AustLit

'Tasmania was a distinctive location for nineteenth-century travellers, and a regular feature of the rich print culture that emerged from the British Empire. Regularly dubbed a “little England” because of its physical and environmental features, the island provided an early source of imperial ideas about Greater Britain and the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race. This paper traces the emergence of the “little England” trope in travel writing, emphasising the importance of this form for knowledge formation. It argues that the contested and violent history of Tasmania, especially the treatment of Aboriginal people, complicated the trope by making explicit the violence that underpinned British imperial expansion. Debates about the morality of colonisation both in the colonial period, and in recent scholarly publications, reveal the high visibility of Tasmania and the complex inheritances of its colonial past locally and in Britain.'

Source: Abstract.

'Tasmania is often represented in travel accounts as a remote place at the edge of the world. For Antarctic travellers, however, Tasmania is not only an end but also a means: a way-station rather than a destination, a point from which to commence the last leg of an expedition or a haven to return to at its conclusion, and sometimes a place to recuperate between multiple visits. This article examines representations of Tasmania – and particularly its capital city and main port, Hobart – produced by explorers and other travellers on their way to (or from) more southerly destinations. Antarctic travel texts compare and contrast Tasmania to higher latitudes, contextualising it not just as a far southern margin of the familiar world, but also as a northern limit of a lesser-known region of the globe. Both Antarctic travellers’ journeys and their narratives produce a connectedness between Tasmania and other circumpolar places, which in turn embeds the island within a new geographical imaginary: a southern rim surrounding a polar centre. These travel narratives reinforce the image of Hobart as a “gateway” but also put pressure on this term, suggesting a relationship with the far south that includes but goes beyond that of an exit or entry point.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'How does a new society learn to think of itself as old? The question has particular resonance for Tasmania, which was arguably the first of the Australian colonies to register that it had a historic past but one that respectable opinion sought to live down. Yet history insistently lingered on as vulgar sensation-seeking tourists raked over the convict past. In Tasmania tourism helped forge a new historical consciousness. This essay sketches some of the mechanisms by which Tasmanians came to appreciate their history. The challenge was to convert this lowbrow interest in a disreputable past into a middlebrow tourism industry. “Travel writing”, broadly defined, contributed to the process by emphasising Tasmania’s Englishness, developing an aesthetic appreciation of its historical fabric and, through state legitimation, demonstrating the civic virtue inherent in history tourism.'

Source: Abstract.

'In her loose collection of travel stories, Footloose in Australia (1973), Patsy Adam-Smith writes that Tasmanians bear little relationship to Australians: “Their folk culture is different, their struggles have been different; their pace, outlook, and environment are so different that they are a separate people, as tough and tenacious as the ‘mainlanders’ [...] but different” (32). This essay examines Adam-Smith’s Tasmanian travel stories, many of which were printed in the influential magazine Walkabout. It situates Adam-Smith’s stories in relation to the field of middlebrow writing and its wide sphere of influence at the time of Walkabout’s run (1934–1974), drawing from her Walkabout articles, travel books and two volumes of autobiography. An examination of Adam-Smith’s travel writing raises questions of gender and spatiality. While Adam-Smith boldly asserted her presence in marginalised space as a female traveller, her texts demonstrate the unstable discursive position occupied by women in mid-twentieth-century Australia. This essay considers how Adam-Smith’s movement beyond the private (and feminised) space of the home reflects and challenges predominantly masculine performances of space.'

Source: Abstract.

'Tasmania holds a special place in the French imaginary, as a symbol of radical otherness, due in no small part to its location far away from France, at the end of the earth. This essay traces the development of Tasmania as both a place of utopian desire and a site of dystopian suffering in the French imaginary, from its earliest associations with Terra Australis Incognita through the first explorers’ landings to today’s interpretations of the island. Within this continuum of utopian travel tales, the essay presents a singular narrative, La Grenouille dans le billabong [A Frog in the Billabong] by Marie-Paule Leroux published in 2004, as an example of how Tasmania remains a utopian construction for the French traveller to the island. Leroux’s intercultural adventure is analysed according to common tropes of utopian writing and thinking, linked to place, people and politics, to demonstrate the contemporary currency of le rêve tasmanien [the Tasmanian dream] for the French.'

Source: Abstract.

'Tasmania is often spoken of domestically as a “problem”. Indeed, talk of “the problem of Tasmania” circulates through intellectual and governmental as much as everyday discourse. For writers like Peter Conrad and Tim Bowden – expatriate Tasmanians who write of their “return” to the island – the discourse on the problem of Tasmania is particularly challenging. As returnees, the narrators of Conrad’s Down Home (1988) and Bowden’s The Devil in Tim (2005) engage in reflections on identity, alterity and history in ways that exploit and resist the stereotypes, tropes and narratives that have traditionally underpinned discussion of the Tasmanian problem. This essay argues that while the texts can be read as complicit with the ideology that sustains the idea of that problem, in their turn to encounters with “ordinary” Tasmania they present alternative visions of the state that question the ideologies that position the island as limited, backward and perpetually beset by intransigent challenges.'

Source: Abstract.