Mapping Mobility in Australia: From the Bush to the Desert and the Ghostly Place

The article examines the motif of mobility in Australian literature and history and points to a recurrent and paradoxical immobility and the absence of a frontier myth as symptomatic of Australia’s relation to the land, its colonial history and the obliteration of its Indigenous population up until the end of the 20th century. It analyses the difficulty non‑Indigenous Australians have had from the very beginning of settlement in mapping out both literally and figuratively the iconic national Bush and its modern avatar, the desert. The spectrality to be found in early works gains an even more problematic and critical dimension after the Second World War with the advent of postmodern parodies and more recently still, the development of multicultural perspectives on such aesthetic issues reflecting deeper political and cultural dynamics.