National literatures, like the nations whose identity they are thought to codify, are often understood as having clearly defined borders. This, however, is a fallacious notion. A brief glance at the major European models for the nationstate reveals how fluid their borders can be: the frontiers of France have been blurred for much of its history (the early modern essayist Montaigne spoke, when travelling, not of leaving France but of entering ‘the Italian language’); Alsace and Lorraine were long disputed territory and the Saar region passed back into German hands as late as 1955. Like France, Germany, which only consolidated itself as a nation in 1871, has seen its frontiers constantly fluctuate ever since, with some of them (the Oder-Neisse line) only definitively recognized as late as 1990. Meanwhile, Britain experienced what was effectively a border war in Ireland until the Good Friday referendum of 1998. Australia is one of the few nations in the world whose stable coastal contours are almost exactly isomorphic with the political boundaries of the nation and thus entirely fixed, though this fixity is belied by the cynical fiddling of the national boundaries to create ‘immigration exclusion zones’ in the 1990s, and forgets a more or less constant off-shore expatriate population of about 5 per cent at any one time. As a continent, Australia appears to guarantee a reassuring sense of cultural continence.

This Australian psychogeography of the coastal border reposes upon a multiple amnesia. It forgets that alongside the convenient distance of the southern continent, it was its island status that configured the Antipodes a natural prison, able to absorb the overflow from the British penal system. (These paradoxical images resurfaced in the 1990s as the mythical centre of Australia became the locus of internment camps for illegal refugees: a 2004 photograph by Rosemary Laing, ironically titled Welcome to Australia, shows the razor-wire compound of the former Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre, as the internment camp was euphemistically known, in a quintessential Outback expanse.) Such European Enlightenment origins mean that the paradigms of transportation and continental enclosure, continence and invasion, mobility and closure (in successive degrees of structural abstraction) have been from the outset (meaning in this case the white-Anglo incipit of 1788) inextricably intertwined with one another.