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May 16, 2007
If Australia as the new world was “empty” (the “black man” was invisible in Britain’s eyes, part of the continent’s flora and fauna), it was quite literally a tabula rasa, a blank tablet upon which new men might inscribe a new history. As John Locke argued in in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, those discontented with the constraints of the social contract could seek refuge in the loci vacui, the empty places of the world, and start society over again.
If America was utopia, then Australia was dystopia--a prison.
However, America had slavery. So how could it understand itself to be pure and innocent? How come it understands itself in terms of an inner good being defended from an outer evil; or New World innocence being protected from Old World corruption. Is America as Eden the expression of what is known as American exceptionalism?
And yet there were utopian yearnings in Australia, such as the utopian-socialist one like William Lane’s The Workingman’s Paradise (1892), Barnard and Eldershaw’s socialistic and feminist Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), and that great utopian experiment, the design and eventual construction of the federal capital at Canberra, whose design by Walter Burly Griffin involved a visionary scheme for a “cosmic city”, based on
the area’s natural topography, but also on Pythagorean geometry and esoteric symbolism.
Australian culture has been founded on the economy of pastoralism. Australia as a culture yearns naively for innocence but is “riven” by the ineffectiveness of its attempts to forget or dismiss the violence that founded it, or the the landgrabbing and quick settlement that marked the 19th century colonial economy.
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