Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
White Australia has had a long, though thinly spread, imaginative involvement in the Pacific region, drawing on the European interests, following Cook's voyages, that formed the Pacific links during the age of sail-the Californian Gold Rush, sealing, whaling, and sandalwood gathering, and notably the 'Blackbirding industry'. Louis Becke's stories, as well as a host of popular writing of the New South Wales Bookstall adventure-romance kind, fit into a wider literature in which the extreme of Paradise and promise of riches (after Stacpoole's Blue Lagoon and Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson) has been offset by visions of perdition and dissipation (as in Melville's Moby Dick and Golding's Lord of the Flies), all within the general context of an outsider looking at the 'space' of Oceania as a kind of adventure playground, to be visited either for delightfully unrestrained indulgence, or for moral, physical, and intellectual testing in order to confirm colonialist values.
ANZSRC / FoR Code
2005 LITERARY STUDIES
Publication Details
Sharrad, P. (2006). The well-dressed explorer: Thea Astley's Beachmasters, a study in displacement. In S. Sheridan & P. Genoni (Eds.), Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds (pp. 77-89). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.