The Cartographic Eye
How Explorers Saw Australia

An investigation of the presumptions and politics of Australian explorers' texts. Crucial for cultural and postcolonial studies.

Simon Ryan (Author)

9780521571128, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 September 1996

248 pages, 24 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.5 kg

' … Simon Ryan's The Cartographic Eye is a very important book … Ryan's scholarship is both detailed and focussed … this is compelling reading.' Australian Geographical Studies

This book is about the mythologies of land exploration, and about space and the colonial enterprise in particular. It is an innovative investigation of the presumptions, aesthetics, and politics of Australian explorers' texts that looks at the journals of John Oxley, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt, and Ludwig Leichhardt and shows that they are not the simple, unadorned observations the authors would have us believe, but, rather, complex networks of tropes. The book argues that contacts with Aborigines and the 'virgin' land are occasions of discursive contest, and that, however much explorers construct themselves as monarchs of all they survey, this monarchy is not absolute. This book scrutinises and undermines the scientific and literary methodology of exploration.

Introduction
1. Exploring culture: the formation and fragmentation of the explorer
2. Picturesque visions: controlling the seen
3. Maps and their cultural constructedness
4. Seeing the Aborigines put in their place
5. The bosom of unknown lands
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]