AustLit

'This chapter explores one of the most potent of the European fictions or myths surrounding the south: the Antipodes. The north’s construction of the south as upside down or back-to-front with ‘feet’ facing the ‘wrong’ direction, the Antipodes proved a powerful metaphor through which settlers in Australia could critique both the colonial political establishment and the British metropole. Examining the poetry, fiction, letters, and illustrated articles in a range of newspapers from nineteenth-century Australia, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which the cartographic, corporeal, and metaphoric inversion associated with the Antipodes not only shaped what Paul Giles identifies as a ‘heightened form of comparative consciousness’ in the southern colonies, but was also re-inscribed in newspaper depictions of settler life, moving from the map to the routines and domesticities, as well as the culture and politics, of settlers’ day-to-day experiences. A practice of antipodean reorientation could be used by people living in and writing from the south as a way of writing back to the north, challenging both the cultural hierarchies and hegemonies of the metropolitan north, and the north’s preconception of the south as topsy-turvy and belated.'

Source: Abstract.

'This chapter engages the rich social, linguistic, and aesthetic repertoire of the flash (originally a cant language of thieves and convicts), using the convict phenomenon of ‘lag fever’ to complicate the idea of colonial belatedness in Australia. It argues that the flash language of thieves, gypsies, and convicts can be understood as an early kind of ‘world language’ that connected underclasses with upper classes within and across metropolitan Regency London and the southern climes and convict spaces of colonial Australia (Botany Bay, Newcastle, and Van Diemen’s Land). Connecting genealogies of masculine style and self-fashioning, and print-visual form, with the social arenas of fashionability, respectability, exile, convictism, and settler culture across Britain, Ireland, Europe, and Australia, this chapter throws new light on the liminal yet transformative Regency cultures of scandalous celebrity, exile, and convictism.'

Source: Abstract.

'This chapter explores the spatialising methodologies of shipboard periodicals produced on three ships as they voyaged between Britain and Australia across the oceanic expanses of the southern hemisphere in the mid-nineteenth century: the Sobraon, the Somersetshire, and the True Briton. By the 1860s, newspapers produced on board the ship by passengers between Britain and the Antipodes were a regular affair: fair copies of newspapers were produced by hand and distributed around the ship, or, if the ship carried a printing press, newspapers were produced at sea. This chapter embeds maritime literary culture, and the production of shipboard periodicals, within some of the key ideological frameworks of settler colonial discourse. It argues that if the production of shipboard periodicals produced sociability at sea, then this sociability was also embedded in settler discourses of race and power.'

Source: Abstract.

'Hundreds of white supremacist working-class Australians settled in Paraguay at the end of the nineteenth century, establishing a community there called Colonia Cosme. In the poetry and song of their newspaper, the Cosme Monthly, these settler colonialists reflected on the racial and class dynamics of their community, imagining affinities between their community, the defeated American Confederacy, and the White Australia policy that would accompany Australian Federation at the turn of the century. Blackface minstrelsy in particular played an important role in the colony’s cultural life, helping to establish a retrograde sense of belonging in a place largely inhospitable to their efforts. This essay considers how the Australians in Paraguay used genre and medium to fix racist identifications at the heart of their colonial culture.'

Source: Abstract.

'This chapter traces the development of the colonial kangaroo hunt as a transnational narrative genre. John Hunter’s First Fleet journal (1793) presented the generic conventions that came to define the colonial kangaroo hunt narrative: casting the kangaroo as fitting quarry and giving an exciting account of the chase and the kill. The chapter goes on to map the subsequent transnationalisation of the kangaroo as scientific details and live specimens were shipped back to Europe. Zoological gardens and acclimatisation societies in Europe contributed to the development of the kangaroo hunt as a recognised recreational activity outside Australia. The kangaroo hunt was absorbed into a global narrative to do with travel and adventure, which also informed readers about species biodiversity in the Global South. These themes were explored in novels by Sarah Bowdich Lee and Emilia Marryat Norris, which are analysed alongside narratives and artworks by Europeans who visited Australia to take part in kangaroo hunts. The chapter concludes that –whether encountered when exploring, wandering, bivouacking, settling, or hunting professionally – the kangaroo hunt is represented as an essential experience both in colonial Australia and abroad, one that unfolds in the contexts of imperialism and empire, military occupation, exploration and settlement, developments in the natural sciences, and transnational narratives of adventure.'

Source: Abstract.

'In 1857 Louisa Atkinson became the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel, Gertrude the Emigrant. Atkinson was already an accomplished nature writer and illustrator whose botanical columns appeared regularly in the Sydney press. Her novels are notable for their detailed attention to Australian plant life, while her bushscapes are remarkably vivid, and several of her works feature dramatic accounts of bushfires. As a naturalist, Atkinson was particularly attuned to outback ecology, and fire scenes are much more than fleeting plot devices designed to bring about dramatic rescues. She resists the settler propensity to contain the landscape by representing it through a lens of the sublime, revelling in its difference, rather than attempting to understand it on European terms. Drawing on Atkinson’s nature writing as well as her fiction, this chapter will examine her depictions of bushfire and land clearances to critique settler understandings of the Australian natural world. Focusing particularly on her fire stories, it will consider how her depictions of fire are distinct from those of her contemporaries and how her writings promote respect for the bush, and critique what Rob Nixon has termed the ‘slow violence’ of settler culture.'

Source: Abstract.

'This chapter repositions the overlooked short stories of Australian-born author Louis Becke as a colonial experiment in archipelagic writing. By examining the stories as a collective, readers are able to view the South Seas of the colonial imagination as a networked vision defined by circulation and exchange. To this end, this chapter offers a reading of each of the stories of Becke’s first collection, By Reef and Palm (1894), allowing readers to construct a literary world. By shifting between story and anthology, the singular tale and the collective experience, Becke attempts to narrate the process of globalisation. By refusing to allow a single narrative or viewpoint to dominate the collection, Becke moves readers into a network of literature than can only be fully understood in an interdependent, transoceanic context.'

Source: Abstract.

'Colonial linguistic studies are fascinating textual sources that reveal much about everyday life and knowledge production under frontier conditions. Gender also influenced the conditions of language learning and cultural exchange. This chapter uses the archival traces left by two women in colonial Australia to explore the relationship between language study and knowledge production, paying particular attention to linguistic texts that reveal traces of cross-cultural relationships and the Indigenous intermediaries who engaged in knowledge-making practices. Eliza Hamilton Dunlop learnt languages in New South Wales in the 1840s, and published poetry that included Indigenous vocabulary. Harriott Barlow lived on the Queensland frontier in the late 1860s, and she worked with local Indigenous people to make one of the first language studies of the region, published in one of Britain’s leading anthropological journals. These intimate exchanges on colonial frontiers reveal the imbrication of language collection, knowledge production, Indigenous engagement, and settler advocacy, and determined in what forms these issues emerged from the colonial south to influence imperial print culture.'

Source: Abstract.