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  • Antipodean Sensibilities
  • Michael Crozier

In an essay entitled “The Lie of the Land,” Australian geologist and professor of English George Seddon relates a story about placement:

At a dinner party last year, a rather snotty English doctor now working in Perth made some disparaging remarks about “the Antipodes.” Feigning surprise, I said “But I didn’t know that you were from Bermuda: I thought you were from London.” Enraged incomprehension. Then I had to explain that if we draw a line from Perth through the earth’s centre, where it comes out the other end—at the antipodes—is very close to Bermuda, Prospero’s isle; if on the other hand, we draw a line from London through the centre, it comes out, appropriately, at a small, cold, wet uninhabited island, named “Antipodes” by Cook, who knew his latitudes and longitudes. This island is some six hundred kilometers southeast of Dunedin, New Zealand.1

Recounting this incident within a more general reflection on images of Australian place, Seddon declares that he wishes to weave mental maps of the place from various images, facts, and [End Page 839] questions. In his dinner-party story he evokes a topographic kaleidoscope by insisting upon geographic precision. More generally, he variegates Australian place by interrogating the ecological and environmental facts and their history. Seddon does not describe himself or his musings as “antipodean,” yet there is something antipodean about his sense of place. The dinner-party exchange, hinting at this sense, is not simply a matter of flash footwork in the face of condescension. His clever riposte flips the disparaging remark by his dining companion into evidence of the metropolitan’s own parochialism. But more than this, Seddon’s excursus on antipodal coordinates upsets the subordinate resonances of “antipodean.” In displacing its two-dimensional north/south sense, he renders the antipodean relationship gyroscopic. The center of gravity is determined by the interplay among mutually perpendicular axes and not by any one particular point or place. In the process, the sense of the antipodean becomes more than simply the underneath, the topsy-turvy, or the perverse.

Here, I want to explore and embellish these hints of the “antipodean,” enlisting several snippets of Seddon’s work as cues for a wider interest in the sensibilities that shape and are shaped by antipodean experiences. There are the obvious examples, the “sole to sole” experiences: Christmas in high “summer,” Easter in the “autumn,” European culture celebrated out of place. There are also the “toe to toe” experiences in which antipodeans fete their own place.2 More often than not, there is footwork of one kind or another involved in trying to negotiate place, and it pays to be alert to these kinds of connotations, to the paradoxes as well as the more positive bearings generated by antipodean gyroscopes. And a raw facticity entwined with the play of imagination never seems to be far away in these oscillations.3 Let’s start by fossicking around Seddon’s dinner party for a little longer.

Seddon’s encounter is not an unfamiliar antipodean experience, its pedigree extending back to nineteenth-century colonial history; nor, strictly speaking, is it exclusively “antipodean.” Societies other than those of Australia and New Zealand have their own versions of the metropole put-down/ periphery come-back joust. But something distinct or notable arises when the antipodean meets the Antipodes. More to the point, place and landscape are heavily implicated in the antipodean—especially the Australian—versions (my main focus here). For instance, in another context Seddon talks about “dual allegiances,” the tensions of being or becoming an Australian that arise out of the discord between a European patrimony and the [End Page 840] Australian environment. He notes that this sense of dual allegiance is not uniquely Australian, instancing those novels of Henry James in which it is a recurrent theme. However, the physical and biological differences between North America and Europe fade into insignificance compared with those between Europe and Australia. At a primal level, not even the seasons tally. Nonetheless, while the European colonization of the Antipodes was a long ecological journey from the Old World, Europe’s intellectual and cultural heritage persisted, remaining...

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