The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia
Notes after a first trip to Australia in April 2006
Australia was familiar — same language; a shared culture to a large degree, more so than America — but utterly foreign at the same time, and I hadn’t expected that difference to be articulated so immediately through its natural environment. In response, here’s an impressionistic selection of notes and images on encountering Australian flora, fauna and environment for the first time, influenced partly by my simultaneous reading of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore.
This approach — reading historical accounts, whilst encountering the contemporary — is lifted specifically from Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. I’ve also folded in other accounts of so-called New Worlds, including Brazil and America, drawing from art, film, food and books, all circling around the sense of environmental difference to Europe.
Note: Despite the title of this piece combining an earlier Hughes classic with the concept of the ‘New World’, amidst talk of flora and fauna, I’ll hold off the Georgian vocabulary. I’m aware of the politics of a white Englishman writing about such things. I’m not Australian. Of course, there are indigenous readings of this ‘world’ – actually the oldest continuous civilisation on…
