Awe, disillusionment and fear: attitudes to landscape among Christian colonists of far South-West Australia

Jane Isobel Grellier

    Research output: ThesisMaster's Thesis

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    Abstract

    [Truncated] This study focuses on a group of early colonists in the Swan River Colony-middleclass people who lived in the far South-West part of the colony between 1829 and the mid 1840s~and considers how they responded to the landscape of the region in the first years after their arrival from Britain. It examines many influences on their responses but particularly their Judaeo-Christian heritage and how it shaped the way they saw the physical world. I have conducted the study through an exploration of texts written by these people immediately after their arrival in the colony; that is, both their diaries and letters addressed to loved ones left behind in Britain. I have chosen not to consider novels, plays and poetry. By this exclusion, I do not mean to suggest that they represent the landscape less accurately than do the diaries and letters, since all genres are constructions of reality and, as I will show later, the colonists were deeply imbued with the accepted middle-class conventions of letter and diary writing, which shaped the way they represented the landscape in their writing. Rather, I have excluded fictional genres since these were not widely published in the early colonial period in which I am interested.
    Original languageEnglish
    QualificationMasters
    Awarding Institution
    • The University of Western Australia
    DOIs
    Publication statusUnpublished - 1996

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    • This thesis has been made available in the UWA Profiles and Research Repository as part of a UWA Library project to digitise and make available theses completed before 2003. If you are the author of this thesis and would like it removed from the UWA Profiles and Research Repository, please contact [email protected]

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