Janie Conway, Southern Cross University

jconway@scu.edu.au

The role of the sea in the formation of an Australian literary imagination cannot be ignored. For early European settlers the sea represented both prison wall and avenue of escape. Today most of the population clings to the water's edge. The sea has become something to escape to, as well as escape by. Writers create imaginary landscapes designed to give impressions of place and conversely displacement. They place characters inside their landscapes and watch them negotiate the territories within the texts as they write.

there are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangements, arising gradually out of the tumult and confusion, and perhaps this satisfaction cannot anywhere be more fully enjoyed than where a settlement of civilised people is fixing itself upon a newly discovered or savage coast". (Carter Paul, 1987, The Road to Botany Bay, pp304 – 305)

Writings such as these, mark the beginning of a progressive literature of exile where the ghost of England provides a constant standard against which everything else is measured. This paper explores the way Australian literature has been formed by a physical and intellectual grappling with landscape. Through my own research and writings I will look at the way the British invasion of the Eora peoples of what we now call Sydney Cove provided the first formative concepts in an Australian metaphysical dialogue with place and space, ocean and shore, floating and landing.