The Course of Empire - Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788-1860

This vigorous and scholarly work challenges a number of long-held conceptions about Australian cultural identity, as Dixon argues the need to evaluate early colonial culture in its own terms and by its own standards. The book asserts that Enlightenment myths of socil and economic progress played a central role in early formulations of Australian nationalism. It was a nationalism antipathetic to the more familiar sentiments of the 1890s: the glory of Australia lay not in that which was unique and indigenous but in that which from her participation in the universal laws of human history. For example, in landscape poetry this form of patriotism was reflected in the imitation of conventional models of descriptove embellishment. In painting, the object was not to record unique features of the antipodean scene but to indicate those aspects of colonial life which confirmed the normal advance of civil society. In the celebration of the progress of society towards the pastoral and mercantile states, the elite justified the colonial dominance of the Aboriginal people both in terms of a `natural' law of economic growth and the authority of classical history...