Landscape in Early North Queensland Writing

Abstract

The aborigines' approach to landscape was unitive: both myth, in which they identified nature with dead or imaginary people, and totem, which associated real people with birds and animals, were ways of enhancing relationship with the land. As far as ideas were concerned, harmony was the aborigines' aim,
though their practice in some respects, such as their periodic burning of the country, was divergent. The attitudes of the European settlers to the Australian landscape were more complex and, on the whole, more negative. Since, however, they were the inevitable expression of a culture geared to definition,
individualism and conquest, a judgmental approach to them may be rather futile. It has in any case been pre-empted by such writers as Robin Boyd, Donald Home and Judith Wright, each of whom deals with the question from a special vantage point.' Here I hope merely to document characteristic European responses to landscape soon after settlement in a particular Australian region, and to unravel some of the underlying complexities.