Almost a decade in the making, the Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, edited by Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard, is now the most up to date and authoritative composite portrait of the state’s history. This work is a remarkable achievement. It is the result of a sustained collaborative effort that is a credit to the skill and energy of the editorial team and to the more than three hundred contributors, along with hundreds of expert readers. In 1912 J. S. Battye, the well-known State Librarian of Western Australia, produced the Cyclopedia of Western Australia: An Historical and Commercial Review, Descriptive and Biographical Facts, Figures and Illustrations, which remained a central reference resource for WA history throughout the twentieth century. The highly regarded volumes of the sesquicentenary series appeared in 1979, followed in 1981 by the influential A New History of Western Australia, edited by Tom Stannage.
Born out of an ancient geographical theory of balance, the term ‘antipodes’ was first used to refer to the vast uncharted underworld of the southern hemisphere from a northern perspective. The principle behind this belief, as described in the Quarterly Review in the nineteenth century, was ‘that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe’. The idea of the antipodes as a counterbalance, though now remembered only as a peculiar, discredited theory, has been surprisingly influential as an imaginative concept. An antipodean expectancy filled minds, maps, novels and utopian plans, laying the foundations for perceptions of Oceania and Australasia that continue to impact on how this part of the world is seen from a distance as well as from within. The region of the antipodes has been occupied by European settlers and their descendants for a relatively short time. And yet, this brief period is set against a backdrop of one of the longest recorded histories of imagining prior to geographical discovery.
Sample Syllabus:
Week 1: Introduction and Overview—Exploration and Colonisation of the Great South Land
Weeks 2–4: Fantasies of the Antipodes
Weeks 3–5: Entering the Antipodes
Weeks 6–8: Images of Contemporary Australia: Enduring Myths
Australia and the South Pacific held a special status in the eighteenth century: this was the farthest region from Europe and the last part of the earth remaining for Europeans to explore and chart. In the context of European nations’ own histories of discovering and exploring the world beyond Europe’s borders, this region is unique in the sense that no other part of the earth had such a substantial and well-documented body of European thought devoted to it over such a long period of time prior to its physical discovery. The ‘antipodes’ existed in the European imagination for approximately two thousand years before Europeans set foot on antipodean lands. Myths inspired explorers to go searching for the genuine antipodes, and voyages were often undertaken with the specific aim of finding the uncharted places that punctuated otherwise formless maps.
Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity
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