Julia Horne - The Pursuit of Wonder

Julia Horne

The Pursuit of Wonder: How Australia’s Landscape Was Explored, Nature Discovered and Tourism Unleashed

Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press (imprint of Melbourne University Publishing), 2005             Pp. viii + 351.               Hardback         ISBN 0 522 85166 5

Academe is an uncharitable trade. Some may think it dismissive to call Julia Horne’s book a semi-coffee table volume which would make an excellent Christmas present may seem dismissive. It is not so intended. The point of this handsomely illustrated work is to demonstrate how landscape in Australia was subject to an imaginative process of mental construction. Horne presents her argument with a touch of the tongue-in-cheek. Chapter titles are redolent of an eighteenth-century novel as “Making Tourism Australian: In which European ideas about travel, art and the origins of tourism, and how they became Australian, are examined.” A couple of episodes are fictionalised, although the author’s scholarly qualifications ensure that we can take on trust that they are genuine conflations from archival sources. Horne’s own personality is never far from the surface. She appears formally on the last page, leading visitors along a nondescript track in the Blue Mountains so that they can suddenly experience the same wonder at the view from Wentworth Falls that made Charles Darwin realise that there was something indefinably different about Australia. Some intellectual effort was required to see beauty in this strange southern continent. Travel enabled men to be men and, strikingly, women to celebrate femininity. The romantic era was seeing grandeur in mountains, and beauty in caves. Australia borrowed these sentiments from Europe and adapted its mountain resorts from the hill stations of British India. Somehow the compulsion to filter the experience of travel through the medium of writing helped make Australia’s forests beautiful and its weird ferns majestic. I have a feeling that this is a book that can be read again and again, each time with fresh insight into the complexity of its arguments. Meantime, it is a hot tip as the ideal Christmas gift for the intellectual bush-walker.