4 - The Antipodal Uncanny
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2019
Summary
Australia's place in the Western imagination is substantially determined by Antipodality. Antipodality, in turn, is largely based on Antipodal inversion, that is, the notion that Australia, as Europe's Antipodes, is somehow like Europe except with the opposite sign. In what amounts to an almost symptomatic phenomenon, this notion frequently reveals itself incidentally, and even actively, in the form of the Antipodal uncanny. Different conceptions of Antipodal space as somehow unsettling and threatening to the European subject cohere in the theme of the Antipodal uncanny. During the nineteenth century, this theme acquired great poignancy as it began to penetrate deeply into the ideology of settler colonialism and its subliminal feelings of guilt over European invasion and Aboriginal dispossession. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Antipodal uncanny had become so entrenched that it surfaced explicitly in Kangaroo, a 1923 novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence which was based on his only month-long visit to Australia. The following passage from Lawrence's novel provides one of the best examples of the Antipodal uncanny:
And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-trunks like naked pale Aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a sign of life – not a vestige.
Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude, dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush, overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his hair began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence. He looked at the weird, white, dead trees, and into the hollow distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home. And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold with terror. What of? He knew quite well it was nothing. He knew quite well. But with his spine cold like ice, and the roots of his hair seeming to freeze, he walked on home, walked firmly and without haste.
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- Australia as the Antipodal UtopiaEuropean Imaginations from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, pp. 89 - 108Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2019