Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Prefatory Notes, Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Introduction: Making Mid-Twentieth-Century Opinion
- 1 Walkabout: The Magazine
- 2 Writing Walkabout
- 3 Peopling Australia: Writers, Anthropologists and Aborigines
- 4 Advertising Australia: Development, Modernity and Commerce
- 5 Transforming Country: Natural History and Walkabout
- 6 Knowing Our Neighbours: The Pacific Region
- Conclusion: ‘Walkabout Rocks’
- Notes
- Index
5 - Transforming Country: Natural History and Walkabout
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Prefatory Notes, Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Introduction: Making Mid-Twentieth-Century Opinion
- 1 Walkabout: The Magazine
- 2 Writing Walkabout
- 3 Peopling Australia: Writers, Anthropologists and Aborigines
- 4 Advertising Australia: Development, Modernity and Commerce
- 5 Transforming Country: Natural History and Walkabout
- 6 Knowing Our Neighbours: The Pacific Region
- Conclusion: ‘Walkabout Rocks’
- Notes
- Index
Summary
From the outset Walkabout styled itself on the qualities of a geographic magazine, and natural history was to play a significant role in realizing this objective. That natural history is broadly educative made it key to one of Walkabout 's aims of bringing a people home to the land in which they dwelt. As David Lowenthal explains:
Australia endured acute awareness of being peripheral in a double sense. One is the antipodal remoteness from the home country, being literally at the far end of the Old (the important) World. The other is its hollow centre, its dead heart, leaving Australia only peripherally alive. Had the centre any culture, it was only alien, Aboriginal. Some felt this flaw so fatal that it precluded ever achieving an Australian nation. No longer. The Aboriginality of Alice Springs is, for all but a few Australians, an emblem of union, not an omen of menace. Peripherality today is more psychic memory than actual menace.
Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century Walkabout helped overcome the notion of a hollow, lifeless centre, of inhospitable remote regions and of inland dreariness, through bringing to light the floral and faunal richness of these regions and, as we have shown elsewhere (see Chapter 3), through peopling these regions with vibrant Aboriginal cultures too. Walkabout helped settlers apprehend not only inland Australia, but rural, regional and remote Australia, and parried urban fears that these regions were ‘omen[s] of menace’.
In doing this Walkabout helped transform the vast space of Australia – mostly unknown to its readership – into place. Hence it was complicit in the process of ‘secur[ing] the land emotionally and spiritually for the settler society’. Yet Walkabout did not imagine possession to be exclusionary, but informed and inclusionary. In discussing the ‘anxious proximities’ that are characteristic of settler societies and the reverberations of their literary preoccupations, Alan Lawson warns how critics
have become ostentatiously good at reading the past for its moral and ethical blindnesses: to do that is no longer a theoretical or a methodological challenge. What we need to be able to do next is to find a theorized methodology for rereading the past productively, not celebratively, not unreflectively, but with an eye to the contradictions that might enable us to learn our difficult relations better.
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- Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016