The uses of fear: spatial politics in the Australian white-vanishing trope [Paper in special issue: Fear in Australian Literature and Film. O'Reilly, Nathaniel and Vernay, Jean-Francois (eds).]

In the 14th century, cartographers depicting Terra Australis, the imagined but as yet unconfirmed southern continent, placed fearsome mythical creatures in the "unknown spaces" on their maps. Their purpose was at least threefold: to disguise the glaring blankness of ignorance beneath the illustrator's flourish; to signal the anxiety and uncertainty attached to spaces beyond European dominion; and, perhaps not least, to symbolically warn off potential alternate northern hemisphere imperialists from seeing the south land as too readily accessible and available. None of the white-vanishing texts have been explicitly discussed in terms of their spatial politics; yet, in both lost-child and lost-adult texts, spaces of fear are used to make certain enduring discursive claims about the nature and quality of opposing "civilized" space and those who occupy it. Tilley discusses these lost-in-the-bush texts that are so common in white Australian textuality and explores the nature of the white-vanishing trope's binary spatial politics as evidence of a prevailing cultural metanarrative of hyperseparation--that is, a sense of exclusion, difference, and deep, profound fear of the projected Other.