Seeking the Centre
The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film

This exciting, highly illustrated book reveals the impact of the desert on Australian culture.

Roslynn D. Haynes (Author)

9780521571111, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 January 1999

364 pages, 16 b/w illus. 50 colour illus. 4 maps
24.4 x 17 x 2.2 cm, 0.83 kg

'This book is enormously pleasurable … a pertinent and intelligent overview of the long history of non-Aboriginal representation and colonisation of desert spaces.' Catriona Elder, University of Wollongong

The desert has a hypnotic presence in Australian culture, simultaneously alluring and repellent. The 'Centre' is distant and unknown to most Australians, yet has become a symbol of the country. This exciting book reveals the singular impact that the desert, both geographical and metaphorical, has had on Australian culture. At the heart of this highly illustrated full colour book is the profound relationship that Aboriginal Australians have with the desert, and the complex ways in which they have been seen by white people in this context. The various attempts to conquer and colonise the 'hideous blank' by nineteenth-century explorers is covered in illuminating ways. In the twentieth century the desert was rediscovered by travellers, artists, novelists, poets and film makers. More recently the desert has been promoted as a site for eco-tourism, new age enlightenment and environmental renewal.

1. The land is a map: the Aboriginal relationship to the desert
2. Forms, images, imaginings: European myths of the desert
3. The 'hideous blank': imperatives for discovery
4. Geography is never innocent: or, what the explorers thought they saw
5. Perspectives on the desert: the art of exploration
6. 'On the tracts of thirst and furnace': dead explorers and national identity
7. Ripping yarns at the outpost of empire: the desert as adventure
8. From 'dead heart' to 'red centre': travellers' tales and the lure of gold
9. Seeing red: twentieth-century art of the desert
10. A gothic desert: psychodrama in fiction and film
11. Revisioning the explorers in twentieth-century art
12. Transforming myths: the explorers in twentieth-century literature
13. Seeing through biology: contemporary artists examine the desert
14. The desert in the Age of Aquarius: environmentalism and renewal
15. The art of reconciliation.

Subject Areas: Biography: historical, political & military [BGH]