preston (Doubleday, 2004) to The Devil’s Mariner by Anton Gill (Michael Joseph, 1997). William Dampier in New Holland: Australia’s First Natural Historian by Alex S. George is a handsomely illustrated book published by Bloomings in Hawthorne, Victoria, in 1999. Selkirk’s Island by Diana Souhami (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001) is riveting, though probably harder on Dampier than he deserves. The second volume of Spate’s trilogy, Monopolists and Freebooters, deals at length with both Tasman and Dampier. I came across mention of B. R. Burg’s Sodomy and the Perception of Evil: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean in the wonderful Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds by James Hamilton-Paterson (Faber and Faber, 2007).
V. ISLES OF DISAPPOINTMENT
Edmond Halley’s voyages in the Paramore are outlined in Below the Convergence: Voyages towards Antarctica 1699–1839, by Alan Gurney (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997). Greg Dening’s Performances (University of Chicago Press, 1996) includes the illuminating essay ‘Possessing Tahiti’. Spate’s Paradise Found and Lost gives account of the circumnavigators from Byron through
to Cook and also details French and Spanish voyages in the period 1769–76. His chapter 11, ‘The Tahitian Venus and the Good Savage’, is a model of good sense in a contentious area.
The ‘Oro cult and the Arioi are discussed in Douglas Oliver’s Polynesia in Early Historic Times (Bess Press, 2002). See also the Handbook of Polynesian Mythology by Robert D. Craig (ABC-CLIO, 2004). Storms and Dreams: Louis de Bougainville: Soldier, Explorer, Statesman by John Dunmore was published by ABC Books in 2005. Dunmore also edited The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, 1767–1768 (Hakluyt Society, 2002). More about Ahutoru can be found, among much else of interest, in Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific, edited by Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoom (Routledge, in association with Pluto Press and University of Otago Press, 2001). Voyaging Through Strange Seas: Four Women Travellers in the Pacific by Honore Forster, NLA News (January 2000) revisits the case of Jeanne Baré: www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2000/jan00/story-1.pdf.
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