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Losing America and Finding Australia: Continental Shift in an Enlightenment Paradigm

Losing America and Finding Australia: Continental Shift in an Enlightenment Paradigm Page 202 Glynis Ridley Queen’s University, Belfast To the naturalist who proudly sent the first stuffed duckbilled platypus from Australia to Europe, Australia was wondrously exotic: to George Shaw of the British Museum, the creature seemed at first too strange to be possible and he initially suspected a hoax.1 Where Joseph Banks saw a wealth of botanic knowledge in a bay that would be named after that fact, and Captain Cook’s Endeavour log represented the area favorably, Arthur Phillip, commander of the First Fleet, saw only the impossibility of settlement.2 And where the first transported convicts saw a living incarceration, their jailers saw opportunities for preferment of various degrees. Clearly, what the naturalist, fleet commander, and penitential officer saw was shaped by very different agendas. One man’s exotic flora and fauna translates into another man’s incomprehension as to what he should eat. Between eighteenth-century naturalists’ fascination at Australia’s exoticism and convicts’ resentment of it there was at least agreement that this land was unlike any other; yet for every written account and artistic representation predicated on difference it is possible to find another that seeks to deny that Australia is in any way different to anything else then http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Eighteenth-Century Life Duke University Press

Losing America and Finding Australia: Continental Shift in an Enlightenment Paradigm

Eighteenth-Century Life , Volume 26 (3) – Oct 1, 2002

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References (21)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0098-2601
eISSN
1086-3192
DOI
10.1215/00982601-26-3-202
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Page 202 Glynis Ridley Queen’s University, Belfast To the naturalist who proudly sent the first stuffed duckbilled platypus from Australia to Europe, Australia was wondrously exotic: to George Shaw of the British Museum, the creature seemed at first too strange to be possible and he initially suspected a hoax.1 Where Joseph Banks saw a wealth of botanic knowledge in a bay that would be named after that fact, and Captain Cook’s Endeavour log represented the area favorably, Arthur Phillip, commander of the First Fleet, saw only the impossibility of settlement.2 And where the first transported convicts saw a living incarceration, their jailers saw opportunities for preferment of various degrees. Clearly, what the naturalist, fleet commander, and penitential officer saw was shaped by very different agendas. One man’s exotic flora and fauna translates into another man’s incomprehension as to what he should eat. Between eighteenth-century naturalists’ fascination at Australia’s exoticism and convicts’ resentment of it there was at least agreement that this land was unlike any other; yet for every written account and artistic representation predicated on difference it is possible to find another that seeks to deny that Australia is in any way different to anything else then

Journal

Eighteenth-Century LifeDuke University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2002

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