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The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia
This book is about the mythologies of land exploration, and about space and the colonial enterprise in particular. It is an innovative investigation of the presumptions, aesthetics and politics of Australian explorers' texts that shows that they are not the simple, unadorned observations their authors would have us believe. The book argues that contact with Aborigines are occasions of discursive contest. It scrutinizes and undermines the scientific and literary methodology of exploration. It will be a crucial text for readers in cultural, postcolonial and Australian studies.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published September 13, 1996
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December 17, 2021
The first English (and Irish and Scottish) settler-colonists in Australia clung to the fringes of the vast continent, "like frogs around a pond," as Plato said in another context. The interior, which came to be known as Australia's "dead heart," remained unknown until expeditions, some publicly sponsored, some private, began to penetrate beyond the shore lands. Some explorers were searching for a postulated "Inland Sea;" others were looking for territory suitable for pasturage; others hoped to find routes that would link up colonies on the coasts.
All these explorers entered the desert country of the Australian interior armed with tropes about landscapes and preconceptions of European superiority. They carried with them technologies of "knowing," especially by "seeing" (and naming, a matter that Ryan does not explore). Their encounters with the landscape and the Indigenous populations typically reinforced the presuppositions and models of knowing the explorers came with; only occasionally did actual experience challenge what they thought they knew.
Ryan's book is a study that seeks to uncover and deconstruct these European structures. The title contains the word "Eye" precisely because, Ryan argues, seeing was the predominate mode by which European explorers captured the land for themselves and made it European. He considers pre-existing notions of the picturesque and the sublime as they were applied to and distorted explorers' accounts of what they saw, considers the ways that maps and mapping acted through them on the landscape, and especially what they made of the Indigenous people they encountered.
Ryan's is a deep and penetrating analysis, an important contribution to our understanding of the confection of Australian self-identity through the travel narratives the explorers produced. It is marred, unfortunately, by a dense and jargon-laden style that will put off some readers and occasionally obscures his argument. Which is a shame, because Ryan has much of value to say--it could just too often have been said more simply and directly.
All these explorers entered the desert country of the Australian interior armed with tropes about landscapes and preconceptions of European superiority. They carried with them technologies of "knowing," especially by "seeing" (and naming, a matter that Ryan does not explore). Their encounters with the landscape and the Indigenous populations typically reinforced the presuppositions and models of knowing the explorers came with; only occasionally did actual experience challenge what they thought they knew.
Ryan's book is a study that seeks to uncover and deconstruct these European structures. The title contains the word "Eye" precisely because, Ryan argues, seeing was the predominate mode by which European explorers captured the land for themselves and made it European. He considers pre-existing notions of the picturesque and the sublime as they were applied to and distorted explorers' accounts of what they saw, considers the ways that maps and mapping acted through them on the landscape, and especially what they made of the Indigenous people they encountered.
Ryan's is a deep and penetrating analysis, an important contribution to our understanding of the confection of Australian self-identity through the travel narratives the explorers produced. It is marred, unfortunately, by a dense and jargon-laden style that will put off some readers and occasionally obscures his argument. Which is a shame, because Ryan has much of value to say--it could just too often have been said more simply and directly.
Displaying 1 of 1 review