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“Our Antipodes”: Settler Colonial Environments in Victorian Travel Writing

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Victorian Environments

Abstract

The Australian colonies were popular destinations for mid- to late-nineteenth-century British travellers, celebrated for their modernity and their immense potential for British emigration. Mastering new nineteenth-century technologies of travel, British (and colonial) travellers flooded the antipodean settler colonies, and on return their travel accounts flooded the periodical press and book publishers.

This essay considers the disquieting differences in the southern colonies, experienced by some travellers, not only with Indigenous peoples, but with settler colonial environments. Expecting to find a perfect copy of England and the imperial self, the Greater Britain traveller could be disconcerted to find that Englishness in the colonies had mutated to something slightly different.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867 (London: Macmillan, 1868), vii–viii.

  2. 2.

    Godfrey Charles Mundy, Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies with a Glimpse of the Gold Fields, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1852).

  3. 3.

    Thomas Atkins , Reminiscences of Twelve Years’ Residence in Tasmania and New South Wales; Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay; Calcutta, Madras, and Cape Town; the United States of America ; and the Canadas (Malvern, VIC: The Advertiser), 1869.

  4. 4.

    J. D’Ewes , China , Australia and the Pacific Islands, in the Years 1855–56 (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), 1.

  5. 5.

    Lydia Wevers , Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 1809–1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), 8.

  6. 6.

    John R. Gillis , “Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds, 1400–1800,” in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, 19–31 (London: Routledge, 2003), 27.

  7. 7.

    For a discussion about travel and mobility more generally, see Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst , eds., Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2009).

  8. 8.

    Paul Smethurst , “Introduction,” in Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, ed. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst , 1–18 (Routledge Research in Travel Writing. New York: Routledge, 2009), 7.

  9. 9.

    Smethurst , “Introduction,” 7.

  10. 10.

    Wevers , Country of Writing, 5.

  11. 11.

    James Buzard , “Portable Boundaries: Trollope, Race, and Travel,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 32, no. 1 (2010): 9.

  12. 12.

    John Plotz , Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 5.

  13. 13.

    Plotz , Portable Property, 5–6.

  14. 14.

    Bill Bell , “Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century,” in Journeys Through the Market: Travel, Travellers, and the Book Trade, ed. Michael Harris and Robin Myers , 119–40 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knell Press, 1999), 119.

  15. 15.

    James Anthony Froude , Oceana or England and Her Colonies (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), 14.

  16. 16.

    Tony Ballantyne , Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire. Cambridge Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 3.

  17. 17.

    James Belich , Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 461.

  18. 18.

    Froude , Oceana or England and Her Colonies, 264.

  19. 19.

    Sidney Smith , Whether to Go and Whither? Or, the Cape and the Great South Land. Being a Practical View of the Whole Southern Fields of Settlement, with Full Information for Intending Emigrants (London: John Kendrick, 1849), vii.

  20. 20.

    Smith , Whether to Go and Whither?, vii.

  21. 21.

    Smith , Whether to Go and Whither?, vii.

  22. 22.

    T. Horton James, Six Months in South Australia ; with Some Account of Port Phillip and Portland Bay, in Australia Felix; with Advice to Emigrants; to Which is Added a Monthly Calendar of Gardening and Agriculture. Adapted to the Climate and the Seasons (London: J. Cross, 1838), vi.

  23. 23.

    John Stephens , South Australia: An Exposure of the Absurd, Unfounded, and Contradictory Statements in James’ Six Months in South Australia (London: Smith, Elder, 1839), 2.

  24. 24.

    James, Six Months in South Australia , 54–55.

  25. 25.

    C. E. R. Schwartze , Travels in Greater Britain (London: Cassell, 1885), 111–14.

  26. 26.

    Schwartze , Travels in Greater Britain, 115–16.

  27. 27.

    Froude , Oceana or England and Her Colonies, 73–75.

  28. 28.

    Quoted in Froude , Oceana, 1.

  29. 29.

    Froude , Oceana, 16.

  30. 30.

    Froude , Oceana, 15.

  31. 31.

    George French Angas , Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand: Being an Artist’s Impressions of Countries and People at the Antipodes. With Numerous Illustrations, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1847), 188–89.

  32. 32.

    “Review. Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in the Australian Colonies. By Lieutenant-Colonel Godfrey Charles Mundy . First Notice,” Empire (Sydney), 7 October 1852: 4; “Rev. of Colonel Mundy Our Antipodes,” The Examiner (London), 29 May 1852: 341.

  33. 33.

    Elim Henry D’Avigdor, Antipodean Notes Collected on a Nine Months’ Tour Round the World (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1888), 87.

  34. 34.

    D’Avigdor, Antipodean Notes, 26.

  35. 35.

    D’Avigdor, Antipodean Notes, 26.

  36. 36.

    Angas , Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, 189.

  37. 37.

    Grace Karskens , “The Settler Evolution: Space, Place, Memory, and the Politics of Legitimate Occupancy,” keynote address to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, Wellington, NZ, 2012.

  38. 38.

    Penelope Edmonds , Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 12.

  39. 39.

    Dilke, Greater Britain, 407.

  40. 40.

    Penelope Edmonds , “‘I Followed England Round the World’: The Rise of Trans-Imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-Century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim,” in Re-Orienting Whiteness, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, 99–115 (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 109.

  41. 41.

    Kathleen Lambert [Lyth, pseud.], The Golden South: Memories of Australian Home Life from 1843 to 1888 (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 71.

  42. 42.

    E. Katherine Bates , Kaleidoscope: Shifting Scenes from East to West (London: Ward and Downey, 1889), v.

  43. 43.

    Bates, Kaleidoscope, v.

  44. 44.

    D’Avigdor, Antipodean Notes, 8.

  45. 45.

    Julie F. Codell , “Introduction: Imperial Co-Histories and the British and Colonial Press,” in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell, 15–26 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 18.

  46. 46.

    Alan Lester , “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 32.

  47. 47.

    “News of the Day,” Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 1886: 4.

  48. 48.

    “Introduction,” South Australian Register, 22 February 1886: 1.

  49. 49.

    “Mr Froude on Australian Public Men,” Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1886: 7.

  50. 50.

    “Mr Froude on Australian Public Men,” 7.

  51. 51.

    “Review Oceana or England and Her Colonies, by James Froude,” Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 1886: 9.

  52. 52.

    “Review of Froude’s Oceana,” Launceston Examiner, 30 April 1886: 2.

  53. 53.

    “Review of Froude’s Oceana,” Launceston Examiner, 2.

  54. 54.

    “Review of Froude’s Oceana,” Launceston Examiner, 2.

  55. 55.

    “Review of Froude’s Oceana,” Launceston Examiner, 2.

  56. 56.

    “The First Yearly Meeting of the Historical Society of Australasia,” Record, 2 June 1886: 2.

  57. 57.

    Hubert de Castella , “Mr Froude’s Blunders,” Globe (Sydney), 11 May 1886.

  58. 58.

    de Castella , “Mr Froude’s Blunders.”

  59. 59.

    de Castella , “Mr Froude’s Blunders.”

  60. 60.

    K. A. R. Horn, “Castella, Paul Frederic De (1827–1903),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: Australian National University, 1969), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/castella-charles-hubert-de-3178/text4763.

  61. 61.

    Kirsten McKenzie , Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 33.

  62. 62.

    McKenzie , Scandal in the Colonies, 10, 7–8.

  63. 63.

    McKenzie , Scandal in the Colonies, 9.

  64. 64.

    The Flâneur, “Acta Populi,” Freeman’s Journal (Sydney), 10 April 1886: 14.

  65. 65.

    Bill Tully, “The Flâneur: 19th Century Australian Fun-Maker,” MARGIN: Monash Australiana Research Group Informal Notes 58 (2002): 19.

  66. 66.

    Flâneur, “Acta Populi,” 14.

  67. 67.

    Edward Wakefield , “New Zealand and Mr Froude ,” The Nineteenth Century 20, no. 114 (1886): 172.

  68. 68.

    Wakefield , “New Zealand and Mr Froude,” 177.

  69. 69.

    Wakefield , “New Zealand and Mr Froude ,” 175.

  70. 70.

    Wakefield , “New Zealand and Mr Froude ,” 178.

  71. 71.

    Wakefield , “New Zealand and Mr Froude ,” 181.

  72. 72.

    Bernhard Ringrose Wise , “An Australian View of ‘Oceana,’” Macmillan’s Magazine 54, no. 322 (1886): 265.

  73. 73.

    Wise , “An Australian View of ‘Oceana,’” 264.

  74. 74.

    “Australian Views of ‘Oceana,’” The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1886: 7.

  75. 75.

    “Australian Views of Oceana,’” The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September 1886: 11.

  76. 76.

    Review, “Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in the Australian Colonies. By Lieutenant-Colonel Godfrey Charles Mundy . First Notice,” Sydney Morning Herald, 9 October 1852: 4.

  77. 77.

    Review, “Our Antipodes,” 4.

  78. 78.

    Review, “Our Antipodes,” 4.

  79. 79.

    Dilke, Greater Britain, 385.

  80. 80.

    Dilke, Greater Britain, 383.

  81. 81.

    Mundy , Our Antipodes, 41.

  82. 82.

    Froude , Oceana or England and Her Colonies, 8.

  83. 83.

    Froude , Oceana, 16.

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Johnston, A. (2018). “Our Antipodes”: Settler Colonial Environments in Victorian Travel Writing. In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_4

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