Sublime travel: Allegory in three Central Australian travel texts

Central Australia plays an important role in a range of myths about modern Australian national identity, as well as global ideologies concerning the relationship between 'modern' societies and their 'pre -modern others'. This thesis examines three travel texts about Central Australia and analyses the manner in which they work as 'allegories of appropriation'. The texts selected (the fourth journal of John McDouall Stuart, 1860; C.T. Madigan's Central Australia, 1936; and, Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, 1987) represent three different stages in the European colonisation of this region. This thesis looks at the manner in which these texts are related in various ways. These include the splitting of 'visual' and 'temporal' codes, their commitment to the discourses of primitivism, and their reliance on the rhetoric of the sublime. These shared elements, it is argued, explaining the ways these are consistent with the ideologies and epistemologies which legitimized the European appropriation of the territory. It also provides a model for analysing the way contemporary texts continue to reflect a range of discourses and ideologies that are associated with the colonial past. At the same time the thesis argues that the texts suggest alternative stories through which one can be read the ideological failure of colonial imperial enterprise. Drawing on deconstructive and post -colonial theory, as well focusing on traditional literary concepts such as allegory and the sublime, this thesis argues that not only is it possible to read in these texts a range of contradictions but that it is possible to chart alternative allegories, ones which resist the essentialising and oppressive rhetorics of the past.