The European imagination abounds with eutopian visions for the region that is now Australia. Various epochs of European history have located their dreamlands in the Antipodes. The Elysian Fields, for example, that evergreen land of peace to which the heroes of antiquity retired, was placed by Homer at the ‘end of the Earth’. Legend also has it that a Satyr called Silenus told King Midas that beyond Europe, Asia and Africa, far south of the great ocean, there lies a land where the people suffer no hardship or want because it provides them with more than they need. This, presumably, was the myth that caused Alexander the Great, after he surpassed the previous limits of the world known to antiquity during his India campaign, to long to journey even farther to reach the other end of the world. Other mythological eutopias such as the Blessed Isles, Hesiod's Golden Age, the biblical Ophir and Marco Polo's fabled kingdoms have also been repeatedly associated with geographical regions that now roughly correspond to Australia.

Even the Garden of Eden, the very archetype of eutopia in the Western imagination, has been located in Antipodal space: it forms the crest of Mount Purgatory in Dante's La Divina Commedia, which he posited on the opposite side of the world to Jerusalem. With this Antipodal geography Dante followed Christian cosmology faithfully, but more often than not the association of eutopias with the Antipodes was rather accidental. Amerigo Vespucci, for instance, the Italian name-giver of America, confusingly located Brazil, which he describes as a veritable tropical paradise, in Europe's Antipodes: