Australia: A Continent Apart

Australia’s remoteness focuses this chapter. Flora and fauna pursued their own evolutionary path; humans and colonizers arrived late. Rock art reveals the hunter-gather lifestyle and spiritual life of First Nation People. Journals from Captain Cook’s voyage envy natives’ simple lifestyle, catalog unique plants and animals, and assess resources for settlement. Records from the First Fleet, headed by future governor, Arthur Phillip, show the challenges of settling forcefully deported petty criminals in Sydney Cove. Twentieth-century women writers offer a sequence of narratives. Barnard Eldershaw recreates Phillips’ mixture of admiration for the place and its people, and aspiration for European development. Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land takes the triple perspective of early administrators, convicts, and natives. Kate Grenville’s The Secret River provides a sequel, as ex-convicts claim land for themselves, decimating native culture. Miles Franklin’s All that Swagger follows an Irish family settling inland, dislodging British identities and hierarchies, but lacking environmental consciousness. Sally Morgan’s My Place reconstitutes her ancestors’ sense of place: from her reticent grandmother’s knowledge of nature, to growing awareness of the family’s stolen generation and a great uncle’s practice of “blackfellas” land conservation. We conclude with the artistic resurgence of the Gadigal mob around Sydney Cove.