Southern doubles

Abstract

In the prologue to a series of squibs titled 'Australian Doubles' in 1856, Melbourne Punch describes the 'startling' discovery 'that the physical equipoise which exists between the two hemispheres of the world extends to the moral and mental qualities of the inhabitants' such that 'every man in the Northern hemisphere has his double in the Southern'. 1 Beginning with 'The History of Victoria' by a 'Thomas B. Camawley' (clearly parodying Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England [1848]), the series of 'Australian Doubles' articles features satirical accounts of the colony of Victoria's history that lampoon both the imitative qualities of colonial writers and the works of popular authors and poets such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, R. H. Horne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Alfred Tennyson among others. 2 Melbourne Punch's parody of the tendency of colonial Australian authors to model themselves on their northern counterparts enacts what Paul Giles describes in Antipodean America (2013) as 'a heightened version of comparative consciousness', one that defines 'the antipodean imagination' as a state in which the 'phenomenological selfhood of any given culture is refracted through alternative perspectives'. 3 Invoking both Terra Australis (the southern continent) and its geographic northern antipode through its reference to hemispheric 'equipoise', the 'Australian Doubles' series imagines antipodean duplicates that simultaneously reproduce and upset, mirror and refract, the 'original' northern writer, artist, politician, and/or artefact. 4 Melbourne Punch's 'comparative consciousness' forms the starting point of this chapter's analysis of the implications the 'antipodean imagination' and its southern 'doubles' had for how the southern hemisphere was imagined, conceived, mocked, and celebrated by the poetry, fiction, parodies, letters, and illustrated articles published by Australian newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth century. While Giles uses the perspective offered by a 'comparative consciousness' to frame his analysis of how American literature adopts and adapts an 'antipodean aspect' from Australasia, this chapter will instead focus its attention on how this 'antipodean aspect' 2