Reading Postcolonial Theory by Choudhury Bibhash

Author:Choudhury, Bibhash [Bibhash Choudhury]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317295709
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The land out there: states and sites of writing

The writing through which land emerged in narratives was, in the case of these early responses to the Australian experience, primarily permeated through the agency of the journal. The way the journals activated the worldviews of the travellers followed a pattern that attempted to establish a connection between the imagined space and the place encountered, yet, many a time, the gaps in narrative and peculiarities in topography were glossed over to draw pictures that entrenched the stories of the recordists within recognizable formats. Commenting on the significance of the journal as the site and agency in the recording of the Australian landscape, Carter writes:

The fact that journals described the places of the journey, rather than any external ‘natural’ place, explains why they flourished on board ship – and why perhaps the greatest bulk of primary material relating to Australia’s spatial history is probably contained in relatively obscure and unpretentious journals kept during the ‘voyage out’. Ships were houses on the move. They had something of the convenience of home with the advantage of enforced leisure. They enabled one to write the letters one would have never written otherwise. Despite the salt spray, the heaving deck, the stench and the poor rations, they offered marginally superior conditions in which to record one’s experience than a campsite in the bush. It was not that life on board ship was more ‘interesting’, that there was more incident to record: quite the contrary, it was the very monotony of sea travel that made it a pre-eminent site of journal writing. For what the emigrants wrote about was the experience of travelling and nowhere was that experience brought home to them more clearly than in an environment devoid of external distractions.

(141)

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