AustLit

‘So much of the writing we see in colonial Australia registers the changing features of the physical landscape: the evolution of the colonial cities, the radical transformation of bush and country. The journals were especially committed to giving definition to the ways in which urban and regional spaces alike were utterly reshaped through the process of financial speculation and colonial expansion. New social and material structures superimpose themselves on existing ones, which they displace or marginalise – but those older forms also return over and over to give the new its self-definition. Richard Dennis makes this point in his book Cities of Modernity (2008): modernity ushers in ‘the realisation that now is not the same as then’, but it also throws these two radically different temporal moments together, recreating ‘the past as ‘other’’ as a continuing proof of the superiority of the new. The idea of a colonial modernity folds this point into further realisation that, as colonisation progresses, an otherwise remote place like Australia is at the same time embedded in global frameworks for the flow of capital and commodities. For Robert Dixon, ‘the term colonial modernity […] refers to a series of developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked apparently provincial cultures like those of the Australian colonies into a busy traffic in personnel, cultural practices, texts and intellectual property around the English-speaking world’. This section of our book shows the many ways in which the early Australian journals registered the ‘busy traffic’ of colonial modernity, as writers navigated their way through increasingly crowded urban streets and the demands of capital impacted on every aspect of daily life: from the rapid growth of business centres across the country to the systematic degradation of the forests and waterways.’ (Author’s introduction : 381)