Australia's place in the Western imagination is fundamentally defined by its Antipodal relationship with Europe. This is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the colloquial description of Australia as Down Under. When considering how much the notion of the continent's Antipodality has shaped conceptions of Australia throughout its different incarnations in the European imagination, it is, of course, important to remember that Europe's exact geographic antipode is actually not the Australian continent, but a region of mostly ocean somewhere south-east of New Zealand in the South Pacific. Yet the fact that Australia isn't really Europe's antipode reinforces all the more the point that Australia's role and significance as Europe's Antipodes is not a geographical one, at least not in any strict sense of the term. Rather, the Antipodal relationship between Australia and Europe is a symbolic one that was initiated and continues to be maintained by Eurocentric desires for an Antipodal counterpart. It is the purpose of this and the following chapters to uncover parts of the discursive history of Antipodality and to discuss key aspects that determine how Australia functions as an Antipodal utopia in the European imagination. This chapter will focus on the first and most fundamental aspect of Antipodality: the principle of Antipodal inversion. It will be argued that Antipodal inversion confers a particular kind of utopian spatiality onto Australia, which stands in a tense relationship with the ideology of imperialism.

Antipodality and the Principle of Antipodal Inversion

Antipodality itself is an idea that rests firmly on the premise of a round Earth. This is because the conception of the Earth as a globe naturally entails the assumption of diametrically opposed places. In Europe, thoughts about Antipodality and about Europe's Antipodes date as far back as classical Greece, where mathematical and geographical discussions about the other side of the World reached a level of sophistication. The Ancient Greek word ‘antipous’ (άντίπους) meant ‘with the feet on the opposite side’, the idea being that people in locations on exactly opposite sides of the Earth stand with their feet placed against each other. One of the first written sources of the word is the Platonic dialogue Timaeus, the text which also relates the myth of Atlantis and addresses the utopian question of what an ideal city would look like.