Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film

by Roslynn D. Haynes

• ISBN13: 9780521571111
• ISBN10: 0521571111
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a book about the Australian desert and its central impact on Australian culture, from traditional Aboriginal art to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Starting with the Aboriginal understanding of the spiritual significance of the desert, it traces the attempts of the early colonists to conquer this alien space; the changing estimate of the inland explorers in fiction and art as heroes, failures, or psychological studies of obsession; the rediscovery of the desert in the twentieth century by travelers, artists, novelists, photographers and film makers; its interest for ecotourism and as a spiritual experience.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vi	(3)
Acknowledgments	ix	(1)
Preface	x	(4)
Some facts about Australian deserts	xiv
Introduction	1	(10)
PART I: ENCOUNTERING THE DESERT	11	(132)
1 The land is a map: the Aboriginal relationship with the desert	11	(12)
2 Forms, images, imaginings: European myths of the desert	23	(13)
3 The `hideous blank': imperatives for discovery	36	(22)
4 Geography is never innocent: or, what the explorers wrote into the landscape	58	(27)
5 Perspectives on the desert: the art of exploration	85	(26)
6 `On the tracts of thirst and furnace': dead explorers and national identity	111	(18)
7 Ripping yarns at the outpost of empire: the desert as adventure	129	(14)
PART II: APPREHENDING THE DESERT	143	(146)
8 From dead heart to red centre: tales of travel and reefs of gold	143	(18)
9 Seeing red: from topography to imagery	161	(23)
10 A Gothic desert: psychodrama in fiction and film	184	(25)
11 Revisioning the explorers: figures of the subconscious	209	(17)
12 Transforming myths: retelling the exploration stories	226	(23)
13 Seeing through biology: evolution and ecology of the desert	249	(12)
14 Self-image, environmentalism and renewal: the desert in the Age of Aquarius	261	(20)
15 The art of cultural encounter	281	(8)
Epilogue	289	(2)
Notes	291	(32)
Bibliography	323	(20)
Index	343