Cirrus@Austlit

'Tasmania was a distinctive location for nineteenth-century travellers, and a regular feature of the rich print culture that emerged from the British Empire. Regularly dubbed a “little England” because of its physical and environmental features, the island provided an early source of imperial ideas about Greater Britain and the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race. This paper traces the emergence of the “little England” trope in travel writing, emphasising the importance of this form for knowledge formation. It argues that the contested and violent history of Tasmania, especially the treatment of Aboriginal people, complicated the trope by making explicit the violence that underpinned British imperial expansion. Debates about the morality of colonisation both in the colonial period, and in recent scholarly publications, reveal the high visibility of Tasmania and the complex inheritances of its colonial past locally and in Britain.'

Source: Abstract.