This seminar explores British travel writing about Australia from the late eighteenth century to the present. Rather than approaching travel writing merely as a series of entertaining accounts of distant places, we will examine it as a historically changing form of observation, description, interpretation, and cultural power. The course traces the development of the British gaze on Australia: from early colonial encounters and maritime exploration to Victorian imperial comparison, scientific curiosity, settler domesticity, and modern forms of literary, comic, and self-reflexive travel writing.
We will begin with early accounts of New South Wales, including texts by Watkin Tench and John White, which helped shape British understandings of the Australian colonies, Indigenous peoples, landscape, flora, and fauna. We will then turn to maritime exploration and mapping in Matthew Flinders, scientific travel in Charles Darwin, and nineteenth-century accounts of settler life, reform, inland exploration, the gold rush, and imperial expansion in writers such as Louisa Anne Meredith, James Backhouse, Edward John Eyre, William Howitt, Anthony Trollope, James Anthony Froude, and Lady Barker/Broome. In the final part of the seminar, we will consider more recent British travel writing and place-writing, including Jan Morris on Sydney, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, Nicholas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania, and Bill Bryson’s Down Under.
Throughout the semester, we will ask how British travellers, settlers, explorers, and writers represented Australia as landscape, colony, nation, and imagined space. Particular attention will be paid to questions of genre, voice, authority, humour, imperial ideology, gender, mobility, natural history, urban space, and the ethics of representing Indigenous cultures and colonial violence. Students will work with a mixture of shorter historical excerpts and selected modern travel texts. The seminar is designed for students interested in British literature and culture, travel writing, maritime history, and Anglophone Australia.
- Dozent/in: Jörg Weber