AustLit

‘The Last Frontier: Land and Landscape’ looks at the intersections between three prevailing ideas in relation to land in Australia at the turn of the last century. Through an examination of paintings, photographs and writings of a seaman/artist/publisher, Adolf Gustav Plate, several layers of the land’s meanings are exposed: German Romantic notions of land as sacred, British ideas of land as property, and the Aboriginal conception of land as existing in a reciprocal relationship to people and animals. A mingling of these ideas continues to inform our relationship to land in Australia…(Author’s abstract p. 103)