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Alas, for the Pelicans!

Flinders, Baudin and beyond

Anne Chittleborough, Gillian Dooley, Brenda Glover, Rick Hosking

In 1802 a Frenchman and an Englishman famously encountered each other off the southern shores of 'Terra Australis'. The voyages of discovery of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders opened the way for the increasingly rapid invasion and colonisation of the Australian continent. This collection of essays, images and poems examines some of the cultural contexts of their voyages and the ramifications of their discoveries over the ensuing years. Flinders himself poignantly noted that the arrival of Europeans in the waters surrounding Kangaroo Island also heralded the passing of what he romantically termed the golden age of the pelicans.

'There are four small islands in the eastern branch [of Nepean Bay]; one of them is moderately high and woody, the others are grassy and lower; and upon two of these we found many young pelicans unable to fly … Alas, for the pelicans! Their golden age is past; but it has much exceeded in duration that of man.' - Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis

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Anne Chittleborough, a librarian by profession, is based at Flinders University, South Australia, and works for a national database of Australian literature, Austlit: Australian Literature Gateway.

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Gillian Dooley is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University. She is the co-editor of Matthew Flinders' Private Journal (2005), of the 2019 Wakefield Press anthology The First Wave: Exploring Early Coastal Contact History in Australia (with Danielle Clode), and (with Philippa Sandall) of Trim: The Cartographer's Cat (2019), a new authoritative edition of Flinders' Biographical Tribute. She also writes on authors including Jane Austen and Iris Murdoch.

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Brenda Glover completed a doctorate in English on Postcolonial Women's Writing at Flinders University. As part of her thesis she wrote a novel, Buttoned Up, which foregrounds the experience of five Australian settler women, a maternal line, across the last century. She tutors in literature, professional and creative writing and has been involved in a range of editing projects.

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Rick Hosking is an Associate Professor in English, Creative Writing, and Australian Studies at Flinders University where he teaches Australian Studies, colonial literary studies, historical fiction and travel writing. He co-authored with Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck Fatal Collisions: the South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory.

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ISBN   9781743057995
CATEGORY   
IMAGES   Greyscale images throughout
PAGE COUNT   252
DIMENSIONS   244 x 170 mm