It is both a similarity and a contrast. The contrast jumps out more. Australians imagined there would be an inland sea, a new Mississippi, but found only desert. An old friend of mine by the name of Peter Thorley recently wrote a book called Desert Tsunami, about the big floods in the desert ten years ago, and Australia's long term climate history, how disappointment of aridity created a laconic hardbitten culture. Peter tells the story that when the settlers first tried to explore the desert, Sturt carried a whale boat with him from Adelaide in the hope of finding a sea. He had to abandon it among the sand dunes and salt flats of the arid interior. America has an abundance that gave rise to the doctrines of providence, liberty and manifest destiny, and then the theory of the happy ending as part of the Hollywood myth. The Australian dream is much more constrained and laconic, whereas the US has an imaginary fantasy of infinite abundance, which I suspect helped to give rise to the creationist tea party idea that humans are above nature. I'm not sure how these myths of national identity key in to Huckleberry Finn though. For Huck, there is this backstory of infinite optimism and freedom grounded in the wealth of rich soil and perfect climate. Perhaps part of it is that the myth of infinite abundance is based on the lie of racial inequality, and even though the Mississippi seems inexhaustible it is still finite.DWill wrote:Interesting, Robert. Do you also think that there could be similarities between the frontier histories of Australia and the U.S. that make HF a book that Australians can relate to more directly than perhaps Europeans can?
The similarity is that both Australia and the US were founded as white settler frontier societies in which the conquest of virgin nature has shaped national identity. I suspect Europeans relate less well to this theme of encounter with virgin paradise because such long history of artificial cultures in urban Europe have established a purely human horizon in which nature is effectively eliminated from sight. Both the US and Australia are built on the bones of indigenous cultures who were so far behind in technology that the invaders did not even recognise the conquest as a war, which was primarily conducted by paper, metal, measles and influenza.
As I mentioned, I have just finished Anthill by EO Wilson, and it picks up some of these themes of how long history of relation to nature shapes cultural identity. I will write a review of it soon.