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Lady Mary Fox (1787-1863) published her *Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland* in 1837.*
I found it in a list of utopias and chose it because I was interested in it as an early example of that mini-genre of Australian SF where there is a hidden race of people (not Aboriginal people) in the interior of Australia. It’s odd but it was definitely a thing, perhaps because people just could not believe that the entire middle of Australia really was one huge desert. It’s from the same mindset as the search for the inland sea.
Because Fox was writing very early in the history of Australian colonisation, the hidden race of people are just on the other side of the Blue Mountains. They are European descended and have built their own society over the past few hundred years. The colony was settled by dissenters three hundred years previously and is called.... Southland. Newcomers from the New South Wales colony find them and the differences in the society are contrasted.
The society in question doesn’t really seem like a utopia to me. Much of the book is concerned with describing how preachers are paid or not paid; how the Bible is divided into pages and lines instead of chapters and verses; how criminals are tested by being sent into the gas caves, where some survive and others don’t.
The two points that are made again and again are that the colonists are astounded that New South Wales has been founded with convicts rather than upright free men and that the colonists define themselves emphatically as not being like the ‘savages’ who live nearby. For example, they do not dance or wear make up because these are things the savages do. (I am reminded here of Mr Darcy saying even savages dance.)
There is also a lot of discussion of the evils of duelling. A lot. Which is odd given that duelling had fallen out of favour by the 1810s.
Either the books is oddly structured or the online, scanned in versions are missing a chunk because the last part of the book seems to just be a letter written by one of the common sailors who accompanied the narrator. The letter gives him more grammatical errors and a smaller vocabulary but basically reiterates the description of the colonists as strange. Then the book just stops.
So does this review.
* Co-written at least partially by Richard Whatley, archbishop of Dublin.
I found it in a list of utopias and chose it because I was interested in it as an early example of that mini-genre of Australian SF where there is a hidden race of people (not Aboriginal people) in the interior of Australia. It’s odd but it was definitely a thing, perhaps because people just could not believe that the entire middle of Australia really was one huge desert. It’s from the same mindset as the search for the inland sea.
Because Fox was writing very early in the history of Australian colonisation, the hidden race of people are just on the other side of the Blue Mountains. They are European descended and have built their own society over the past few hundred years. The colony was settled by dissenters three hundred years previously and is called.... Southland. Newcomers from the New South Wales colony find them and the differences in the society are contrasted.
The society in question doesn’t really seem like a utopia to me. Much of the book is concerned with describing how preachers are paid or not paid; how the Bible is divided into pages and lines instead of chapters and verses; how criminals are tested by being sent into the gas caves, where some survive and others don’t.
The two points that are made again and again are that the colonists are astounded that New South Wales has been founded with convicts rather than upright free men and that the colonists define themselves emphatically as not being like the ‘savages’ who live nearby. For example, they do not dance or wear make up because these are things the savages do. (I am reminded here of Mr Darcy saying even savages dance.)
There is also a lot of discussion of the evils of duelling. A lot. Which is odd given that duelling had fallen out of favour by the 1810s.
Either the books is oddly structured or the online, scanned in versions are missing a chunk because the last part of the book seems to just be a letter written by one of the common sailors who accompanied the narrator. The letter gives him more grammatical errors and a smaller vocabulary but basically reiterates the description of the colonists as strange. Then the book just stops.
So does this review.
* Co-written at least partially by Richard Whatley, archbishop of Dublin.
