In her famous essay ‘Australia's Double Aspect’, Judith Wright wrote:

What Wright seems to argue is that in the idea of Australia, two competing and ostensibly antagonistic visions of the continent come together to form a precarious unity. Wright's double aspect is readily translated into a dystopian vision of exile on one hand, and a utopian one of ‘newness and freedom’ on the other. However, a first inconsistency in this double aspect becomes apparent when Wright explains that Australia, as a land of exile, ‘could scarcely have been more alien to all European ideas either of natural beauty or of physical amenity with its unknown plants and animals, its odd reversals of all that British invaders knew and understood of their own country’. One might wonder here how dystopian this vision of exile really is, because after all isn't this newness and freedom from European ideas liberating, and therefore in a sense utopian too? In other words, just how dystopian the ‘reality of exile’ is depends to a large extent on what one is exiled from. The two experiences of Australia, it seems, aren't as distinct from each other as a neat dichotomy of utopia and dystopia suggests.

Australia's ‘odd reversals’ certainly challenged the imagination of Europeans in a very special way. The continent at the other end of the world was and continues to be a symbol for absolute distance and otherness, and as such provides a uniquely fertile setting for imagining places and societies radically different from, but sometimes also uncannily similar to, Europe. This is the story that this book attempts to tell: about the unique place which Australia holds in the European imagination. It is a story which stretches back to European antiquity, and which is marked by visions of Arcadian lands of pleasure but also of terrifying monsters. It is a story in which dreams and nightmares cut across, complement and contradict one another in visions of an Antipodal utopia.