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January 8, 2004
Apart from the different colour it does look like a stony desert in the Australian outback doesn't it. I'm having difficulty in finding images of Sturt's Stony Desert to compare the landscape of desert with that of the Gusev Crater on Mars.
Mars Exploration Rover Mission
Is Mars the new American frontier? The new site for their old imaginary? Didn't Star Trek talk in terms of Space as the final frontier?
The imaginery in the cultural encoding of the inland deserts in Australia is that of the 'Dead Heart.' It is an encoding that evokes of images of heat, vast tracts of sand, no water, a featureless wasteland where little grows and nothing lives. It is a desolate and lonely place where nothing moves during the day.
This encoding forgets that the desert areas of Australia have a history. They were once coverd by sheets of polar ice, and before that by great areas of shallow seas. And they have a future. Since the continent continues to edge slowly northward its desert regions may well become tropical regions.
The encoding also forgets that the desert by moonlight is alive. Animals that are nowhere to be seen during the day are everywhere.
The difference betwen the Australian stony desert and the Gusev Crater is that the former is alive and the other is not.
If we come back to the cultural encoding of the desert we find that it is an encoding that is embodied in Russel Ward's The Australian Legend(1958). Ward argued that the Australian ethos - egalitarian, collectivist, anti-authoritarian and practical - had its origins in the response of convicts and bush people to 'frontier' conditions. This elides the difference between desert and frontier highlighted by the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. Here one of Australia's greatest 'frontier,' was a 1600 kilometre dingo-fence in Western Australia beyond which stood the desert: a nothingness that spelt death for whites but not blacks.
If we displace the pioneer/pastoralist elision between frontier and desert we can grasp that the pioneer identity of Australian white settlers (Ward's Australian Legend) was in clearing the land for European-style agriculture. The wilderness of the varoius deserts, in contrast, induced environmental agoraphobia.
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Yes, you are right about Star Trek.